From someone that has managed mining rigs from 2012-2015...

The people running GPU mining rigs have been a seasonal fad when crypto prices are accelerating. In those times GPU mining is profitable but only by so much. People delude themselves into thinking it is a better investment to buy hardware to generate them out of thin air. The reality is you still have to pick the right crypto to mine and make the capital investment. More often than not you're better off just buying the crypto outright and riding the trend upwards.

What the fools buying up GPUs now do not get is that 99% of these shitcoins will be gone in 2 years and Bitcoin mining has for a long time been taken over by ASICs (processors designed specifically for Bitcoin's blockchain). Any crypto that comes into high demand has processing power thrown at it putting the average Joe miner back to losing money when factoring in electricity costs.

On the note about providers throttling traffic: that's not really how they work. The traffic is miniscule and decentralized. That is one of the beauties of blockchain that got me into it so long ago. Theoretically, a government could completely isolate their Internet from the rest of the world and the blockchain would continue both interally and externally. All it would take was a single telephone, satellite, etc. connection to link them for a short period and the ledgers be made aware of one another. It is very robust in that sense.

Sorry, that's my fault. By throttle I don't mean speed throttle or traffic shaping, but good old fashioned "Blockchain traffic requires our Premium Miner package." Like how some ISPs used to require you to pay for a business package if you wanted to run your own web or email server.

2012-2015? I guess you did very well out of it then...

this is what surprised me, because I saw the rise of ASIC folks like bitfury and e21 and based on rough maths, the new generation GP or GV or Vega architectures still don't eclipse what you could buy from ASIC. and Doge / Lite / whatever didn't seem like it had the same backing and name recognition.

But now i guess there is Etherium and Ripple, plus all these world+dog ICOs happening and the complexity of that is still worthwhile? I have a Titan X card that is doing SFA at the moment, and have been wondering if there is value in using it solo, but i also see these dedicated mining Mobos coming from ASUS and others that are like, Pentium or i3 core, with eight x1 PCIe lanes connecting to cards via ribbon cables. which suggests that even a single high-end card (Titan V excluded) won't have the juice to do much by itself.

what is your though in the BTC / BCC split? or the ETFs rolling out? given the volitility i'm surprised there is no basket ETF available yet. call it the "YoDawg" ETF. :P

I am not a fan of ETH or XRP as they are 'centralized' by a governing body of developers/investors. They are 'a' use of blockchain but not my preferred implementation which is as decentralized as possible.

I have never put a single penny (or satoshi) into any ICO shitcoins. Lots of friends have made some really good paper money off them but I steer clear as they are highly probable to all be vaporware and the hype surrounding them is far too reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

So if you have the hardware you have to pick the right one to be mining at that moment. There are some websites that can help calculate the profitability but I have never used them as mining alt-coins with former Bitcoin rigs came into fashion after I sold my rigs and left the business. You're on your own there and it's speculation but I still have friends that run several rigs and pull a modest weekly income out of them (well, up until a few weeks ago).

The split? Bitcoin is in trouble. It has first-mover advantage which means it will very likely keep the highest market cap and volume for the forseeable future. However, with transation fees peaking at $40 it has reached a really problematic point. Part of the reason the transaction fees are so high is allegedly BCH supporters are flooding the chain with transactions. Either way both the high costs and vulnerability thereof exposes the biggest challenge facing Bitcoin right now. Ultimately the 'winner' of all the cryptos are going to be the one or few that find a platform for users and that coin becomes their medium of choice. I don't see anything really in the space right now that has the advantage but it is possible that BCH is the closest as it is designed to be "Bitcoin 2.0" as it grounded on fixing the lessons learned over the years Bitcoin has been around.

As to what I mean by a platform; watch for any online retailers to begin accepting BCH (some have been taking Litecoin for a long time). In truth though the power really relies in the merchants and consumers that benefit most from Bitcoin's most prominent use-case which is drugs, extortion, and money laundering. So watch for another prominent Silk Road clone or the requested coin of choice for the next wave of Russian extortionware.

I took some time during 2017 to work on an ETF... not to go through regulatory stuff for trading but for my own analysis. I created an index that would track the crypto market. The problem is that Bitcoin's market cap is so volatile that you can't really get a reasonable guage of the entire market because it becomes distorted. Another challenge is that from 2015-2016 Bitcoin and alt-coins worked in an inverse coorelation. Since mid-2017 they now actually follow Dow Theory and do correlate. If you really want to put some Bitcoin exposure in a 401k or stock portfolio use the symbol GBTC.

On the upside, if/when the crypto mining bubble bursts, there will be a bounty of cheap, high-end video cards available. When that happens, I think I'll be building a nice little Octane render farm for the office.

I work at a Best Buy.

Cryptocurrency is not the reason people don't buy high-end graphics cards at Best Buy.

can't vs. don't

As someone who's built most of his own gaming PC's for the last 15 years, I'm not worried about this latest spike in graphics cards.

This is what they do, wave and crest in prices for anything on the bleeding edge, for whatever reason at the time. Yeah, it's gonna suck if it causes too much pressure on mid-range building, which is what anyone practical does, but that will be temporary as well.

Besides, everyone knows that the real culprit in the latest 'murder' of PC gaming is that dastardly knave Reginald Loot Box.