Now that it's been 24-ish hours since Nvidia announced their new approach to crypto-currency mining, I've seen arguments from miners concerned customers rapidly evolve from "this will not actually do anything" to a very obvious form of the slippery slope fallacy.
So let's discuss the realities of crypto-mining, what it achieves, and what it's real world effects are.
Power Consumption and Climate Change
Climate Change is real, the space and time for debate is over.
California, Oregon, and Australia were ravaged by massive wildfires last year, nearly 500 people have been killed by these combined wildfires. And Australia now has a new batch of wildfires that have only just begun.
Texas is still in the middle of a winter storm that delivered it's lowest recorded temperatures in 60 years, causing widespread blackouts, and resulting in 47 deaths and counting.
These extreme weather events are the result of climate change, and one of the biggest contributors to climate change is fossil fuel burning for energy production.
Fossil Fuels currently deliver the vast majority of power around the world, with renewable energy sources being introduced at a rate lower than the increase in energy demand.
All of this means that increases in energy consumption will largely be met by increased burning of fossil fuels.
How does cryptocurrency factor into this?
For the basic reason that crypto-currency mining consumes a lot of power.
The Ethereum network alone consumes 7.75 Terawatt-Hours per year, enough power to supply over 700,000 US households with power for that same period of time. With each transaction requiring 34KWh of energy, enough power to run an average single US home for an entire day.
And Ethereum is not the biggest energy hog in the crypto currency space.
The Bitcoin network consumes over 121 Terawatt-Hours per year, more than 15 times the power consumption outlined in the Ethereum network as stated above. So take all of those values and multiply them by 15.
This is such an enormous amount of power that it is affecting the national power grid of countries like Iran. And cause additional pollution to be generated as fossil fuel based power plants struggle to keep up.
The Economic Question
How valuable is Crypto-currency in reality? I'm not asking how much crypto currencies trade for, I'm asking how much value does it add to society?
From what I've seen, crypto-currencies continued relevance has been driven by two primary groups;
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those wishing to manipulate an unregulated market with pump and dump, pyramid, and other such get rich schemes.
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those wishing to use an untraceable currency to perform illegal transactions, namely in drugs or weapons trades.
As a society, neither of these groups have a positive impact.
Taxation
One thing that I hear frequently as a "positive" of crypto currency is that it's not taxable.
Which is completely incorrect, The IRS does tax the sale, exchange, or gains of or from Crypto-currencies, and the US is not the only government to tax Crypto-currency. In fact it is now a shorter list to list the countries that don't tax Crypto-Currencies.
So congratulations; if you still think that Crypto-currencies are not taxed, you're committing tax fraud.
Viability as a common currency
This goes back to the previous subject on Power Consumption, but at it's core, no current Crypto Currency is widely viable as a mass-use currency, due to the high power consumption of individual transactions, and the delay that certain networks have in processing transactions.
The Visa Network is one of the most used payments and transaction system in the world, with a peak capacity of 65 thousand transactions per second
Bitcoins transactions per second is rated at 7. not 7 thousand, not 7 hundred, just 7.
Ethereums transactions per second is at just 15 transactions per second, still not impressive. And while it's creator recognizes that this is a problem, his proposal to improve it is continually delayed, just like his Proof-of-Stake proposal.
But Ethereum/SpecificCoinILike is going to go Proof-of-Stake
Ethereum was widely introduced in 2015, since 2015 all I've heard is that Ethereum is going to move to Proof-of-Stake "soon". At a certain point, it's all hot air. Not to mention that there are still debates in the crypto space about the inherent value of Proof-of-Stake coins versus Proof-of-Work coins. With many pointing to the principle that in a Proof-of-Stake model, the more coins you hold, the higher probability you have to win new blocks. Thereby concentrating the ownership of coins with those who already hold a larger number of coins.
Why are you posting this on /r/Hardware?
The current crypto-rush, like the crypto-rush that preceded it, is having an enormous impact on the supply and availability of GPUs. The previous crypto-rush had the (in hindsight) fortunate timing to arrive many months after new GPUs were announced and shipped out to consumers. Meaning that while some were unable to buy the latest and greatest GPUs, many of the latest and greatest GPUs were in the hands of their intended customers.
This time around, the Crypto-rush started building before these new GPUs were even announced, and combined with a global pandemic, there fomented a perfect storm that almost completely wiped out any possibility of a gamer getting their hands on a GPU, without resorting to bots.
This has led to a lot debates over who has the better claim to such hardware, and my vote is for the gamers. For reasons that I've outlined here, Crypto currencies are a net negative for society;
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Driving more pollution via fossil fuel burning, which in turn drives more extreme weather events.
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Being an unregulated market where fraud and ponzi-esque schemes run rampant.
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Funding terrorism, and illegal drugs and weapons trades.
it's hard to see where the benefits are.
And while gaming can't claim to make the world better, it doesn't actively make the world worse.
But what about Nvidia?
What about them?
They are not outright eliminating the capability to mine.
They aren't changing any hardware currently in peoples hands.
The news about the 3060s reduced mining capability has been widely discussed, so it's hard to see where someone would be uninformed on the subject of the 3060 and mining.
They have very clearly said that they do not intend to limit other CUDA applications, and other compute based uses of their GeForce GPUs, if they do they open themselves up to the biggest class action lawsuit in their history.
Nvidias CUDA advantage only exists because every GPU in their lineup can do CUDA work, they aren't going to throw away 14 years of work, and one of the most widely used parrallel computing platforms, just because of this mining craze.
You can't look at a situation like this one, where Nvidia has been dragged through the mud by people claiming they only do business with miners, where their global supply chain can't keep up with the demand of both insatiable miners and gamers, where every news story about Nvidia includes a blurb about how unsatisfied customers are with supply, and expect them not to do something about it.
For the first time, a major GPU vendor has taken direct action against miners using their GPUs, and frankly I think the GPU market will only be better for it.
If miners don't like this change, then they shouldn't have taxed the global supply chain to the point that this was the most logical decision for Nvidia to make.
