Mining drives up the price of graphics cards

[cobito]

We are not in the best moment to buy a new PC: RAM at a sky-high price, SSDs prohibitive and now graphics cards only within reach of miners.

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[whoololon]

I'll start by saying that I'm about to dive into a subject I don't know much about, but weren't there, until recently, versions for mining and versions for leisure?
Okay, the trick is that, although you can limit a graphics card for mining (by removing the video output connectors), you can't do the same with one for leisure...
or can you?

[cobito]

@whoololon The only time I touched the subject was years ago, I calculated the NPV of the operation even with ASICs or FPGAs and I forgot about the matter (I don't know if the subject has changed much or people really don't know where they're getting into).

Back then AMD's graphics were clearly superior in this aspect to Nvidia's and I remember that (coincidence or not), Nvidia released the Tesla designed only for GPGPU, without video ports. The thing is that the performance/price ratio of a gaming graphics card is better than a dedicated computing card. Besides, the gaming one allows you something that neither an ASIC, FPGA nor Tesla allow you: to play.

[krampak]

I've been mining Ethereum for a few months now, and it's still profitable on graphics cards. Bitcoin stopped being profitable a long time ago with the advent of ASICs, but the hashing algorithm of ether and derivatives like ZCash prevent the use of specific ASICs for it, so GPUs are still the most optimal way to mine today.

Taken from the wiki:

Ethash PoW is memory hard, making it basically ASIC resistant. This basically means that calculating the PoW requires choosing subsets of a fixed resource dependent on the nonce and block header. This resource (a few gigabyte size data) is called a DAG. The DAG is totally different every 30000 blocks (a 100 hour window, called an epoch) and takes a while to generate. Since the DAG only depends on block height, it can be pregenerated but if its not, the client need to wait the end of this process to produce a block. Until clients actually precache dags ahead of time the network may experience a massive block delay on each epoch transition. Note that the DAG does not need to be generated for verifying the PoW essentially allowing for verification with both low CPU and small memory.

Although that graph is worth little if we don't add the consumption factor to the equation (the 295X2 will obviously go up in smoke).

Edit: Today there has been a very significant drop in all cryptocurrencies in general... (due to some comments from JP Morgan) although as always in 2 or 3 days it will recover (I hope xD)

And here's an infographic to understand what bitcoin mining is:

[cobito]

It seems that the graphics market is calming down and some mid-range models are returning to reasonable prices. We will have to see if this lasts and how the second-hand market gets (which, if it gets interesting, will be full of very, very common cards).

Source.

[Fassou]

Blockchain is the future, but this whole cryptocurrency thing might end up like Forum Filatélico

[Xevipiu]

I am a miner, the thing has gone down a lot, but it is enough to finance the hardware

My last investment to mine has been x8 RX570, doing undervoltage and stretching the Elpida memory, they give 30mhs each

[garfield]

Let's see, because I have too many stories of people who know people... and so on ad infinitum.
How much are you making with the 570?, but real, taking out the light and with the depreciation of the graphics card. Let's see if in the end Ether is going to be the bubble that you have to get on.

[krampak]

@garfield a pelo I would say that with just one RX570 today (ether at 250€) you get about 13€ net per month, plus what you can get later by speculating with the currency in the traders, but the more graphics the more profitable. Personally, I mine ZCash because the HD7950 that I have mining at work (with the boss's consent xD ) gives more yield in the ZEC client than in the Ether one.
Off the top of my head, Xevipiu with 8 RX570 at 30MH/s calculating about 1200W of consumption (he will confirm it) at 0.11€/kW gets about 180€ net per month.

[cobito]

They say they want to regulate cryptocurrencies in Europe. Will the ECB finally be the one to bring down the price of graphics cards?

[krampak]

@cobito https://www.coindesk.com/mario-draghi-european-central-bank-has-no-power-to-regulate-bitcoin/