Ethereum GPU mining?

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AdamK47

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,169
2,830
126
I've been mining vanguard index funds with my income. With the current low income to index ratio, I think I'll make it out on top.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,785
136
Also, the DAO hack was as much a bug in Solidity as it was anything else.

Interesting. I didn't know that.

On another news:

Plasma is going nowhere at this point. An article I read about the state of Plasma says there are numerous different versions and none seem to be production ready. From what I can understand with my limited knowledge, there are tons of scaling options presented.

The two that seems to be at a forefront of scalability research seems to be Enjin's ERC-1155 meant for DAPP games and the research the Loom Network is doing with Plasma Cash and DPoS.

Red Squirrel said:
Of course trying to speculate stuff like that is pretty much a gamble. Not any different than the stock market.

IMO, the Constantinople hard fork in January should help. Last week or so it had a single day gain of 10% just because the developers announced the block number for the hard fork. If the announcement affected it that much, I assume the actual thing should prove positive in general.
 
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reb0rn

Senior member
Dec 31, 2009
221
58
101
DAO was not blockchain problem, it was smart contract being done by ppl that know nothing.
Editing (hardforking) blockchain for someone mistake (bad trade, exchange hack, personal interest, bad written contract) should never be done
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Interesting. I didn't know that.

This explanation is the best I've seen to date:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/

I've been given to believe that overall it's a timing problem. Many have blamed Solidity itself for these problems, such as this doom-and-gloomer here:

https://blog.lamden.io/turing-incompleteness-and-the-sad-state-of-solidity-d5278ba4eda0

He sort of has a point, and it may be one of the reasons why the EF is getting away from Solidity. It should be noted that the Ethereum blockchain has only voted to save someone from a failed contract one time.

DAO was not blockchain problem, it was smart contract being done by ppl that know nothing.

And yet if you knew the situation well, you'd know the DAO team had already rolled out a proposed fix for the problem. They didn't deploy it quickly enough, sadly.
 
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Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,197
12,025
126
www.anyf.ca
I noticed my income (in Ethereum not dollars) have been slightly going up, kinda interesting. Is this because of less people mining?



Eth now at around $126 as I type this, so it's a bit higher than it was before. Just going to keep going until I decide I want to use the hardware for something. I'm almost tempted to even buy more cards now that they are getting cheaper on Ebay, but think I'll hold off. Now would be a good time to buy if I'm going to do it though. If the price of eth happens to go up then everyone else will be buying and they'll go up in price again. That's a big IF though. :p
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
ETH going up, difficulty going down, more profits. Might be time to jump on some of those ETH ASICs if you specifically want to mine ETH. I would not go the GPU route now if you're "serious" about mining. As much as I hate the ASICs.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,197
12,025
126
www.anyf.ca
It is tempting, the issue with ASICs is if it's anything like the bitcoin ones they are probably super hard to get ahold of. I'll have to look into them further. Probably expensive though.

Eth at $136 CAD now.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
The other risk is that the EF might eventually agree on an algorithm shift to kill the ASICs. Or they'll just roll out PoS in 2019 (yeah, right).

edit: glancing briefly at coinmarketcap, it looks like ETH is back up to ~$110 USD. That puts it where it was maybe 2-3 weeks ago? Not a bad little gain, but it has a lot of ground to make up to get back to where it was last year. I would be cautiously optimistic. It may take a long time for values to return. That could be good for miners, especially if some people dropped out that have no intention of mining again, at least not under PoW.
 
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IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,785
136
It is tempting, the issue with ASICs is if it's anything like the bitcoin ones they are probably super hard to get ahold of. I'll have to look into them further. Probably expensive though.

The issue with ASICs is that it runs one algorithm, so if you can't mine that then there goes your ROI. Also once its obsolete it basically becomes worthless. Well, maybe you can salvage components for scrap?

Also the January hard fork(Constantinople) will reduce block rewards to 2/3rds of what it is right now.
 
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Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,197
12,025
126
www.anyf.ca
The issue with ASICs is that it runs one algorithm, so if you can't mine that then there goes your ROI. Also once its obsolete it basically becomes worthless. Well, maybe you can salvage components for scrap?

Also the January hard fork(Constantinople) will reduce block rewards to 2/3rds of what it is right now.

Yeah that's what keeps me away from wanting to get into them. And they are so hard to get anyway. It looks like the Ethereum ones arn't even THAT much better than GPUs. They are better per watt but that's about it.

I'm finding some GTX 1080 Tis for a couple hundred on Ebay so it's super tempting, but I don't know how many of these are scams, seems too good to be true considering most of the other listings are still in the 500+ mark.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
The good ETH ASICs aren't widely available yet. They're coming, though. I think you're looking at the older Bitmain ASIC.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
I think not, assuming you can get your mining software to allocate 100% of VRAM for the DAG, which may not be possible on cards with primary display duty. According to the DAG size calculator, the DAG will reach 2.99GB on April 28th 2019. After that all bets are off.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Possibly. It won't be like the 2GB card dump since ETH has just pulled itself out of a long period of decline (as opposed to when the 2GB cards stopped working, when mining profits were looking better). All vid cards now have ASICs as competition either presently or in the coming months. There's enough pressure to dump cards that I doubt you'll see any extra 1060s hitting the streets due to the DAG. Maybe there will be some stragglers.

eBay already has 3GB 1060s listing for $110-$130.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,197
12,025
126
www.anyf.ca
Yeah and it would not really be a smart move to buy them anyway unless you want them for another crypto.

The 1070's seem to be the best bang for the buck still and they are coming down, but don't think I'll buy any more, as tempting as it is.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,785
136
More noise about PoS in 2019:

https://bitcoinist.com/ethereum-pos-blockchain-cut-energy/

I share the skepticism of others who are actually working on PoS. I would be thrilled if they could get sharding working in 2019. Not gonna hold my breath, though.

Next seems to be what they call Ethereum 1.x. We might see ProgPOW to kill ASICs, and include rent scheme for smart contracts to curb storage usage. There's no way we'll see PoS/Sharding in 2019.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
There's no way we'll see PoS/Sharding in 2019.

I agree, but it's interesting to listen to Buterin (among others) claim that Ethereum will drop it's power usage by 99% in 2019. So someone is confident that they'll at least put it on the testnet before the year is out. Hadn't heard about ProgPoW though.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,785
136
I think I read somewhere that PoS testnet will arrive before summer.

But I think its too optimistic.
 

Sonikku

Lifer
Jun 23, 2005
15,749
4,558
136
Yeah, but those 105c temps... How long is this card going to last mining around the clock?
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,226
9,990
126
Aye! Too bad they're $700!

I just "lost" another RX card, a 570, or maybe a PCI-E slot (would be a bummer, just upgraded to this mobo a month ago).

A little annoyed at that, $300 and it's less than two years old. No fan dust build-up or noise or whine or any sort of indication that that card might be going. Now, it's not even detected at all in Device Manager.

Does 24/7 mining kill RX cards in less than two years? It was an MSI Gaming X model.

Edit: After further testing, it was my primary PCI-E slot on my *refurb* mobo that went.
 
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Sonikku

Lifer
Jun 23, 2005
15,749
4,558
136
Aye! Too bad they're $700!

I just "lost" another RX card, a 570, or maybe a PCI-E slot (would be a bummer, just upgraded to this mobo a month ago).

A little annoyed at that, $300 and it's less than two years old. No fan dust build-up or noise or whine or any sort of indication that that card might be going. Now, it's not even detected at all in Device Manager.

Does 24/7 mining kill RX cards in less than two years? It was an MSI Gaming X model.
I don't know about that, but I imagine your 570 card ran a whole lot cooler under load than the Radeon 7 does.
 

Feld

Senior member
Aug 6, 2015
287
95
101
Aye! Too bad they're $700!

I just "lost" another RX card, a 570, or maybe a PCI-E slot (would be a bummer, just upgraded to this mobo a month ago).

A little annoyed at that, $300 and it's less than two years old. No fan dust build-up or noise or whine or any sort of indication that that card might be going. Now, it's not even detected at all in Device Manager.

Does 24/7 mining kill RX cards in less than two years? It was an MSI Gaming X model.
As long as the temperature is kept low, 24/7 mining is actually easier on a card (aside from the fans) than the intermittent loads and fluctuating temperatures of just being a gaming card. Fans are the only thing mining actually wears out faster unless you're mining with a major OC and sky high temps.