I remember I was short the stock via puts quite a bit and they kept saying crypto was 5% of the business which I knew was a lie. It turned out great for me. Fast forward to 2022, you see how much of the GPU “shortage” was due to crypto mining especially in Russia (there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating their kitchens with GPUs).
But with bitcoin mining your heat pays for itself, while if you use a heat pump you have to buy power to run the heat pump. So while heat pumps are more energy effient, bitcoin miners are far more economically efficient.
This is only true if the value of the Bitcoin you mine is higher than the difference in cost between buying and operating a heat pump and buying and operating a mining rig.
I don't agree with a lot of things in CAPEX vs OPEX, but this is one that is clearly right:
Having equipment sitting around unused is way more expensive than most people care to think about.
A heating coil might not be terribly valuable in July, but come November it will have roughly the same value it had the previous February. Bitcoin mining hardware that's switched off for five months is losing value at an alarming rate, and very quickly won't be a net reduction in costs.
Very quickly a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate, and cheaper to purchase. And if you amortize the cost over the life expectancy, that threshold is very, very low. People who have recent memory of living paycheck to paycheck are constantly screwed by the latter, and that Venn diagram overlaps heavily with several other circles that make crypto super attractive to some people and super ridiculous to others.
I went down this avenue of compute as radiator long ago, and I could never get the math to work, unless I moved somewhere that was cold most of the year, and that sure as fuck is not going to happen.
In a very brief nutshell, the ways in which buying a little hardware or a tool to save thousands of hours of frustrating development work is not a slam dunk because of colors of money.
In either case, you still have to compare against using the fossil fuels to heat your house instead of turning them to electricity first, to heat your house via the heat pump or the resistive heater
In that case you would still have an absorption refrigerator that "cools" the outside and dumps to the inside as an alternative. They are usually either gas-fired or running off of district heating (well, 50-120C seems usual).
2/3rds of that cost is labor. 3 ton multi-zone heatpump kit is $2500-3500, another $250-500 for an electrician to pull #6s and a ground to a 60A disconnect outside and sealtite whip into the heatpump, and 60-80 hrs at $125/hr to install the heat pump and air handlers, including all the exterior wall penetrations and sealing, running glycol lines, installing thermostats, wiring air handlers, etc.
Yeah single room. There's dual room splits that run a bigger compressor with two heads too. They are usually way cheaper than bigger units even when you account how much juice they eat up but you should do your own math because it depends on the house and the setup.
Also if you want to control every single room including bathrooms and walk in closets it gets tricky.
I'd assume that they were going to use carbon-generating fuel, and that someone somewhere would already run a mining rig. IE: It's murky.
If they were going to heat using an electric space heater, it's a wash.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, but the electricity comes from nuclear, it's lower carbon.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, and the emissions are higher. BUT, if they were going to run the mining rig anyway, and they've merely turned off the gas heat, the emissions are overall lower.
Heat pumps work by moving heat, they usually move more heat than input energy.
Basically, a refrigerator is a heat pump. The input energy runs the heat pump, which it uses to move heat out of the refrigerator. Typically, for every watt of electricity, more than a watt of electricity is moved out of the refrigerator.
They work by compressing gasses into fluids, and then letting the fluid expand back into a gas. Basically, when a fluid evaporates, it absorbs heat as potential energy. The energy can be harvested by compressing the gas at a high enough pressure that it condenses into a fluid. Do this in a loop, and you can move heat.
Or an example that might be more readily acceptable, being something that a person without any domain knowledge could simply test* to prove it to themselves:
Suppose you built a shed around the outdoor unit of a central air conditioning system and let it come up to max ambient temperature. Then right next to it you built a shed with a resistive heater which consumes the exact same wattage as the air conditioner. The first shed will be much warmer because you're not creating heat so much as you're moving heat. If you increase the resistive heater's wattage by about 2.5x then the sheds will be about the same temperature.
* Don't actually do this and expect the system to survive.
I understand this, but the argument I was responding to was "you're already going to use the electricity, you might as well make profit", but actually you could use less energy so it's not a given that all this electricity was going to be used. It is instead a choice between profit and carbon emissions.
Why would we assume they are (I'm not sure that the "someone somewhere" part of that is material either) going to use a mining rig already to assess the merits of mining rigs for heating? That's tautological.
For a guy in Siberia various climate models show that the global warming will improve life. Winters will be much milder, agriculture will be less risky.
My understanding is that this isn't true, because Siberia's muskeg soil isn't very suitable for growing things, whether frozen or not. (Same with northern Canada. Muskeg and mosquitos are why northern Ontario has never been settled.)
My point is that when we as outsiders look at this practice and evaluate its merits, we should care about the carbon emissions even if the people there don’t.
> If you live in Siberia you presumably want the planet to warm up more. ;)
No you don't, when permafrost melts it causes ground to move. It is really bad for everything build on or in it. Something like houses sinking and falling apart. In some cases it cause big holes in the ground and they got even bigger over time.
Because permafrost melting is the only negative consequences of climate change. There are no forest fires, no problems with insect due to milder winters, etc.
For bitcoin mining to pay for itself, you need to leave it running to the max 24/7. Each miner is a noisy ~3000w machine. So that's a 3000w heater. You would normally turn down the heater during the day, but if you turn off your miner during the day, you won't break even.
Apparently you haven’t heard of immersion cooling. It’s essentially silent, and many people are using DIY setups to augment a heat pump or hot water heater.
Commercial solutions have been in development for a few years. Here’s one example:
https://www.wisemining.io/
Edit: after re-reading your comment I realize you also aren’t aware that miners can be throttled. Powering it down is not the only alternative to consuming 3kW.
I couldn't actually find anything about this in a search, but I think the point is that they're already using the GPUs for something else, and heating their kitchen with the excess heat just makes sense at that point.
The only thing I did find was that apparently Russians are taking the components from kitchen appliances to use for other things, which seems entirely unrelated.
This isn't really a "practical use for blockchain tech". Rather it's just a positive way to use the side-effect that blockchain tech requires computing components that generate a lot of heat.
Ultimately the heat output has nothing to do with how the tech is used (like bitcoin). If Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) stopped holding value people wouldn't heat their homes like this because it would cost more than traditional heating methods (as someone pointed out above about heat pumps.)
Until 100% of our electricity is provided by renewables or nuclear, resistive heating is just turning converting fossil fuels into heat, which we convert into electricity, which we convert back into heat. It would be more efficient to just burn the fossil fuels on site.
>> more efficient to just burn the fossil fuels on site.
You forget exactly how efficient a coal-fired powerplant actually is. Love or hate them, they have 100+ years of technological innovation to squeeze every watt out of coal. Your fireplace at home is not nearly as efficient. So an electric heater powered by the grid is almost certainly more efficient than burning your own coal at home in an inefficient stove.
A good oil-burning heater has over 90% efficiency. Even no so good and cheap one can get over 70%. The best industrial electricity-generating plants that runs on oil has efficiency bellow 60%.
Does that oil-burning heater need oxygen? If it does then it needs ventilation, air movement in/out of the house, pushing that 90% efficiency number way down.
Efficiency wise, the comparison between a heat pump and a furnace depends on the outside temperature. Heat pumps lose their efficiency for high ∆T, so for winter in a Russia, a furnace is likely the better option
90% is overtall efficiency including losses due to ventilation. Such system with its heat exchangers is not cheap, but long term it pays off compared with less advanced heater.
that assumes the use/utility of the computation is 0. We can all debate if that's true or not about cryptomining.
One day we may heat our homes with distributed computing like BOINC.
Consider the house that marginally has electrical resistive wall heaters (Like the bay area) and an excess of spare computers sitting around (also like the bay area) ... It's marginally better for the house nerd to leave their PCs on using BOINC than run the wall heater.
If by mining, you mean cryptocurrency creation, the utility is effectively 0. You can achieve the same utility if a cryptocurrency simply credited all new coins to my wallet. If by mining, you mean validating transactions, then that's something you have to do all year round, even if it's warm. That makes about as much sense as asking VISA to send me a rack that does computations for them only when my home is under 20 C.
Burning fossil fuels on-site means transporting fossil fuels to people's houses. Natural gas has a GWP which is 21 times that of CO2, and residential natural gas distribution systems are responsible for massive emissions just due to the leaks.
Unless you assume CCS for the fossil plant, which is not a setup that would work well for a typical residential forced-induction gas-fired central hot water heater (combined with passive radiators in rooms or underfloor heating).
The Mitsubishi Mr Slim heat pumps that we install are able to warm your home in temperatures as low as -15°C and -25°C
When temperatures drop below zero degrees, ice will build up on the outdoor unit of
any heat pump. How the heat pump reacts to this determines how effective it will be in
providing heat to your home. To remove the ice build-up the heat pump will need to go
into Defrost Mode. During this time the heat pump will not be delivering heat into your home. HyperCore’s Defrost Logic has been fine-tuned to extend the period in-between defrost periods and optimise its heating performance.
Mitsubishi Electric offers heat pump systems with Hyper-Heating INVERTER® (H2i®) technology which can provide up to 100 percent of heating capacity at 5° F and continue operation down to -13° F even wiThe Mitsubishi Mr Slim heat pumps that we install are able to warm your home in temperatures as low as -15°C and -25°C thout auxiliary heat.
You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air. That way you can get the same amount of heat as if you were using three+ times as many graphics cards.
I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.
> You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air.
I don't think you understand how heat pumps work. Heat pumps have significantly greater than 100% "efficiency". They don't turn electricity into heat. They use electricity to move preexisting heat, and it turns out that's far more efficient in terms of Joules of heat delivered to your home per Joule of energy spent. In fact, for any given Joule of energy spent, you can generally move two to three Joules from outside your home to inside of your home.
If the source of heat you're pumping is coming from resistive heating you're using electricity for, you're only getting 1 Joule of heat for every Joule of electricity. Adding heat pumps to this system doesn't help you.
> I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.
Because owning and operating a heat pump is almost certainly cheaper than the costs of owning and operating a mining rig, even offset by the value of the cryptocurrency you generate. You'd almost certainly be better off by heating your home with a heat pump and using the energy savings to buy that same cryptocurrency.
The exceptions to this are if you are in a location where energy is extremely cheap, or perhaps if you generate more than your household usage of electricity (including resistive heating) through solar or wind but aren't able to sell that electricity back to the grid.
I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it ironic that you assumes others don't know because you don't understand it or haven't heard of it.
A heat pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside. By using heat from the extracted air, you can use whatever you want to generate heat inside and get multiple times the effective heating as it's reused. Use wood, electrical floor heating or GPUs. It doesn't matter. The energy from the extracted air is transferred to the fresh supply air. The exhaust air will be freezing.
Also, electricity has been expensive the last two years, but mining has still been profitable, considering I already have some GPUs in my workstation and home server.
You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win win.
> I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it ironic that you assumes others don't know because you don't understand it or haven't heard of it.
>
> A heat pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside.
If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the Joules you've spent to generate that heat. So sure, you can use a heat pump to move that heat around a space. But doing so just spends more energy and decreases the overall efficiency of the system.
The principle of a heat pump getting such efficiency numbers is entirely predicated upon the notion that you're able to move that heat from somewhere it already exists "for free" in sufficient bulk.
> You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win win.
You fundamentally misunderstand the economics of this situation. Mining costs money in the form of hardware and electricity. In exchange you can potentially extract some amount of revenue. If your alternative was to use that energy to generate one Joule of heat for every Joule of energy spent, you might as well mine to get a rebate.
But the sum of mining revenue minus mining costs are almost certainly less than the costs of simply operating a heat pump instead. Again, you'd be better off using a heat pump to heat your home and using the money saved on energy to simply buy $CRYPTO at market prices.
As I said, I already have GPUs. If you don't think mining has been profitable for me and others during e.g. the last year then you need a reality check, cause it has been profitable.
> If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the Joules you've spent to generate that heat.
It's not magic, or complicated. The energy spent is used multiple times, as I said. You can save energy using a heat pump both by using it for initial heating, or transferring existing heat that would otherwise be thrown away.
So no, I'm not misunderstanding anything. If you think it's not possible then you too can get this "magic" using e.g. Nibe F750 + SAM40. Check their documentation, it even has charts for everything!
There was a comment on another web site a while back: "The words you're using - it's like you know what a microwave is, but you keep calling it a fridge, and you want that fridge to do an oil change on your cat."
You insist you know about heat pumps, but your comments indicate you don't understand the fundamental principles.
> You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air
Unless I'm misunderstanding part of this proposed setup, I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. The higher efficiency of heat pumps comes from the fact that the outdoors is an effectively infinite (for the purposes of a house) source of temperature differential. You can only move as much heat as exists, so you can't use a heat pump to multiply a finite heat source.
I'm not sure what there is to misunderstand. Heat is taken for the outgoing hot air, and transferred to the fresh air coming in. So instead of hot air going out, the air going out will usually be freezing.
In my experience, people usually try to avoid exchanging air with the outdoors when they're concerned about significantly heating/cooling their homes. If you're exchanging air then a heat pump could super heat/cool the outgoing air, and that's the piece I was missing from your proposal.
A house must exchange air. Better insulated houses are basically air tight, so you must have ventilation to get fresh air.
A pro with that solution is that the extracted air has a high temperature all year, making it more efficient that using a heat pump to extract heat from outside that might be -30 celcius. A downside is that the amount of air is limited, so if you need more heat then you have to supplement it with something else.
You get it, but it seems there are a few others that don't realize that a heat pump can also be used to increase efficiency by reducing the heat lost. While I do get that it's unknown to most people, some people here perfectly illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect...
That sounds like heat recovery ventilation; while useful, it serves a different purpose than heat pumps (which heats up enclosed spaces without the ventilation). Also HRVs normally work with whatever existing air and don't use extra heated air…
This was the best blog I ever noticed on this topic,an Australian using exhaust air from their miners to pre-heat incoming air to their heat pump. TL;DR - it's worth it.
Russian nuclear is ~17% (compare US at 19%). Overall it is slightly less CO2-intensive than the US, as it uses less coal. They have almost as much hydroelectric power as the entire US renewable sector.
Might be more, but it's still a minority of their grid. Wikipedia has a graph for 2016: 18.1% nuclear, 47.9% natural gas, and 15.7% coal.[0]
"Energy Matters" says that EU energy production was 26% nuclear in 2015, but only 12% for consumption[1], so I'm not sure how to look at that comparison. Either way, that's probably mostly France (~80%[2]). US around 8-9%[1].
TL;DR: Yes, most western countries probably have less nuclear, but it's a low bar.
Cryptocurrency is not even 1% of global energy consumption. The environment is being destroyed by China, western nations, fossil fuels. If anything cryptocurrency is just a very small drop in their bucket.
Monero is almost solely use for crime. Most exchanges won't touch it, and that's a good thing because it would pour fuel on top of the existing cryptocurrency-enabled ransomware trash fires, if it was actually usable.
If we were talking about petty crime, I may agree with you, but cryptocurrencies enable ransomware, which frequently shuts down critical services like hospitals and schools. Ransomware attackers have also leaked personal medical records from hospitals, and student's private records from schools.
Surveillance is an issue, but for the most part, it's not warrantless in our current system. Cryptocurrencies, excluding things like Monero and Zcash actually make it considerably easier to do warrantless surveillance.
If I'm forced to choose between some instances of illegal warrantless surveillance, and the complete inability to trace financial crimes, I'll take the instances of illegal surveillance, with the hope we'll try to fix those issues.
There are those that day global warming is caused by politicians talking crap about global warming.
My theory is global warming is caused by the people that vote for the politicians that talk crap about global warming.
When the war started in neighbouring Ukraine (I live in Romania) the local market started seeing graphics cards again which, previously, had been marked by local official resellers as "not in stock for the near future". This is for business procurement, so not even retail.
Do you think it's more than 5%? Maybe it is, but it seems like every place that offers GPU rental services (Amazon, Vast, etc) they are being used almost exclusively for machine learning applications. The rate they can be rented out is 3-4 times higher than would be profitable for any cryptocurrency mining, which should be a pretty solid indicator of where the demand is actually coming from.
I know I'm in the minority, but my GPUs are used almost exclusively for password cracking. I've got ASICs for the crypto mining.
I worked at a security consulting firm that had an 8 GPU password cracking rig. Teams would be able to send it hashes obtained during assessments/red teams and try to discover passwords.
I was not doing that type of work so I'm not sure what type of software was used but I think it had multiple open source programs available.
Like others said, hashcat. Doing pentest/red team stuff, you quite often stumble across password hashes that can do some pretty cool stuff if you can crack them.
Did you know that if you're on a Windows network, random machines all around you will just try to authenticate to you, and disclose the hash of the user on the system? Plug in on a Ethernet jack in the lobby, or conference room, get onto the wifi, compromise any machine on the network and run responder or inveigh, and you just get dumps of user passwords, and if you can crack any of them, its a pretty quick path up to Domain Admin on the network, which then can dump everyone's hashes.
If and only if you would have used electrical heating anyway, then using a GPU's waste heat for heating your home is one of the best things you can do with it and it's "100% efficient". That is, 100% of all the energy your GPU consumes also ends up as heat in your house and it's thermodynamically equivalent to any other type of resistive electric heater.
Of course, the energy consumed by any even semi-serious mining operation far exceeds a home's heating needs.
However, resistive heating is 3-4 times less efficient then ground/air source heating, so if your actual aim is to heat the house, you can do a lot better[1]. It's just better, if you're generating heat anyway, to also use the waste heat than to dump it outside.
[1] YMMV in permafrost regions, and the hardware is too expensive for many people.
Not necessarily, a FIR heater (which is also resistive) deposits a larger fraction of its input energy in humans than a GPU cooler which heats the air which then indirectly warms the human and also everything else.
They do use little electric heaters some of the time.
And there's smaller mining operations, the economies of scale aren't that great, more the difficulty of finding GPUs. You can lend it to neighbors and give them a cut of the proceeds, you could do the whole town. So in fact ordinary mining operations waste the heat, this would not.
I want to answer the other poster who shows up dead: how can you lend a miner? Like lending a little heater. Like lending a cow, one guy needs milk the other wants the meat and hide. So if you already have all the electrical heat you really need for your house but want to mine more, you won't benefit from more heat for your own house. Whereas maybe across the street a neighbor is still using little electrical heaters a lot, doesn't understand crypto very well. So they work something out, the neighbor gets heat, pays the electric bill, and gets a cut of the mining, and the original miner provides the GPU through his contacts and gets a share too. So that way the heat doesn't go to waste, and the miner can scale.
Clarifying for alisonkisk, lend means 20 cards instead of 10 you need for heating, lending the other 10 out to a neighbor for his heating. Economies of scale, for instance by buying more cards at a time at a better unit price.
How can you lend your miner to a neighbor for heat? You all need heat at exactly the same time. Are you going to move the rig to a different home every hour?
Well right, you can't. Very good point. But perhaps you have guests for a month and when they leave they have guests, that means more of the house has to be heated instead of sealed off. I've seen that in huge houses.
I have some doubts that any significant amount of cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would include a few questions of the definition of “Siberia”, a deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people’s ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place, and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era grids.
Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-rich-quick crowd, it’s impressive to see the levels of motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual strengths.
It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper.
It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
PoW is not useless. Hashcash in its original form is a prime example. It’s good design/engineering that solves a problem.
Blockchains are not useless. Append only, verifiable data structures have countless applications that again, can be used to solve actual problems.
Systems which combine these to create a “trillion+ economy” that’s sole external affect appears to be inducing an obsessive overuse of the word “fiat” while consuming incomprehensible amounts of the worlds resources—not just power, but hardware, and importantly, the focus of many intelligent people—that is a venture of questionable use.
> It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless.
> Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth.
How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth?
> Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.
See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective control to the boinc server managers. The users have to sign up to earn that way
my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of work for the chain itself, which is what the parent comment was all about.
I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution for the requested scientific computation is correct", or even a little thing like storing the boinc participation statistics, but those are features of the boinc network independently from grc.
What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain, not because that makes sense, but because blockchain. Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a monkey a banana for making their number go down and its number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific computation and is purely speculative.
> PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
This is a complete, steaming, and self-serving pile of bullshit. It isn't at all democratic and you need far more than just "electricity" to participate.
Sure, but what % of heating is just natural gas furnaces?
We should evaluate things against what the actual, real world alternative would be, not just against the best possible world.
(That said, I should acknowledge that a large part of that electricity comes from burning natural gas at an efficiency loss, so resistive heating is still worse than the natural gas furnace.)
Yes, and that's very nice if you have a heat pump. I suspect people with heat pumps use them for heat. It'd be weird if they didn't.
But, to restate my previous comment: if you have a natural gas furnace and a GPU, but no heat pump, and are deciding which to use for heat, it doesn't matter how efficient the heat pump you don't have is.
If you own your own home and have the capital to get a heat pump, great, do it. But a lot of people rent. They can't just swap out their furnace for a heat pump.
Here in the US, I don't think these are in common use. At least, I've never seen one in person. Are they used much wherever you are? They do seem like an interesting idea. Here's a US Dept of Energy page about them: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps
I have a geothermal heat pump. I am not in the US (3 phase 400V electricity is common here). I'd suppose nowadays they should be pretty standard. Some heat pumps also work both ways, e.g. they can heat and cool.
As an extra benefit the heat pumps have lower maintenance, risk.
(responding here, but applies to all currently at this level)
Ahh, now I see where there might be confusion. Heat pumps that operate on electricity are increasingly common in the US. Most of them are air-to-air, but some are ground-source. What I'm claiming are rare-to-non-existent are residential heat pumps that operate directly off of natural gas, using an ammonia absorption process, with no electricity involved.
Arguably 'freemint' was saying that it's more efficient to generate electricity centrally using natural gas and then distribute this electricity to power heat pumps than to burn natural gas for heat at each site. Yes, likely. My surprise was that I thought he was claiming that non-electric natural gas powered heat pumps were currently available to residential consumers. I knew this style exists (see the link I gave above) but I've never seen one in operation.
From what i have heard it varies a lot on a state by state basis. I suppressed my urge to look up heat pump statistics because frankly i should work on more important things. Just uhhmmm please don't act like i am supposed to research for you unpaid. I might fall for it and hate myself for it later.
This is kind of funny because the SEC is basically saying Nvidia held their share price artificially high by doing this, but Nvidia also bought back billions of their own shares, by this logic they were overpaying.
The most successful fraudsters eventually start to fully believe their own fraudulent story. This of course entails to do things that make sense in the fraudulent narrative, but are actually disadvantageous when judging them from a viewpoint outside of the fraud.
That is a separate issue. Stock buybacks can be done to reward insiders. A dividend would be distributed equally and has the effect of directly cutting the share price. A buyback distributes cash unequally and puts upward pressure on share prices. Only insiders know for sure if the action is being done to buy back shares on sale or to distribute profits.
It's bad for society to have companies spend money on their own shares, and dividends have the appealing property that they allow a holder to both continue to hold, and bank some gains for further investments.
Most holders own enough stock that if they wanted to both bank some gain and hold they could sell some stock and hold on to some other stock.
I think we should get rid of the tax advantage for capital gains though, the mechanism through which a company distributes capital shouldn't determine tax rate. Also I think dividends make it psychologically easier for people to live off the interest.
The reason that cap gains are taxed differently is because of inflation.
If you have 10000 in stock, and there's 20% inflation and the price of your stock goes up to 12000, you haven't made any real gains (no added purchasing power) but you have accrued 2000 in taxable gains.
Instead of adjusting returns for inflation, we just reduced the marginal tax rate for capital gains.
Stock buy backs and dividends benefit or harm all shareholders in proportion to how much stock they own regardless of being an insider or not.
Unless the insiders act illegally. If an insider wants to act illegally they can do so in any number of ways other than knowing that a buy back is coming.
I am curious if there is evidence for this. I don’t see how distributing capital that could be used for growth pressures share prices up.
People not selling back the shares are trading the current profits for a bigger share of future profits, which may never exist. So I am not sure on a risk adjusted discounted cash flow model there is any justification for increased price pressure.
I always presumed that the main benefit of buybacks v dividends was being able to time capital gains for tax purposes.
But this is all speculation too, no evidence behind my post.
There are two reasons in my mind why buybacks are different. The first is that buybacks are reported after the fact and do not directly alter the share price, rather they increase competition for the available shares and reduce dilution. Dividends immediately reduce the share price by the dividend although the price often moves up a little before the ex-dividend rate.
The other reason is that there are very few stocks that are being valued by the market on any sort of model. That goes for cash flow models as well as other things like PE ratios, etc. We are in the tinkerbell regime, prices went up over the last 10 years because people are clapping louder. Obviously that is a controversial take but I am not predicting a reversal, just saying that the market overall is in a weird place.
There's also an open market buyback. And multiple ways of doing it off the open market, often known as a tender offer for a popular method where you get shareholders to bid on the lowest price they would accept within a range of premium buyback prices.
Off the market, an offer does become public immediately, that is a necessary component of doing it at all. The sales do not. Directly is the wrong word, there's no more direct way to affect price than a bid/ask/sale of a share. The key is that the information about how much of the stock will actually get bought at what price is delayed on its way to becoming a price signal in the market.
> I am curious if there is evidence for this. I don’t see how distributing capital that could be used for growth pressures share prices up.
Say I have a company worth a $1,000,000 dollars that has a 1,000 shares each worth $1,000. Company comes into a giant one off windfall. They use that windfall to buyback half the shares. There are now there are only 500 shares that own a $1,000,000 dollar company so each share is worth $2,000. Or put another way .2% of future profits is worth more than .1% of future profits.
> I always presumed that the main benefit of buybacks v dividends was being able to time capital gains for tax purposes.
It's not about timing, it's simpler. Buybacks are taxed as capital gains, and dividends as income.
This is not true, qualified dividends are taxed at the capital gains rate. Most are qualified.
Also, with the windfall the $1,000,000 company is no longer worth that much, it is worth $1,000,000 + the windfall, so you will be buying back at a much higher rate.
After the company spends the windfall it's only worth a million afterwards.
But you're right about qualified dividends. I had no idea qualified dividends were taxed at the same rate as capital gains. I'd always hear that was why companies do stock buybacks.
Thanks for teaching me something new. You're right it's about allowing investors to time their taxable events.
Yes my last sentence was wrong, however as you can see it was 2k a share before the buyback but after the windfall and ended at 2k a share. The buyback did nothing, it was the windfall that moved the price.
Buybacks increase prices, a large part of compensation is linked to share price, executives don’t care if the company is overpaying, they see more in their pocket.
You think wrong, if they commit, it's to push their agenda even further, they knew what they were doing, maybe they did in preparation for such charges
"The SEC’s order also finds that NVIDIA’s omissions of material information about the growth of its gaming business were misleading given that NVIDIA did make statements about how other parts of the company’s business were driven by demand for crypto, creating the impression that the company’s gaming business was not significantly affected by cryptomining.
The SEC’s order finds that NVIDIA violated Section 17(a)(2) and (3) of the Securities Act of 1933 and the disclosure provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The order also finds that NVIDIA failed to maintain adequate disclosure controls and procedures. Without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, NVIDIA agreed to a cease-and-desist order and to pay a $5.5 million penalty."
I'm confused about why this matters. From anecdotal experience, Nvidia seems to be struggling to meet demand for its products right now anyways. It's hard to tell, but I assume that even if crypto took a major hit, Nvidia could still sell a good chunk of its newfound supply to genuine gamers instead. Alternatively, they could invest more into their ML-focused chips instead, which are also supply constrained.
Granted, this might not have been true in 2018, which appears to be what the SEC's charge is focused on. Nonetheless, I don't think the huge amount of demand from crypto for Nvidia's products should be construed as a bad thing; there's plenty of other demand.
Companies are not allowed to lie to their investors. Part of the deal of being a public company is that all communication is communication with their investors. If they told their investors that they were selling GPUs to gamers, while in fact selling most of them to miners, they violated the law. The principle of it being that said investors might have had a different outlook on the company depending on who they were selling to.
Besides, there is a difference. Because whenever crypto collapses (and it has twice already in the past), a lot of the existing mining GPUs end up on the secondary market. If this happens now, it will have a material impact on the prices of GPUs going forwards.
> they told their investors that they were selling GPUs to gamers, while in fact selling most of them to miners
I don't think nvidia even did this, they marketed to gamers and reported the correct number of sales. What people do with the card once its sold is not up to nvidia its not information that an investor can reasonable assume nvidia will report on.
If I invest in a steel mine they market their steel to car manufactures and report the correct number of sales. If they also happen to sell to gun manufactures I can't then sue said company for not reporting that.
On the other hand, NVIDIA does not have legal authority to control where its GPUs actually end up being used (nasty things like drivers shutting down when detecting virtualizations aside). How can anyone prove or disprove that a specific percentage of GPUs end up in a specific market, as long as NVIDIA can prove they have kept their usual delivery targets towards wholesale distributors?
That is irrelevant. The SEC also didn't go and check what people were using their NVIDIA GPUs for.
The problem is that NVIDIA leadership knew/believed that a proportion X of their GPUs were being bought for crypto mining (thus tying demand with crypto prices), while they reported to investors a different number, Y, with Y < X. This is material information that they simply lied about, which is illegal for a publicly traded company. In fact, the lawsuit could have happened even if Y > X.
If NVIDIA had reported the same numbers they did, and people had been in fact using them at the same rate that they did, but NVIDIA hadn't known about it, then nothing illegal would have happened. If NVIDIA had later found out and disclosed this to investors, again no lawsuit (though perhaps share prices would have changed, one way or another).
This is a good question. I remember having to give my identity before walking out of a store with a computer with a GPU in it, and if someone really wanted to buy multiple GPUs for mining that wouldn't stop them.
"NVIDIA launched a product line of cryptomining processors, known as “CMP,” which the company marketed to large cryptomining operations ... Based on known CMP sales, the company identified cryptomining as a significant element of the OEM GPU sales"
"NVIDIA also received information indicating that cryptomining was a significant factor in year-over-year growth in NVIDIA’s Gaming GPUs revenue. Some of the company’s sales personnel, in particular in China, reported what they believed to be significant increases in demand for Gaming GPUs as a result of cryptomining"
These were the 2 most concrete points to me - management was aware miners drove up GPU prices for gamers and saw it as another big market to capture, and sales attributed increased demand to miners. The rest of it basically says crypto grew, nvidia sales grew, and nvidia thought sales grwe because of crypto.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible even knowing these factors to know who really bought the GPUs or where they really ended up, but idk all the SEC probably cares about is nvidia not disclosing material seeming information.
No; there's been many tests. The mistake seems to come from thinking GPUs "wear out" like cars. The cooler might, but the silicon is fine.
Some even suspect that crypto mining is better for the card than gaming as it avoids the constant ramp-up/ramp-down of the clock/activity by keeping it pegged at 100%. In turn, that would lower thermal stress.
Actually there's reasonable evidence to believe this isn't true. This paper from google: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s... outlines specific scenarios where CPUs fail over time. Given the evidence that these are silicon defects that are actually worsening over time, there's no reason to imagine these failures don't extend to GPUs as well.
The difference in data here is obviously scale, google has -way- more CPUs than GPUs so the absolute counts of failures will be different.
I'll concede that silicon can wear out over time; it's impossible for it to be immune from happening, and I wasn't speaking in absolutes. But as you mention, it's one of scale. I'm curious how likely a second hand GPU from a cryptominer is affected.
So that's actually one of the awful implications of this paper. It's probably actually happening at a rate higher than would be noticed by humans.
If a given piece of silicon is hosing up a GEMM (matrix multiply), in graphics scenarios this may be invisible to the human eye as it could potentially just introduce artifacts in a scene rendering that could be entirely ephemeral to the frame.
In the case of crypto mining though, it's completely possible (probable?) that there are GPUs that can't possibly ever calculate a proper SHA3 hash (see the paper on AES instructions that fail in symmetric ways).
Yes, because hard drives, like cars, have moving parts that can wear out.[a] The silicon of a GPU doesn't have moving parts and is therefore more resilient.
[a]: It's (hopefully) common knowledge in the tech community that purchasing used hard drives is a Bad Idea(TM)
Yes, but for different reasons. The grandparent is probably incorrect though, there is emerging evidence that silicon is actually changing/failing over time. See this paper from google on their CPU cores where they have practical evidence of this occuring: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s...
If their data is correct, it should follow that these exact issues will happen on the small transistor process GPUs as well.
It's not emerging, electromigration been a core constraint in semiconductor design for 60 odd years. E.g.,:
Blech, I. A. and Sello, H. (1966). The Failure of Thin Alluminum Current-Carrying Strips on Oxidized Silicon. In Proc. Symposium on PoF in Electronics, 496-505.
Totally untrue. I've run many many tens of thousands of GPUs for years, in the worst of conditions (directly exposed to seasonal temperatures and environment)... they keep on ticking.
Power supplies on the other hand... those don't seem to last as long, but we open those up and they are hand soldered by someone in China.
Actually it can be the opposite - if the miner is using it properly and not overheating them regularly they can be in good shape. If they run at a high percentage but the temperature stays constant then theres not a lot of wear going on vs suddenly heating and cooling all the time.
I imagine the bearings in the fan might have more wear, however, but that might be more easily fixed.
GPU mining was consuming much more of the supply than you suggest (that’s literally the basis of this lawsuit)
When the GPU mining bubble pops, there’s a secondary effect as miners unload their used GPUs at fire sale prices on the secondary market. This means that the demand reduction is even worse than it might seem.
What about a year or so later when supply chains are back to normal and crypto demand dries up? Suddenly investors are wondering why their revenues are falling 50% instead of 5% that they predicted.
A better question to ask is "why did Nvidia feel it was necessary to lie to their investors?". Lying to your investors is illegal, regardless of whether or not you profited from it.
> A few million is not a punishment it is encouraging Nvidia to do nasty things in the future since they know they can get away with it.
Ok so tell me precisely how much NVDA benefited by not disclosing how much sales were to crypto?
I'm a NVDA stock holder and I just don't see what the fuss is. It's been impossible to buy a Nvidia card over the last 3 years due to scalpers and crypto farmers. I guess I thought everyone kinda knew that?
If I were the SEC, I'd say that they lied about it to avoid a risk discount on their stock. The volatility of crypto currencies exposes their business to more risk. Whether that's true, or provable, IDK. However, it is motive for Nvidia to lie, and they did lie.
The problem seems from stem from the fact that if NVDA disclosed that crypto amounted to 5% of their market when instead it's 5 times as much (random numbers for the sake of the example), investors are bound to suffer more in case of a crypto market crash, because the crypto exposure is much higher than what was disclosed by the company.
> investors are bound to suffer more in case of a crypto market crash
Do we know that actually? There was already outsized demand (demand > supply) for Nvdia GPUs to the extent that consumers literally couldn't buy GPUs for ~2 years (still is a problem) without buying from a scalper. A few things to consider:
(1) In most markets where demand outpaces supply, new entrants emerge. That is almost impossible to do in GPUs due to compatibility/support. So we've had pent up demand in that market.
(2) Consumers waited for supply to catch up to make the purchase even though they were ready to purchase.
(3) AFAIK there was no surcharge implemented by NVDA and this value was captured by scalpers. In fact, the price for performance ratio for the latest series of NVDA GPUs was so good that even if crypto wasn't a thing many consumers were ready to replace their old GPU.
(4) Crypto focused demand is a leading indicator of sales for that channel. With the shift to PoS, the overall demand for crypto rigs could shutter overnight.
My theory (as an NVDA investor) is that sales wouldn't falter because they were already selling products as fast as physically possible due to supply constraints. The question then therefore is what is the forecast 2-5 years out? NVDA is IMO heavily diversified in markets that have long term plays that easily could substitute any dip in consumer GPUs due to less demand from crypto.
TL;DR - I think people are overthinking this and if you don't have any idea of how to calculate what a meaningful penalty should be (i.e. "well the company was set to gain X amount of profit due to their infraction") then it's hard for me to take the argument seriously that $5M "isn't enough".
I think the gist is that they’ve intentionally misled investors by misclassification of sales from more violative, unpredictable crypto into stable pc gaming market.
I don't quite get this. Was it not blatantly obvious to everybody that Nvidia's sales were largely driven by cryptominers? Did they specifically market to cryptominers and lie about that or something? I don't quite get what they did wrong.
What's also baffling to me is how their share price is taking a nosedive because of this news. Any investor should know about this. And $5 million fine doesn't sound like enough to hurt the company that much.
But if it's true that they misled investors, does that mean that investors can get their money back or something? It seems like any investor who wasn't aware of this is now screwed twice.
Not putting “blatantly obvious” things in the disclosure documents is WORSE than omitting obscure things. The market for Nvidia stock is not made up of the same people who buy their graphics cards. Maybe even almost no crossover. The prospectus regime for public companies is there to protect ordinary investors who do not know this stuff. The overall effect is to increase the “smartness of money” by avoiding people investing who do not know this basic stuff. And yes there is a robust regime for investors to sue for defrauding them in this fashion.
A lot of it is designed really well but squashing human stupidity on the scale of trillion dollar economies is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. The message a lot of people got from 2008 that it was the bankers and the system that hurt the little guy and therefore we should no longer trust any of it. And create a new financial parallel universe in which to rediscover why regulation is needed in the first place. Vitalik Buterin today literally suggested an analogue of FDIC insurance for cryptocurrency banks.
My view is that the banks did hugely mess up and did not face enough consequences — and the correct approach is to massively enhance enforcement. (In many ways that actually has happened.) But moreover they preyed on stupidity, just massive massive stupidity that will always be there to contend with. Fraud always looks better than real investments to the marks. People have to overlook the shady parts, and to make them do that a product must offer unrealistic returns. Millions and millions of people are not smart enough to tell when that’s happening to them. As long as the SEC and its ilk let these run, people get hurt and everyone suffers, either personally, or from the inefficiency of fraud generally or the collapse of interlinked financial systems when the fraud gets big enough. Dealing with this is a huge task and often unpopular. If you tell millions of Americans they can’t invest in crypto scams, many of them will be royally pissed off, because they were promised riches! That’s even worse than whack-a-mole — letting frauds off the leash for one minute leaves your hands tied unless you are top of your game and have a lot of built up trust.
That’s why people keep pointing to the lack of arrests as a huge failure of 2008. As mistakes by government go it was much worse than the bailout, which was rather necessary to limit the damage. It meant people thought the government was in on it, or that they didn’t care. Frankly I think Bitcoin would never have taken off if there were a slew of high profile arrests. It would not have seemed necessary.
> We actually have some pretty good regulations in place.
That's only if your basic view of the financial markets is of something legitimate and socially beneficial. I would say that is mostly not the case; and in the past, the US government at times needed to recognize this at least partly, on pain of mass upheaval and system collapse, putting stronger regulation in place, e.g.:
This is all before the complex derivative markets formed which gave rise to the 2008 crash. The housing situation in the US even now seems rather tenuous and volatile, whether through some financial crash or a different form of crisis:
> The market for Nvidia stock is not made up of the same people who buy their graphics cards. Maybe even almost no crossover.
I think this is the problem you have investors buying stock in a company they have no concept what that company does they just know its a hot stock because the price is currently pumping. They go all in with no due diligence assuming the price will continue to pump for no reason and when it doesn't and the supply demand level out they act like they where scammed like the company should have told them when to buy and sell.
It was obvious to the gamers who tried to buy a GPU for a reasonable price. If you put some time into this endeavor, you were bound to see all those cards coming in to retailers immediately being bought, with a few appearing on secondary markets at higher price tags but being bought away very quickly there as well. This occurring in parallel with a huge bunch of "looking for GPUs A, B, C, D, offering $ridiculous_price in cash, will take any number of cards" offerings on Craigslist and similar platforms speaks a clear language: nobody is trying to secure various different GPUs despite high prices in basically unlimited numbers for GAMING! Nor do gamers buy up all those overpriced secondary market offerings within minutes of them being posted.
But: the stock market investors that are moving the really big bags of cash rarely have hours and days to spend trying to hunt down GPUs for their gaming rigs. So they wouldn't see these obvious hints.
I managed to get some GPUs at MSRP over that period and as I got something a bit faster over that period, I would sell to defray my upgrade cost.
I tried to restrict to US buyers to try to get it in the hands of someone who just wanted to play games.
They went to US addresses as my shipping restrictions and other exclusions required, but I unexpectedly got dinged for “International Fees” by eBay.
So I dug in as to why. When I checked the shipping address in Google Maps, they were warehouses. Googling again, known freight forwarders.
From what I can ascertain, one likely went to Qatar, and the other ended up in Uzbekistan. The accounts that bought them were quite old, not new, and had extremely high quantities of feedback. Based on the absolutely extreme auction end prices ($1540 for a 3070!), I wasn’t surprised in the end. The buyers were clearly extremely well organized and had exceptionally professional communication.
If you have a publicly-listed company you have to disclose all macro, market, and sector/industry risks (as well as company-specific risk) that might impact investors. The mere fact that they didn't disclose it (in 2018) is blamable.
Their stock price doesn't tank on this news, it's trending down along with BTC and other crypto assets. The market isn't stupid, it's pricing into NVDA price the risk of cryptos going into a prolonged bear market.
Investors will probably never get their money back. First of all, NVDA stock is up a ton since 2018, and second of all, shareholders are considered full risk-on and should diversify. Class actions are possible but highly improbable to work. The company has been buying their stock back too which show their commitment to reward shareholders as well.
I think the amount is far too low but charging them is reasonable. Maybe they won't do it again. I suspect with such a low fine they don't care really and they'll just pay it.
I'm pretty content to buy Nvidia on the way down. Their position in the type of silicon that is essential to the future of computing would be very hard to assault.
Two things: (GPU) cryptomining is extremely unpopular with PC gamers, especially those who DIY build PCs, because the demand for GPUs for mining is substantially worsening the general GPU shortage, pushing prices even higher. NVIDIA has made a lot of noise about how they are on the 'side of gamers' (such as with their Low Hash Rate cards which have a software lock designed to reduce mining efficiency which held for about a year or so), but in general seems to have been happy in practice to make as much money as they can off of it. So NVIDIA has a marketing interest in downplaying the impact of cryptomining on the shortage while selling as much as they can into the high demand and high prices at the moment. (And tech journalists communicating to these gamers do read these reports and tell the consumers about this stuff)
Secondly, from an investors point of view, GPU cryptomining demand is seen as a lot more volatile than PC gaming demand. A crypto crash or the planned ethereum switch to proof of stake could reduce this demand substantially. If a larger fraction of NVIDIA's sales (and thus revenue) is due to cryptomining, it's less likely to be similar next year (not only because cryptomining might buy less new cards, but also because they might flood the market with used cards, reducing demand for new cards from PC gamers, which happened during the last big crypto crash). This is the main reason the SEC is not happy about it. When reporting to investors NVIDIA also has an incentive to downplay crypto-related demand.
Minimizing the perception of downside risk in sales when it dries up to keep share prices higher than they otherwise would be. Had they come out and said approximately X% of a given quarter's sales were mining related, it would have most likely been priced into the stock as cyclical sales with a lower resulting multiple.
Thats still strange as the lowered gaming sales are partly due to increasing prices from crypto miners and higher material costs. Their profit margin and sales only grew larger during this time
The point is that it's unreliable income. The cryptomarket can crash, which will have an effect on future earnings. If nVidia isn't open about how much of their revenue is at risk, investors can't make informed decisions about investing in nVidia.
Is the sec concern trolling nvidia? What do they mean by impact?
> the sale of its graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed for gaming
SEC recognises that these cards where marketed to gamers and even recognise that the parts of NVIDIA marketed toward crypto mining was reported as crypto mining.
It seems like nvidia did business as usual and the real problem is those filthy gamers that aren't gaming.
If NVIDIA reported its gaming cards to SEC as crypto cards, now that the crypto market is dead and those cards are being used for gaming would SEC still consider NVIDIA to be in the wrong for their undisclosed impact on gaming?
Seems like SEC is mad at gamers for making money instead of gaming and they are taking it out on NVIDIA. Im just glad some one is standing up to these filthy gamers.
> In two of its Forms 10-Q for its fiscal year 2018, NVIDIA reported material growth in revenue within its gaming business. NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in gaming sales was driven in significant part by cryptomining. Despite this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its Forms 10-Q, as it was required to do, these significant earnings and cash flow fluctuations related to a volatile business for investors to ascertain the likelihood that past performance was indicative of future performance. The SEC’s order also finds that NVIDIA’s omissions of material information about the growth of its gaming business were misleading given that NVIDIA did make statements about how other parts of the company’s business were driven by demand for crypto, creating the impression that the company’s gaming business was not significantly affected by cryptomining.
> “NVIDIA’s disclosure failures deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company’s business in a key market,
> Seems like SEC is mad at gamers for making money instead of gaming and they are taking it out on NVIDIA. Im just glad some one is standing up to these filthy gamers.
1) Weird of you to add everything after your first sentence without indicating you edited your comment.
2) I have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't about nVidia reporting their cards as crypto cards. This is about nVidia not reporting what portion of their revenue is subject to volatility in the cryptomarket. SEC isn't mad about anything. It sounds like you're mad, tbh, and I'm not sure why.
> This is about nVidia not reporting what portion of their revenue is subject to volatility in the cryptomarket.
Nvidia doesn't know what customers use their cards for and it especially doesn't know the volatility of the market, no one does. If nvidia knew market volatility before hand they wouldn't need to make gpu they could just trade the market more efficiently than every one else.
You and SEC are talking about pure speculation as if it was fact, nvidia didn't speculate in their reporting they gave accurate numbers as they should. Until you can show otherwise its all just speculation.
> NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in gaming sales was driven in significant part by cryptomining. Despite this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its Forms 10-Q, as it was required to do, these significant earnings and cash flow fluctuations related to a volatile business for investors to ascertain the likelihood that past performance was indicative of future performance.
What proof do you have that the SEC is speculating about NVIDIA having this information?
Speculation? It is well-known that their drivers contain extensive telemetry functions. This removes any shadow of a doubt that they know what the cards they sold are being used for.
This a little off-topic, but is there any sort of solution to crypto miners intercepting gaming GPUs?
As a gamer, part of me gets annoyed that crypto-miners make it more difficult to get gaming GPUS. On top of that, the massive energy consumption caused by crypto mining feels excessive.
But the freedom-loving part of me feels uncomfortable with solutions meant to prevent gaming GPUs from being used for crypto mining (let me use my hardware however I want).
Is there some sort of better, arm-chair-expert compromise?
It's interesting to note that their stock started to take off somewhere in 2014 and exploded in 2017, correlation doesn't mean causation, but it's fits so perfectly with the rise of mining.
Well rise of mining is somewhat a misunderstanding, because since I've been a frequent user of cryptocurrency since early 2011, from my point of view that's when GPU mining started but I digress.
How would Nvidia even know what people are doing with the cards they purchase? Thats like saying that Intel should disclose that a large portion of its chips are being used to siphon porn off the network.
I was always wondering why the big players don't just make ASICS for crypto mining that would make happy both the miners (with their faster speeds) and the gamers (who would not have to compete to get a gaming card).
But now it is obvious to me. It is better to have in your earnings gpu sales because you can always claim that you expect a steady source of income. If they had 60% of their revenue explicitly from a volatile market like crypto mining, then their stock would not look attractive.
They don't have to. The problem is that they said to investors repeatedly, "Sales are up due to increase in gaming demand", when they actually knew that a signficant portion of the increase was due to cryptomining.
So what the SEC is fining them for is lying to investors. If nvidia didn't know how much of their sales were to cryptomining, then there would be no fine. If they did know, and did share that in their reports, there would be no fine.
It is their job not to mislead investors about how their products are used.
This is not a fine for "You didn't know how your product was being used" but "you knew it was being used for crypto but reported to investors that it being was gaming"
While this seems like something the SEC should indeed be paying attention to, it pales into comparison with Elon Musk openly breaking every rule in the book on Twitter while they do absolutely nothing (up to and including directly pumping and dumping stock ...)
This is true. I met a prince once, named Mikhail von und Zu Lichtenstein Oyarzún. Weird fucking guy, but that's how princes are, I didn't judge.
But then lo and behold he traveled to Spain, a country which recognizes nobility, and tried arrogancing his way into a party (like "what do you mean I'm not on the list!?"). The press asked who the fuck is he, asked his parents, his parents weren't his parents, his parents had no idea who the fuck he was. Said as much publicly. "I have no fucking idea who this asshole is" said his father.
And then he was on TV in 2017 or 2018 as the world-class bullshitter of all time, but with much contempt. He had hours of talk-shows just for him, his law school professor going in front of the camera saying what he did was illegal because he pretended to have authority. He was a scammer, in particular he posed as a human-rights lawyer targeting victims of torture to get their secrets and extort them. Tried to do it to me, but you can't con an honest John.
So what happened, going back to your point? He brainwashed himself, told himself he was a prince 10 million times. But lied to himself literally 10 million times.
I looked Mikhail von und Zu Lichtenstein Oyarzún up and it seems like the story might be true to some extent. Seems like a person that was impersonating a prince.
Well looking up the name is difficult, and you'll have better luck in Spanish.
I think it's Miguel von und zu Liechtenstein, I misspelled it earlier, it's a tricky one. Said his name was Mikhail legally but when he flashed both copies of his Chilean ID it was Miguel, not Mikhail.
It was also in the papers, like Publimetro, and El Mercurio. Also on a morning show, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miguel+de+liech..., TVN I remember. 30 minute show about him, which I have no problem with it's righteous justice and juicy gossip at the exact same time, win-win. If only all television were that good in every sense.
That's how I found out he was full of shit, I saw his face on a television at a cornershop and it all made sense. But stayed in character to a literally insane degree, and was very consistent about it. He even convinced high-ranking politicians, the President, he went all out. Shot the moon. And it sort of worked out, hey! Isn't that remarkable, actually pulled it off haha, good one.
He did his damndest to get everyone's hatred, too, particularly with that foundation trying to outlaw hate speech and instigation of violence, as a front to commit extortion and virtue signaling. Yeah because then he got to talk to people giving him early warning of pitchforks, could do man-in-the-middle attacks by plagiarizing his victims pleas to elicit the pity that was not rightfully his, and gating access to government help to clean his victims out.
Human-rights corruption, like stealing candy from a baby!
> He was a scammer, in particular he posed as a human-rights lawyer targeting victims of torture to get their secrets and extort them. Tried to do it to me, but you can't con an honest John.
EDIT: You're right I did in fact say victims of torture are liars, at least it can be read that way! Wow, didn't realize it, didn't intend it. So I don't know what he was saying to the others, but he set up many many scams like talking really loud on his cell about "an opportunity going to waste" when we met at Metro el Golf staircase, trying to get me to ask on my own accord what that opportunity was, but I had no curiosity for it. So helping me with torture, I fell for it a bit, but it was something I could not fail to want.
So honest John means many things, but basically it's hard to get someone to engage in a scam without engaging greed. Now with the tortured that's disgusting, it's not greed but he verbally claimed a government payout to the tortured--a pension--ten times higher than the real amount. It's like 230.000 CLP whereas he claimed like 2.200.000[1]. And that's designed to get them to pay him something, very difficult money for a torture victim to earn because their careers are ruined as part of the torture, to keep them down. The torturers advise to steal and impoverish them, never pay back debts. Torture involves bankrupting the victim, it's property crime too. Coerce signatures of course, give up deeds, give up property, give up a car in one case, betray people, betray yourself.
But then the torturer tells you the solution is to get a job. Try to get one with that ruined resume though! "Where did you work in April 2009? No good answer? No hire!"
[1] Morally that's 10x as much, so he didn't actually quote 10x as much because that's too disgusting, too easy to put that in a newspaper headline, it burns too much. But that's how he got the number, multiply it by ten, and then subtract a meaningless amount strictly in order to reduce hatred against him, which he also did with a nonprofit called Sin Odio, Without Hatred, which was linked to his claims of being a human rights lawyer.
My torturers did this too: I was under amnestic drugs from March 29, with a few days on at the beginning, but in total 29 days under amnestics, meaning they give you pills as soon as you awake, all day long, and then you think tomorrow is today, next week is this week, next month is this month. Literally motivating the question, "what year is it?!" Like in time travel movies. But it was less than a month because that's bad PR, saying you tortured someone for a whole month, so they say 29 days, so that I have to say "almost a month" when morally the intention was a full month, minus some meaningless amount to take away the PR sting. Water down the accusation, but if it weren't for the intent to water down the accusation, it would have absolutely been a month! A lunar month, though. And so the reason is they do this to women too, but they menstruate so they know if they've gotten roofied for weeks, unless you shoot the moon, 24/7 amnestics for an entire menstrual period, 29 days, they end up at the same part of their cycle as before the amnestics started, then it's not as obvious.
This is a non story. They missed something in the laundry list of legal disclosures that goes in the financials. Nobody ever looks at those since they’re a useless shotgun approach covering everything short of zombie apocalypse.
This is very much not just missing a laundry list of legal disclosures. They actively lied to investors said increased sales of consumer graphic cards was due to a "Fortnite Boom" when it obvious to industry observers that is was a mining boom. Miners and Fortnite players have very different life-time revenue expectation, miners tend flood the used market with used cards dropping the prices that can be asked for future products, gamers tend to keep their cards and buy new cards when they want to play more demanding games. This leads to less of oversupply on the used market. The last mining bust had a huge negative influence on Nvidia.
So a GPU made for gaming is used for computing something, and then it is their fault? Would they rule the same if you sell knives for Bushcrafting, but they are using the knives in kitchens?
And one could argue that gaming is also rendering / computing / solving problems.
It's about what NVidia told their stockholders in reports.
Rather than: "This years growth is fueled by sales to the cryptominer market" (which is a pretty dang volatile market to sell to as a crash will floor nvidia's market with cheap used cards rather than selling overinflated new ones...)
They lied and said: "oh yeah no, totes all those gamers buying cards for sick rigs", and the pc gamer market is much more stable, it's predictable, you know roughly when / how much of the market will be buying new to replace a card that's now too old/limited.
tl;dr they lied about who they were selling to, because the volatility (no guarantee of that market still existing in a year or two's time) would make shareholders understandably nervous.
I have seen several people claim nvidia lied and was telling investors that their increase in sales was because of a fortnight boom but I can't find where nvidia allegedly said that.
It seems like they didn't lie they sold gpu and reported the correct number of gpu sold. The only claim nVidia made was that it marketed these cards to gamers which the SEC acknowledges they did, this isn't a lie.
> In two of its Forms 10-Q for its fiscal year 2018, NVIDIA reported material growth in revenue within its gaming business. NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in gaming sales was driven in significant part by cryptomining. Despite this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its Forms 10-Q, as it was required to do, these significant earnings and cash flow fluctuations related to a volatile business for investors to ascertain the likelihood that past performance was indicative of future performance.
The issue isn't the number of GPU sold, noone's saying they lied about how many they sold or their profit. They lied about the market conditions for that quarter, to make the growth seem "stable", not from a volatile market that could dry up in 2 years or 2 months...
