[cyfex]

"GPU compute powering crypto for the last decade..."

I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI.

I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable

[decimalenough]

Bitcoin mining is powered by ASICs. Random shitcoins are not.

[reverius42]

Random shitcoin mining surely isn't a large fraction of industrial GPU usage?

[decimalenough]

Not anymore, but around 10 years ago it absolutely was, because for a short period you could literally print money with them.

[reverius42]

Ah, but any 10 year old GPU now is e-waste, not useful LLM hardware. So it might as well have been mining ASICs.

[latchkey]

GPUs were used primarily for ethereum and to a lesser extent, other shitcoins. ETH switched to PoS in Sept 2022 and 18+ million GPUs were turned off almost over night. Nothing else has the liquidity to sustain a large operation any longer. ASIC's are used for bitcoin and a few smaller shitcoins, GPUs hadn't been used for bitcoin in many years.

GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware.

CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.

[ButlerianJihad]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies

Major cryptocurrencies are based on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. There are other consensus algorithms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction

scrypt has been introduced to stave off ASIC and FPGA solutions.