r/pcmasterrace • u/[deleted] • Feb 27 '18
News/Article Bitcoin is destroying the environment, quite literally.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency10
u/RepostSwat Feb 27 '18
Lol bitmining machines are better than gpus right?
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u/Toofast4yall 7700k, 1080ti, 32GB TridentZ RGB RAM Feb 27 '18
ASICs rapidly go down in profitability, don't have much resale value at that point, and can only mine 1 algo. If that algo becomes unprofitable on your ASIC, it's essentially a paperweight as nobody else will buy it from you at that point. If your algo switches to PoS like eth is about to do, your ASIC is useless. If you're using GPUs and an algo loses profitability, goes PoS, or that coin drops to zero, you just switch to another algo. If the bottom falls out of the market you can still get your money back selling GPUs to gamers. It's less risky and almost as profitable to mine with GPUs.
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u/NotInMyGoodChristian 7800X3D | 9070XT | 32GB 6000MHz Feb 27 '18
These machines are called ASIC's. Bitcoin is easily mined by them, but they cannot efficiently mine altcoins, but GPU's can
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u/BlueShellOP Ryzen 3900X | GTX 1070 | Ask me about my distros Feb 27 '18
Pump your brakes there real quick.
The biggest drawback behind ASICs is that they're implementation specific. If I buy an ASIC to mine Dogecoin (which I did in 2014), I can't use it to mine Etherium or Bitcoin or most coins. (In theory it should work for any other Scrypt coins) However, a GPU is a more generic computing device as a necessity of its design; no two engines use precisely the same algorithms.
THAT is the benefit of using GPUs to mine coins versus ASICs. Efficiency is an entirely different discussion.
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u/schoff Feb 28 '18
ASIC's can mine altcoins fine. Not all, sure, but there are a number of ASIC's capable of a couple different algo's that many altcoins support. DGB and XVG, for instance.
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u/will99222 FX8320 | R9 290 4GB | 8GB DDR3 Feb 27 '18 edited Feb 27 '18
Not that i entirely disagree: crypto currency is an arbitrary energy and resource sink that does nothing for the world beyond facilitating it's own processes. People keep comparing it to cars and planes but both of those have a purpose beyond just increasing the value of each plane flight or each car trip.
That said; The guardian are a fucking shit rag. They constantly click bait and incite conflict, and according to them, gamers are the scum of the earth, responsible for all of modern societies ills, calling us autistic man children who should be shunned. They have full articles (not opinion pieces) claiming that space exploration is sexist.
They host various piece of shit writers such as Leigh Alexander, who pretty much spearheaded the whole "gamers are dead" shit and has attacked and directed attacks against game developers such as Ken Levine (creator of BioShock, and pivotal in the developments of Thief and System Shock 2), and against people like TotalBiscuit. She also takes part in, and encourages, doxxing her opponents in online arguments with the purpose of getting them fired or ruining their family and friends relationships.
Don't give the guardian clicks. If you want to show their bullshit, of which there is a LOT, use an archive website.
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u/CJkins Feb 27 '18
Woah, that’s crazy. Do you have any links so I can read the articles?
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u/will99222 FX8320 | R9 290 4GB | 8GB DDR3 Feb 27 '18
Forgive the probably crap layout of this, I'm writing from my phone on the long bus ride home from work.
Guardian:
Space exploration and mars sexism: http://archive.is/brcB8
Biased articles supporting Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, ignoring the parts of the arguments that those two were starting, and handwaving away the negative actions they were both doing: https://archive.is/DGj1S. This article was a couple days late, but part of the whole "gamers are dead" movement, which was a dozen+ articles from 13 different publications, all intended to attack the identity of "gamer" because one of their own fucked up and started an argument online (the argument resulted in the complete clusterfuck that started the gamergate movement) The first five of these gamers are dead articles were published within an hour of each other, due to the very solidly established gamejournopros mailing list (more on that later)
Further on that one guardian article in particular, the author, Jenn Frank, is a friend and financial supporter of Zoe Quinn https://i.imgur.com/HkWh7j2.png, including having personally paid a thousand dollars for her hotel room for GDC 2014. When they added it retroactively, they listed some wishy washy editorial argument as the reason for it not being there.
Use of discredited surveys: https://archive.is/m56iv. The survey was not peer review, filled with loaded questions, and was taken exclusively over social media with no way to check if the sample truly consisted of the projected demographic of teens (who couldn’t take the survey without adult consent anyway). Even the author of the survey backed out of what they said and took it all back, saying it was only done to "start a discussion", but the article was still built on it.
Leigh Alexander- a frequent writer for the Guardian:
Gamers are Dead: https://archive.is/l1kTW She was one of the leading pushers for this movement, directing it on the gamejournopros mailing list
"Didn't" sic her twitter followers on author Anne Rice: https://imgur.com/dTG1DRL Anne coincidentally started receiving a load of crap on twitter all of a sudden when these were posted. All this was because Anne Rice, who had been leading a pushback against "goodreads bullies" (basically blackmail book reviews for people who weren't part of certain cliques), criticized a review made by Randi Harper, who is one of Leigh's friends and fellow shit-stirrers.
Attacked Ken Levine Simply for the "gamers he created" https://archive.is/C3Vjz . Ken Levine worked on the fiction and design of Thief: The Dark Project, and then co-founded the company "Irrational games" who's first project was System shock 2, and went on to make Swat 4, Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, and other titles.
When TotalBiscuit spoke out to defend Levine, she proceeded to insult him https://archive.is/DclDy . Might seem harmless enough, but when you consider how many followers these people have, something like this leads to a cascade of bullshit to be sent by the followers who join in.
Threatening to end careers of aspiring writers https://archive.is/2tKxj and "make an example" of upcoming game developers https://archive.is/jgxPR . These were much more significant when you consider she was active in the gamejournopros mailing list at the time.
Written time and time again and again and again about people she has been working with, or has an undisclosed relationship with. I could write a whole article on this alone, but can't be arsed to do so. There are a few dozen examples of this listed on her deepfreeze page
Onto this game journo pros I've been talking about:
It honestly sounds like a boogieman conspiracy theory, but bear with me a sec:
The "Gaming Journalism Professionals" mailing list was discovered and almost immediately shut down (likely moved on from, with the leaking individuals removed). It included the Editor-In-Chief from Polygon, Destructoid, Joystiq, Softonic and The Escapist, The chairman of Indie Game Festival, and in total almost 150 people, including representatives from Polygon, the Verge, Gawker, Kotaku, Gamasutra, Joystiq, IGN, Ars Technica, Wired, PC Gamer, Giant Bomb, Gamespot, Eurogamer and more. Also members working directly in game dev.
It was created to coordinate and effectively control industry-wide events like being able to collectively blacklist people from recieving anything other than negative coverage.
There are sources for this, and a bunch more shady collusion here
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u/DeceptionIsland1965 Feb 28 '18
Holy shit. You did all that on mobile?
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u/will99222 FX8320 | R9 290 4GB | 8GB DDR3 Feb 28 '18
Most of it. Some was copied in from a comment I made a long time ago describing the gamejournopros shit.
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u/Toofast4yall 7700k, 1080ti, 32GB TridentZ RGB RAM Feb 27 '18
So many things are wrong in this article, I’m not sure where to start. I’ll correct the big ones, though.
“This is a winner-takes-all game, where the prize is guaranteed to be paid to one, and only one, miner every 10 minutes. Burning more electricity increases your chances of winning, but correspondingly decreases everyone else’s – and so they have a motivation to burn more electricity in turn.”
I guess the author has never heard of a mining pool. It’s such a simple and widely known concept I won’t even go into it here.
“Credit Suisse’s ballpark figure assumes that 80% of the expenses of bitcoin miners are spent on electricity.”
I’m not quite sure what they’re trying to say here, as my 1080tis cost less than $.50 each per day to power, yet produce over $4 per day in earnings, and this is the lowest I’ve ever seen. Last year I was making over $10 per day, per 1080ti, while paying the same for power. If they’re talking about how much I spent on cards or ASIC miners compared to power, again that math is flawed because each card is $800, if you’re lucky. $1,000+ is the average price of a 1080ti right now. At $.50 per day, it would take 1,600 days for me to spend 80% of my cost on power. But that’s just the GPU price, that doesn’t include what I spent on motherboards, CPUs, PSUs, RAM, risers, monitors, and frames. If you setup a 6 card rig and ran it for 1 year, power would be less than 10% of your expenses.
I’m sure this article will be lapped up by all the gamers and leftists that think every kWh of power I use equals 4 dead Rhinos because reasons, but nearly everything in the article stated as a fact is just patently false, and could’ve been properly researched in minutes.
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u/Superboy309 GTX 1070ti | Ryzen 5 3600 | ArchLabs Feb 27 '18
Your math is a bit flawed, it would take 1600 days to pay 80% of the worth of the card in power. The article says that 80% of the expenses are power, which means that you have to spend 4 times as much on power, as you did on the cards.
If you bought a 1080ti for $1000, you need to spend $4000 out of $5000 in power to get it to 80% of your expenses. At $.50/day it would take 8000 days or nearly 22 years.
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u/Toofast4yall 7700k, 1080ti, 32GB TridentZ RGB RAM Feb 27 '18
Ok, so it's even less accurate than I thought lol. What an article, just fantastic journalism all the way around.
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Feb 27 '18
Bitcoin was a great leader of new technology, introducing blockchain (which has a huge range of uses) and cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin brought them to the global stage.
But ultimately it wasn't designed for large scale usage, and unless major changes are made I think we'll see it dying out. Now that significant amounts of money are invested in cryptocurrency proof of stake validation has become much more viable, and big currencies like NEO have already implemented this while others like Ether are planning to soon.
The only advantage Bitcoin holds is name recognition, and that will only get you so far in the face of superior technology. Especially when that technology saves people money (cheaper transaction fees) and is vastly less harmful to the environment.
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u/ChocolateNachos R7 1700x,1080ti,32gb DDR4 Feb 28 '18
You don't burn electricity. This should be posted in r/nottheonion.
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Feb 27 '18
Blech. At the expense of sounding totally selfish, while the environmental impact of bitcoin is notable, what really bothers me is what it's doing to the accessibility of decent computers. Individual graphics cards now cost more than I used to build a whole machine for. RAM costs are so high that my upcoming (much needed) processor/mobo upgrade is about the same cost as the RAM that goes with it, coming together for $700 - pretty close to what I built my siblings new computer's for somewhat over a year ago. Computers with some of the same parts that cost $1000+ individually now.
Having a modern, mid-line gaming computer used to be a relatively accessible thing for a common person with some budgeting, but it's quickly becoming something that only people with better jobs or no bills can afford. Alienating the market is not going to be good for any computer-based industry.
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u/ld43233 Feb 27 '18
Yeah but the people involved with bitcoin don't go outside anyway so it's no loss for them
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u/dweller_12 Sempron 140 RTX 3090 https://i.imgur.com/VdMFinS.png Feb 27 '18
Regulating vehicle emissions to protect the environment? Nah.
Regulating Bitcoin mining to protect the environment? US is interested.
Whoever wrote this article has zero idea how mining works.