[vitus]

> slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs

This is across the board, not just for high-end cards.

Newegg has a total of one graphics card released in the past 5 years in stock that it sells directly (https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-001Z-00042), a RX 550 going for $200 (plus $8 shipping) -- the 2GB model launched at a MSRP of $79; I assume the 4GB model's MSRP would be somewhere between that and the $99 MSRP of the RX 560.

The rest of the items for sale are third parties which are often no-name brands/shippers from China (e.g. Yeston which seems to have lackluster reviews about short warranty and sloppy build quality, Corn which has many horror stories about shipping delays or just missing products), and all have similarly drastically hiked prices. Next cheapest card shipped from the US is a 560 at $279+15.

The 550 is by no means a high-end gaming GPU, nor was it when it came out.

[bko]

I think you're missing my point.

No one has a claim on any one product such that they can demand the destruction of something millions of people find value in and that has a market value of a trillion dollars so you can have your GPU return to a price in the past that they found reasonable

[vitus]

You're exaggerating why people dislike cryptocurrency by focusing on a singular reason.

I think the root cause is because it's conflated with bitcoin and the PoW system it's built on top of, which is generally considered to be unproductive. Take away PoW, and you remove the incentives for miners to suck up vast amounts of electricity, the supply of graphics cards, probably even infrastructure hijacks to some point.

(And yes, I understand that the graphic card shortage is more strongly tied to Ethereum's ASIC-resistant hash. But that's still a PoW system.)

[bko]

Bitcoin and PoW crypto is priced to the global lowest cost of energy. For instance, it would not be economical mine bitcoin in Los Angeles in the middle of the day in August. Most of the mining happens in remote areas in China where there is abundant cheap energy at off-peak times.

So it's not fair to look at pure energy used by the Bitcoin network as though its some fungible limited supply that we can just move away from Bitcoin production and move to Texas during the winter storm.

Regarding carbon emission, that's a political problem. If you want to create a tax on carbon, you can do that, although I'd prefer carbon capture tech. But in no way should some governing body try to allocate the validity of carbon emissions based on purpose. That would be no different than central planning where some central authority determines how many X should be produced, when and where. It's been tried and failed.

But look at the point of PoW and the purpose of crypto. Its sound money and has value, and an expense to maintain. Whats the alternative? Create a currency with a trusted central bank, and build an army to defend your organization when someone uses your currency to "fund terrorism"? I imagine there's CO2 emissions w/ maintaining an army as well

[rudderz]

HN has hated crypto for a decade now and it's only recently been about energy consumption. It was and will be about monetary policy and the role of government in issuing currency. Kaynes vs Hayek kind of thing. Which in a way is about authoritarian vs market forces. For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.

[1996]

> For some reason Hacker News really likes the idea of centralized authority and criminalizing things like math and free association by threat of violence and imprisonment.

The new kind of "geek" in the opposite of the traditional "geek" who was a libertarian / pro freedom.

My guess is that most geeks can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them (google/facebook/twitter...) so they decided to loudly proclaim their allegiance to modern values (environmentalism/social justice/wokeness in general)

[lanstin]

There were leftists among geeks the whole time. Stallman didn’t even want passwords. A lot of people viewed technology as a way to achieve mass human prosperity and end the bullshit accumulation of numbers in a database/blockchain ledger as a proxy for social status/power. The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent. The difference between math and computers back then was that computers would let you do math stuff and thereby transform society.

[1996]

I disagree.

> There were leftists among geeks the whole time

Clearly a much smaller proportion.

> The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent

Is it not interesting in how this is a new social good, especially for geeks working for large corporations in California?

I believe all behavior is based in self preservation: it would be career suicide for a young googler to be part of the christian right, or pro Trump, or try to pull off a Damore like memo.

So I am not surprise they do not bite the hand that feed. I am only surprised in the convoluted rationalization they engage in, instead of being more honest (at least online where they can be anonymous) and say "I pretend I'm woke because I like my job because I like the money and status it gets me"