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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Assuming everyone commenting here has read the post, if it is 'cryptocurrencies' 'like' Bitcoin and Ethereum that use PoW? Then, that is an undeniable, and an undisputed; Yes.

However, if you are talking 'cryptocurrencies' that means you are talking about all of them. Not all cryptocurrencies are like Bitcoin, and Ethereum and not all of them use PoW. So the title should be:

   'Is Bitcoin, and Ethereum to blame for High GPU Prices?'

  'Are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and Ethereum to blame for High GPU Prices?'

Rather than generalising for 'ALL' active cryptocurrencies in existence, which everyone knows isn't true but continue to attack anyway.

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It's a bit funny that the blogpost found a higher correlation between bitcoin and GPU prices than between ethereum and GPU prices. You don't mine bitcoin with a GPU. Just because it correlates doesn't mean it's a causal effect. Looking at shop prices is probably suboptimal compared to looking at auction prices, shop prices lag too much. This summer you could almost see demand shifting in real time based on the ethereum price. There are probably other confounding factors such as summer is vacation and warm weather time so demand from both gamers and miners is reduced and perhaps there was more supply as well?

Then the validity of the correlations is "verified" by checking if there exists a correlation between CPUs and cryptocurrency prices? What does this verify, it's just another correlation?

The argument is that bitcoin ASIC manufacturing takes capacity away that could be devoted to GPUs. I don't know enough about chip manufacturing to know if that's true.

Seems plausible, as does the fact that high end gpu crypto mining drives up low end gpu card prices as well. No one is using a 1030 to mine anything, but those prices are up too.

This nuance isn’t helpful for this discussion I think. 1.4T of overall cryptocurrency 2.2T is POW (68%). BTC and ETH alone account for 57% of all cryptocurrency market share [1].

Proof of stake is 9% of the overall market. I’m not sure where the other 23% go but I don’t think any one idea has captured a more significant piece. It’s like arguing that saying the energy sector is responsible for CO2 emissions. Like sure, you could make the case that wind and solar are net negative but it’s not a helpful contribution to the discussion.

[1] https://coincodex.com/cryptocurrencies/sector/proof-of-work/

You have a point for the purpose of calculating the scale of the impact. But it is also true that a significant part of crypto does not drive demand for hardware or electric power.

There are proof of stake coins with multibillion dollar valuations that bring a novel combination of smart contracts and other "platform" capabilities and low cost. This is important because these technologies ensure that crypto can survive if the cost and latency of proof of work becomes a drag on both usefulness and valuation. Kind of like renewables have shown that coal can be phased out. In Germany, renewables are now 40% of electricity production, projected to become 60% by 2030. Trends matter.

I have a hard time taking a gesture toward "multibillion dollar valuations" seriously in a realm where market manipulation is rampant.

>proof of stake coins with multibillion dollar valuations

I can mint a billion PoS shitcoins and sell myself one for ten dollars and suddenly, I have a valuation of ten billion. That doesn't make it less of a shitcoin. Every PoS coin is one such shitcoin.

Bitcoin can't be economically mined by GPUs so it's not to blame at all in this crypto hype cycle or even the last one of 2017. The people on reddit you see with racks full of 3000 series cards are mining Ethereum.

All cryptocurrencies are the same scam anyway, really don't see the need to differentiate this way.

Some of them artificially inflate the cost of hard drives instead of GPUs, totally not the same!

Are storage prices inflated at the moment? How is a physical commodity comparable to a ledger with hashes, ultimately assigned a value purely out of demand, despite being devoid of any actual purpose or usefulness?

Storage prices jumped sharply a few months back due to Chia. They've mostly come back down since then.

I have no idea what the point of your second question is.

What's artificial about it?

The cryptocurrency is designed to demand storage for the sake of demanding storage (i.e. as proof of waste) rather than for any of the natural reasons for which people demand storage.

Thus artificial.

There exists a (niche?) area of cryptocoins which are rewards for producing CPU / GPU intensive work - one example is GridCoin but many others are put there once you start searching. The result is there are work farms out there computing data arguably for good reasons (cancer research etc.) but in effect you have the same environmental cost as PoW chain computations as they chase the coin rewards.

> Assuming everyone commenting here has read the post

Proof of stake is mentioned at the end of the article.

> Other mechanism for securing blockchains exist and successfully used (see Proof of Stake). Proof of Work creates external costs (environmental impact, higher electricity prices, GPU scarcity) to benefit a small group of miners.

How beneficial blockchains are is a separate question, but proof-of-work is popular because proof-of-stake has serious issues.

Indeed, I'm aware but felt it would be overkill to mention this when the person clearly didn't even read the whole article.

For people interested, look up the "nothing at stake" issue.

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