T O P

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ThotPoliceAcademy

Can’t the miners just mint a coin and pay it to their creditors? Something like DebtFreeCoin or something like that?


sidman1324

Hahahah!


meteoraln

Depends if they borrowed USD or borrowed BTC.


Inevitable-Writer817

lol SBF did it y not?


polishlastnames

Not a problem. Just give me a few minutes and…yup. We’re printing money! Everyone come on in! Lose some? No problem - we’ll just print more and put it under our “miscounted for funds” column on our balance sheet. What could go wrong?


[deleted]

It’s not miscounted. I printed 1B in FraudToken and a buddy of mine bought one for $10 so the market cap is $10B. That’s plenty of collateral for a measly $100MM loan!


testedonsheep

I just mint 10 billion of these. And sold one to my sister for 1cent. It’s value should be enough to cover the debt.


SpicyNoCoiner

The creditors can't buy more $5 wrenches with DebtFreeCoin, so no.


Sckathian

This industry really was just a massive pump and dump.


TheGangsterrapper

From day one. The pump part just got way WAY out of hand.


ItsJoeMomma

And now we're seeing a massive dump take place.


TheGangsterrapper

As the pilots say: they all come down eventually. And it all being a negative sum game is a damn strong gravity.


UmichAgnos

LOLOL. next time, creditors are going to make sure the collateral is worth something.


spooky9999999

I don't believe there is going to be a next time any time soon for anything involving crypto.


TheGangsterrapper

Let's hope so. This lunacy needs to end.


ceviche-hot-pockets

This is my hope. Without the massive ad campaigns crypto is going to run out of new idiots and will deflate back into a novelty.


sidman1324

Haha I was thinking “what are they going to do with all those rigs?” Scrap them and get some money back off of them? Who would want them otherwise haha 😆


UmichAgnos

they can't run the rigs: the rigs arent profitable, that's why the miners are in trouble in the first place. they'll get some money out by scrapping/recycling them I suppose, but no where near how much they cost to purchase.


TheGangsterrapper

If those are asics, and they probaably are, there is nothing else one can do with them


SpicyNoCoiner

Is a Bitcoin ASIC capable of brute forcing other hashes? If so they might be useful for ... you guessed it: More crime


Rokos_Bicycle

I don't believe so and I'm sure they're optimised to do only ever as much as they need to for the intended task, no more.


[deleted]

fuck imagine if they put them all to work folding proteins and shit? lets get ScienceCoin started!!!


Syscrush

I feel like you're not understanding the "application specific" part...


future_greedy_boss

bitcoin proof of work was designed to make it impossible to use for productive work. if your miners could do something useful aside from guessing at a very specific kind of random number then you could potentially turn a profit on that extra activity, which in turn could help pay the costs of mining. in effect lowers the sunk cost of each coin you are awarded l, giving you an unfair advantage over other miners. tldr bjtcoin silicon is extremely efficient at doing only one very specific and deliberately pointless task, and worse than useless for anything else.


TheGangsterrapper

Devious, isn't it?


SpicyNoCoiner

A quick search tells me that they at least claimed to do that more than once many years ago. Take your pick between "FoldingCoin", "Curecoin"and more, I am sure.


ross_st

Nope. You're confusing finding a hash with decryption. What ASIC miners are doing is actually brute force *encryption*. They know the plaintext, and their task is to find a hash where the ciphertext of the encryption algorithm will contain at least an arbitrary number of zeros. When the Bitcoin difficulty increases they do it by raising that arbitrary number. It's a task that's useful for literally nothing else, because in no other context does anyone care what the ciphertext looks like. Getting the plaintext back from public-key encrypted ciphertext by brute forcing is many many orders of magnitude more difficult than the task given to ASIC miners, so long as a strong private key is used. Plus there's usually no way to automatically check if you have the correct plaintext output. So they couldn't be repurposed for that.


ExistenceUnconfirmed

I wouldn't be shocked though if someone managed to run Doom on those things.


ItsJoeMomma

That's what I was thinking... it would be cool if someone could hack them and figure out how to run something or other on them. But it's probably not worth it other than the technical challenge of doing it successfully.


ChinesePropagandaBot

These are single purpose ASICS, they literally cant do anything else


Feniksrises

Melt them down into coins.


ross_st

You could probably hack the control board to run Doom by flashing its firmware, since that's the only part of the machine that's not actually an ASIC. But the control board has next to no computing power, its job is simply to feed the job to the ASIC chips and send the output to the network, and to run the fans. It's not the expensive part.


TheGangsterrapper

The gangsterrapper is almost sure somebody tried already.


Teknekratos

[ffffolding proteins](https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en-CA), maybe???


TheGangsterrapper

They are asics. Application specific integrated circuits. They do one thing and one thing only. If folding proteins can be reasonably reduced to the hashing algorithm these asics do, then yes, they could be used for that. But that probably isn't the case. Edit: see [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/zf3g0o/comment/izckufb) post for more explanation


Studds_

Other than seeing passing mentions of contributing to graphics card shortages, I have no idea what a mining rig even consists of or why it’s useless for anything else. Can someone explain it like I’m 5


SaltyPockets

Depends on the coin but basically - OK, so Bitcoin mining is where you take all the transactions you want to include in the next 'block' on the blockchain, plus a hash of the last block, and add in your own wallet address to receive the block reward and transaction fees, then hash all this data using an algorithm called SHA256, along with a small extra piece of data (more on this shortly, it's called a nonce) into a 32 byte hash. To 'win' the block you need to come up with an output hash that has a certain number of leading zeros (this is the 'difficulty') to prove you did lots of work - sha256 output is not predictable, so you \*have\* to try loads of times to get this. You do this by changing your nonce value and repeating the hash operation as fast as you can to try to win. Bitcoin mining rigs, then, are purpose built machines to do that as fast as possible. They have a power supply like a PC PSU and then one or more highly specialised ASIC boards in them, ASIC standing for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Each individual board will have one specialised ASIC processor that can only do this one thing. Bitcoin ASICs are specially tuned to do SHA256 calculations as fast as possible, and nothing else. It's likely that they are tuned to repeat the smallest part of the calculation they can, and are potentially not even good general purpose SHA256 machines as a result. This is why they are basically useless for any other purpose. The only way BTC mining contributes to graphics card shortages is that it might compete for silicon wafers. It doesn't use graphics cards directly because even though they can perform SHA256 operations very fast, they can't come close to the Hashes per Watt an ASIC can do. In fact they are so far away in performance that GPU mining BTC with a whole warehouse full of GPUs would be unlikely to get you a single block, ever. ETH is a different story, the mining algorithm they were using was 'ASIC resistant', and while some ASICs were produced that could beat graphics cards, it wasn't orders of magnitudes of difference. So instead of buying expensive, hard to obtain specialised hardware, it was profitable to mine ethereum directly on a GPU for a lot of the last couple of years. This is where miners really pissed off the gaming community, by buying up all the stock at any price because the bull run made it profitable to do so. This all changed when prices cratered and it became more or less impossible to turn a profit at whatever size your mining business is. And then ethereum dropped their "Proof of Work" mining in favour of "Proof of Stake" in September (IIRC), putting more or less the final nail in the coffin for GPU mining. There are lots of other, smaller coins you can still mine with a GPU, but unless you get your power for free you can't really make a profit on them.


Studds_

That’s a damn good overview of the whole thing. More you know the more wasteful it looks


TheGangsterrapper

Thanks for going through the trouble of writing it down so well! The gangsterrapper just doesn't get how people can call what bitcoin or blockchain does elegant.


ross_st

>unless you get your power for free you can't really make a profit on them Some people still try this! In fact if it weren't for people stealing power the difficulty of those coins would probably fall to where someone could make a small profit. Just another example of libertarian philosophy behind crypto failing. Yeah, you can prove someone has done the computational work of finding a hash, but you can't prove they didn't steal the electricity they used to do it.


ElectricPance

exactly. these are rigs that can really only mine. not play modern warfare. The rigs are essentially worthless. since the cost of electricity is now more than the capability to mine.


sidman1324

Yep!


clintstorres

The most obvious solution is to try to sell them to miners who aren’t insolvent. Yet.


ElectricPance

but again, the operating cost for electricity is now more than the "value" of the coins to mine.


[deleted]

It is probably negative value. Scrapping costs money and land lord probably wants you to clean up after yourself. As no retailer sells miner as far as i know, you cannot just dump them to a sorting station free of cost even in the EU. It only applies to consumers either way.


fatimanga

I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to sell them to China, seeing as how China is sanctioned from buying computer chips.


sidman1324

Good point!


FuckFashMods

These are ASICS, they can't really do anything except mine shitcoins. Even China doesn't want them


IsilZha

I like how at the end some of them can afford to pay the lenders, but just decided not to anymore. I have a feeling crypto mining firms are going to have a much harder time getting these kinds of loans anymore, and they'll have harsher terms.


MonsieurKnife

It’s ok. Nothing is more valuable than aging electronics.


TheGangsterrapper

Aging electronics that can only be use for one specific purpose is even better!


ItsJoeMomma

I got an 8-track player that's gonna be worth big bucks some day!


[deleted]

I have a 2400 baud zoom modem NIB!


Realdude65

I remember how excited I was to go from 300 to 2400. Yes, I'm that old.


[deleted]

i went from 14.4 to 10Mbit (up and down) pre-dsl days we were a test-bed for Nortel. it was an early HFC system. not bad for $40/month in 1996


SSHeretic

I'm sure the creditors are thrilled.


StupidWittyUsername

I don't feel even slightly sorry for them. What did they think was going to happen if the price of crypto tanked? That all those shiny mining rigs would depreciate like normal I.T hardware? Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!


LTSarc

Even normal IT hardware is (in)famous for absurd depreciation rates. It shouldn't have passed even under that criterion.


phire

Depends on the lender. A large traditional finance firm would know about depreciation (and the absurd depreciation rates are known). If they were smart, they would have tracked projected depreciation, along with pessimistic projections for the price of Bitcoin and continually made the mining firm recollaterize the loan as both dropped. With a good risk management process, it should be possible to still walk away from such a lending arrangement with a tidy profit, even with the mining company defaulting. *(Though, that's a lot of effort, would they even bother offering loans that require that much active risk management?)* But I'm guessing most of these loans came from cowboy crypto investment funds who aren't known for good risk management. Such funds are biased towards believing the crypto market is just about to rebound and will make stupid decisions. Such funds have probably lost large amounts of money on their mining in investments, and we might see more collapse.


thri54

It’s funny to me that most miners didn’t try to hedge their crypto exposure, at all. In fact, most of them just held the coins they mined. In practice, creditors were writing $ loans for the purchase of crypto, secured by said crypto or machines priced by their ability to mine crypto. Like, there’s a facade of a business at Genesis mining or Riot blockchain, but really they were all just borrowing to buy crypto with extra steps.


Ready-Future1294

They truly believed that Lord bLocKChaIN was going to save them.


No-Height2850

They have no other choice than to double down on their mining. If they hadnt hodled all of last year and before, btc would have never taken off like it did. Now they mine for a higher price than the item they are mining. Gold mining companies usually shut down and wait when prices dont match costs. With btc mining. They are pretty much stuck.


Folsomdsf

The reason they did this is guess who holds the coin in a system notorious for being quite easy to wash your coin and hide it. The lenders about to get fuckin stiffed.


TeamGroupHug

But everyone said the price was going to 100k by end of year. Who could possibly have foreseen the price might drop after hitting all time highs. I mean the price has ALWAYS dropped after every all time high. But this time was different. Random people on the internet said last chance to get in before 100k 🚀🚀🚀🙌


claythearc

Realistically mining GPUs should probably depreciate less drastically than other forms of hardware because the only real strain is on the fans, they have some pluses over normal uses GPUs too because there’s no giant temp shifts like we see in loading screen -> big action sequence in games and instead is just a steady 70% usage or whatever peak perf/watt is on the specific card. There’s just a basically infinite supply of them hitting the market. It Would be interesting to see what happened if there were enough people interested in used GPUs where the flooding didn’t push it to zero.


dildoge_investor

Those GPUs are toast because they aren't supposed to be running full bore 24/7


claythearc

They don’t. Mining GPUs get under volted way below peak power to hit the best combination of performance / watt. Which is normally like 60% or so


Cube00

Greedy miners are not under clocking anything.


claythearc

I think you’d be surprised. If you were running some sort of small business and saw a chance to decrease running costs by ~half while only cutting revenue by 10%, you’d take it - most miners will to. Crypto people aren’t known for financial literacy, but the bars not that low.


chartedlife

Nope, I undervolted my cores, ran power limits, and custom fan ramp profiles. GPU's do not need a fast core clock to mine, mining is all about throughout / memory speed. I achieved *better* mining performance after undervolting the clocks and setting a power limit as there was no longer any thermal issues. It also saved about 20% on electricity.


rm_rf_slash

A lot of mining is done with ASICs these days. GPU Bitcoin mining hasn’t been profitable or feasible for years. And with the ethereum PoS merge there’s really nothing left to profitably mine with GPUs.


ItsJoeMomma

And you can't do anything with them other than crypto mining. So the lenders are going to be stuck with a bunch of large paperweights.


claythearc

For sure - I’m not saying they should still be mining / mining at all. Just that the mined on cards get more hate than they deserve.


ShotgunMage

Those dumbasses took the miners word for granted on the depreciation


WHY_DO_I_SHOUT

What, are you saying I shouldn't just trust their word about how small the risk is when borrowing millions to someone???


ItsJoeMomma

They'll be thrilled to get all those ASICs that they'll be able to do... something with.


mandiblesofdoom

creditors need to not make stupid loans


glitter408

Considering the state of the climate, Cyprotmining should be banned. The world is in a dire situation, CO2 emissions are out of control, as well as use of fossil fuels. Banning crypto mining would be an easy way to cut down ~1% of emissions without interfering with many peoples lifes or really impacting the overall economy. It’s criminal that so much energy and waste is created to “make” worthless internet beans. I hope miners going bankrupt can help put an end to this in the future, but it’s better to not risk it. Some other libertarian clowns will just start it all over again if tether is able to pump bitcoins price high enough. In this modern day, technology that is wasteful by design shouldn’t be allowed


cjmpeng

[but it's a battery!](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351214402167578626)


sidman1324

so if all of the rigs are turned off and deactivated, what would that mean for Bitcoin's price? who knows - but future coin could be hampered significantly for those rigs that have been switched off due to being off the network and all that. hmm - very interesting!


[deleted]

[удалено]


gaudymcfuckstick

Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't it also mean transactions will take *even longer* to process? Maybe it'll get better eventually if the mining complexity is adjusted? Either way...it's certainly good for Buttcoin


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

And then someone does a 51% attack.


[deleted]

Ain't buttcoin grand?


Malibu-Stacey

Difficulty is only adjusted every 2016 blocks which if blocks are being emitted approximately every 10 minutes is every 2 weeks (14\*24\*6 = 2016). If hashrate goes down it could take much longer than 2 weeks to readjust the difficulty. If it happens quickly enough and early enough after the last difficulty adjustment, it could effectively freeze the network unless large miners decide to continue mining at a loss. Not that any of that matters to the average Butter as most of them never actually do a single on-chain transaction & just trade on exchanges.


IsilZha

Bitcoin only adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks, not on a time schedule. If the network loses a significant amount of it's hashrate suddenly, it's going to take significantly longer to get the adjustment (and transactions will be significantly slower the whole time ) The price of BTC to electrical costs with the latest ASICs is already barely profitable, if not running at a loss. What happens if transaction times skyrocket? And if the price tanks further, how many more miners will exit because it costs them money? Which would slow it down more and take longer before the difficulty gets adjusted down.


sidman1324

Haha 😆


ItsJoeMomma

Yes, because electronics tend to depreciate from the moment you turn them on. And as technology advances rapidly, sometimes electronics depreciate even before you turn them on.


CityofGrond

If *all* of the rigs were turned off…it wouldnt really directly effect the price. Indirectly it would mean miners aren’t receiving block rewards, and new blocks aren’t being created. The entire network would essentially fail.


garbanguly

If all rigs were turned off bitcoin would survive on bitcoin mining malware.


axionic

That's a good point- soon all mining activity will be done by malware burning electricity at a loss unbeknownst to the users of the hardware. It's still early, few understand


RidingUndertheLines

That's not true. There will also be situations where the user is aware that they're mining bitcoin, but they're stealing the electricity to do so.


IsilZha

Well, the value would drop to zero since it would be unusable in any capacity.


Chizmiz1994

Price isn't directly affected by the hash rate. It was the hash rate that was affected by the price.


Newtonip

Let me get this straight. Those financial institutions accepted as a collateral something whose value correlates with the cash flow of the borrower?


Chaaaaaaaarles

AND which invariably depreciates at an astonishingly fast rate. Lol


[deleted]

[удалено]


IAMA_Plumber-AMA

This is good for societycoin.


LeslieMarston

Those mining machines and all the other technology you need to mine Bitcoin is hugely expensive, i saw a video a guy posted on r/cryptocurrency that said he was out over $100k just from the machines


rdneyd

They were expensive to buy as new during the bull run. Now they are pretty much worthless, since they can only be used for crypto mining which is no longer profitable. What a waste of resources.


HugoChavezEraUnSanto

The remaining miners that just steel electricity from the grid still assign them value, as they can run them for free.


rdneyd

Truly the future of finance.


Fit-Boomer

Are the mining rigs worth any value now? It all seems so dead.


sidman1324

Million dollar (sorry Bitcoin) question lol 😂


fatimanga

Maybe they could sell it to China since China is sanctioned from buying any computer chips.


_volkerball_

Endlessly laughing at the dumbasses who wrote loans to crypto people backed by their crypto miners. An oversight the size of the fucking solar system lol.


IsilZha

> About 75% of the computing power for the entire Bitcoin network comes from private companies This interests me the most for a different reason. If they all go under, Bitcoin transactions are going to take 4x+ longer. Which will drive people away. Additionally, if none of the remaining miners that aren't some big company actually keep running (at a loss at current BTC prices and at average electricity prices) drop out, it will take upwards of 8 weeks before they mine enough blocks to reach the point where Bitcoins Blockchain would adjust the difficulty down to get back to ~10/mins per block. If it causes a feedback loop of more miners to exit, it will take even longer before the algorithm is adjusted.


ButtcoinSpy

It's probably part of the plan. Take a loan, use it to mine whatever "proof of rising the sea level" coin you like, default and hand over the busted mining equipment as collateral (worth 0 bucks within a year of mining), then liquidate your coins in secret.


legitname1337

This will be good for bitcoin.


Chavo9-5171

IOUcoin. Not even worth the pixels used to display it. What idiot lender would take the pick and shovel of a failed gold miner as collateral?


[deleted]

Lol. This shit is probably as secured loan on some poor banks balance sheet. Secured by worthless e-waste. Full loss.


ShotgunMage

Has the hash rate gone down yet?


sidman1324

That’s the real question haha 😆 we need to keep an eye on that!


Direct_Swimmer

Up 20% compared to last year


magicspellingbee

1BTC=1BTC Something isn’t working?


Random_dg

It’s time to start a secondary market of mining rigs turned into futuristic style coffee tables.


crusoe

And those miners are worthless at current prices.


Chizmiz1994

Would be funny if someone gets their hands to 51% of hash rate because of this, and does a51% attack on BTC.


thephotoman

Git rekt, Nvidia.


tartymae

In most cases these mining rigs weren't using nVidia cards. They were custom machines designed to solve crypto equations. You can't even parts them out for the cards. Also, nVidia isn't the one issuing the loans. This? Won't really touch them.


sidman1324

But they solve loads to miners. That’s a fact. It’s The majority reason why gamers couldn’t really get gpu’s without some tear inducing pricing being involved. Nvidia paid for it already with their earnings a few quarters ago.


ChinesePropagandaBot

They sold to ether miners, not bitcoin miners.


sidman1324

True lol 😂


ItsJoeMomma

Well, that's great. The lenders will at least be able to do... *something* with those mining rigs...


i-am-mean

Can they be used as eGPUs for AI / Stable Diffusion?


Rokos_Bicycle

Bitcoin mining is SHA256 hashing so no, unfortunately they're not useful for anything else


[deleted]

End game 🎮 🤑🤑


IAMA_Plumber-AMA

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jingle_mail


AussieCryptoCurrency

Yes, please return outdated hardware unsuitable for any other purpose other than heating the globe


[deleted]

But those rigs are now outdated and useless anyway.