Topic: 8th Alt coin thread. Or what to do now that asics are all over the place. - page 75. (Read 81547 times)

Whether you like ASICs or not is kind of a null point considering they are being produced regardless.  I understand the argument that people will just buy more and the same amount of electricity will be used regardless.  This argument ignores all of the drawbacks to asics though and only considers the benefits of high hashrate with lower power.  Keep in mind:

1.  ASICs cost significantly more than a GPU
2.  They can only mine one algorithm
3. They are useless for any other function.
4.  Warranty and support are dismal
5.  Their value is strictly tied to the coin(s) they can mine.

So you are really weighing versatility with lower performance vs no versatility with high performance.  For this reason alone, GPUs aren't going anywhere.  I'm not a green peace, save the earth type of person. i don't think ASICs are good because they save electricity.  But as someone who has worked in the technology sector for 15 years you can't discount a technology that is more efficient just because its different than what you own.  Half of these coins that are forking are nowhere close to the goals of their projects yet they are wasting resources to accommodate older, slower, and more power hungry devices.  And whats going to happen when nvidia releases their new cards?  Should we cripple the algorithms because now some people have faster, more efficient hardware?

And just as a disclaimer, I am 100% GPU.  I've owned 1 asic, the A3.  I owned it for 2 months, made $1000 and sold it for what I paid for it.  It was loud and hot, not for me.  Really the only reason I think the Z9 is so great is because its neither hot nor loud.  I am still not going to buy one though.

Of course they can.  Who do you think makes the chips?  Really no different than Intel being able to reduce the amount of oem computers produced.  Of course this is counter intuitive to cash flow.  While miners have bought a lot of GPUs I almost guarentee the shortage is due to Nvidia shifting production to deep learning gpus.  Much more money in that market.

"I said that if zec does not collaspe  the asic miners will save no money."  Sorry but I'm not a mind reader.  This is a vague statement and could mean anything.  What do you mean collapse?  The price drops? 51% attack?  Collapse can mean many things.  "the asic miners will save no money."  Again, what does this mean?  I would think that if zec collapses they would be a up a creek too!

I don't know how many of you were around in 2013....2014 but we are seeing the exact same trend with mining profitability.

Basically at the end of 2013, everybody was pulling in $5-$10/day per GPU mining DOGE or LTC.

Then BTC peaked at Nov 2013 and started its downtrend.... but the downtrend of the mineable alts was much worse and faster.

Then to make matters worse it was around the time that Scrypt ASICs came out which lead to an exponential growth in difficulty.

Hence the profitability quickly went from $10...$5....$2.50.......$0.25 profit per day per GPU towards the end of 2014.

I have a few  with a stick of ram and a celeron cpu I will pm you




https://i.imgur.com/hwDRGiF.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/pEzJ2nz.jpg

Can look up letine on Alibaba. https://leiqing.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-806058575/Miner_Components.html?spm=a2700.icbuShop.88.22.49bd2501MHc5CM

I source my mobos and case from them, they are reliable.

Regarding GPU supply: Can Nvidia regulate third party producers to reduce how many GPUs they put out for sale? It feels like there should be ALOT of more GPUs out on the market, but there isnt. And the price is still higher then i would expect it to be in this climate.

Does anybody know where I can buy the Onda B250 BTC-D8P boards cheap? Looking to prepare maybe 2 more rigs for when the new Nvidia gen comes out. Or should I rather buy the Octominer? I need compact builds since they are gonna be sitting in an office.

so youre gonna be selling pickaxes and shovels. not a bad strategy at all

well  that is why asics suck.

if you are all asics  the game becomes power cost


and  cheapest power = winner winner chicken diner.

Gpus were nice  because they had an after life and other purposes besides mining.

As for fpga tech  mixed with  gpus  long run = loser
Short run  they can work.

I can not stress any more  then this  there were millions and millions and millions of gpus that had the ability to make some money.

Killing that off  destroys mining eventually.  Since you kill off the widespread customer base.

For me  I am working at getting solar expansion since I have a 73 acre piece of land from and investor with some money.  I have buysolar as a solar guy

our goal will be to develop this and  to develop a 900-1200 watt solar setup for a little guy

both projects  shoud do well in this climate of low margins.

Also speculation:

Mineority charge $399 for Rx570 + 1 year of hosting. It's ~$30 USD in electricity to run it for a year at $0.03/kwh, 120W. Let's call it $50 USD to run a card all in, inclusive of wages, cooling, rent and other fixed costs divided by all GPUs.

At their scale, I assume they can get Rx570s for $150. And their cost is $150 + $50 to run it for 1 year. It's not too bad, they get 1 card free for themselves for every purchase. They get all the money upfront, no cash flow issues. They make money mining off the free gpu they get for each purchase. After some months, they pay off the facility upfront costs and stuff like mobo,psu, other pc components.

I spend an hour a week taking care of 300+ GPUs and 22 asics, almost all errors except hardware failure self recovers. They can surely do better, and 1 technician for every 10,000 GPUs should be sufficient. This is 1 salary to pay for every 10,000 gpus, 5000 which are mining for themselves.

It's only possible due to their massive scale. And if they are btc early adopters they are pretty stacked. It's all just fermi estimation, but they can do it. You won't be able to mine shitcoins as they pop up, but if you just don't switch coins often, mineority's package makes sense.

FWIW speculation:

1) What is interesting is mineority's approach. From their website, it appears that they will be selling, maybe hosting some current generation GPU's. Their pool and some other services will be charging 0%. Also interesting is that they appear to be purchasing 2000 fpga's out of a 5000 unit order. How will they make money?

Some very rough numbers: A 100,000 sf warehouse is about $500k/year with a 3 year lease at a minimum. Additionally a warehouse has to be facilitated. So say $4 mil for the FPGA's and $1.5 mil for 3 years of a warehouse. So $5.5 mil upfront to start. If they can average $6 - $7 per day out of the FPGA's (150W ea) for a year, they will pay off the startup capital. The FPGA's will also take up very little space and cooling so they can use the rest of the warehouse as a hosting facility. By shrinking the space requirement, they can lower their risk.

2) In the give and take concerning FPGA weaknesses, from GPUhoader's succinct summary: "In general this means memory bandwidth or area heavy portions of the algorithm may be handled by the GPU, and hash algorithms designed for hardware implementations are handled by the FPGA.".

i don't see the point of ASICS saving power as well. Not bashing here but ASICS saving power i can't comprehend. People would just end up buying more asics and hash and in the end what you will have would be same or more power consumption with higher network hashrate and difficulty. Profit would simply readjust and be the same in times like this. ASICS in general i feel is sort of like a nuclear arms race.

The only time i see asics being a viable choice would be perhaps a portfolio diversification where you have x amount of GPU and require x amount of asics to balance your mining venture.

I said that if zec does not collaspe  the asic miners will save no money.

if you truly don't understand this I am sorry for you.
if you do understand and are trolling I am sorry for you.

I would like for you to take my point of view and explain why I said what I said.

If you can't do that it is okay
If you won't do it it is okay.

How can you say they save zero power?  to get the same performance on 1080tis it would take 3 Kw.  The Z9 uses 300 w.  To get the same performance on Nvidia you would spend $10k just for the hardware, not to mention the rest of the components needed.

When you say a coin is crushed, what do you mean?  unprofitable to mine?  Really I think this is the major disconnect and why zcash has a committee to make decisions like this.  Most miners don't care about anything but profitability, which is natural.  But do you think the average bitcoin holder mines or cares about people making money from mining?  No.

As for the cheap power, there are other aspects such as space, heat, management, and noise. Even if electricity is free there will come a time when you run out of space, have issues with heat, and possibly worry about noise.

If zec does not collapse and does well asics save zero power.

If you don’t understand that power savings is always short term it’s cool.

If you do understand that asics don’t save power and are lying it is also cool.

I understand why asics are an issue as bitmain and innosilicon can simply build and sell .

We are witnessing just that an historic build and sell move by the two companies.

Since the companies can do this and we see it now it means any coin can be crushed btc is crushed due to endless asics being sold.

Which means power is not saved which is why I wrote this reply.

If you see my first post my goal is cheap power no more no less.

Only cheap power works for miners all the time.

IMO the people who are against ZCash's decision more than likely haven't read the ballot or don't understand what is going on.  Zcash isn't welcoming asics, they are simply saying they are not prioritizing switching the algo to resist them.  In fact I think the road they are going down will be interesting.  By 2020 they want to have their own thermodynamic efficient algo that they will post open hardware specifications for.  It would be like the Open Compute equivalent of an asic miner.  If we are also being honest with ourselves its not like the Z9 is some power-hogging contraption that sounds like a jet taking off.  This thing outperforms a 1080ti by 14x with virtually the same power usage. Not to mention its $850, not much different than the price of a gtx1080ti.  Out of all of the miners bitmain has made recently, I think this is the hardest one to argue against.

As for the founder's reward, say what you will but you only need to compare the price to the forked coin that removed the fee. $156 vs $7

yeah  most all coins are down now.

And if I owned 20% of all the zec in the world

i would feel my wealth has slipped a lot since December

so why not welcome asics for a price boost.

Btc was 19k and now it’s 6k.


You do have a point not arguing. Just stating the obvious

well the coin was once 866 usd  it is now 185 usd.

I can't help but think they believe price will go higher this way.

 I  am mining on the eth pill earning 1.35 a card spending 180 watts a card