Dev reply please - Stonks

Then you should have said gambling, not casino. I don't think we even disagree much on this point, you're just getting revisionist so you don't appear wrong. It's ok to say, "I meant to imply gambling when I said casino" and let it go.

Is the block chain provably trustable? People operate as though it is, and I'm not aware of of it being hacked directly yet. As processors get more powerful, more old things that were uncrackable get cracked. Will bitcoin experience the same? I don't know.

With that said, the weakest link in the chain is all that is needed to break it. And so at best, crypto currencies are no more secure than any other currency, if either one can be stolen from an exchange.

Since I live in the U.S., the GDP of my country is sufficient backing for all of my currency needs. Others may choose differently, but crypto has no inherent value that is greater than an economically backed currency. At least when we are talking the one used as the world standard. Crypto fluctuates too much for use as a reliable currency, for high-risk investment purposes, it is probably fine.

Bitcoin was the problem until it wasn't, now Etherium is the problem. Since neither need to exist, the end effect for me is the same, expensive video cards and silicon wasted on devices making pretend money. Luckily they waste power too, so it's not just video cards and silicon that get wasted, how awesome!

a) Meanwhile a bunch of people just spent a year refreshing shopping sites every day in the hopes of maybe getting a new card and coming up short. Nvidia can sell as much as they want without crypto existing, but the people making money out of thin air seem to have more money than everybody else, so they get the private stock. This is helping nothing for the average consumer. Plus, Nvidia's R&D budget is going to have more to do, going forward, with how close AMD is to their heals than anything else.

b) With Apple and Samsung, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, and many others, this could be happening anyway. At this point there is enough capacity, just not enough 5nm or 7nm, so they are fighting over that. Intel's failing process improvements are pushing them to look at GF or TSMC to catch up. There is enough demand to keep things expanding.

c) Most don't want their degraded cards. Mining runs very hot, especially on memory, this is very bad for the chips. Ebay is the last place people look for a card, but they do look there if they have to. People want a brand new card with a warranty, and failing that they want as little wear and tear as possible. Mining cards being on the secondary market is worse for that market because it makes that market less trustworthy. If the secondary market was all consumer based, non-mining stock, it would be more attractive.

I have a friend who bought a 3090 and is mining with it, he even redid the thermal pads on the memory it was running so hot. Normally I'm all in to buy his stuff when he upgrades. That card, not so much. My other friend has a RX 6900XT, no mining. I'd pay good money for it second hand, because I know where it's been.

"The only reliable currency is the loyalty of a man whose life or death you hold in your hands." -- Mookie Wilson, post-game interview, 10/25/86

No, I meant casino. When you figure out how to have a casino without gambling, let me know.

Absolutely not. You make an excellent point that most people don't realize. There is no mathematical proof that the ECDLP is NP-hard, yet people operate as though there is. /Shrug.

No, again you miss the point. If one steals a Bitcoin from an exchange or a dollar from a bank, the total monetary supply remains unchanged. When the Fed prints three trillion dollars, however, the monetary supply changes dramatically.

Many national currencies have entered hyperinflationary spirals. Under the current scheme that Bitcoiin and Ethereum operate in, this cannot happen. Let me repeat that: it is impossible.

You realize, of course, that not everyone lives in the United States, right?

What color is the sky in your world? There is only a finite supply of gamers in the world. Take that number, however large or small it is, and add mining sales to it, and you get a larger number. Please extract your (already self-admitted) anger and bitterness out of your chain of mislogic.

Sigh, yes of course it would "happen anyway". The point is that its happening considerably faster, thanks to the tremendous demands now placed on foundry capacity, and the resultant high margins said foundries are now experiencing.

A debateable point, but one thats entirely irrelevant anyway. Every used card a miner offers for sale, they do in fact sell. And every card they sell is one less purchased new at retail.

As opposed to the same card wasted on increasing your Counterstrike fps count?

Plus it employs hundreds of thousands (millions?) all over the world. It's probably the second vice to appear in history.

I know we're off track but this whole thread is off track. Here's an annual report on gaming by the American Gaming Association.

I always find it an interesting read. I'm in the gaming industry so it's more interesting to me than to others probably.

Already did, it's called a fancy hotel, they exist all over. Casino players lose money, get some comps for nice amenities. At a fancy hotel they just pay money directly for that.

And again, if you meant gambling you should have said gambling, instead of casino. It makes no sense to say that I'm wrong for saying casino, while you are somehow right for saying casino, when you meant gambling. Since you concede a point in the next part, I know you are capable. This is dumb, and even if you were correct, it wouldn't serve your point at all. I really just don't understand why you need to die on this pointless hill.

Thanks. I mean I could end up being wrong, but I think we agree that nobody knows or can know at this point what the future holds in this area.

It's interesting that you consider U.S. dollars insecure because the fed can print money, and crypto secure because the supply is fixed. But which one fluctuates like a roller coaster on a whim? Not U.S. dollars. When the fed expands the money supply, the change in value of an individual dollar is minimal, and based on what other currencies are doing also. Crypto's go up, they go down, they are like stocks without the financial statements or public information that most use to evaluate their investment.

So while the thing you fear cannot be caused by the specific situation you detail, it still happens all the time for literally no predictable reason. At least the conditions under which the fed might print money are somewhat predictable or detectable.

Meanwhile I was actually speaking of security, as in the currency being stolen from you, in the post you replied to. There's no FDIC insurance on crypto. Exchanges have mostly been secure, but bad things have happened also. I can't say how that compares to banks being robbed or whatever, but again FDIC, which covers any sums I'd have in there.

Yup, and they can trade in whatever currency or commodity or equity they want to make their money more secure or stable.

We just went an entire year where the newest products were basically unavailable on a daily basis. This was made worse by the pandemic and work from home dynamics, but at it's core the demand was there before that. Maybe you were unaware, but if you read tech articles, or watch tech youtubers from the last year, it's detailed all over.

There are a TON of gamers out there now, and PC gaming is growing again. Consoles (PS5 and Xbox) use the same chiplets (subcomponents of CPU/GPU) as PC's now, AMD based APU's (that's a CPU/GPU combo) built specifically for them. Both consoles were hard to get for months after release, same issue.

So just to clarify, my world isn't the one with an oddly colored sky. Do you even follow tech news?

Considerably is questionable, but I'll concede faster. Nvidia used Samsung 8nm this time around, because they had to. TSMC is clogged up with Apple having hoarded the 7nm, and then moving to the 5nm, which then opened up the 7nm for AMD. These foundries were already slammed, and would be so without crypto.

You see it as a benefit, I see it as a problem. Car manufacturers are having to stop production because they can't get enough chips to build automobiles. Silicon availability is finite, and I don't like seeing it wasted on pretend money, even if using it for gaming could be considered a waste by somebody else.

And if the miner never bought it first, it still would have sold, you literally just showed there was demand for them. My contention is that the buyer in this case would have preferred the card without the extreme wear and tear, but it willing to settle if they have no other choice.

I kind of concede that point in one of my last two posts, but let me clarify.

Importance Hierarchy:

#1 Staying alive
#2 Eating good food
#3 Entertainment
....
#999,999,999,999 Generating unnecessary currencies

So yes, my wants are frivolous, but they are not a needless alternative to a thing that already works fine.

Tried to write this post a few times but can't say what I want to say without being too antagonistic. I don't like any industry that is based on the concept that there is a sucker born every minute. Whether it's the house always wins, or the house enables people to get taken by others so they get a cut of it, it doesn't sit well with me.

I guess I feel bad for the suckers, and wouldn't do that to them if it were me. That is why when I compare crypto to gambling, you should infer negative connotations from that.

I'm not going to judge people for what they do for a living, unless it's murder//violence, but personally I would not work in that industry. You'll never see me in Vegas either, but to be fair that's mainly because of the heat.

Liquid air has to be stored at a temperature below -200 degrees Celsius. You don't just have a container of it sitting around in your home. It also won't have any water in it at all, as well as no CO2. And you don't use it in an experiment with iron filings at room temperature.

They aren't suckers, they're adults. You imply that the millions of people that gamble are somehow less intelligent or more gullible than the mainstream. There are problem gamblers, of course, but the vast majority know exactly what they are doing. And they are way more intelligent and sophisticated than you give them credit for. As with anything, though, it's easy to judge from the outside.

I didn't seek out this industry, it found me. Truth be told, I don't feel the need to defend the gaming industry. It is what it is. I'm just providing perspective.

I just like the stock.

Uhh, gaming is very productive. Do you know how much platinum I can produce six boxing on my 1080ti??? Not to mention the RL salt I can farm 360noscoping kids on cstrike.

Barnum would tell you that they can be both, and he's right. The average person can't mathematically understand how odds actually work, they are unprepared to understand their own predicament.

To be fair, some people have lots of money, if they enjoy blowing it that's their business. I'm not worried about them. It's the people who are incapable of understanding the risk, and think they can solve their problems with one more pull that I worry about. But there has to be a line with freedom, so gambling can't be outlawed, and I'm fine with that. I even buy lotto tickets sometimes.

It's just that the entire industry, from a marketing perspective, is based on tricking the people who are incapable of understanding the risk, into taking the risk. The people at the top want their money, just like any other industry, but they have to be a little shadier to pull it off. Maybe that's a dark take, but I have no sympathy for people who can look at a huge pile of money and think "that's not enough."

People like my mother-in-law, who will buy lotto tickets every day, spend hundreds of dollars a year, and then think it was worth it when they win a couple hundred dollars one time. If it makes them happy, great, that's not serious gambling, but she lost money on it, no question. She just doesn't see it. I can't shut off the math, it's in my head when I witness anything.

I was playing Rocket League tonight and my wife walks in and puts a sports betting flyer on my desk as a joke, because we mock that crap relentlessly. The ads say "we think you're a fricking moron" and people don't see it.

But I've had a bit of wine, so I'm running with the emotions tonight. I like you, we agree on a lot, and knowing you work in the industry doesn't change my opinion of you. But it also doesn't change my opinion of the industry. Yes, I think the average gambler is clueless to their actual chances. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe some people just like losing lots of money for the chance to win a little once in a while. Again, if that makes them happy and doesn't destroy their lives, no biggy.

I'm a low risk kind of guy, and losses hit me on multiple levels, so I don't take the risks. Some people need the risks, and don't sweat the losses even a little bit. I can't even begin to understand that way of thinking, but I chalk it up to "some people just don't think about what is happening as it's happening" and that doesn't make it easy for me to not see them as idiots. Maybe that's my problem rather than theirs, but it's how I see it.

No. In general usage, gold and silver do not rust. Silver tarnishes. Gold doesn't "do" anything in common usage as the oxidation is not significant. No one, in common usage, says "Look at that rust on that gold and silver!"

There you go again. Do you know how condescending that is? Plus, you have no clue because you (likely) don't know a single one. If you do, tell me about him/her.

Most regular gamblers are quite sophisticated. Even if they aren't technically geniuses, they are very savvy. The tourists are just that - tourists. They don't care if they don't understand every detail. They're just out to drink (or smoke some weed), gamble a bit, and hang out.

The majority of the money that the Gambling Industry makes is through exploiting people with addiction problems, and they know it.

From a House of Lords report into gambling in the UK (the USA has a much bigger problem).

While speculating in crypto markets is not defined as gambling it does hold similarities in how interested parties market it in order to add value to the system, and to mask the volatility.

https://www.technologyreview.com/20...te-currencies-like-libra-before-it-was-chaos/

My faith in the average person to use their brain comes and goes, that's probably condescending too. I'm no genius, let me put that out there first and foremost, I just care about understanding how everything that could affect me works. Most people I run into don't work like that, it's not that they can't, just that they don't by default.

So there's a couple places my view comes from. First off, the average person hates math, or at least has no use for it unless they are forced to. If the resistance to the "new math" among the population over the last decade isn't proof enough, I don't know what is. People lining up to say that treating (49 + 52) as (50 + 50 + 2 - 1) is terrorism, well that doesn't inspire confidence that sans a calculator, they could survive on this planet if math stood between them and breathing. Condescending, yes absolutely, truthy? Also yes.

Next up is literally any RNG thread you see out there. How many times do people have to be told that random means random, and you can't expect patterns from random. Yes, I know computer randoms are not true randoms, but they do the job for the most part, and we write the rest off as RNGesus is a moody bugger. If you extrapolate that to how people understand odds, it's pretty similar.

Now where it all falls apart is that the average person is not the average gambler, and this is where I defer to your experience on who is playing/losing/winning. Risk aversion levels matter in how this is viewed, and I'm not blessed with a level that lets me look at wasted money as no big deal, or something that can be made up on a future risk. There is income and outlay, and waste is unnecessary outlay. Waste is stupid, and mostly avoidable, if not the first time then certainly the times after that. It's not so much that I'm condescending, as my view of things does not allow for a positive outlook on needless waste. But that will certainly appear condescending, and I get that.

The rub is that people spend money for entertainment, and if taking risks is entertaining to them, they will do it regardless of how it's ended in the past. A savvy gambler probably doesn't play slots, or roulette, they probably do play poker or blackjack. They probably do pretty well at those, which means somebody else is losing to them (at least with poker). This is why you have pro poker players who make the big bucks, and everybody else who plays them, that don't. In an all-pro tournament this is less of a thing, but there will be those who think they can compete at that level and can't. They probably find that out the hard way.

I'm sure my picture of what people spend, how often they win, how much and how often they lose, is not correct. If casino's are only making a thin margin similar to other industries then maybe my view is a bit harsh. But my extreme risk aversion level doesn't let me believe that. I understand that with odds of 1 in 24 million, I can't just buy 24 million tickets and guarantee a gain if I win more than 50 million dollars ($2 tickets). But that's because I think about that stuff, and I don't see a lot of evidence that other people do. They just don't act on it because they don't have $48 million dollars or enough time in the day to sit at the gas station and fill out that many lotto ticket forms.

Maybe I'm just an ***hole, IDK.