And it is currently harming science. Scientists and labs are unable to source GPUs for data crunching, and it is driving up their costs quite a bit, on average increasing hardware spending by 2x when they can actually source relevant hardware.
One link among many: https://gizmodo.com/how-the-cryptocurrency-frenzy-is-interfering-with-our-s-1822994731
āHarming scienceā is kind of broad when that link talks about something as silly as searching for alien life.
That said, I do have a friend who does bioinformatics research and they use their GPUs for that, so I can understand the reasoning.
The solution seems so simple, Folding@home just needs to do an ICO and issue tokens for āminingā their data. They could probably make a ton of money on top of getting the people working on their project again. Am I missing something or why arenāt they doing that?
Devilās advocate: if neither games nor crypto existed, would there exist hardware for number crunching that is remotely as affordable as GPUs are, even with the current inflated prices?
I believe the hardcore crypto believerās argument about wasting electricity is that itās intended to be an alternative to wasting energy on getting rare gems and metals out of the ground that have no real intrinsic value either.
I donāt know enough to have an opinion on it.
Games drive it not crypto. Nvidia and friends have already clearly said they arenāt reacting to the crypto bubble, because - itās a bubble. They are have enjoyed great temporary sales but its a foolish mistake to change business plans over, and overall earnings have been stable for a long time from the scientific community.
I guess if things change in the next few years and it doesnāt go away, they will change too. Itās too early for crypto to take credit for anything at this pointā¦
If you want to thank someone for great gpus, thank Carmack.
The problem here is that metals have value and practical applications.
Gemsā¦ wellā¦ in case of Diamonds, you have DeBeers which ariticically inflated their prices.
CryptoMiner, however, produces nothing useful. Unless youāre using cryptominer to warm up the apartment, that is. In which case itāll be producing heat.
It is worth mentioning, however, that producing cryptominers is also harmful to the environment, because their chips, like any other chips, require rare minerals. Seems to be a bit excessive for a for a room heater.
Yeah in a way itās gambling, but Iād rather say itās more like investing in the middle of a dotcom like bubble.
I say the advantage we can take from blockchains or dags and decentralized applications is real. We need to wait for mass adoption to see the actual value of that technology, until then its just pure speculation.
I started buying eth and bitcoin on bitcoin.de and then sent the bitcoin to a paper wallet and the eth to binance to put it in alts. Made some bad calls and some good calls. When bitcoin went down and I was successful on binance I also sent that there, and made some more good calls. Then everything went south and I had a few very bad timing moments. Binance is pretty great Iād say, app is really good and they got many coins, only thing that sucks is they have tether pairs instead of usd pairs. I also went to cryptopia to buy a potential moonshot coin, the website is a disaster though and you can forget to use it on mobile.
Yes I didnt figure the tax issue yet. Original plan was to just buy and hold til infinity, but that is now obsolete. I also have all the transaction history, so Iām not worried.
Iām also sceptic concerning wasting energy by mining just to produce a coin, itās one of the biggest flaws right now imo.
There used to be one coin that was technically doing a useful job. Primecoin. Used prime numbers. It apparently had a ton of flaws, though.
I was more interested in buying the dip and less interested in talking about it. Itās actually disappointing to me that things are on the uptick again, since I was hoping for a longer (and deeper) crash period. Ah well.
Dip can still happen. Everything still quite unstable for my taste. Like, right now it has a pullback and part reddit is already kind of freaking out again. Extremely bipolar. (although I suppose reddit is a tiny fraction of all buyers globally).
Reasonable. Shorting cryptocurrency would be another reasonable idea - if thereās an exchange that allow itā¦
In either case transaction costs were too high for me to justify trying to play with crytocurrency exchanges.
(Still looking for a way to cash out my 0.18 XMR)
Not sure if kraken is available in your country, or you want to bother getting through the authentication process (was a huge hassle for me), but it seems you can deposit XMR there over a wallet address, then sell it for either EUR, or USD and withdraw that to your bank account. Right now it would be about 50$. Have you calculated how much the electricity to mine it did cost you?
That would be an interesting way to monetize a website. You are a genius Arowx!
Imagine that instead of selling advertising for your website, you sell processing power. People could upload equations or formula to solve such as looking for prime numbers. Then when people visit your website, it just runs some javascript (or even WebGL shaders for parrallel processing) then sends back the data to the server with AJAX.
Imagine an animation which takes 5 minutes to render each frame. The animator would upload their animation to be rendered to a processing company. Then this would be given a code and you earn money for each frame rendered. If you put the code on your home page then when people go to your home page it could run some safe javascript to render out a frame. Then the website owner would earn money.
There needs to be a name for this. āMicro Distributed Processingā maybe. It has to be done in javascript so that it runs on client side sandboxed without downloading a plugin.
Also, it solves the problem of fraudulent clicking on ads. Since if people refresh the webpage loads of time, that is only a good thing because it means more processing is done.
It could solve the issue of micro-payments for the web. Letās make this happen! _
OK, hereās what we could do to start. First get the open source Blender and translate the rendering capabilities into javascript. Then set up a company to render Blender animations. Then let the public run the javascript on their computers or websites and pay them per frame. The frames would be encoded. Then combine the frames back together and deliver the results back to the customer. Simple as that.
Animations that require minutes to render typically have huge amounts of data (meshes and textures) that are needed to do said rendering. Youād have to upload the full scene to every computer involved in the distributed rendering. Itās unfeasible for an unobtrusive background thing that is to be done seconds at a time while people browse different websites.
But as far as I remember there is/was an actual distributed rendering effort for Blender where people would donate their rendering power during times where they donāt need it themselves, to get rendercredits that they then can cash in when they themselves need something rendered quickly. Thatās also much closer to the free and open source spirit around blender. Itās hard to get (most) blender users to spend cash on things, because theyāre used to getting amazing things for free.
Some (vaguely) games related crypto news:
I just read that Crytek created their own cryptocurrency Ecosystem for gamers:
I wonder when Unity Technologies is going to follow.
Havenāt bothered to withdraw XMR yet. The issue with kraken is that Iāll lose on currency conversion commissions either way upon withdrawal. I found few exchanges that can apparently withdraw to paypalā¦ but I simply havenāt bothered with this yet.
Not sure. Probably barely profitable.
For some reason, I see this idea as amoral and dishonest.
All the resources of target hardware should be utilized by the game, and not by malware functionality that will ramp up userās electricty bill.
I wouldnāt do it.
I see this approach in more positive light when it comes to web sites, though. But even in that case, crypto-mining is rather meaningless waste of CPU power, woudlāve been better if background calculation was doing something actually useful.
This is old news, already. There were multiple services that attempted to sell processing power before bitcoin was a thing, the issue was that everybody has a ton of processing power available, so it wasnāt profitable.
Something like scene rendering in animation canāt be quantized into small chunks of works without complete renderer redesign. As far as I know, a render farm machine will render the whole frame alone.
Also, recently there were plenty of attempts to install miners as malware. Those pop up everywhere. I personally purged somebodyās XMR miner from a server of one of the people I worked with - based by the logs this thing worked for several months before somebody noticed it. One of my friends works for a company that install financing software, he told similar stories. Somebody sees a server and tries to install a miner on it. Then suddenly everything is working very slowly.
The whole thing as this point is pretty much ādrain somebodyās electricity in exchange for peanutsā.
If they have any sanity, never? CRC currently trades at likeā¦ $0.50 and is far too niche to ever go any higher. This is simply one of the last ditch efforts of a company perpetually at risk of going under.
I thought theyād already partnered with a cryptocurrency provider late last year? They had a stand at Unite, it was talked about for maybe a fortnight after, and I donāt think Iāve heard anything about it since.
Edit: Yeah, here we go. Theyāre called āGameCreditsā.
Iāve talked to my tax accountant now and even though Iāve sent him a full detailed ledger export from kraken that has all trades and fees in an excel sheet in it, itās not in a format he could automatically feed into their accounting software to properly document it. Since itās such a small scale and below the limit where it would be taxable, weāve agreed to deliver a screenshot of my total account balance that I made at the end of the year together with a printout of the detailed trades list to the Finanzamt, and hope they wonāt complain. And the plan for this year is now cashing out when Iām in the plus again and quit trading, because the time it would take to sift through all trades in detail and list it in the proper way of our legendarily complicated German tax bureaucracy would eat up any profits many times over he said. Soā¦ no trading for me I guess and I donāt think I want to longterm HODL with how the market and crypto in general are right now.
Yeah, I agree with doing taxes on trading will be quite tedious and complicated. Even more because I use multiple exchanges.
Actually, with all the recent development I feel more and more secure and bullish again. Like, look at how long the period was that crypto had been evolving and growing now. Even if we in came just before the ath and following january crash, how likely is it that its over just right now? I mean, its not like the people behind the coins(besides scams) stop working all of a sudden now. They continue to develop their product and grow their businesses, and with that I suppose the market will also grow again. Right now, with the uncertainty, this might be a good buying opportunity.
What I do now is I do no longer trade around, but I just start buy a mix of high and low market cap coins that I like and let them just sit. Probably another coin each month now or so. This should also make taxes much easier.