Thanks, y’all. Damn. I’m officially and completely appalled. 
I didn’t think I could be any more appalled than I already was. Or hate Greg Abbott any more than I already do.
Jesus. Henry. Christ. 
This really is the Wild Fucking West, isn’t it.
From a relatively disinterested outside observer, I’d like to gently recommend that you pace yourself.
ETA: I realized you made the exact same point so this is a waste of a post. Apologies.
Here is a picture of a puppy:
Truly. There will be much worse along shortly.
More dapper and capable than Greg Abbott
Puppy for TX Gov!
All true, but to “find” that virtual currency take some serious mathematical calculations. I have a Bitcoin mining thumb drive that, when I plug it into a desktop or laptop, starts “mining” on its own, taking only the 5v from the USB port but will report to the box its in when it finds one. It was estimated when I bought it for $20 it would take 10,000 years to find a Bitcoin. Directly below is a “starter” rig purported to be the most profitable in 2021. Costing 6,000€, with 10 Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti GPU cards, it is claimed to earn 1,120€ a month at a cost of 100€ a month (0.1€ per kWh) in power for a net profit of 1,020€. Cite.
Below that is a rather larger rig in Siberia.
In Siberia. Well, at least they don’t have to heat the joint.
That was the advice people gave me after election day 2016. Didn’t work then either.
YES!
I truly had no idea about the mining and server farms, electricity usage, and stuff. Is this common knowledge among adult, literate, sentient people? I’m guessing not.
Truth be told, you’ve been arming yourself against Mothra.
Pretty legitimate defense for not knowing.
It isn’t entirely unprecedented:
Not really. Literate adults understand there’s something called ‘crypto’ out there that involves ‘mining’ but that’s about the extent of general knowledge.
There’s a smaller group, generally more tech savvy, who have a better understanding of the other issues.
It would shock me to learn if more than handful of high ranking politicians, especially on the GOP side, understood the issues involved either, other than the buzzwords floating around. Same is true for the CEOs of the big investment companies trying to cash in as well. Understanding the technology is for the geeks.
Adult, sentient, geeky people. Ask me who’s in the Super Bowl and watch my dumb look. We all have our priorities. Yours is Clarence.
I’m not buying that cite’s price; a single 3060 Ti runs roughly $900, so six would be $9000 right out of the gate, not including the other components. I would guess that rig is closer to $10000, instead of $6800 (6000 euros in USD).
I think it’s the Yankees versus the Lakers.
Depends on when and how it was priced. I bought a 3080 for less than $900 a bit over a year ago. Also depends on how you are sourcing them, OEM’s get a much better deal than retail buyers.
Sure, but I doubt they’ve ever been under $600 for anyone since the pandemic began. That’s my point- they’d probably have to get them for like $500 in order to be able to make that rig for 6000 euros.
Certainly if they bought the cards on the open market, it’s possible, but wholesale prices have been lower. And it depends on when you buy. I just checked the local Microcenter, and they’ve got a 3060TI retailing for about $630 at the moment, so 600 euros isn’t ridiculous.
Their 6 month time frame to recoup their costs is also about right. For a similar consumer card in somebody’s home PC, the ROI is a little over a year early in January (more time than that is required now due to lower crypto prices), so the ~6 months for a dedicated rig isn’t unrealistic.
Still, a lot of this depends on the price of electricity, the current price of bitcoin and so on. Crypto prices have dropped a lot over the last month, so the ROI has become poorer (GPU prices have also been tracking crypto prices, unsurprisingly). And it requires a fairly large up front investment that a lot of folks wouldn’t be able to manage to begin with.
I wonder if anyone is skipping all the hubbub over bitcoins and just speculating in GPUs; buy a bunch while they’re cheap and sell them at a profit later.
Nobody’s really getting them cheap right now (though prices have fallen a bit due to falling crypto). But some people have been profiting on GPUs as well. eBay is full of people selling extra GPUs they managed to get their hands on.
And most crypto miners are planning to recoup part of their costs by selling cards if/when crypto prices drop low enough not to be worth it anymore.
That’s another reason why Abbott’s idea is stupid. Nobody (intelligent) really thinks this is an eternal gravy train or that prices will ever be stable or eternally rise. Relying on a ‘commodity’ whose prices can fluctuate wildly from month to month in order to fund power plants that take years to build is the exactly kind of strategery I’d expect from our GOP leaders.