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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.
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.
I bought into Litecoin at under $5 with some hobby money some months ago and it's hanging out at $30. I cashed out my original investment (leaving several times that in Litecoin, yay profit), bought ten Radeon cards and some cheap motherboards with the money, threw together some Debian USB sticks in an evening and am now mining on P2Pool for shits and giggles.
In a few weeks the equipment will have paid for itself, even accounting for the insane difficulty increases. Power is cheap here, so I will do pretty well for a while yet. Bonus: the rigs run hot so I'm basically making a little money heating my house.
You can laugh all you want. I'm having a blast, I've made a tidy profit, I have a bunch of new toys to play with, and if Litecoin ever does go ballistic like Bitcoin did I won't be left on the sidelines like you will. Don't really care about the likelihood of *coins taking over the world, or whatever - there is money to be made and I'm happy to make it.
It's a fun hobby. Honestly, it's play money to me and I've multiplied it several times. Not complaining. More fun than hitting the casino like some people I know, even if it's gambling all the same.
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.
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.
After the gold rush was over, there was still plenty of money to be made selling picks, shovels and mules to the prospectors.
No sig today...
This is exactly why I think Bitcoin will collapse. Or perhaps, "should". There are quite a few with high percentage of all the money, one with at least 20%.
Sooner or later some of them are going to dump. Getting $1'000'000 for "nothing" is very tempting.
Later, much later, the gullible are going to understand they were ripped of, several times. Then, again it might be so that they never understand as they see Bitcoin as "mathematically proven" money missing the problems entirely.
I hope you have luck. I just cannot do the same for ethical & moral reasons. Damn, parents!
Now that's the right attitude to have. You know it's a bunch of people buying an investment (not a currency), hoping it will appreciate so that they can cash out once it hits a high enough price point.
Bitcoin/Litecoin is an (irrational) investment, not a currency.
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
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.
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.
My moral prohibits me from taking advantage of the buyer, no matter whether I "misrepresent" the goods or not.
If I have the knowledge that something is not as valuable as the price is, due to reasons the buyer does not understand, I just skip it. I will not sell a lemon car even if the buyer does not have the mechanical knowledge to find out it is lemon.
Hey, those values I share! The only difference between us is that I don't believe accepting market value for anything, from wool socks to XBoxes, is "taking advantage of the buyer." When I sell a coin, I get $30, my buyer gets 1 LTC, and both parties are happy. If that's taking advantage of someone, I hope you don't work anywhere that sells a product - that might comprimise your morals! So much cognitive dissonance.
I don't have any knowledge that LTC or BTC are somehow flawed. I know how they work, but people set their value, and people are unpredictable.
I will not sell lemon eletronic coins because I know they are lemon.
I do not expect you to hold these values.
You don't actually know that online coins are lemons despite all your posturing. It's a belief you hold, fine, but you haven't made a case for it. I invite you to back up your assertions by taking a short position on cryptocurrency. At least then you could make some money if you prove to be right.
I'm no more immoral for participating in the cryptocoin economy than someone else is for participating in the Craigslist economy.
..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?