RTX 2080 price rises by 1,000 yuan: Miners are going crazy

Tony has two colleagues who have been installing computers for half a year, but to this day they still can’t turn on their computers because they can’t buy a graphics card. . .

I participated in several shopping sprees involving tens of thousands of people, but each time I was just a runner-up and was fooled by a group of plug-in users.

If you are unwilling to bow to the scalpers who raise the price on Xianyu, you can only wait.

Now the guys in the graphics card bar are all angry and would rather not play games than resist reselling.

However, the scalpers are not panicking at all. After all, there are a bunch of mine owners standing behind them, so they will never have to worry about the market.

Some time ago, a foreign miner named Simon Byrne built a mining farm with 78 RTX 3080s and mined Ethereum every day.

He also proudly posted a message and showed off his own machine. Just looking at the picture makes people's blood pressure rise.

Tech APP did the math: after deducting various costs, this mining farm can earn more than $120,000 a year, and even make some of the money back by reselling the graphics cards.

Wait, here comes the question: If graphics cards are so hard to buy, why don’t miners use CPUs for mining, but instead pay extra to buy graphics cards to build mining farms?

Is it because it looks better when the RGB lights are on during startup? (Obviously not

In fact, this is somewhat related to the principle of mining. Tony will briefly explain it to you using Bitcoin as an example.

The story begins with a group of people using a decentralized ledger to keep accounts, which is called blockchain. A page filled with transactions is called a block; pages strung together form a chain.

For security reasons, they stipulate that every transaction can only be written into the block and finally strung together on the chain after being calculated and verified.

This process, just like trying the password in a diary when you were a child, has to be repeated again and again.

However, arithmetic is troublesome and no one is too lazy to do it. In order to encourage everyone to do the calculation, Bitcoin came into being. As long as someone calculates correctly, they can get Bitcoin as a reward and may also get transaction fees.

In this way, driven by rewards, miners came into being. They competed to use computing power to solve the problem, trying to solve the answer, so as to package the new transaction into a new block and attach it to the blockchain. This process is called mining.

The difficulty of mining depends on the percentage of the total computing power of the entire network. If a miner has 1% of the total computing power of the entire network, then the probability of him mining the next block is 1%. So in essence, mining is a competition of computing power.

The difficulty of Bitcoin mining is shown in the figure ▼

So in the mining computing power competition, which one is stronger, the CPU or the GPU (graphics card)?

First of all, the CPU, as a central processing unit, is optimized for a serial instruction set. Although the single-line computing power is very strong, there are not many threads.

Like a gold miner on PopSpurt, each hook is dropped and retrieved quickly, but there are only a few hooks:

As a graphics processor, GPU only helps share some of the CPU's work.

Although its ability to run complex programs is far less powerful than that of a CPU, it can stack hundreds or thousands of stream processors, each of which is like a small CPU, making it more suitable for large-scale parallel algorithms.

Just like an ordinary gold miner, although the hook speed is not fast, there are many hooks and there are more opportunities for testing, so it is more suitable for simple repetitive operations such as mining.

In addition, the cache capacity that the CPU can rely on is very small, usually only a few dozen MB, but the speed is very fast.

However, this speed advantage is not competitive in mining, because the computational difficulty of mining is not high, but the amount of computation is high.

Look at the graphics cards next door: they are usually equipped with more than 4GB of physical video memory, which is not as fast as the CPU cache but is enough and cheap...

Moreover, the CPU's control judgment and scheduling branches make it seem that the mining activity takes too long to complete, which makes people feel that "I figured it out first, but I raised my hand too slowly."

In fact, the abandonment of CPU mining can be regarded as the tears of the times.

In the early days, Bitcoin miners used Intel or AMD CPUs to mine. However, as more and more people and equipment were involved in mining, the difficulty of mining also increased accordingly.

Because in Satoshi Nakamoto's design, if the speed of block generation increases, the difficulty of mining will have to be increased, and vice versa, the difficulty will be reduced, thereby ultimately controlling the total amount of Bitcoin.

Relying on CPU mining after the difficulty increases is like spending 180,000 real coins to make 160,000 counterfeit coins - the cost far outweighs the benefits.

At this time, some people thought of using GPU for mining, which relatively improved the efficiency.

Some smarter people have developed mining machines that are more suitable for mining based on mining algorithms, such as ASIC mining machines that use ASIC chips as core computing parts.

Bitcoin is the first virtual currency, and its mining machine was also invented the earliest. In view of the SHA256 algorithm it uses, the mining machine chip is designed to only calculate SHA256, using single-purpose to defeat multi-function, so it can mine and beat the top computer CPU in seconds.

However, GPU also has its advantages, that is, you can mine whatever you want, and it is convenient to sell it second-hand if you don’t want to mine anymore. This is also the reason why the miner bought 78 RTX3080s to assemble a mining machine instead of choosing a dedicated Ethereum mining machine.

Come to think of it, why is the RTX30 series so hard to get?

In addition to the dealers' actions, the elimination of 4G graphics cards by Ethereum on December 25 last year also had a certain impact. Miners are in urgent need of upgrading their graphics cards to 8G, and the number of upgrades is huge. One mining machine alone will use 6-8 graphics cards.

The newly launched RTX3080 has a performance improvement of 1.9 times compared to the RTX2080, but the price is almost the same. Naturally, it has become the first choice of miners.

Every time a new card is released, the miners are often the first to rush in, so much so that news reports have to dispel rumors that "mining capabilities are not that strong" to comfort game players.

Gamers all over the world have suffered from the fact that graphics cards have been snatched away for a long time...

Of course, manufacturers are also well aware that this algorithm of graphics cards can easily lead to their loss to mining farms.

In order to prohibit GeForce gaming graphics cards from being used for mining, Factory N previously sold mining cards with a 90-day warranty and disabled DirectX support to prevent mining cards from entering the gaming market.

However, mining cards have a short warranty period and are difficult to sell to recover costs, so miners are still keeping a close eye on ordinary gaming graphics cards.

These efforts of manufacturers seem to be a drop in the bucket compared to the high returns from mining and rampant scalpers.

Tony had to say a cruel but true conclusion:

If you want to actually sell graphics cards to players in need, you either have to wait until scalpers start to become wealthy, or the price of the currency drops, or more cost-effective mining machines are produced.

Before this, no matter how much AMD says yes, ordinary players who are weak, pitiful and helpless can only say yes.

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