Crypto Crashed So Hard It May No Longer Be Profitable to Mine Ethereum
hothardware.com
hothardware.com
2. Miners become disincentivized to mine
3. Some miners shut off machinery
4. Network mining difficulty adjusts to new equilibrium
Same action occurs in the opposite direction when the price rises
My impression was that this was mostly just a problem in theory, and would not be triggered by the sort of decline in prices we're seeing in recent days. I assume the same is true for Ethereum?
Either way the party carrying out the attack is unlikely to be able to benefit from it, especially if a prerequisite of the viability of the attack is the network already being incredibly week.
a) Short all of PoW cryptocurrencies
b) Carry Out 51% attack
c) Profit.
ii) Nation States can easily carry out this.
a) Carry Out 51%.
b) Shut the assholes who parrot, "Hurr Durr Crypto is better than fiat" once for all
At this point, it is only the will that is not there, not the capability
Wouldn't this leave the network extremely vulnerable to 51% attacks though? If the recovery mode is that miners keep mining in the hopes of being the last man standing so that they can control the chain afterwards, then...
Nevermind, just answered my own question. Multiple miners are likely to keep mining in the hopes of being the last one standing and being able to 51% Bitcoin, which will keep mining competitive and get you to the block difficulty adjustment even if it's momentarily unprofitable.
Now the value of bitcoin drops precipitously - let's say they wake up one day and the block reward is worth $3. Let's say they all shut off their machines. Dave wakes up and sees no one is mining bitcoin, and thinks "I can be the last one standing". He now has to spend $300 * 10 = $3000 (in the worst case where the drop is right after the last adjustment) to mine ten blocks, for which he receives $30 worth of rewards.
But how does this help him? If the difficulty adjusts downward, Alice, Bob and Carol can all just start mining again. It's not like they're permanently locked out of the system because they turned off their mining rigs. So Dave has spent net $2970 for...what exactly? The ability to run a 51% attack and double spend to recoup his cost? To run the double-spend, he has to re-mine a second side chain at the way-too-high difficulty! I'm skeptical that this is an attractive proposition for Dave.
Even if this did occur to Bitcoin, the community and miners would likely work together to put out a hardfork that adjusts difficulty downward to start the chain.
Depends on the area and many other factors, e.g. how the electricity is generated. In much of the northern US/south eastern Canada, electric heating is much more expensive and less efficient overall.
Natural gas heating is less than 100% efficient (if a new furnace maybe in the area of 80%), and causes global warming.
>Power generation itself and transmission
is separate from the efficiency of the heating process, which is 100% efficient.
Unless your power is generated by coal, in which case you’re even better off using natural gas.
So yes, I agree, but heat pumps have cold weather limitations that mean they only benefit relatively warm climates.
Also, I've never seen a building (in the U.S.) that relies on electric heating if temps in the area will get much below 10°F (-12°C). At that point, it's always natgas/propane/fuel oil/wood.
But the heat pump has a "outside" part, where there is a fan and other electrify using stuff. Can you not risk that more heat is generated outside than is moved inside?
Sadly I've seen many buildings (apartments and homes) that use electric baseboard heaters, and you probably have as well. They just aren't very modern.
Keep the house at 66, heat one room at a time to 70.
From my own energy monitoring applications, I recon about 40% of my winter heating needs are met in this manner. I DO use a heat pump for heating between 40°F-60°F, but the efficiency of such a device rapidly diminishes as the temperature falls below freezing. Below 20°F, an average heat pump begins to be LESS efficient than simple resistive heating.
Mitsubishi's residential air-source ductless mini-split heat pumps that have their "Hyper-heating inverter" technology, and similar systems from Fujitsu, are still about twice as efficient as electrical resistance heating down to around 0℉. They don’t start getting beat by resistance heating until around -15℉.
Their capacity starts dropping at around 23℉ and would be around 75% at -15℉ so if you need to go below 23℉ you do have to oversize your system.
As it stands, the previous generation shows that prices can become arbitrarily high if supply is low. Two years and a crypto crash later the cards are getting close to their MSRP from two years ago.
It always confused me how many people stocked up on the latter, since if you want to actually have a resistance like the founding fathers intended, not just have a series of manchild meltdowns at the idea of a "well regulated" militia, ending with getting shot by the senate sergeant at arms, what I was told you do is run up on them like they're Reinhard Heydrich and use at least a .22 magnum, with hollowpoints, so they enter the skull, split open wide, then bounce around, rather than .223 rifle round or some double plus P bullshit that will go in one side of the head, out the other, and through a wall into the head of someone who's not a totalitarian scumbag.
But I was very drunk and had my phone off when I had THAT conversation. I've quit drinking alcohol with strangers since. Zdraví! :-)
Anyways, to swing it back to gaming or whatever:
>As it stands, the previous generation shows that prices can become arbitrarily high if supply is low
The issue is the supply will always be low if the MSRP is too low and/or folks don't enforce the law when people buy up consumer goods for illegal enterprises to the detriment of the hobbyists and other peaceful civilians the MSRP is meant to be set for.
The issue is can people make the supply low and drive the cards price up where such activity is profitable, or not. You can declare the MSRP 'too low' but if there are plenty of cards available at MSRP no one will pay the inflated price.
The supply was very low, which allowed people to drive the price up for opportunities to engage in some profitable arbitrage with those few who were interested in overpaying for the cards. After a short time of ubiquitous scalping, the manufacturers themselves raised the price to eat the amount being arbitrated because why wouldn't they if there were still people buying at that price? At that point why would they make more cards if they can make money selling fewer cards with less cost?
The 'market finds the price' approach doesn't work if everyone involved including the manufacturers are all looking to drive the price up for their own profit, which is what happened. Lots of people made money as middlemen for running bots etc to snap up whatever supply of cards there were, without adding any value or improving anything but their own finances.
Now translate that to everything else you buy and you can see that if the same could be done to baby formula, or cars, or houses, or eggs, and you can clearly see it would be a negative on society in general. You just need someone with a big enough fund - like say blackrock buying up homes, etc.
Agreed. Folks want to focus on one variable (the MSRP) -- with the idea "the market" will adjust that variable, but "the market" is not a healthy one -- if people are buying a bunch of GPUs to create an electronic currency that is less private than cash, then using it for a host of illegal activity you can do... with cash... and in the process distorting the market for scientific equipment (as the one parent hinted at with their comment about "just" doing machine learning) then only changing one variable (the MSRP) isn't the appropriate solution.
But you get people who would scoff at the idea of an invisible man in the sky having near religious meltdowns if you tell them there's also no invisible hand in the market :-)
Nvida specifically or are you using their name as a stand in for GPUs in general?
I want the pain to really hurt. They deserve it. I would blame NVIDIA and AMD for not ramping up production, but the sad fact is, there's only so many foundries capable of producing GPU chips and those are TSMC and Samsung, so it's really a matter of not having enough capacity.
I quit gaming to focus on disinformation because when I went off to college, folks from that community went so far as to walk uninivted into a house party thrown by an ex-girlfriend to repeat dead memes then act surprised when the response was nearly kinetic.
(I was starting to get involved with the local green movement instead of Pokemon Green, they were forever angry sitting alone at home for hours never led to a girlfriend. Always whining about finding a girlfriend, never a partner, the rude little "incel"s)
Anyways, I agree that the Bitcoin boys deserve to be pain, and they should pray to whatever god they wish that it's only psychic after being so harmful to the planet to try to route around consent (and AML laws - 10k is 10k dumbasses).
The hard truth is that Lyft, Airbnb, Bitcoin, Grubhub, a lot of it is reinventing the cyberpunk lifestyle you could have lived in the 90s or could TODAY with a little cash and respect for the fact that people are not programs and do not have the memory of goldfish.
> If I can pick up a 6900 XT for $499 or so, especially used from a miner who's had it undervolted and likely running at 80% or less all day, I'll bite.
It's sad that places like Ebay are useless due to so many scams, and Craigslist suffers the same issues if you don't "keep it local" -- at least when I used to do deals on CL, I had the option of just taking a Louisville slugger to someone if they tried to walk away with both the currency and the merchandise.
(Or getting in my car and driving off if they tried to negotiate too hard over ten bux.)
Anyways thanks for raising this idea of undervolting -- I had a Game Gear as a kid so I'm forever on the lookout for ways to avoid my battery going dead.
(It took six AAs and would die just as you got close to Lake Erie, the thing fucking sucked power worse than a Dogecoin farm)
>I would blame NVIDIA and AMD for not ramping up production, but the sad fact is, there's only so many foundries capable of producing GPU chips and those are TSMC and Samsung, so it's really a matter of not having enough capacity.
My worry is they'll build foundries across SE Asia, and then folks like Apple will coerce the smaller countries in parallel more easily, now that China has built up a middle class that, much like the times leading up to the Tienanmen protests, is once again ready to rise up against their totalitarian oppressors.
Take a look at the "big board":
Taiwan is staring down the barrel of the PRC, and South Korea is forever under the threat of annihilation since Kim Jong Dumbass could launch a massive kinetic strike at any moment, and major powers like China have stated they have a no first strike nuclear policy.
(On my end, I'm just one guy, but I also am feeling hamstrung by a decade plus long promise to only relatiate, never intrude, in the "cyber" realm... but I'm just one guy, taking a break from making purposefully inflamatory GIF laden conference slides since apparently diplomacy gets you nowhere :-) )
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/22/06/276653...
Better explanation from https://docs.ethhub.io/questions-about-ethereum/what-is-the-...
>The Difficulty Bomb was originally put in place for a variety of reasons:
>- To act as a deterrant for miners who wish to continue mining the Ethereum 1.0 (Proof of Work) chain once the network moved fully to the Ethereum 2.0 (Proof of Stake) chain
>- To ensure that the core developers of Ethereum 1.0 are "forced" to upgrade the network via a hard fork (if only to delay the effects of the bomb) so that the network does not stagnate innovation-wise
None of this implies that eth might or might not be a good investment.
the running meme is the miners will move to etc and call that the real eth.