Nerdy Awesome shit you bought!

[Scouse]

These fuckers keep sucking up too much of my money. But at the prices they charge for their quality I can't really beat them.

£360 today on a collection of dry bags, a merino baselayer, a down jacket and a superlight outerlayer. @Big G'd be proud - must be all that money I'm saving 'cause of not having kids

 

[old.user4556]

These fuckers keep sucking up too much of my money. But at the prices they charge for their quality I can't really beat them.

£360 today on a collection of dry bags, a merino baselayer, a down jacket and a superlight outerlayer. @Big G'd be proud - must be all that money I'm saving 'cause of not having kids

I love a good dry bag, nice waterproof compartments giving you piece of mind that your kit is arrange and safe. No faffing with over-covers for a rucksack in the rain.

 

[Bodhi]

I do appreciate a good waterproof bag - there's nothing worse than doing your best to keep your grips dry in the rain, pulling out an 8 iron and finding the grip wet through

 

[ECA]

Bought a newish to market chinese powermeter for the bike ( honestly half the fun is experimenting with how good/bad chinese stuff is ). £180 vs the cheapest non-chinese powermeter the 4i @£320.
Also picked up a bryton 530 for £120 instead of a much pricier and less durable garmin unit or the wahoo.

£300 for power meter+computer vs an easy £600 buying western brand name stuff.

 

[Fweddy]

My work PC has just been upgraded to one of these. Seems pretty good so far.

 

[Jupitus]

My work PC has just been upgraded to one of these. Seems pretty good so far.

Blimey! What kind of job do you do?

 

[Moriath]

No gfx descripter in the pc so i guess its compiling huge stuffs or something

 

[Fweddy]

Blimey! What kind of job do you do?

I'm an animator. I've started doing more 3D stuff lately so work felt like I should have a beefier computer to do it on. Really tempted to put Steam on it for the evenings though...

 

[Moriath]

Got a r pi 3 and its 7inch touch screen.

Put a retropie image called hyperpie on it. Got a portable emulation station with 16k games from speccy and c64 via snes and stuff to play station one

Gonna lose me some hours in this

 

[TdC]

My work PC has just been upgraded to one of these. Seems pretty good so far.

we buy lots of these things and fill them up with lots of these things. you'd love that as a render farm

 

[Fweddy]

we buy lots of these things and fill them up with lots of these things. you'd love that as a render farm

Ooh, definitely! Send log in details please. What do you use them for?

 

[TdC]

Ooh, definitely! Send log in details please. What do you use them for?

Financial pricing and risk computations

 

[Fweddy]

Financial pricing and risk computations

Doesn't sound as important as cartoons tbh.

 

[caLLous]

Or mining. There's so much money being made in cryptocurrencies right now ffs.

 

[TdC]

you don't want to mine with a GPU anymore tbh. FPGA's are where it's at.

 

[caLLous]

you don't want to mine with a GPU anymore tbh. FPGA's are where it's at.

This account probably belongs to a big mining farm like that. Each of those workers listed below is probably 6x RX 480 or 6x 580. The ones with hashrates of 175-180 anyway, the slower ones will be 6x RX 470 or 6x 570. He's clearing $20k a day at current prices/difficulty.

 

[Raven]

Out of interest. Please fill in the Xs as best you can.

The cost of 4000 GPUs = X
The amount of power to run 4000 GPUs = X
How much could you generate in 24hrs = X

I did briefly look at it as something to do with my old PC but never could see how it was really worth the hassle.

 

[caLLous]

Well, the hashrate of the cards will remain the same - eg an RX 480 can do 30MH/s with memory overclocks and can be made a shit ton more efficient by underclocking the GPU (because Ethereum mining is more about the memory than the GPU) and undervolting both the GPU and the memory. The return you get for that 30MH/s depends on the network difficulty, which is currently going up as a result of the increase in price and more people mining. I started in September with a 6x RX 480 rig that was bringing in 1.2 ETH a day. Back then, 1 ETH was worth about $11. Yesterday, 1 ETH hit $230.

You can of course sell as you go but the better theory is to hold on to it as it increases in value. That above is an extreme example but there's obviously a high initial investment required and there's obviously a risk factor. But as of right now, he is clearing 112 ETH a day which brings him in $21k (it went up a bit since my last post). Now, his hashrate is 129.5 GH/s and that "making of" video (assuming that the video is connected to the account I linked to) with the stupid computer voice was uploaded in May last year. When I started in September, his 129.5 GH/s would (due to the much lower difficulty) be bringing in 971.25 ETH a day, and more than that before then. That 971.25 ETH that he was pulling in per day is worth $181k at today's prices. Assuming he got the cards straight from AMD he would've paid a reduced price so let's say $200 per card (probably less) so he paid $800k. He's in Iceland and the electricity not only costs very little (because geothermal) but it's chuffing freezing for most of the year so cooling is less of an issue. So it's not about how much cash you can generate per day, it's about how much of whatever you're mining you can generate, and then holding that while the value increases (which it is, lots).

As for the risk factor; Ethereum is better than Bitcoin in every conceivable way. The underlying blockchain tech, the fact that it's more scalable, the fact that it has a Turing complete programming language behind it, the fact that several big companies have already started using it without people even knowing (eg Germany’s Energy Giant Launches 100s of Ethereum Based Electric Cars Charging Stations), the fact that more and more companies are signing up to the EEA (the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance), and probably loads of other reasons.

All of the above is why you can't buy a RX 470/480/570/580 anywhere at the moment.

 

[old.user4556]

This account probably belongs to a big mining farm like that. Each of those workers listed below is probably 6x RX 480 or 6x 580. The ones with hashrates of 175-180 anyway, the slower ones will be 6x RX 470 or 6x 570. He's clearing $20k a day at current prices/difficulty.

Explain like i'm 5. What is this? Mining? Seems like some really crazy setup, tell me more!

 

[Raven]

I now wonder what it is you are doing, surely there must be something of value to produce the currency? So something like decryption, looking at proteins or something?

 

[caLLous]

Explain like i'm 5. What is this? Mining? Seems like some really crazy setup, tell me more!

Basically (very basically but maybe not ELI5-basically), miners validate the transactions that take place on the blockchain. If enough miners "agree" on the hash of a block (ie there is consensus), it is committed to the blockchain and is set in stone and cannot be changed. It's a way of securing the network and ensuring total transparency. This site has a good overview of the network - you can view any and all of the transactions since the beginning on a site like etherchain.org.

As a reward for the processing power (hashrate) they contribute, they are paid with Ether, which has a value in USD and can be bought and sold.

 

[old.user4556]

Basically (very basically but maybe not ELI5-basically), miners validate the transactions that take place on the blockchain. If enough miners "agree" on the hash of a block (ie there is consensus), it is committed to the blockchain and is set in stone and cannot be changed. It's a way of securing the network and ensuring total transparency. This site has a good overview of the network - you can view any and all of the transactions since the beginning on a site like etherchain.org.

As a reward for the processing power (hashrate) they contribute, they are paid with Ether, which has a value in USD and can be bought and sold.

I did some reading, and:

 

[TdC]

This account probably belongs to a big mining farm like that. Each of those workers listed below is probably 6x RX 480 or 6x 580. The ones with hashrates of 175-180 anyway, the slower ones will be 6x RX 470 or 6x 570. He's clearing $20k a day at current prices/difficulty.

I'm not saying it can't be done with GPU's, I'm saying for the average Joe it's less efficient. Most people can't buy 4000 high hash-rate cards, let alone the systems to put them in. Not everyone lives in Iceland. When you have to pay for your Watt/Hours yourself, FPGA is king.

Out of interest. Please fill in the Xs as best you can.

The cost of 4000 GPUs = X
The amount of power to run 4000 GPUs = X
How much could you generate in 24hrs = X

Initial
The systems we use for our risk stuff cost about 250K each, incl 6 P100 cards. To get 4000 cards we would need 667 systems. At our price point, that is an initial cost of about 167M euros, and that is including the nice discount our vendors give us.

Power
We rate a P100 at 250 W. We can assume a miner will run 24hrs so that's 6KWH/GPU/day or 24K KWH for 4000 of them per day. A KWH in NL costs about 0.22 euros so the cost per day for this is 24K * 0.22e = 5300 euros / day.

Breakdown
Note: I'm not counting what it costs to buy power infrastructure to deliver 24K KW to out fantasy facility safely because frankly I have no idea how much that would cost. I'm also not counting cooling and housing costs.

Hardware : 167M euros (4y depr cycle = ~42M euros / year)
Power : 5300 euros / day = 2M euros / year)
Overhead (10%) : 440K / year
Personnel : (NL average = 33e/hour) * 2 datacenter monkies * 3 8h days / week = ~80K

Expected yearly costs : 42M + 2M + 440K + 80K = 44.520.000 euros
Expected income : 21K dollars = 18.7K euros * 365 = 6.825.500 euros

So, as you can guess, I wouldn't do this. That said, our hardware is hella expensive. You could put together a system that can fit 6 high-hashrate GPU's for a lot less. A 10 second google teaches me that a 6 gpu mining system can be put together for as little as 1800 dollars. Then things change

 

[caLLous]

I did some reading, and:

View attachment 36724

Yeah it's exciting tech.

The Ethereum Name Server just went live a while ago as well so people can bid for "<name>.eth" to make payments easier (currently to send Ether to another account you have account names like "0x85fdc336c3d20039b1facd71420c6aaab5d4ea1e"), there are new ICOs (Initial Coin Offering, basically a play on IPO) which are services which make use of the Ethereum blockchain coming along every week - storj for distirbuted storage, golem for distributed computing, kik (the messaging app) just today announced Kin etc.

 

[caLLous]

I'm not saying it can't be done with GPU's, I'm saying for the average Joe it's less efficient. Most people can't buy 4000 high hash-rate cards, let alone the systems to put them in. Not everyone lives in Iceland. When you have to pay for your Watt/Hours yourself, FPGA is king.

Sure, you have to factor in the cost of everything (hardware/electricity/etc) and then calculate how long until you hit return on investment. Like I said earlier, it's possible to undervolt the cards to make them much more efficient. In GPU-Z the "GPU only" wattage for a RX 570 straight out of the box at full load is 130W but it falls to 70W when undervolted while the memory is being pushed form 1750Mhz to 1900+ (GPU only as in it doesn't account for power required for other board components). A whole rig with RX 470s can run at 700W which is a fraction of the wattage required to get Bitcoin miners going back in the day, before ASICs came along. Then there's a mining application called Claymore which can actually mine 2 coins at once - one can be Ethereum (which is very memory intensive but barely touches the GPU) and the other can be Decred or Siacoin or Pascal or one of the other GPU intensive ones. It uses more power but (completely fucking inexplicably if you ask me) you don't lose any hashrate on Ethereum and you get the added benefit of making a few $ per card per day from the other coin. Then you could even use the CPU on the rig to mine a CPU-friendly coin but the idea is to make the rig as cheap as possible so I usually just throw a Celeron G1840 in mine.

The thing to do is join a pool, not try to mine solo. Solo means you're chuntering away for days potentially without success but with a pool you're just contributing x MH/s and are paid accordingly when blocks are found. On alpereum.ch right now there are 1084 miners, on ethermine.org there are 18168, another 1227 on ethpool.org (less there because they use a different payout scheme which is not for the weak of heart or low of hashrate), another 28335 on dwarfpool.com and that's just the big pools. These are miners, not workers. A miner can have multiple workers (a worker is a rig basically) connected to one account. There are lots and lots and lots of "average Joes" mining right now.

I was being a bit flippant when I said you should mine with your P100s, you would probably get a smacked bottom for running them at full pelt (if they ever even have downtime) and your other server chaps might question why the cooling systems kick in more often. Anyway, for hashrate per buck, any one of the Polaris cards from AMD would wipe the floor with them because Ethereum was designed specifically to resist ASICs and FPGAs (by doing everything in memory instead of using the GPU). The devs want mining to be accessible until the "difficulty bomb" hits (which means mining will become less and less "worth it" very quickly in the run-up to Ethereum switching to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work, and mining will cease to exist) and because of said bomb, it's probably not even worth designing and producing dedicated machines.

 

[Jupitus]

Errr... yeah!

 

[Edmond]

My PC (this one) is about 6 yrs old now, i built it but it's really starting to chug. Ive had a look at new stuff but it boggles me tbh. Not sure if it would be easier to get one off the shelf.

I don't do gaming and this one has served me well, even the one of the cores was corrupt from the off and i had to shut it down, so its only running 3, but even so the new stuff has moved on so much

 

[Scouse]

I did briefly look at it as something to do with my old PC but never could see how it was really worth the hassle.

Put my mate onto it a couple of years ago. He's made £30,000 so far...

 

[Tom]

I don't do gaming

 

[Edmond]

Let me rephrase that, I don't game on the PC, I have a PS4

I meant I don't need the PC to be a gaming PC