The mystery of unavailable graphics cards

[Rachael]

If I may fire a curious interjection: Can I ask you why you want to shed Eruanna? You've always been an angel to me on every forum, and that's all I knew you by. So I didn't know you didn't want to be called it. lol

(Although, I think I call you Rachael in recent history... I'm pretty sure, anyway. I'm not sure about much these days, to be honest.)

Was just curious if there was an anecdote behind it.

I've not so much shed it, I still identify by it in some form (being a past nickname, particularly), but more I just wanted to be more my real self here. There's a few personal factors that influence this, as well, but suffice to say I am just not as personal with 'Eruanna' as I am to 'Rachael'. One makes me feel a lot more distant, and the other much closer to my work and to my words.

As for the other part, well ... uh, I have no words for that. >_>

[Reactor]

I really do not know why you are so insistent. I consider it rude to use names people have discontinued using.

Alright then, if you really wanna know, I tell you the story.

So, this is an old habit of mine, originated from the good ol'days gone by, when the site Chat.hu was popular, and 500-700 people could chat with each other in one big chatroom each evening. First, there was no moderation at all, and so the nolifer troll wretchs have flooded the site, forcing the admins to eventually employ moderators. Unfortunately, many of the moderators were supporting the trolls (or were real trolls themselves somehow getting moderatory rights), and when arguments started, they banned the innocent chatter, not the troll. This happened to me and my friends a lot, and even though we had dynamic IP and could easily avoid banishment, we still had to choose temporary nicknames (as the registered one was banned). We, however, used our original names to call each other, not the temporary one, signifying that who we really are. If someone called us by our temporary,unregistered nickname, it showed that he/she is a stranger. Since I partake in Chat.hu conversations for more than 10 years, this habit became part of my personality as I had to utilize it daily.
So that's the reason behind it, nothing more, nothing less.

[insightguy]

Going from discussing about pseudonymous interactions here in the forums and getting somewhat back on topic:

From what I hear, cards used for mining probably won't be in too bad of shape because the miners undervolt and they run constantly instead of peak-lull-peak-lull so there's less thermal expansion cycle damage.

With regards to buying used card from these miners, I wonder how many of them actually bother to under-clock their setup? (factoring greed and all) Because the way I see it, these miners would want to sell their equipment as soon as the bubble bursts and getting a 1080 at half price that's in relatively good condition is not really a bad deal, unless it's nearly dead.

[SouthernLion]

If I may fire a curious interjection: Can I ask you why you want to shed Eruanna? You've always been an angel to me on every forum, and that's all I knew you by. So I didn't know you didn't want to be called it. lol

(Although, I think I call you Rachael in recent history... I'm pretty sure, anyway. I'm not sure about much these days, to be honest.)

Was just curious if there was an anecdote behind it.

I've not so much shed it, I still identify by it in some form (being a past nickname, particularly), but more I just wanted to be more my real self here. There's a few personal factors that influence this, as well, but suffice to say I am just not as personal with 'Eruanna' as I am to 'Rachael'. One makes me feel a lot more distant, and the other much closer to my work and to my words.

As for the other part, well ... uh, I have no words for that. >_>

Okay. Well, then Rachael it is, ma'am. lol

[DoomRater]

So many people here keep saying bitcoin isn't anything at all.... if that's the case, go and invalidate everyone's Bitcoin!

Bitcoin IS something- a running hash. The more you helped out finding it, the more you earned "from nothing" (you know, except that pesky electrical current needed to perform calculations that would simply take too long by hand). The problems are more along the lines of how transactions are handled and how it relates to actual currency (THIS is what doesn't really exist). Why the call out on this distinction? Because as a proof of concept BlockChains make sense for records of transactions that are not meant to change hands often. There are legit reasons to use this technology.

[Graf Zahl]

And what value does that hash have? Actually, none at all! The only reason people pay for it is some sort of make-believe. But ultimately it's a totally empty value - it has no collector's value, it has nothing physical attached to it, it's just a sequence of bits and bytes.

And the entire "earning from nothing" concept is what drives this to such insane proportions. Real economy is about producing something tangible, this is ultimately just black magic.

[DoomRater]

You can't falsify it because it's cryptographically secure. That IS a value because it demonstrates a proof of concept.

Edit: I am saying the technology Bitcoin itself uses is valuable. I'm not saying Bitcoin is valuable economically (the relation between actual economics and the blockchain record of transactions isn't really there)

[ZZYZX]

I think I've seen pre-edit version of this thread where it was called "wtf is up with card prices" and had specific numbers like 299 and 900+ $ for a 1070. Was way easier to understand the size of the catastrophe that way.

[Rachael]

Do you mean the topic that was recently deleted? That was by request of the author since it was essentially a duplicate of this one.

[SouthernLion]

For the first time in my life, me and Graf agree on something 100%.

[Bigger C]

You can't falsify it because it's cryptographically secure. That IS a value because it demonstrates a proof of concept.

Edit: I am saying the technology Bitcoin itself uses is valuable. I'm not saying Bitcoin is valuable economically (the relation between actual economics and the blockchain record of transactions isn't really there)

Seconding this. The other advantage of blockchain is that it's peer-to-peer rather than client-server. Means not having to rely on a third party as a mediator in transactions.

[insightguy]

And the entire "earning from nothing" concept is what drives this to such insane proportions. Real economy is about producing something tangible, this is ultimately just black magic.

Technically speaking, you are, you are investing in a mining rig to solve equations to get dough, it's not really "nothing". Though the bubble for bitcoin is something I'd rather avoid.

And besides, currency only works if you have faith in it, (or is paper / plastic somehow worth a lot just because it has ink on it?)

You can't falsify it because it's cryptographically secure. That IS a value because it demonstrates a proof of concept.

Edit: I am saying the technology Bitcoin itself uses is valuable. I'm not saying Bitcoin is valuable economically (the relation between actual economics and the blockchain record of transactions isn't really there)

Basically this.

[ZZYZX]

The other advantage of blockchain is that it's peer-to-peer rather than client-server.

That's also a disadvantage because that's why blockchains require consensus algorithms (which are normally slow especially voting-based) and ledger distribution among peers (which is even slower). And the larger the network is, the more time it takes to synchronize properly, and with more than ~20 peers there is already a good chance that some peers always "live in the past" and don't have the latest version of the data. Essentially "fast read, extremely slow write".

[Kinsie]

Because as a proof of concept BlockChains make sense for records of transactions that are not meant to change hands often. There are legit reasons to use this technology.

The "Blockchain" that keeps getting spruiked around by companies looking for investors to pump money into them is more or less a collection of general database technologies that have been around for quite a while (Git is a fairly good example of similar tech), along with proof-of-work stuff that isn't really useful outside of Internet Heroin Money. (The actual hashing "work" is just meaningless busywork to keep botnets from taking over the entire network in a single afternoon.)

[ZZYZX]

along with proof-of-work stuff

This is the part called "consensus algorithm" and it isn't exactly the only one available. It's just that historically it's the most known because Bitcoin made this distributed database type popular and it had PoW.
Generally, if we don't talk of coins, there still should be some means of centralization to validate user actions. This authority can be itself spread among multiple peers ("user nodes" and "validator nodes") for better stability, but in no case it's rational to have all nodes to participate in it.
Minimal blockchain is a versioning database where there's current state + signed/hashed changelog (just like you said, like Git). Everything else is pretty much related to making it P2P, not to it being a blockchain.