Definitely a good thing but FYI it hasn't been profitable/feasible to mine bitcoin (SHA-256) on GPU for many many years as ASIC based miners have completely taken over. I've talked about it plenty on HN but any way you slice it crypto is an unbelievable waste of resources in every possible way regardless.
What really (finally) more or less killed GPU mining was the Ethereum move to PoS (Proof of Stake).
Bitcoin has a use, but there are other options for consensus algorithms that don't waste as much energy as the citizens of a medium sized country and fill the same user case (and other expanded use cases). Why not just do that?
Strictly speaking, the comment you're replying to doesn't say which of the two is a contest to waste resources and which has potential to have useful results.
In general, the purpose of Bitcoin is not to get rich, but to have a currency that is universally accepted and not tied to a political party’s fiscal decisions.
Only if you really like big numbers for the sake of them. Otherwise, one is just straight up snake oil[0], and the other… is kinda hard to tell yet, because while I'm really impressed, I don't know if it's {a toy, a tool, the first sign of a major transformation}.
[0] did you know the original snake oils contains more omega-3 and therefore improves cognitive function when compared to lard? I did not. But you can get omega-3 elsewhere, and the people who made the term synonymous with fraud didn't use those snakes, so…
or games. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.
I get that it is entertainment, but so are board games and that don't require mining rare earth minerals or putting pressure on the grid as you can always play board games with candles on.
I'm of two minds on this. I'm not a gamer so part of me thinks gaming is a complete waste of time and resources. Then again, the same could be said about almost any hobby/pastime.
That said, gaming is what gave us GPUs (which have developed for gaming over the course of decades) so that we can now utilize them for more interesting and "productive" applications.
So, for me, in the end I'm happy the PC gaming industry and user base has been pushing GPU capability.
Be careful. The gaming industry has successfully conditioned people into believing they need a $1500 GPU with the TDP of a microwave so they can play the next unfinished-at-release AAA title.
One day we'll find out that all of the VR, crypto, and maybe now AI bubbles were nothing but conspiracies being driven by big-GPU to keep their share price up.
VR has been a godsend for forcing hardware, OS and driver developers to actually pay attention to jitter and max latency. If crypto means we get nice fast pretty games and fancy AI then I’m for it. :)
Charlie Stross (cstross on here) had a fun blog post[1] about this phenomenon just a week and a half ago.
> As for what you should look to invest in?
> I'm sure it's just a coincidence that training neural networks and mining cryptocurrencies are both applications that benefit from very large arrays of GPUs. [...]
> If I was a VC I'd be hiring complexity theory nerds to figure out what areas of research are promising once you have Yottaflops of numerical processing power available, then I'd be placing bets on the GPU manufacturers going there
For most part of the 20th, a bulk of the energy humanity was able to extract was used for industrialization. Now it seems that a vast bulk of the energy being extracted will go towards computation.
I doubt it frankly. Computation consumes a lot of energy, true, but it is dwarfed by how much energy we use in transportation and food production. Energy use per capita in most of the Global North is about 75,000kWh per year,
Yeah but every time we discover a new interesting thing to do with computers the requirements go up by several orders of magnitude. How many more orders of magnitude of energy can we spend on food production from here with current projections of world population to peak in 2100?
theres an economics theory of “supply creates its own demand”. we wanted to do ml, gpus were around for games, we repurposed them for ml, and ml architectures that benefit from gpus won the “hardware lottery” (influential paper from sara hooker in case you are unaware)