Question Scalping is bad, mmmm'k Newegg?

[VirtualLarry]

For a 1660, I might understand, but a 1650? This same card was $255 a few months earlier, and I thought that price was harsh.

 

[thilanliyan]

you're probably better off just buying 35,000 RVN.

That's almost always been true for pretty much every coin lol.
Oh how I wish I had bought eth when it was like $10

 

[MrTeal]

That's almost always been true for pretty much every coin lol.
Oh how I wish I had bought eth when it was like $10

Heh, pretty much. Mining has the coverage on the downside that if the crypto tanks you always sell the cards, but if you're paying $400 for a 1650 good luck getting even close to half that back if crypto in general goes tits up.

 

[moonbogg]

I'm in the same boat. The PC under my TV has a Haswell i5, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to justify replacing it if these prices continue.

Same here with my current GPU. At some point I have to weight what a GPU does for me vs the asking price. It doesn't matter how fast or how good the GPU is either. Make it 3X as fast as a 3080 with 20GB of ram and if it's around $1000 I'm just not buying it. The value offered from such a device is just not there at these prices, and $1000 is considered dirt cheap these days. I'm definitely tapping out. You should be able to get a fully capable 1440P, high refresh GPU for a few hundred bucks. That's where the value is at for high-end PC gaming. It makes sense there. It doesn't make sense at all to go much higher. The super high-end makes sense at around $6-700 to play games in full glory if you want that luxury.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Same here with my current GPU. At some point I have to weight what a GPU does for me vs the asking price. It doesn't matter how fast or how good the GPU is either. Make it 3X as fast as a 3080 with 20GB of ram and if it's around $1000 I'm just not buying it. The value offered from such a device is just not there at these prices, and $1000 is considered dirt cheap these days. I'm definitely tapping out. You should be able to get a fully capable 1440P, high refresh GPU for a few hundred bucks. That's where the value is at for high-end PC gaming. It makes sense there. It doesn't make sense at all to go much higher. The super high-end makes sense at around $6-700 to play games in full glory if you want that luxury.

Is this, effectively, the end of the GPU market, as a "gaming device", rather than a "mining device"? I mean, NVidia pulled the LHR card, but as has been seen, it's basically a sort of whack-a-mole game, and there's more miners and talented devs (and new coins) than NVidia, it seems, so it seems like a pointless endevour on the whole.

Edit: I mean, at "practical, for the masses" pricing models. There will always be GPUs available for the Hermes scarve crowd. Maybe GPUs will go the route of the Rolex, and only Wall St. bankers and their families will be able to afford GPUs and gaming.

While the rest of us, "game" on cell-phones, like dirty (phone) console peasants.

 

[NTMBK]

Is this, effectively, the end of the GPU market, as a "gaming device", rather than a "mining device"? I mean, NVidia pulled the LHR card, but as has been seen, it's basically a sort of whack-a-mole game, and there's more miners and talented devs (and new coins) than NVidia, it seems, so it seems like a pointless endevour on the whole.

Edit: I mean, at "practical, for the masses" pricing models. There will always be GPUs available for the Hermes scarve crowd. Maybe GPUs will go the route of the Rolex, and only Wall St. bankers and their families will be able to afford GPUs and gaming.

While the rest of us, "game" on cell-phones, like dirty (phone) console peasants.

Thanks, miners

 

[moonbogg]

Is this, effectively, the end of the GPU market, as a "gaming device", rather than a "mining device"? I mean, NVidia pulled the LHR card, but as has been seen, it's basically a sort of whack-a-mole game, and there's more miners and talented devs (and new coins) than NVidia, it seems, so it seems like a pointless endevour on the whole.

Edit: I mean, at "practical, for the masses" pricing models. There will always be GPUs available for the Hermes scarve crowd. Maybe GPUs will go the route of the Rolex, and only Wall St. bankers and their families will be able to afford GPUs and gaming.

While the rest of us, "game" on cell-phones, like dirty (phone) console peasants.

One thing is crystal clear: if this keeps up, then yes of course PC gaming will die. There's no question about that. It will be a casual/indie gaming APU driven industry only. You buy a computer off the shelf and whatever it can do is what you will do with it. There won't be a large enough market for $1500 GPUs to mean anything for gaming. GPUs will simply be parallel processors used for other tasks such as work, research, mining, AI, etc. No one buys a $3000 Quadro or $5000 Tesla for gaming and they won't be buying GPUs that cost that much for gaming despite any other branding they are labeled with. I mean seriously, a GPU that's branded GeForce but still costs thousands of dollars is still way off the radar for all but a literal handful of gamers. No one is developing games for hardware like that.
I saw a video from Hardware Unboxed where they think things will return to normal, but as long as GPU mining is profitable I don't see how that can ever be the case. Miners have no quantity limit because more GPUs = more money. If your local nursery started selling money trees do you think the obvious demand issue for such a tree would be solved simply by expanding the size of the nursery? Not a chance in hell. You can't grow enough trees like that to satisfy demand. It's just not possible. GPUs are literal money trees. If people want those trees for a low price simply to look nice in their garden like they are used to buying trees for, they aren't getting one, like ever.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wait until they start putting GPUs into HVAC systems as heating elements. Someone (either the homeowner or the vendor / installer) will be making $$$ off of them.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Miners have no quantity limit because more GPUs = more money.

BTW, this is not strictly true. Normally what happens is, the hashrate on the network increases, increasing the mining difficulty, so the more miners and mining hardware on the network, the less profit per MH/sec, so eventually, the network reaches a type of equilibrium, and only those miners with deep pockets or free / nearly-free electricity can afford to continue mining. But this has been offset the last few months / first part of 2021, by rising exchange values for coins, in terms of Fiat USD, keeping mining as profitable as ever.

I don't see how it can continue forever... unless countries around the world keep printing Fiat currency, and giving it away. (Enter UBI.)

 

[Markfw]

Miners are scum. Its been almost a year since I have tried buying a 3080TI at MSRP. I even enter the newegg shuffle for anything that is MSRP. So I have never won that, and never found a card anywhere close to MSRP. I can't really even afford the $1200-1400 MSRP cards, but I want at least one. I refuse to pay scalper prices.

Again, miners are the scum of the earth.

 

[aigomorla]

Miners are scum. Its been almost a year since I have tried buying a 3080TI at MSRP. I even enter the newegg shuffle for anything that is MSRP. So I have never won that, and never found a card anywhere close to MSRP. I can't really even afford the $1200-1400 MSRP cards, but I want at least one. I refuse to pay scalper prices.

Again, miners are the scum of the earth.

Lost... MSRP for 3080ti starts at 1199...
This is probably the cheapest 3080ti you can buy.

GIGABYTE Eagle GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Video Card GV-N308TEAGLE-12GD - Newegg.com

Buy GIGABYTE Eagle GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 ATX Video Card GV-N308TEAGLE-12GD with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Even the Founders Edition, aka vaporware Edition is 1199.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-12gb-gddr6x-pci-express-4-0-graphics-card-titanium-and-black/6462956.p?skuId=6462956

and its completely wasted on you as well Mark... Ti's are all LHR... meaning you can't fold on them either.
And if your going to only fold them, the non Ti version is better as it has similar hash rates, which means similar fold performance.

But again, in your case, its probably better to get 3 x 3060 non LHR's, as it would perform ~ 2x the performance of a 3080.
But this is a miners top card ATM... so you'll probably never get one even if you subscribe to the newegg shuffle for the next yr.

 

[moonbogg]

Regarding the actual topic, it makes perfect sense that newegg charge more. I wonder how long it took them to feel like idiots as they watched people buy up all their inventory only to instantly flip it.

 

[aigomorla]

That's almost always been true for pretty much every coin lol.
Oh how I wish I had bought eth when it was like $10

actually no...

With ETH for example today, and not 6 months ago when we had that crazy bull rush, it is more cost effective to build steadly and add slowly.
So if you had 10k, your better off getting a 10k machine for mining, have it do 30 dollars / day for however many days it takes to 10k.
And statically you'd be ahead if you put 10k at once. Not to mention that 10k will grow even more because of the never ending source of additional funds on a steady basis.

Its the common stock model, of putting in X amount of cash in investment as a monthly then putting the entire goose egg, as you spread out gains and loss that way.

And ultimately once the mining ends, you can always sell the eq off for a return of initial premium, which will net you far more then if you just dropped 10k and let it sit.

But this is only looking at if you were to drop 10k and you had ups and downs, and not a full on never ending bull market.

 

[Shmee]

Miners are scum. Its been almost a year since I have tried buying a 3080TI at MSRP. I even enter the newegg shuffle for anything that is MSRP. So I have never won that, and never found a card anywhere close to MSRP. I can't really even afford the $1200-1400 MSRP cards, but I want at least one. I refuse to pay scalper prices.

Again, miners are the scum of the earth.

I am surprised you would say this since you are so into distributed computing. You are entitled to your opinion of course, but still it surprises me.

Miners aren't the only reason for the lack of GPUs, and they do serve a purpose for those cryptos running PoW. So they make more sense than say, scalpers, or retailers who scalp. Also, there are different sorts of miners. There are large mining farms, which I think we should limit, but there are also small time miners as well. Many miners only mine on a single GPU when not gaming. Sort of a side income.

As we transition to PoS and such more, miners will play a lesser role of course.

Anyway, people who don't understand crypto are the scum of the earth.

 

[Markfw]

I am surprised you would say this since you are so into distributed computing. You are entitled to your opinion of course, but still it surprises me.

Miners aren't the only reason for the lack of GPUs, and they do serve a purpose for those cryptos running PoW. So they make more sense than say, scalpers, or retailers who scalp. Also, there are different sorts of miners. There are large mining farms, which I think we should limit, but there are also small time miners as well. Many miners only mine on a single GPU when not gaming. Sort of a side income.

As we transition to PoS and such more, miners will play a lesser role of course.

Anyway, people who don't understand crypto are the scum of the earth.

First... I don't JUST do distributed computing, I help research cancer, nothing else. And I am "scum of the earth" since I don't understand crypto ? Tell that to the millions of gamers, and people like me who use video cards in a reasonable manner, instead of using all the natural resources of the earth to make money.

I say again, miners are scum of the earth.

 

[Shmee]

I say again, people who don't understand crypto are scum of the earth.

 

[Markfw]

I say again, people who don't understand crypto are scum of the earth.

Oh, I understand it, I just don't agree with trashing all of our natural resources to make money.

 

[zir_blazer]

Oh, I understand it, I just don't agree with trashing all of our natural resources to make money.

If anything, the novelty is that building crypto farms out of commodity Hardware is the only time I have seen middle class people being able to thrash natural resources to make money. Formerly, destroying the environment for profit was the exclusive playground of big corporations with political lobbyists bribing lawmakers to be able to do so.

I do not see anything wrong with middle class (Or even lower. Why not all?) people wanting to live out of passive income, then be able to have the FREEDOM to decide if they want to work for more money, or not, instead of the current system where I consider that people that need to work in order to afford the minimum stuff to survive could be simply called a modern day slave. Crypto made such lifestyle accessible for people of lower classes than ever before, and it has my gratitude for that.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Oh, I understand it, I just don't agree with trashing all of our natural resources to make money.

Given that has been SOP for the last, what, 5000-odd years of human history, it doesn't seem likely to change.

 

[NTMBK]

I do not see anything wrong with middle class (Or even lower. Why not all?) people wanting to live out of passive income, then be able to have the FREEDOM to decide if they want to work for more money, or not, instead of the current system where I consider that people that need to work in order to afford the minimum stuff to survive could be simply called a modern day slave. Crypto made such lifestyle accessible for people of lower classes than ever before, and it has my gratitude for that.

So introduce a universal basic income, ban crypto, and save the planet.

 

[Mopetar]

Oh, I understand it, I just don't agree with trashing all of our natural resources to make money.

I think you've got issues with a lot of people beyond crypto miners. I mean actual miners for starters. And probably everyone who didn't live in a grass hut for the last 200 years.

Personally I don't think the argument against miners wasting resources is a good one. If it were truly wasteful and had no value, people wouldn't freely spend money on it.

The bigger problem is that the argument also applies to gaming. Compared to using a GPU for cancer research, gaming on it isn't any better than mining with it.

More generally even if I did think mining was completely awful I still wouldn't want to ban it because I'm really not going to like it when someone else decides gaming (or something else I enjoy) is awful and uses that same reasoning and precedent to ban the things I think I should be free to do.

Mining isn't even inherently wasteful or destructive of natural resources. Using excess wind or solar power to mine does no further environmental damage and using the waste heat it normally produces in lieu of just running an electrical heater during the winter months or places where it's really cold at night makes far more economic sense than using electricity or other fossil fuels to produce heat.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

If it were truly wasteful and had no value, people wouldn't freely spend money on it.

That doesn't stop people from spending an awful lot of money, if they see a potential profit in it. The best example happens to be the original tulip bubble in the Netherlands.

Tulips have no value as such other then being pretty to look at. Yet rare varieties went for quite enormous sums, because people where expecting them to increase in value forever. Needless to say, that didn't happen, and a lot of people lost their entire savings. Sometimes even more.

More generally even if I did think mining was completely awful I still wouldn't want to ban it because I'm really not going to like it when someone else decides gaming (or something else I enjoy) is awful and uses that same reasoning and precedent to ban the things I think I should be free to do.

Mining isn't even inherently wasteful or destructive of natural resources. Using excess wind or solar power to mine does no further environmental damage and using the waste heat it normally produces in lieu of just running an electrical heater during the winter months or places where it's really cold at night makes far more economic sense than using electricity or other fossil fuels to produce heat.

I really don't have anything against individuel miners. What you do with your own purchased equipment is your business, and yours alone.

My beef is with mining farms. When crypto uses more electricity then entire 1st world countries, things have gotten out of hand, and should be regulated at least.

 

[Mopetar]

The tulip example gets thrown around a lot, but it's not particularly applicable. Farmers could (and many did) switch from other crops to grow tulips, which increased supply significantly. I don't thin the general understanding of supply and demand was quite as good at the time (all of this happened 100 years before Adam Smith had even published Wealth of Nations) which partially explains why it crashed in the way it did once people started to realize the situation the market was in.

However, no one can just go out and increase the number of coins that can be supplied over a period as for most of these currencies It's fixed. More people working just makes everyone's work harder. That limits the supply which grows at a rate below that of inflation for most other currencies. While I won't claim that the average investor/user of these crypto currencies is more knowledgeable than the tulip investors of old, there's a better foundation for cryptocurrency being a sensible investment in that it can't really lose value due to inflation, at least not relative to anything that can just fire up a printing press.

Also at what point does an individual miner turn into a mining farm? I'm just curious as to where in your mind it goes from "okay, your equipment" to not? If I use just one watt fewer than an entire country would I still be okay?

 

[Furious_Styles]

The tulip example gets thrown around a lot, but it's not particularly applicable. Farmers could (and many did) switch from other crops to grow tulips, which increased supply significantly. I don't thin the general understanding of supply and demand was quite as good at the time (all of this happened 100 years before Adam Smith had even published Wealth of Nations) which partially explains why it crashed in the way it did once people started to realize the situation the market was in.

However, no one can just go out and increase the number of coins that can be supplied over a period as for most of these currencies It's fixed. More people working just makes everyone's work harder. That limits the supply which grows at a rate below that of inflation for most other currencies. While I won't claim that the average investor/user of these crypto currencies is more knowledgeable than the tulip investors of old, there's a better foundation for cryptocurrency being a sensible investment in that it can't really lose value due to inflation, at least not relative to anything that can just fire up a printing press.

Also at what point does an individual miner turn into a mining farm? I'm just curious as to where in your mind it goes from "okay, your equipment" to not? If I use just one watt fewer than an entire country would I still be okay?

We decide as a community where to draw the line. To add to insert_nickname's point, there is a local crypto mining operation that is now #2 for most power used in the city. Only the local university consumes more power.

 

[moonbogg]

I like the argument that crypto frees people because I'm certain there are many people who have experienced freedom because of it. At least in the U.S., I think the biggest gun to people's heads is health insurance. It's essentially blackmail used by employers to keep people working. If people already had healthcare, they'd be free to choose a lower stress, lower demand job that is more flexible and may pay less, but they can live a simpler life where they'd be happier with more time to live and enjoy their family. Maybe a much smaller home in a rural community away from the city etc. But, they can't because they need that stressful city job to keep those outrageously expensive "benefits" for their family. They aren't "benefits" at all. It's blackmail and should be illegal to hold something so vital over people's heads. Every time you're stuck at a red light and might be late, your children's access to health care flashes before your eyes. It makes you hate the system, but you grit your teeth and trudge on because there is no other choice. That's slavery. If digital economies involving hardware could actually solve this problem, then we should go all in. However I'm sure it's not that simple.

 

[blckgrffn]

I like the argument that crypto frees people because I'm certain there are many people who have experienced freedom because of it. At least in the U.S., I think the biggest gun to people's heads is health insurance. It's essentially blackmail used by employers to keep people working. If people already had healthcare, they'd be free to choose a lower stress, lower demand job that is more flexible and may pay less, but they can live a simpler life where they'd be happier with more time to live and enjoy their family. Maybe a much smaller home in a rural community away from the city etc. But, they can't because they need that stressful city job to keep those outrageously expensive "benefits" for their family. They aren't "benefits" at all. It's blackmail and should be illegal to hold something so vital over people's heads. Every time you're stuck at a red light and might be late, your children's access to health care flashes before your eyes. It makes you hate the system, but you grit your teeth and trudge on because there is no other choice. That's slavery. If digital economies involving hardware could actually solve this problem, then we should go all in. However I'm sure it's not that simple.

Oh boy, triggered response. I apologize in advance.

Dude/Dudette - as an owner of a small business that offers health benefits and I am *personally* the one that does all the shopping, the legwork, the payroll deductions and all the rest I can assure you it just sucks for us too and I don't think any employer wants to deal with it. It's expensive, it a huge time and focus leach and you are always wondering if what you are providing is actually going to help your valued employees when they need it.

As a small employer I would *vastly* prefer paying some flat fee premium into a single (govt run? IDK but it doesn't matter) provider system and have our employees know they just use the same health care system as everyone else has.

The systems to setup healthcare benefits are byzantine and atrocious and require a lot of lingo learning and extra overhead. Staying with the "right" coverage to get the right tax breaks is annoying AF.

In this huge aside, to me the system is slanted so that:

A) For profit health insurance providers provide their shareholders ever increasing profits and
B) Create a scenario where large employers who can afford dedicated benefits coordination staff have a huge advantage over all small business.

A is generally worse than B except I run the small business in question so I hate both of them.

I say all of this because I think your hate of healthcare being tied to employers is not something employers relish either. It's a necessary evil for us as well. Save your hate for the system of for profit health care, please.

/end response.

I am not sure crypto will really help with this either. I feel like the time to make money on it was.... like 5 years ago. Mining now is just a dabbling hobby compared to what it was (provided you HODL''d). Which is maybe why I am still surprised it is such a thing.