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Surge In Litecoin Mining Leads To Graphics Card Shortage
New submitter Kenseilon writes "Extremetech reports that the recent price hike of Litecoins has triggered yet another arms race for the *coinminers out there, leading to a shortage of AMD graphics cards. While Bitcoin mining is quickly becoming unfeasible for GPU rigs with general purpose graphics cards, there are several alternative currencies with opportunities. The primary candidate is now Litecoin, which has the aim of 'being silver if Bitcoin is gold' Swedish Tech site Sweclockers also reports [in Swedish] that GPU manufacturer Club3D have told them that miners are becoming a new important group of potential customers. However, concerns are being raised that this is a temporary boom that may hurt AMD in the long run, since gamers, their core consumer group, may not be able to acquire the cards and instead opt for Nvidia."
http://www.troll.me/images/facepalm-picard/not-this-shit-again.jpg
All my usual retailers have stock, this is just an article to pump up litecoin activity and interest.
It isn't silver to BTC gold, it offers no great advantages over BTC hat can't be integrated into the bitcoin protocol if deamed worthy and you cant buy anything with it except other crypto-currencies.
This article is spam at best , a pump and dump endorsement at worst.
Litecoin. Give me a fucking break.
Please help me out here. I'm asking seriously. If all you need to do to succeed at bitcoin mining is throw computer resources at it, and they are $1000 apiece, then why aren't all the world's supercomputers on the job making a thousand bucks a minute? The answer is of course, they have more important things to do. But even if they don't, they have the capacity to. It doesn't make sense to me. The whole currency could be deflated to nothing in one swell foop. If it could be so easily destroyed, then is its foundation really a solid one. I await enlightenment.
NewEgg shipped my new pair of 780 TI cards today, equipped with Gigabyte Windforce aftermarket coolers, I'll finally get rid of most of the crappy FPS problem on my 3 Dell 30" monitors thanks to only having a single AMD 7970 card.
Why not just buy a second 7970 card and Crossfire them? I considered it, but since they are impossible to find for a reasonable price, forget it (2 months ago they were under $300, today they are closer to $500). The microstutter problem also remains when Crossfiring two cards and also running Eyefinity.
Given that the problem has been known for a year and still isn't fixed, I'm not giving AMD any more time.
Off to NVidia for me! Oh well, shame on you AMD, loyal customer here, but you just didn't leave me any options.
When the bubble bursts, cheap cards will be available in large numbers. And the bubble will burst, even Bitcoin is subject to economic rules and historically demonstrated facts. Its very volatility shows that its value has no basis in reality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... alt-coin mining is one of the few remaining industries that they can get in with not so much upfront money.
The general consensus is that the newer cards are faster but they are also drawing more power per 'unit of work' and thus are not as good a solution. Note that this has not stopped people using these cards (and indeed, older, less powerful cards) as one can still make a small profit on relatively modest hardware.
Ultimately the aim of the coin miner is to find the hardware that provides a reasonable mining rate whilst costing as little to run as possible. At some point the value of a litecoin may increase to the point where electricity costs become less of a factor in the choice of mining hardware. You'll start to see people moving to the newer cards if this happens.
Another thing to consider is ASICs. These devices are generally expensive in terms of R&D but their performance can be orders of magnitude higher than GPUs. The problem described in the article is that ASICs are not ideal at solving scrypt. However, I think it's inevitable that hardware specifically designed to mine litecoin is inevitable if the value continues to rise.
When will a *coin virtual currency make calculations useful for science? I can't help but feel this whole thing is total a waste of energy.
Why would you need to kite a coin? It's not like it would know how to nuke you with an AOE.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Buying multiple carbon intensive products and running them 24/7. I'll stick with actual coins thanks.
A lot of people are. We saw what looked like some crazy flash-in-the-pan project. By the time we realised this might actually be worth taking seriously, it was already too late to make the mega-bucks.
I've looked at it, but by the time I did it was already at the point where GPU mining was barely covering the cost of power. ASICs still turn a profit, but that's a big investment in something that might well collapse any day now. It's a bubble, everyone knows it, and when it bursts it'll burst fast.
Not all of us who are mining LTC now bought new cards solely for that purpose.
Personally, I just happened to derive some unexpected profits from the few BTC I had lying around for ages, and, having looked at LTC mining feasibility, decided that I'll use that cash to entertain myself with a new graphics card for my gaming rig - and will also use it to mine LTC while it's reasonably profitable, to recoup as much of the card's cost as possible. So I've got Radeon 280X, not because it had the best hashrate, but because it seemed like the best deal in terms of price to perf right now, within the lower performance limit that I've set.
Who cares about the absolute value of any particular coin? What matters is the ratio of its value to mining difficulty - i.e. how much $$$ you can mine per day. CoinWarz maintains a list, and there are mining pools now which automatically switch coins based on which one is the most profitable currently (and immediately exchange them for BTC at the end of the round).
These are just get rich quick scheme that only benefits the early adopters, it's too late for anyone to just join in and actually make it rich.
Make it rich, no.
Buy a new shiny video card and recoup its cost is totally doable, though.
Lots of >=1000W PSU's are hard to come by also at the moment. I expect because of Litecoin mining also.
Third option: Your employer can simply decide not to be your employer (that is, not employ you, or fire you if you are already employed) unless you accept your payment in legal tender. And every court in the world would approve that.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Anyopne speculating with them, I guess. And anyone using it as a payment system.
That matters to miners. To others it only matters very little.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
For sexcoin, your proof of work is in form of a sperm probe?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
As I understand it, the supply of maximum number of Bitcoin is limited, which is supposed to preserve the value, much as the limit on the amount of available gold, and the cost of mining additional gold, preserves its value. But aren't there an unlimited possible number of cryptocurrencies like Litecoin?
In the world of metals, by analogy, it would be as if there were a limited supply of silver and gold, but a new precious metal (with its own limited supply) could be created at any time. Would metals then be rare enough to be useful as currency?
As another analogy, in the world of fiat (paper) currencies, governments control the supply of their currency (in theory) to preserve the value. Assuming each government creates just one fiat currency (not always the case, I know) then the number of fiat currencies will be limited. Imagine a world, though, in which anyone - including someone anonymous - could create their own fiat currency. The first person to do so might create a currency with value, especially if their new currency served a need unmet by other currencies, e.g. anonymity and cheap micro-transactions. But as more homemade fiat currencies began to emerge, would the first one retain its value?
why would someone intentionally cripple their product as to avoid sales? Any company in their right mind would be thrilled that their product is flying off the shelves
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Who cares about the absolute value of any particular coin?
Anyopne speculating with them, I guess. And anyone using it as a payment system.
So is the U.S. dollar a hundred times "better" than the yen in some sense? Is the euro "better" than the dollar because 1 EUR is worth more than 1 USD? Is the pound "better" than the euro because 1 GBP is worth more than 1 EUR? What really matters to the users of a currency is the rate of change in exchange rates between two currencies over time, or between a currency and goods and services over time.
Is it also too late to invest in tulip bulbs?
Well, the point I was trying to make is that your employer is not required to employ you. So if you make unreasonable demands on payment modalities, the employer can simply not employ you.
But thank you for explaining the term "legal tender"; I indeed didn't understand that correctly, although that was not central to my argument.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And if I don't know the absolute value of the bitcoins in euros
I don't see how that's an absolute value. The value of bitcoins relative to euros is 1 BTC = 649.50 EUR as of today, but the "absolute" value of 1 BTC depends on how you define the "absolute" value of the goods that 649.50 EUR will buy you.
This. It's a reasonable way of making a gaming hobby pay for itself.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
However, concerns are being raised that this is a temporary boom that may hurt AMD in the long run, since gamers, their core consumer group, may not be able to acquire the cards and instead opt for Nvidia
Concerns? Sounds like concern trolling to me. Since when is it a bad thing that your products are so popular that you can barely keep them on the shelf, and they're selling well above MSRP? Most vendors would kill to attain that level of popularity. It's not just due to short supply, either – the Tahiti GPU (7950/7970/280X) is about 2 years old, and was being deeply discounted up until the recent boom.
Personally, I think this is great. AMD has been chronically short of funds for R&D, and hopefully the recent boom in high-end GPUs will give them a much-needed infusion of cash. A competitive market is good for everyone, even if you're an Intel/Nvidia fan.
It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair. I make no claims about Litecoin as an investment. I make my own decisions, other people can do the same.
As for mining - I am paid for verifying transactions on the network. That's honest work.
I really don't understand why you think participating in a marketplace is immoral. So there are some whales out there with big balances... So what? They didn't set Bitcoin's value. If you've been watching the exchanges recently, you sometimes see whales coordinating to cause a sell-off so they can snap up cheap coins. Lately, though, it hasn't been working for them. They dump coins and the market doesn't even blink, and then they're forced to buy back in at a loss.
This kind of manipulation happens in every market. It's human nature. Playing the holier than thou morality card is your choice, I guess. As for me, I'll keep selling coins to people that want them, and building the network by doing the useful work of verifying transactions.
Anyone speculating with them, I guess.
Anyone speculating only cares about percentage increases. If what I have is $1k, it doesn't matter if I buy 10 coins with it or 1000; it only matters that the amount I buy, I can later sell for $2k.
Well, there _are_ such things as "brand" and "brand loyalty".
Imagine two firms producing hard drives, X and Y, both quite competetive in quality and performance on servers. Hunting season comes and people notice that X brand hard drives are _awesome_ for skeet shooting, and so they buy out X's hard drives clean.
But then hunting season ends, and more servers are equipped with Y brand drives, because X was out of stock all the time. When they're going to upgrade they're likely to say "Well, Y served us well, let's see what's their new series are", and when they're asked what to get for your own server they're likely to say "We're using Y, works great, why don't you get one too?", so X gets a long-term loss in market share, even though it had a huge spike while it lasted.
TL;DR: I can see the reasoning, though I don't believe there're enough skeet-shooters to empty the shelves. Shops near me don't seem to have shortages, at least.
Oh, I do not dispute that the scam in here is cleverly disguised. The possibility to "mine" Bitcoins is a truly impressive misdirection and supports the legend that this "currency" is made by users. But as soon as you look at the increase in mining effort, the pyramid in this scheme becomes blatantly obvious again. The matter of the fact is that the Bitcoin mining difficulty was cleverly designed to make mining hard just when the currency takes off. In addition, the early miners (the very top of the pyramid) got their coins basically for free.
That said, not all cryptocurrencies are a scam. Those that are ground in real value and are up-front and honest about the properties of the scheme are not.
But all that are build on nothing and have strongly progressive mining effort (i.e. far, far stronger than hardware speed advances) are. The idea is a truly beautiful scam that facilitates elaborate misdirection. Take for example all the claims that Bitcoin was "anonymous". Not so, as current research shows. I am pretty sure the designers were aware of this, but hoped that it would stay hidden for long enough. It did. Or take security. They must have been aware that stealing Bitcoins would be ridiculously easy. All the users and exchanges that have been robbed make a pretty impressive statement as to its insecurity. So from a technical perspective, Bitcoin is a pretty bad, insecure and non-anonymous hack and that likely was clear to its designers. Yet they went ahead nonetheless. Why? Because they never cared about its users, except as people to be separated from their money.
Now, I _am_ impressed by Bitcoin. Usually a scam has to be simple to be successful. The designers managed to use something complex and successfully lied about its properties and made it _appear_ to be simple (secure, anonymous, "you mine it yourself"), without any of that actually being the truth. And they have pulled it off, like quite a few other pupils of the great Ponzi.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That would be the case if someone was running the company as a tax write-off for some other reason.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The problem described in the article is that ASICs are not ideal at solving scrypt.
ASIC Bitcoin miners can't solve scrypt at all - you can't mine Litecoin with them. I guess you could call that "not ideal".
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
..and I'm thrilled that when Scrypt miners dump their GPUs on eBay en masse (like SHA-256 miners did with Bitcoin), the market will be flooded with a nice supply of Radeons.
..and yes, while I am concerned about the stress the cards are put under for 99% of their life, most miners seem to peg their card's fan speed at 80-100%.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
I bought my R9 290 a week and a half ago, and even then I knew something was up with this, as cards started showing "out of stock". I paid $400, the going price at the time, and got it in last Monday. At the time I ordered, it looked like I could make $600/mo off of mining from it. Now it's close to $200/mo. I'll likely be able to eventually recover my initial cost, or sell right now on ebay for ~$200 profit and go back to my GTX 760, but the chance to make real money is long since over.