Ethereum GPU mining?

[Feld]

As a holder of eth but not a DAO investor, I can't be buggered to care about it that much. In the long run, a fairly large chunk of eth is going "offline" (read: becoming unrecoverable) which reduces currency supply, increasing the real-world value of my holdings. So hey, cool!

Downside is it's spooking people that either don't understand what's going on or are just too irrational to think for themselves, so they're dumping stake. Too bad.

You should probably reconsider your assumption that you would be better off seeing DAO investors get screwed. The DAO is not inversely correlated with ether value - since one is directly tied to the other, that much should be obvious. Ether price went down at the same time as DAO tokens. If the community allows such theft to happen when a fair means of preventing it is available, Ethereum is going to tank far harder than it did today. Any deflationary price bump from the permanent loss of 30% of the DAO holdings will be a blip on the chart in comparison.

I think the quick announcement of a plan to prevent the loss of any ether is a major reason eth didn't drop more than it did. The DAO got significant coverage in the mainstream press, drawing new people in to cryptocurrency. But they will skewer not just the DAO or even Ethereum but all of crypto if such massive preventable losses are allowed. The loss of public confidence in Ethereum could take years to recover from. You can kiss the hopes of rapid expansion from wider adoption over the next 6 months or a year (and the ether price increase that would go with it) goodbye. At least that's how I see it.

I am a DAO token holder, but I'm also miner and an ether and bitcoin holder. Allowing the theft to go uncorrected is incredibly shortsighted and detrimental to crypto in general. Fewer coins in circulation only raises value of the others when demand stays solid. In reality, demand is very likely to fall faster than the potential deflation can account for.

 

[Feld]

I'm trying to figure out if the thief who was behind this actually thought he could get away with it.

He already did. The thief certainly knew he wouldn't get the ether for 27 days and would probably be stopped from getting it at all, but that wasn't even the primary goal. Margins to short sell ether for 3000 bitcoin were opened up on Bitfinex right before the attack. He knew the attack would tank the price of ether, and he has already made his millions. Hopefully it can be traced through the Bitfinex account.

https://twitter.com/EthereumWiki/status/743905989682855936

 

[DrMrLordX]

You should probably reconsider your assumption that you would be better off seeing DAO investors get screwed. The DAO is not inversely correlated with ether value - since one is directly tied to the other, that much should be obvious. Ether price went down at the same time as DAO tokens. If the community allows such theft to happen when a fair means of preventing it is available, Ethereum is going to tank far harder than it did today. Any deflationary price bump from the permanent loss of 30% of the DAO holdings will be a blip on the chart in comparison.

I think the quick announcement of a plan to prevent the loss of any ether is a major reason eth didn't drop more than it did. The DAO got significant coverage in the mainstream press, drawing new people in to cryptocurrency. But they will skewer not just the DAO or even Ethereum but all of crypto if such massive preventable losses are allowed. The loss of public confidence in Ethereum could take years to recover from. You can kiss the hopes of rapid expansion from wider adoption over the next 6 months or a year (and the ether price increase that would go with it) goodbye. At least that's how I see it.

I am a DAO token holder, but I'm also miner and an ether and bitcoin holder. Allowing the theft to go uncorrected is incredibly shortsighted and detrimental to crypto in general. Fewer coins in circulation only raises value of the others when demand stays solid. In reality, demand is very likely to fall faster than the potential deflation can account for.

I ain't sweatin it. Ironically, had all those holding eth thought the way I do, nobody would have dumped eth after the theft, causing the short to mostly fail. I have to wonder what the thief might have done to drive eth prices up leading into the attack . . . it sure went up a lot over the last few days.

In any case, Ethereum has already shown itself to be resilient. The DAO will move on, and smart contracts overall will be better for the experience. In the meantime, let people dump their eth. Difficulty will drop and I'll get to mine more. I don't mind if eth sits around $8-$9 or so. It's at $13.92 now so it can stand to lose some more value.

 

[techie81]

I will continue to mine and hold on to Ether but it's not looking too good at this point.

 

[Erithan13]

What a wild ride, falling toward $10 now. I've mined about 30 eth none of which I've sold yet so I'm gonna sit tight and see if the price recovers. Something like ethereum or the DAO was never going to be smooth sailing the whole way. Maybe in a year or two this whole drama will just be a minor blip in the grand scheme of things. Bitcoin survived the whole MtGox implosion so let's hope ether will prove resilient.

 

[Feld]

I ain't sweatin it. Ironically, had all those holding eth thought the way I do, nobody would have dumped eth after the theft, causing the short to mostly fail. I have to wonder what the thief might have done to drive eth prices up leading into the attack . . . it sure went up a lot over the last few days.

In any case, Ethereum has already shown itself to be resilient. The DAO will move on, and smart contracts overall will be better for the experience. In the meantime, let people dump their eth. Difficulty will drop and I'll get to mine more. I don't mind if eth sits around $8-$9 or so. It's at $13.92 now so it can stand to lose some more value.

It's your decision of course. But a comment I saw on reddit from user GGTplus sums my thoughts up pretty nicely:

The way the problem is handled will be heavily scrutinized, and while a [hard fork] is not ideal at all, leaving or burning the funds could put off many institutional investors, researchers, incubators, entrepreneurs, who are creating the ecosystem. (and whose involvement made your coins value rise). That what is at stake.

...

Nobody will care five years from now if a hard fork was implemented to help innocent people get back their money that was stolen from them in the ecosystem. But if the money doesn't make it back to its rightful owners, people will remember that.

I think everyone but the thief and maybe a few other big short sellers with great timing will stand to lose far more by not righting an obvious and egregious wrong.

 

[Tumaras]

It puts them in a tough spot, the 3M+ ETH he got if they do nothing with make it have near zero value, and if they do a fork or other action it sounds like the guy who "creatively acquired them" already is lawyer'ed up. Either way it is a massive blow to credibility.

I am not short or long in ETH, just a small timer and I always convert my profits to cash asap just in case something like this happens (which seemed bound to sooner or later). But I definitely feel bad for the investors that were sitting on a lot of DAO or ETH, or that recently bought a bunch of mining equipment for that matter. It may go back up, the gpu mining equipment can always be used for other gpu-centric altcoins, but still not a good thing. Curious what this does to the RX 480 interest also if ETH completely falls off.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I think everyone but the thief and maybe a few other big short sellers with great timing will stand to lose far more by not righting an obvious and egregious wrong.

My impression is that they may not be able to get the money back, whether or not they choose to do so. If they can, great. If not, well, congratulations folks, you got burned during a financial experiment. Let's all learn from it and move on.

Theoretically, Vitalik and the others who benefited from the pre-mine could probably cover the loss since they are presumably holding a lot of eth and since they are heavily involved in the DAO. The main thing to do is to make sure that the thief does not get his grubby mitts on the eth, and that mission is already accomplished, more-or-less.

It puts them in a tough spot, the 3M+ ETH he got if they do nothing with make it have near zero value, and if they do a fork or other action it sounds like the guy who "creatively acquired them" already is lawyer'ed up. Either way it is a massive blow to credibility.

I've read hints that the thief may actually assert that what he did was legal within the terms of the smart contract, and that he should be entitled to whatever he could take from the DAO since the actions fell within the rules of the contract. For anyone to step in and stop him constitutes a breach of contract. Now if THAT holds up in court, then there's a problem. The fact that some jerk found a bug and used it to try to take a bunch of eth (and mostly failed) is not that big of a deal. Bugs can be fixed, and people will learn from the problem when coding their contracts in the future. But if code bugs within a smart contract are regarded as being enforceable elements of the contract in-line with the contract's original intent (or if intent is held to be irrelevant) then that's a big deal for Ethereum and every other cryptocurrency attempting to emulate some or all of Ethereum's features.

I am not short or long in ETH, just a small timer and I always convert my profits to cash asap just in case something like this happens (which seemed bound to sooner or later). But I definitely feel bad for the investors that were sitting on a lot of DAO or ETH, or that recently bought a bunch of mining equipment for that matter. It may go back up, the gpu mining equipment can always be used for other gpu-centric altcoins, but still not a good thing. Curious what this does to the RX 480 interest also if ETH completely falls off.

For anyone long on eth, it's just going to lower difficulty and make mining easier. For anyone short on it, yeah, it sucks. Incidents like this are why I prefer not to hype the coin too much and instead stick to the technical elements of what it takes to run a miner (to the best of my ability; I'm still learning). All of what made Ethereum good before is still there, and now we understand the consequences of why smart contracts have to be rigorously tested for code flaws. Of course, haven't they been telling us this for months now, that coding dapps and smart contracts is really hard, and that testing is essential? Everything has to be airtight.

 

[Feld]

My impression is that they may not be able to get the money back, whether or not they choose to do so. If they can, great. If not, well, congratulations folks, you got burned during a financial experiment. Let's all learn from it and move on.

Theoretically, Vitalik and the others who benefited from the pre-mine could probably cover the loss since they are presumably holding a lot of eth and since they are heavily involved in the DAO. The main thing to do is to make sure that the thief does not get his grubby mitts on the eth, and that mission is already accomplished, more-or-less.

That is the most important thing, definitely.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Oh, also I do not think Ethereum's drop in value ($11.71 now folks, keep it up, lower that difficulty! /s) will do too much to Polaris since most of the rumours are that it will be slow mining Ethereum anyway. As a graphics card, it should be very nice. For mining? I'm not so confident that it will be useful.

 

[Madpacket]

I recommend anyone interested in The Dao theft watch the following podcast. Some good information, especially on the possible legal ramifications.

https://youtu.be/RHcLKrkwPLQ

Ultimately if a fork doesn't take place and the thief isn't denied the ether there's no real path to Proof of Stake. This will kill Ethereum's ability to scale and speed necessary to continue to be the best crypto platform.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Interesting. PoS is a big part of the future of Ethereum. Without that, I'd have to curtail my own mining and get out, which would suck but eh that's life ya know?

So they know what they need to do. It's doubtful that they care what I do individually, but the entire platform would be basically dead without PoS/scaling/etc. Makes you wonder about the cryptocurrencies copying Ethereum's features as well . . . be careful what you copy.

btw eth is back up to $11.83 which is an okay place for it to be. Before the rapid inflation ~1 week ago, it was sitting at around $13-$14 so no big whoop on that side. But that's temporary. Long-term they gotta fix some things.

 

[Madpacket]

Interesting. PoS is a big part of the future of Ethereum. Without that, I'd have to curtail my own mining and get out, which would suck but eh that's life ya know?

So they know what they need to do. It's doubtful that they care what I do individually, but the entire platform would be basically dead without PoS/scaling/etc. Makes you wonder about the cryptocurrencies copying Ethereum's features as well . . . be careful what you copy.

btw eth is back up to $11.83 which is an okay place for it to be. Before the rapid inflation ~1 week ago, it was sitting at around $13-$14 so no big whoop on that side. But that's temporary. Long-term they gotta fix some things.

Yes it's an interesting problem. But one that's easy to fix without really compromising integrity of Ethereum (remember miners have all the power here). Hard forking will be a very democratic process among the miners so I really hope we all come to our senses and support it. All this libertarian fear mongering is just that.

Here's a detailed response from one of the slock.it founders that explains how this works. Recommend reading this to cut through some of the FUD flying around.

https://blog.slock.it/what-the-fork-really-means-6fe573ac31dd#.oy7qykkac


I also agree with you that without a move to proof of stake there's little reason to stick with Ethereum or any other crypto besides BTC.

Although the utility of the Ethereum platform is surprisingly useful in many ways, in order for real big changes to happen we really want speed and scalability.

PoS could bring up to a 1000x speed increase (total number of concurrent transactions). With Ethereum's flexibility this could lead to things like actually being able to compete with companies like Visa/MasterCard speed wise but with all of the advantages of security such as immutability and accountability. It could lead to things like eliminating the need for centralized web hosting, cloud and storage providers. It could do this all without silly hacks like "lightning networks" or off chain services.

I'm surprised how well the price of ether is holding up. Or maybe I shouldn't be given how easy it will be to fix this theft.

 

[SK10H]

I'm surprised how well the price of ether is holding up. Or maybe I shouldn't be given how easy it will be to fix this theft.

Still too early to tell as this is the first wave down, may take out the stop loss order at $0.01 soon. :sneaky:

The parabolic push from Eth since Jan need a pause. $1 to $21.

Bitcoin price history data from http://www.investing.com/currencies/btc-usd-historical-data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin#Prices_and_value_history

Dec 2012 $13
April 11, 2013 $266

266 / 13 = 20.46

Date Price Open High Low
Apr 16, 2013 67.57 82.51 84.00 51.00

51 / 266 = 0.1918

If we apply 0.1918x to $21.5 -> $4.12 / Eth



Let's take the stabilized low print on July1,2013 as the next launching pad.

Jul 01, 2013 81.01 90.21 91.97 75.57

Nov 2013 $350 – $1250 (from Wiki), I remember it nearly touch gold price of about $1200-1220 but not 1250. I will use $1200 instead as that trade for a few hours at least.

1200 / 90.21 = 13.3x

Jan 14, 2015 170.00 220.68 221.15 162.68

162.68 / 1200 = 0.1356

0.1356 x 21.5 = $2.92 / Eth but this take a long time.



I think it's reasonable to expect ETH to go back to retest the $7 dollar range. Going back to $4 will making many miners barely break even, maybe even losing if counting the new mining equipment ROI.

 

[videogames101]

RIP DAO

I guess Ether tanks now?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Not if there's a hard fork and the miners all support it. It might delay PoS though.

 

[Chiropteran]

Not if there's a hard fork and the miners all support it. It might delay PoS though.

If there is a hard fork to fix the theft, ether is proven to be a centrally controlled system. I agree with the guy here:

https://medium.com/@CryptoIQ.ca/code-is-cruel-a23ece319aa1#.2k0ot3y3f

 

[DrMrLordX]

If there isn't a hard fork, all the irrational actors out there may tank the entire currency. That's a big problem.

I do agree that people should be rational when dealing with Ethereum and the DAO; however, historically, investor-types have not behaved rationally, leading to arguably-stupid behavior. Today's NYSE and other stock markets are full of irrational buy-high-sell-low moments.

Also I don't see a hard fork as proof of centralized power when it only works if the miners all agree to it. I see it as an agreement on the part of the miners to get that money back for the DAO investors who lost it.

In a more-rational world filled with more-rational people, we'd take the lumps and resolve to make future smart contracts more ironclad. We'd also wait until Serenity before dumping that much eth into a single smart contract-driven entity (some have argued that bugs in Homestead made the DAO hack possible, not sure if they're 100% correct in that assertion). We are not in a rational world, and sadly, the future of the currency is driven as much by "investor" confidence as it is by the fundamental, underlying technical advantages of Ethereum.

So if they gotta hard fork to keep people involved and keep it moving forward, then that's what's gonna happen.

 

[Chiropteran]

If there isn't a hard fork, all the irrational actors out there may tank the entire currency. That's a big problem.

How so? The bug was in the DAO smart contract. Ethereum itself is fine.

I think the main problem is the precedent that is being set. Bitcoin had a setback when MtGox failed, but there was no central authority creating a hard-fork to get everyone's money back. Bitcoin has been proven to stand by it's core features, which include non-reversible one-way transactions.

Once the cat is out of the bag, how long until someone asks for another fork because they got scammed out of some coins? Or how long until the NSA demands the X coins be rendered unusable via a hardfork because the coins in question are used by a terrorist IP?

 

[Thala]

Not if there's a hard fork and the miners all support it. It might delay PoS though.

Disagree. There was nothing that compromised Etherium, which would justify a hard fork.
Also the term "theft" is debatable. Apparently the contract was the code, which behaved correctly and according to specification...not necessarily as intended. All the investors agreed the contract and now pretend to not have read the fine print.
That the thing with smart contracts, you cannot say both code is contract and then later....wait i did not mean that literally.

 

[Madpacket]

Pro's and Con's of a Hard Fork (taken from a reddit thread).

I don't agree with all of the points made but it's food for thought


"Pros:

-Simple quick fix

-Don't end up spending months debating this and wasting our time
-SEC doesn't investigate everyone involved

-Price doesn't crash because ethereum under SEC involvement and traders are afraid of dump from attacker

-$150 Million dollars are returned to ethereum evangelists who will reinvest and be even more motivated to make ethereum succeed

-DAO token holders are happy and get what's rightfully theirs

-The black hat attacker doesn't end up owning 5-15% of all ethers potentially threatening any POS upgrade possibilities

-All the DAO buyers and token holders don't get screwed over
-The community doesn't split into pieces and people don't hate each other, and instead becomes a force to reckon with as people realize we've tackled a problem way bigger than the block size debate in record time

-Media starts spinning this as a good thing and people don't remember Ethereum as that platform that got hacked

-We will not be known as Mtgox 2.0

-The wider world discovers that unlike any crypto before ethereum was able to thwart an attack and recover from a huge potential disaster

-This whole event becomes a huge lesson and a blessing in disguise as traditional financial institutions aren't afraid of hackers stealing their money on Ethereum, and the media exposure brings massive attention

-Ether price sky rockets to $100


Cons:

-A purist fundamentalist maximalist (possibly anti-ethereum) vocal minority who thinks forking is somehow cheating or morally wrong, when it's actually part of the blockchain's social consensus mechanism, don't get their way."

 

[Madpacket]

This is also neat. Our first real dip in difficulty (no surprise) happened.

https://etherscan.io/charts/difficulty

 

[Chiropteran]

Disagree. There was nothing that compromised Etherium, which would justify a hard fork.
Also the term "theft" is debatable. Apparently the contract was the code, which behaved correctly and according to specification...not necessarily as intended. All the investors agreed the contract and now pretend to not have read the fine print.
That the thing with smart contracts, you cannot say both code is contract and then later....wait i did not mean that literally.

You are not disagreeing with me. Everything you wrote, I agree with.

 

[Thala]

You are not disagreeing with me. Everything you wrote, I agree with.

Arrrgh....i used the wrong quote. Sorry...going to fix this.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I haven't had any card fans degrade yet.

This weekend I had the fans on both my Sapphire Tahitis (one a 280x one a 7970 Ghz) completely stop working. One tore in half!, the other makes a terrible clack noise and won't spin above a slow speed.

I spent all yesterday trying to rig my own cooling. I got two 90mm fans for each and I zip tied them on, but my problem was these were "quiet" fans even at 12v so the GPUs can't get above 950mhz before the heat gets out of control. I think I am going to try again with more aggressive fans, any recommendations?