LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/12/9/cryptocurrencies-are-causing-shortages-of-amd-radeon-gpus.aspx

by mrb • 13 years ago

62 90 13 years ago

That's no joke. I was trying like crazy to get in on one of the deals over "Cyber Week", and the deals that would pop up would literally be sold out within 2 minutes of appearing. I read a few threads in FatWallet and Slickdeals in which people said things to the effect of "Damn Litecoin miners! Some of us want to play games with these!"

Shortly thereafter I came to the realization that, if this many people are jumping into the Litecoin pool, mining Litecoins is going to get a lot harder very quickly, so I stopped bothering to look.

gatehouse• 13 years ago

Yeah, if you are "in the herd" and want to speculate, I think it makes a lot more sense to just buy the coins.

acangiano3• 13 years ago

Smart cryptominers don't mine Litecoins. They mine the most profitable coin at the moment, then sell it and convert it to LTC (assuming they believe in LTC).

woah2• 13 years ago

Hopefully nobody figures out how to ASIC Litecoin. If it stays on general purpose hardware for a few years, we will have a huge network of processing power ready to be harnessed.

If someone makes Litecoin ASICs, we will have a huge network of space heaters.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Here you go: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355268.0 It's not clear that it's any cheaper than GPUs, though.

salient• 13 years ago

GPU mining is still not as decentralized, as basically only high-end PC gamers (with their own default cards) and the people specifically buying GPUs for mining will have a shot at it.

CPU-only mining would be a lot more decentralized, if such a thing is even possible.

lukifer5• 13 years ago

ProtoShares (and a few other coins, I believe) focus as much on being memory-hard as CPU-hard. While CPU/GPU can be "cheated" by designing ASICs, there's no such thing as application-specific memory, making it a better candidate for an honest signal. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

acangiano3• 13 years ago

CPU-mining however is also more profitable for malicious parties (e.g., botnets).

tedunangst2• 13 years ago

One of the difficulty parameters for scrypt is memory. Set it to 16GB and you'll keep GPUs out of the game for a while.

Detrus• 13 years ago

Can there be a coin for which ASICS will be general purpose enough?

smtddr6• 13 years ago

Truth! I have a co-worker who had to jump on getting 2 of them from Newegg. They're nearly impossible to buy now unless you catch a 40% markup on ebay or something. I'm very sorry for all the gamers out there. This isn't fair to them. :( . I just purchased my LTC with good ol' USD. Besides Bitcoin, we both are betting that Litecoin will "go up to da moon!". Specifically, I expect LTC to reach $900 by end of 2014. I have no data whatsoever to back that up with other than the Litecoin-related announcements I sometimes see on various forums of small businesses accepting LTC along with BTC. I'm already holding some[1] and will probably buy a few more if I see another price drop.

1. http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK...

Kopion• 13 years ago

Do you know of any good write-ups on buying LTC? I know there are plenty out there for BTC, but they don't always translate well to LTC

kookiekrak• 13 years ago

buy bitcoins from coinbase, transfer to btc-e, trade for litecoins, transfer to wallet and hold.

or bitcoins -> cryptsy -> ltc -> wallet.

i've traded on both sites and its worked out relatively well

knodi• 13 years ago

What can you use LTC for?

Thats right, nothing but hope.

whyenot4• 13 years ago

You can sell them for bitcoins ;)

There are even mining pools such as middlecoin that shift from one scrypt-based alt coin to another depending on what is easiest to mine and sell on exchanges for BTC. As a miner, you don't have to lift a finger, just point cgminer at the pool's address and supply a BTC address for payouts, the pool operator takes care of the rest.

Some smaller altcoins (such as stablecoin) have had to make changes to their difficulty calculations because these pools, with relatively massive amounts of hashing power, come in, push up a coin's difficulty and then leave again once it's no longer profitable. Sitting on the sidelines, it's been really interesting to watch.

smtddr6• 13 years ago

Oh c'mon, you're trolling. :)

https://www.google.com/#q=stores+that+accept+litecoin

nerfhammer• 13 years ago

could an alt-coin be based on socially useful computation, e.g. folding@home?

TillE• 13 years ago

As long as the work is hard to compute but quick to verify, sure. But you're probably going to run into the problem of having one central entity providing work units.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

Well for the example: calculating primes does not require a central authority

If the problem was purely mathematical in nature, that's where you don't really need authority.

nwh3• 13 years ago

That's not right. It must be hard to produce, easy to verify, and be deterministically linked to the previous POW. That last feature is critical.

Yrlec• 13 years ago

Check out Primecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

wesley• 13 years ago

curecoin, gridcoin, devcoin

nisa• 13 years ago

Fascinating. Slighty related: I've stumbled over Primecoin¹ while researching Litcoin mining. Primecoin uses prime chains as proof of work. Existing GPU implementations are slower than modern processors and I'm not sure about the feasability of FPGAs and ASICS. It's an interesting idea.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

Apparently it didn't gain much traction here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6011094

kaonashi2• 13 years ago

Thus demonstrating the sheer idiocy of crypto-currencies -- they burn real resources on what is essentially bookkeeping.

smtddr6• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that the mining won't last forever. Bitcoin mining has already become all but unreachable[1] for normal household resources. Litecoin's blockchain is still new enough that it hasn't reached that point yet. Just like BTC, LTC was first just CPU, now it's GPU, then ASIC will show up then finally it'll just be pools for 0.00003 LTC a week or you'll need a freakin' Pixar+Dreamworks+ILM SuperPowered-RenderFarm or something that no ordinary person can reasonably afford access to.

1. http://www.ibtimes.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-facility-...

galactus• 13 years ago

Doesnt the bitcoin network need mining to work? As far as I understand it, mining needs to be done forever, even if its impossible to collect new coins.

drzaiusapelord3• 13 years ago

Okay then someone starts up some other crypto coin. It doesn't ever have to end. Boom, bust, and hopefully cash out before the bust. GPU shortages and breathing in extra coal emissions continues.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Bitcoin mining has already become all but unreachable for normal household resources.

Sure, but the total energy being "wasted" by Bitcoin mining globally may still be increasing.

aianus• 13 years ago

So do the banks' and payment processors' datacenters and hundreds of thousands of employees.

In addition, when the market becomes more efficient we'll see all commercial mining done in places like Iceland that have dirt-cheap renewable energy sources and cheap cooling.

mrb3• 13 years ago

Common misconception. Crypto-currency mining is not wasteful compared to other financial activities: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_o...

lukifer5• 13 years ago

I like to think in terms of the energy wasted by all the bank employees driving to work every day. If even 10% of those made redundant by a distributed banking system were able to start working from home doing other things, I'd guess it was a net win.

drzaiusapelord3• 13 years ago

Except banks hire employees, pay taxes, provide a service, build ATMs, offer lines of credit, provide consumer protections, etc. Thats 100% different than neckbeards going through garbage dumps looking for lost coins and kids buying GPUs with daddy's credit card for bragging points.

Shame this isn't just arbitrary math instead of contributing to something like folding@home.

DennisP2• 13 years ago

In the winter the waste heat can offset your heating bill. Now we just need someone to use mining chips as the heating elements in heat pumps and we could have energy-neutral mining year-round.

vilts• 13 years ago

That's exactly what I'm currently doing. Six 7950's are running and keeping the 70 sq m first floor rather warm when I'm not here. Outside temp is around 0 degC. Even if the coin prices drop so much that it breaks even in electricity, it's still good "free" heating. Hopefully the rigs pay themselves before the price drops that much.

sentenza2• 13 years ago

For some of us, that's a horrible deal though. The average price for electricity here in Germany is 0.264€/kWh.

Dwolb• 13 years ago

Is it so different than bookkeeping burning real resources on bookkeeping? Paper, ink, accounting software, Excel, all use resources.

whyenot4• 13 years ago

That is not true of all cryptocurrencies. See for example Peercoin which uses proof of stake instead of proof of work.

oakwhiz• 13 years ago

Alternatively, perhaps it is demonstrating and concentrating the raw bookkeeping costs of capitalism itself.

erikpukinskis3• 13 years ago

This is wrong in several ways:

1) The total electricity used in Bitcoin mining is pegged to the bitcoin supply, which is decreasing towards zero. So the amount of electricity used should be decreasing. It may temporarily increase while prices go up, but the long term trend will be towards zero. And transaction fees shouldn't change this too much. Competition amongst miners should eventually drive those towards zero too.

2) It's not just bookkeeping that's happening, it's dispute resolution. Currently your financial disputes are solved by calling your credit card company and having them deal with it. There's a whole network of dispute resolution services going all the way up to the SCOTUS. All of which uses resources. Bitcoin does all that through mining.

3) It's not actually that much power. The hashrate is 7m GH/s. Let's assume 2 watts per GH/s, that's 14 megawatts. You could power that with three big wind turbines.

maxerickson3• 13 years ago

If there is zero electricity being used to mine bitcoin, it has failed and will be worth nothing.

Describing the relationship as 'pegged' is also sort of aggressive. A better statement would be that most people will only spend electricity if they are able to recover that cost in bitcoin (and probably a small profit). So there is some upper limit of mining activity to be expected given the current bitcoin price, size of reward and typical efficiency of mining hardware (cost of electricity will also factor in, but that should be relatively stable).

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

The total electricity used in Bitcoin mining is pegged to the bitcoin supply

No, its not. "Mining" is a misleading term based on the early-phase reward. A better name for the function would be "providing resources for transaction processing". In the early phase, the reward is new bitcoins (hence, "mining" as the common name for the process), in the late phase it becomes transaction fees.

And transaction fees shouldn't change this too much. Competition amongst miners should eventually drive those towards zero too.

Competition among miners only drives transaction fees to zero if there are a large number of miners compared to the number of transactions -- i.e., if either usage isn't high or lots of people are dedicating resources to mining (and thus, electricity usage isn't going to zero.)

It's not just bookkeeping that's happening, it's dispute resolution.

No, its just bookkeeping.

Currently your financial disputes are solved by calling your credit card company and having them deal with it.

True for certain classes of financial disputes when credit cards are used, but not generally the case. But, whatever.

There's a whole network of dispute resolution services going all the way up to the SCOTUS. All of which uses resources. Bitcoin does all that through mining.

No, it does not do the same function as the entire court system in terms of financial dispute resolution. Disputes involving Bitcoin are still resolved through the legal process. In fact, the absence of chargeback like mechanisms means that any disputes require escalation to more expensive mechanisms of dispute resolution sooner.

(Now, if transactions are done in a manner which is anonymous, dispute resolution may be practically impossible in the same way that that can be become the case if you are doing anonymous drops to exchange cash and goods -- but that doesn't mean that mining is fulfilling the dispute resolution function, just that you've adopted a protocol which excludes dispute resolution.)

polskibus• 13 years ago

That's the same in EU - amazon.co.uk shows 1-3 months delivery for R9 280X and in Poland the arrival date of new batch was already moved twice in the last 3 weeks. 3 weeks ago I placed an order fo R9 280X, the LTC difficulty is now 2x of what it was then. I think I will soon be cancelling the order as LTC price falls and the break even point is ca. 2 months instead of 1 month.

Ihmahr• 13 years ago

Meanwhile,

I still can't mine ltc on my mac.

EDIT: Both Asteroid and MacMiner don't work for me.

lukifer5• 13 years ago

It takes a little effort to compile yourself, but you absolutely can. https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer

nwh3• 13 years ago

Unless you really want to have a dead GPU, that's a good thing.

whyenot4• 13 years ago

Sure you can.

http://www.asteroidapp.com

(cgminer and cpuminer are also in MacPorts)

daddykotex• 13 years ago

Why is AMD Radeon GPUs more efficient to mine LiteCoins than Nvidia GPUs?

kostyk• 13 years ago

Ya, good question.

retroafroman• 13 years ago

See this discussion and linked article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889027

It has to do with the different architecture allowing more 32-bit operations per second.

hrkristian• 13 years ago

IIRC, AMD GPUs support and are optimized for newer versions of OpenCL, while Nvidias Cuda solution is much (much) less effective for mining. At the very least a Google search with that in mind will get you the info you need.

DennisP2• 13 years ago

One reason is that AMD has a single-instruction bit rotate, which is used a lot in the hash function. Nvidia needs three instructions.

Another is that AMD uses a large number of simple cores, and Nvidia has a smaller number of more complicated cores. The simple cores are all the hash function needs, so AMD can run more operations at once.

smtddr6• 13 years ago

Because this: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

Apparently AMDs have been declared the winner in terms of work accomplished/resources-consumed ratio.

haakon• 13 years ago

If Litecoin is anything like Bitcoin, here is a good explanation: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU...

alexgaribay• 13 years ago

Essentially Radeon GPUs have a better architecture than Nvidia GPUs when it comes to executing the mining algorithms associated with cryptocurrencies.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvi...

EDIT: grammar

winslow2• 13 years ago

It has to do with the amount of power usage and the return rate or mine rate of LTC/BTC. AMD seems to have a better ratio of coin per wattage. So basically just better bang for the buck.

defective• 13 years ago

Bang for the buck = efficiency, so you just answered the question "Why is it more efficient?" with, "Because it is more efficient."

The reason, more or less, is that AMD GPUs tend to have way more cores than Nvidia GPUs, and their cores can, in hardware, do the integer operation necessary for the hashing algorithm. Nvidia can only emulate the integer operation, so it takes three instructions on Nvidia vs one on AMD.

acangiano3• 13 years ago

The gist of it is that AMD GPUs have more, simpler ALUs, while Nvidia GPUS have fewer, more complex ones. For simple tasks such as sha-256 and scrypt algorithms, the former approach is several time faster than the latter.

corin_• 13 years ago

Can confirm, working in hardware marketing in Europe, many retailers and AIB manufacturers are talking about Litecoin causing stock issues (and/or sales peaks, depending on which side they're looking at it from). Have even seen a major systems manufacturer I work with change up the GPUs in their SKUs based on availability issues.

bede• 13 years ago

From selling my 7950s earlier in the week on eBay UK, the going rate appears to be around 35% more than normal (Amazon) retail price. It's quite amusing, although I do feel for those caught in the CrossFire™ (sorry), who simply want a card to play video games.

MatthewB• 13 years ago

Took me about a week to find 2 of them on newegg. If you check newegg daily, you can probably find a couple here and there. You can possibly even find a name brand one.

bsamuels• 13 years ago

This AMD GPU shortage isn't quite so terrible. I have a pair of AMD 5850s that I've been offered $250 each for. Never imagined those kinds of returns on 4 years old graphics hardware.

I wonder if the demand for altcoin mining cards will end up becoming so great that Nvidia will modify their architecture to better facilitate it.

EdJiang• 13 years ago

Alternatively, you could try mining yourself if you're curious and want to learn about cryptocurrencies. I wrote a guide on how to get started with mining in <10 minutes (mostly for friends with gaming PCs), for some of my friends who were interested.

http://edjiang.com/post/69758178501/mining-altcoins-for-fun-...

bluedino• 13 years ago

Could AMD be using a significant amount of capacity for the new Mac Pro GPU's?

udev• 13 years ago

Mac Pros probably don't sell in the numbers that the Apple laptops, iPads, or iPhones sell.

But it is entirely possible that Apple feels the shortage of AMD GPUs right now, which could be one of the causes for the Mac Pro not being available.

pat2man• 13 years ago

This is a cool side effect of GPU mining, this is all commodity hardware. In a year or less miners will need to upgrade their GPUs and will be selling their old GPUs. Gamers can then buy them up for cheap. With ASIC Bitcoin miners the hardware is useless once it becomes inefficient to mine on it.

dllthomas• 13 years ago

It's going to be an interesting hiccup in bitcoin when we eventually have to migrate off of SHA256 and suddenly existing ASICs become irrelevant.

ac29• 13 years ago

Clearly, this is in no way related to the busiest shopping period of the year.

I'm sure there is some increased demand from cryptocoin mining, but really its pretty myopic if you think even half of the Nov/Dec demand for GPUs is going that way.

aet• 13 years ago

I see R9 290x on Amazon Prime...

LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs

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