Solved! Nvidia sells $30 million worth of "mining GPUs" to a single company.

[moonbogg]

Hut 8 Buys $30M Worth of Nvidia's New Crypto Mining GPUs

The batch of processors will add 1,600 GH to Hut 8's mining capacity.

www.coindesk.com

Wow. I guess that says it all. Try and tell me none of those GPUs could have been used for gaming cards. Even miners are sounding pissed about this in a video I watched. They feel like they don't have a chance to buy cards either, lol. This mining business is much bigger now than gamers and small-scale miners alike. It's basically a corporate thing now as far as where GPUs will be going for a long time it seems. How will this effect gamers getting cards you guys think?

 

[fleshconsumed]

so how again is it traceable? If i mine with a proxy (or buy bitcoins), then divide my wallet to multiple wallets using a diff one for each transaction its all traced easilY?

It's traceable if you ever convert it to actual currency (dollars). All exchanges where you can convert crypto to USD know your identity, so if you ever send crypto to an exchange to cash out federal government will know that that wallet belongs to you and they will know everything you've ever done with it. There is less of a privacy risk when it comes to person-to-person transactions because private citizens do not have access to the same resources as government, but as soon as you pay someone with crypto they will know how much money you have in that wallet, that in itself is a huge privacy issue that is just too onerous to deal with.

As applicable to governments banning mining, how can they ban mining? One is physically shutting down known mining farms, and two, shutting down miners ability to cash out. Mining farms would have to start laundering their profits like gold/diamond/drug cartels, unfortunately for them crypto being a public ledger it's much more difficult to launder crypto.

 

[Leeea]

so how again is it traceable? If i mine with a proxy (or buy bitcoins), then divide my wallet to multiple wallets using a diff one for each transaction its all traced easilY?

yes

the block chain is a public ledger for all to see.

 

[killster1]

It's traceable if you ever convert it to actual currency (dollars). All exchanges where you can convert crypto to USD know your identity, so if you ever send crypto to an exchange to cash out federal government will know that that wallet belongs to you and they will know everything you've ever done with it. There is less of a privacy risk when it comes to person-to-person transactions because private citizens do not have access to the same resources as government, but as soon as you pay someone with crypto they will know how much money you have in that wallet, that in itself is a huge privacy issue that is just too onerous to deal with.

As applicable to governments banning mining, how can they ban mining? One is physically shutting down known mining farms, and two, shutting down miners ability to cash out. Mining farms would have to start laundering their profits like gold/diamond/drug cartels, unfortunately for them crypto being a public ledger it's much more difficult to launder crypto.

using a proxy to mine, then breaking your wallet to individual transaction wallets wouldnt solve this? cash it out in Yugoslavia. i know for a long time now they are into 10 forms oF ID to buy it from a official site, of course you could get better rates buying from your partners in crime.

 

[NTMBK]

using a proxy to mine, then breaking your wallet to individual transaction wallets wouldnt solve this? cash it out in Yugoslavia. i know for a long time now they are into 10 forms oF ID to buy it from a official site, of course you could get better rates buying from your partners in crime.

Yugoslavia hasn't existed for almost 30 years.

 

[bejellio]

At current market prices that's, what, 3 GPUs?

I know this was a bit of a dated posted, but it made me lol =).

 

[nOOky]

At this point I'd be looking for a monitor capable of 1024 x 768 so I can run newer games in all their glory at reasonable FPS with my older GPU's. Just have to sit closer to the dang thing.

Strange how it all ends up being about money, isn't it?

 

[beginner99]

so how again is it traceable? If i mine with a proxy (or buy bitcoins), then divide my wallet to multiple wallets using a diff one for each transaction its all traced easilY?

How do you buy bitcoins? Buying or cashing-out is the easiest part to use (for law enforcement) to determine the owner as at the source/sink will need to be some verified bank-like entity meaning they need to have your real name.

Now of course if you only stay inside bitcoin and never do a transaction with someone that knows who you are, then you will stay anonymous. But is that really all that useful? If you mine yes, you can make money and spend it.

 

[amenx]

How do you buy bitcoins? Buying or cashing-out is the easiest part to use (for law enforcement) to determine the owner as at the source/sink will need to be some verified bank-like entity meaning they need to have your real name.

Now of course if you only stay inside bitcoin and never do a transaction with someone that knows who you are, then you will stay anonymous. But is that really all that useful? If you mine yes, you can make money and spend it.

What if you sit on it for years and just take out smaller, more frequent amounts that would normally fly under the radar?

 

[Hitman928]

What if you sit on it for years and just take out smaller, more frequent amounts that would normally fly under the radar?

The moment you buy or sell bitcoin, any transactions related not only to that bitcoin, but any wallet that bitcoin touched become traceable to you. This includes branching wallets. For instance, if you mined a bunch of bitcoin at some point, then sent that bitcoin to a bunch of different wallets and then from one of those wallets sent some to an exchange to cash out, now every wallet you sent bitcoin to can be traced to you. It's not always easy or straight forward, but it can be done. Additionally, even if you never buy or sell bitcoin but just send bitcoin to a wallet that someone can prove you sent the bitcoin to that wallet (online messaging, texts, etc.), then once again, all of your branching bitcoin could then be traced.

AFAIK, only Monero offers truly anonymous transactions which is why some exchanges won't let you exchange Monero and those that do usually have very strict rules about what you can do with it.

Edit: As far as fly under the radar, I mean, someone would have to have a reason to look into your transactions in the first place, it doesn't really matter how big or small once they have a reason to look. Once they start looking, you have a traceable history that lives on the blockchain forever.

 

[beginner99]

Edit: As far as fly under the radar, I mean, someone would have to have a reason to look into your transactions in the first place, it doesn't really matter how big or small once they have a reason to look. Once they start looking, you have a traceable history that lives on the blockchain forever.

Exactly. That's the core point.

It's not like anyone will likley look at it if all you do is a handful of minor transactions per year. But once you either do something illegal, law enforcement can go back and see all your transactions to possible illegal activity, even 10 years later.
More troublesome is that bitcoin (or other crypto) with this downside simply can not replace traditional banking. I don't want all my transactions and savings out in the open for everyone to see.

 

[Dribble]

It's still much harder to track then using a credit card as you don't need a name/address/credit rating to own some bit coin. While it tracks a history of transactions it doesn't store a link to a real person with a real bank account, it just tracks stuff going into pretty anonymous wallets which one person can have as many of as they like.

 

[beginner99]

It's still much harder to track then using a credit card as you don't need a name/address/credit rating to own some bit coin. While it tracks a history of transactions it doesn't store a link to a real person with a real bank account, it just tracks stuff going into pretty anonymous wallets which one person can have as many of as they like.

In fact you do need a name to buy bitcoin unless you mine it. Or at least here (Europe) you need the name. Any entity that allows you to purchase crypto from "cash" will by law require your name with proof with an official document like a passport. From that point on it's "easy" for 3-letter agencies to track your bitcoin flow. As soon as you pay someone you now with bitcoin he can theoretically also track back addresses and determine how much bitcoin you have and on what you spend it. It's all in the public domain for anyone to see. I admit right now while possible it would be rather cumbersome and time-consuming (but still possible compared to traditional banking).

And if crypto actually takes off I bet you there will be services that offer such tracking support with nice graphs and info what your target spends his money on. So I would be careful what you do right now because in 10 years it might be easy to associate with you.

 

[blckgrffn]

My take on it - you won't ever spend your BTC.

But maybe you will borrow against your BTC in fiat to get short term funds. Then you will pay that back. No taxable event. No loss on the upside created as the value trends up. It's like certain types of life insurance where you never pay taxes because you only draw down on the end value of the life insurance policy, but use it as a mask to hide massive amounts of investments and the gains they have made.

Only if you want to "cash out" would you outright sell your BTC but if you are a believer in it's future there is no way you would do that.

It's too valuable and too traceable to spend as cash, but if you want an asset that a third party can monitor and that you can prove you have access to then it is pretty remarkable.

In any case, there is enough really smart people leveraged highly into BTC now I expect to see every possible iteration of innovation attempted.

 

[Golgatha]

[TechYesCity][YT]

Smaller PC retailers even going out of business due to lack of access to GPUs. "This is far WORSE than we saw during 2017-2018".

I think even Micro Center et. al. are feeling the hurt right now. My hypothesis is their 5000 series Ryzen CPUs are only staying in stock because you simply can't get a GPU to pair it with. Further evidence to this hypothesis is Micro Center's PowerSpec in-house brand full systems, which include these unobtainium GPUs, go out of stock much more quickly.

 

[moonbogg]

I think even Micro Center et. al. are feeling the hurt right now. My hypothesis is their 5000 series Ryzen CPUs are only staying in stock because you simply can't get a GPU to pair it with. Further evidence to this hypothesis is Micro Center's PowerSpec in-house brand full systems, which include these unobtainium GPUs, go out of stock much more quickly.

I wouldn't be surprised by that. Not just a gaming computer, but the entire gaming computer industry revolves around the GPU. There's no point buying anything if you can't find a GPU, unless something breaks of course. I upgraded my platform recently and it feels like a mostly pointless upgrade because for the first time ever, there's no GPU upgrade paired with it. I know life has infinitely more pressing issues than finding a gaming GPU, so I haven't lost perspective. It still sucks though.

 

[CP5670]

Yes, the whole DIY desktop industry is tied to gamers and video cards at this point. Probably 90% of people who buy custom PC parts (as opposed to OEM or laptops) are gamers who need good video cards.

 

[moonbogg]

I think that at least for a while, related industries may benefit because a lot of GPU money is being spent on other stuff since GPUs are nonexistent. That only goes so far and for so long though.

 

[bigboxes]

More minings GPUs lol

= less GPUs for gamers. Screw mining. Make crypto illegal.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Screw mining. Make crypto illegal.

That just hurts the little guy, too. If miners and scalpers are willing to pay the bigger bucks for the cards, they're going to be the ones getting the cards, so if an "Average Joe" wants a card, he'll have to pay higher prices, and thus, depriving him of being able to offset that higher price by mining, just means that the average Joe isn't going to be buying these cards.

You might as well have said, "We need gov't subsidies for video cards for gamers". Same effect.

 

[bigboxes]

That just hurts the little guy, too. If miners and scalpers are willing to pay the bigger bucks for the cards, they're going to be the ones getting the cards, so if an "Average Joe" wants a card, he'll have to pay higher prices, and thus, depriving him of being able to offset that higher price by mining, just means that the average Joe isn't going to be buying these cards.

You might as well have said, "We need gov't subsidies for video cards for gamers". Same effect.

Mining is a waste of resources. I'm against mining. I don't care about gaming. It's about outlawing something that has no benefit. It's completely made up. I'm for the government regulating it into non-existence.

 

[bigboxes]

Won't someone think of the little guy. Wah!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Mining is a waste of resources. I'm against mining. I don't care about gaming. It's about outlawing something that has no benefit. It's completely made up. I'm for the government regulating it into non-existence.

Same with Credit / Debit cards? Say goodbye to easy online purchases? Because they're a waste of electricity, doing all of that transaction processing, having all of those offices, CC terminals, cash registers, they all add up to loads of power usage. On the order of what Bitcoin uses.

 

[Magic Carpet]

You might have a case with Chia, Larry, but not with Bitcoin 😛

 

[blckgrffn]

You might have a case with Chia, Larry, but not with Bitcoin 😛
View attachment 44975

Eh, always fun comparisons. Does that take into account a business like Authorize.net - all of their staff, the office buildings, their call center and all the overhead garbage that comes from a payment processor that btc (or most crypto) processing doesn’t have?

And on btc, is that worst case scenario? Clearly it’s not lightning network overhead.

Holistically the payment processor appendage that skims money from every transaction also has a non trivial footprint in it’s entirety but is probably not nearly so inefficient and costly as say the medical coding industry.

I always like to consider the footprint of a company like Facebook and compare the marginal utility it provides humanity. Haha, I happen to think that is negative so…

And really, if you have no utility to be gained via crypto then it is a huge energy waster. I get it. No way around it. It’s like not having a FB account yet existing in a world where we have to endure it. The question is, I think, if the people invested in btc will all agree it has no utility left to them and walk away. IDK. Our short term history says they have more likelihood of doubling down.

 

[jpiniero]

nVidia in their financial report said they sold $155M in CMP branded products last quarter. For this quarter, the forecast is for $400M or so.

That's just CMP.