Cryptocurrency Miners Are 'Limiting' the Search For Alien Life Now (vice.com) 135
Since the latest graphics processing units (GPUs) are so popular with cryptocurrency miners, the SETI project -- short for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" -- can't find the graphics cards it needs to expand its operations. The SETI@home project helps provide some computing power, as it involves thousands of volunteers who turn the power of their computers over to the project, but it's only a portion of the SETI project's total computing power. Motherboard reports: Searching the stars is intense work that "uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space." Analyzing all of the data from these telescopes uses a lot of computing power. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs and we can't get 'em," Dan Werthimer, chief scientist of SETI, told the BBC. "That's limiting our search for extraterrestrials." Manufacturers such as Nvidia are struggling to keep up with demand for graphics cards. It recently told investors it would rise to meet its manufacturing challenge while focusing on its core market -- gamers. It even suggested vendors limit purchases of graphics cards from individual buyers in an effort to stop miners from buying up all the cards. "This is a new problem, it's only happened on orders we've been trying to make in the last couple of months," Werthimer told the BBC. "We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them.'"
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them.'"
Offer more money and more hardware will get manufactured.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a solution to both problems: make a cryptocurrency where the work product is some large quantity of SETI search. Here's an idea for a name...
Star...
(hmm, what indication of money can we think of ? Ah that's it)
...bucks
Yeah! We'll mine for Starbucks. Surely that name isn't taken :)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah! We'll mine for Starbucks. Surely that name isn't taken :)
You need to drink a cup of coffee to clear your mind. Starbucks is a name already taken. It was a major character in Battlestar Galactica. I don't think the show owners would like you mining for any of their characters.
I'm pretty sure if you get sign off from the owners of that show though the name is not used anywhere else.
Taken [Re:Simple solution] (Score:3)
Yeah! We'll mine for Starbucks. Surely that name isn't taken :)
You need to drink a cup of coffee to clear your mind. Starbucks is a name already taken. It was a major character in Battlestar Galactica.
You spelled "Moby Dick" wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong, it was Luke Starbuckster.
Re: (Score:1)
The pointless search for nonexistent intelligences is one of the biggest white whales in history. Or is that white elephant? I always forget...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Offer more money and more hardware will get manufactured.
Well, why aren't the manufacturers investing in new factories to increase capacity? Probably because they see the current high demand as a passing fad, and that demand for their cards will return to normal levels after the bubble burst. They don't want to get stuck with a big new factory, when no one is buying cards for mining any more.
Re: (Score:3)
There's a simple economical solution.... INCREASE THE PRICE the graphics cards will be sold at from the manufacturer until the excessive demand is suppressed down to the level of the supply.
If the SETI work is more important than the crypto mining work, then they should be able to justify paying more per graphics card than the miners, thus the GPU power will go to SETI. ALTHOUGH as I see it NEITHER the miners nor SETI are the "intended" audience for those products ---- ultimately they're meant fo
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
astronomical levels
Hmm... I guess SETI should be used to that.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sorry. Random price increases / decreases happen all the time. All businesses have to deal with them. Smart businesses plan for them. Every farmer worth his salt knows that sometime in the next five years the price of diesel will shoot up for some reason. In another year the price of the grain he is selling will fall for some reason. He may not know what year or what budget item will cause him trouble, but he will budget for SOMETHING to go wrong.
Should't the people writing budgets for scientific
Re: (Score:2)
scientific endeavors can totally afford to scale up budgets dramatically just because one special interest drove up prices
Naw.... prices go up for a healthy reason: the manufacturer is able to sell every unit they can make, And there's demand for more than they can make, therefore buyers have to compete a bit.
Sure it is ashame now that there's no untapped super-inexpensive surplus of computing power in GPUs to be had at basement bargain rates anymore; enabling these projects to tap a mass market
Re: (Score:2)
Which results in severe long term contraction of their main market, and after crypto boom ends, long term contraction for the company itself.
Re: (Score:2)
If the SETI work is more important than the crypto mining work, then they should be able to justify paying more per graphics card than the miners, thus the GPU power will go to SETI.
There is no point in doing any SETI right now. The Aliens are not broadcasting anything for us to hear.
They are too busy mining and trading Cryptocoins, like everyone else. Aliens aren't stupid and are convinced that they will be able to predict the bubble collapse, and get out in time with a tidy profit.
Re: (Score:3)
Nvidia has pretty much said this
NVidia is EXTREMELY shortsighted if they believe the demand for their cards caused by Cryptomining and other compute applications is a temporary fad.
People have been buying GPUs for mining since 2009, and it's been ramping up over the past few years --- the name for something lasting almost a decade that only seems to be growing is not a fad.
In the future better decentralized cryptos should also likely spur MORE demand for GPUs not less; not to mention the demand for
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Here's the thing. It's not nVidia or AMD. They only build the chips. Moreover, they CAN and WOULD ramp up their chip productions, provided the integrators (AIB cards) ask for them... which they don't. I'm talking about ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, Sapphire (for AMD cards), etc. - these are the ones who won't ramp up productions, and paradoxically they are right as well.
Manufacturing process ain't willy-nilly making a card. It's a complex process involving a multitude of vendors, component providers and logist
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you can get Slashdot to give them a GPU every time they repost this story. So far, they would owe them two.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a popular misunderstanding. In reality, no amount of money will design and construct a factory in short term. These are long-term commitments. This is especially true for very sensitive equipment like GPU dies and memory dies.
Building more production capacity is a function of both resources AND time. Cryptocurrency boom has only lasted a few months. Even a very optimistic estimation of construction speed of a factory capable of producing GPUs and memory for them is measured in years.
Re: (Score:2)
Fermi Paradox - (Score:4, Funny)
- answered. They're all too busy mining cryptocurrency. Good lord! Charles Stross was right!
News Headlines (Score:2)
Russian Hackers Are Aliens. SETI and Bitcoin Unite Forces!
Re: (Score:2)
I still remember F-Secure's Hyppönen's joke.
"Not all hackers are Russians. Some are Ukrainians".
Granted he's actually talking about private criminal enterprises, and not the state actor hacking BS story that keeps on rumbling in certain circles.
Re: (Score:2)
That various nations are operating or funding cyber warfare groups is hardly a secret and hardly BS. Russia, the US and China are known to do this. Now pinning any particular hacks on these state actors is extremely difficult. Russia funding hacking of US elections? plausible theory, but finding proof is going to be difficult, if the US even were to declassify any proof they do find. It's a topic that a layperson can't be expected to discuss with any amount of certainty.
Duplicate content (Score:5, Informative)
This is a duplicate of this story [slashdot.org]
BeauHD is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
He must be running out of Net Neutrality news to push.
Re: (Score:2)
The other post is still on the front page. I know it's too much to ask 'editors' to check in the archives that a story hasn't been posted, but not even reading the front page of the site that you're working for? Why is BeauHD still employed?
I demand a refund!
(Actually, I agree with you; just meeting my snark quota.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When you limit your pool of applicants to those who will pass a drug test, you wind up having to take any gibbering idiot who will come along — usually some kind of evangelical, and those people are universally batshit insane.
I don't use illegal and/or non-prescribed drugs and I am neither evangelical nor batshit insane. I do think that people who use illegal and/or non-prescribed drugs are personally and mentally weak. If you can't deal with your life without using drugs, there is something wrong with you and your life and you should change yourself and/or your life. Grow the fuck up and take responsibility for your problems instead of hiding in drug induced stupor.
Re: (Score:1)
And I think people who use illegal drugs, live in the wrong country or state.
They should move to a state where the drugs are legal or can be prescribed to adicts.
The rest of your post only shows what an uneducated moron you are.
Re:BeauHD is a moron (Score:5, Informative)
I do think that people who use illegal and/or non-prescribed drugs are personally and mentally weak.
Square. Anyone who didn't try pot in college is someone I don't understand. And for the people who tried it and decided it improved their quality of life? Toke on, laws be damned. Maybe when I need someone to judge me I'll visit your mountaintop.
If you can't deal with your life without using drugs, there is something wrong with you...
I won't entirely disagree, but that does imply that there's "something wrong" with just about everybody. A perfectly healthy body shouldn't NEED aspirin. It should produce everything it needs. But, aspirin's good for some people. Some people just find their morning more pleasant with a cup of coffee or a cigarette. Caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, Prozac, Lipitor, cocaine, Viagra, Xanax, these are all drugs that enjoy popularity. Sugar's kind of on the fence and factors in heavily to the average American diet. Maybe when you said "drugs" you meant the "drugs D.A.R.E. warned me about", but drugs is drugs. The fact that the fed classifies pot as more dangerous than coke should tell you they don't know WTF they're talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet it's not too hard to tell if someone was a pothead in college about ten years later.
It's not too hard to spot the kids that are GOING TO BE potheads either. Cannabis must be REALLY bad when it's getting to the kids that haven't even tried it.
Ps I'm Dutch, so don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Congratulations on being Dutch. You don't know what you're talking about.
DaveV1.0 is a moron (Score:2)
Spoken with the compassion that the right wing became famous for. 'My life is good, and fuck anyone who wasn't lucky enough to be born with my genes/family/environment'.
Look asshole, nobody is asking you to devote your life to the orphans of Calcutta, but
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So no, you have no stones.
You don't get to even talk about courage as long as you're too cowardly to log into Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
So no, you have no stones.
You don't get to even talk about courage as long as you're too cowardly to log into Slashdot.
Ahhh, ad hominem bullshit.
Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. Run along, child. I'm not playing your little game. Log in or piss off.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:competition... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree about cryptocurrency, but I fail to understand why you think that discovering signs of aliens would be no use to humanity. Sure, its not going to affect you on a day to day basic, but it means life has arisen elsewhere and this in turn will influence scientific thoughts about biology and its origins. A lot of science is blue sky research that may lead nowhere, that doesn't make it pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be nice to think that, but we have enough trouble decoding stuff written in unknown languages by ancient humans and they thought it the same way and had the same concepts about the world as us. I suspect trying to decode something sent by aliens would be orders of magnitude harder.
Re: (Score:2)
The big difference is that anything sent by aliens would be meant for us to understand. The problem with ancient human languages is we only have fragments and they weren't talking to us so they didn't try to leave us any clues. Also all we have is written words of ancient humans, whereas aliens would likely send us video, which makes the rest of the learning pretty easy (once you figure out how they encoded the video, which they will attempt to convey).
Use FPGA boards instead? (Score:4)
There are a ton of cheap FPGA boards left out there that were used for Bitcoin mining. Why not repurpose them? I can pick a decent one on Ebay for $60-100.
Re: (Score:1)
Can you give examples? The key issue for mining vs science/graphics is that pcie bandwidth doesn't matter. In bitcoin mining, you have little source data and little need for memory and a complex brute force problem. Any FPGA system based on low bandwidth and/or low memory capacity is unlikely to be useful for science.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a ton of cheap FPGA boards left out there that were used for Bitcoin mining. Why not repurpose them? I can pick a decent one on Ebay for $60-100.
Can you repurpose them for the kind of processing that is heavy in floating point math, Fourier transforms and I/O? Bitcoin mining on FPGAs made sense because it was a relatively simple integer operation with embarrassingly little I/O. My hunch is that SETI processing on FPGAs is not cost-effective, since GPUs are so much better for the kind of math and memory access.
This reminds me of early discussions on FPGA miners with other algos such as Scrypt, which is memory-hard, so if you're developing a custom
Re: (Score:2)
Why not use both and mine twice as much?
SETIcoin (Score:1)
Create a cryptocurency SETIcoin, where the miners has to search aliens in order to get coins.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Create a cryptocurency SETIcoin, where the miners has to search aliens in order to get coins.
There are those days i wish i had modpoints. Not often, but today is one.
There are no Aliens (Score:1)
Everybody *knows* that with absolute certainty and no doubt at all so we should close down SETI because we all know it serves no purpose and never will.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, there almost certain are aliens somewhere in the universe. However, the chances to them being anywhere even vaguely close to Earth is practically nil, and even if they were, if they are smart enough to overcome the incredible vastness of interstellar space...they are smart enough to not come here.
So yes, SETI in it's current form is mostly a waste.
Re:There are no Aliens (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, there almost certain are aliens somewhere in the universe. However, the chances to them being anywhere even vaguely close to Earth is practically nil, and even if they were,
That's right. If they were already here for 10's maybe of hundreds of thousands of years we would know. I mean it would be just like if we were hiding in the bush observing wild animals. We would know that a species 10,'s of thousands of years ahead of us would not be able to hide from us, there would be strange signs everywhere. We would know.
Besides, our governments would tell us immediately that aliens were here and give up the power they have over us. Plus the elite would want to give up their positions of power over us so that we could all live together in peace, hold hands and sing kom-by-yah. Personally, I'd spent more time on the beach. I'd probably keep coding if I could. I wonder what sort of computers aliens would have?
if they are smart enough to overcome the incredible vastness of interstellar space...they are smart enough to not come here.
For sure. Earth would be the top selling reality TV show amongst the races in the galaxy. Imagine the cheesy announcer voice saying ToNight On EAAAARRRRRTTTTTHHHHHHH..... Watch these crazy primates choose between two equally crazy candidates to control the.largest.super.power.ever (they think). The insanity of these barley evolved chimps with powers over the atom to destroy .E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. is palpitation inducing. WILL THEY EVER LEARN???
So yes, SETI in it's current form is mostly a waste.
It is unknowable. Even if Aliens wanted us to know, our governments have a pretty large dragnet of technology to control us with. None of us plebs walking around our cities and towns know anything more than we've been told and most of us are too apathetic and insular to even look up from our phones to whatever truth is supposedly out there. Maybe this is all we're evolved enough to handle and we'd be dangerous with anything more powerful than what we have.
But hey, may as well laugh at the absurdity of it all :)
Re: (Score:2)
You think animals don't know humans exist?
Re: (Score:2)
You think animals don't know humans exist?
Whenever an animal is looking at you they are saying to themselves "no, no, no, no omnipotent species staring right back at me, doesn't exist, figment of my imagination", just like we do. That's exactly what I didn't say.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I have to wonder what's a bigger waste of energy... looking for broadcasts from aliens that are probably too far away to reach us, or minting Internet funny money for drug dealers.
Re: (Score:2)
Everybody *knows* that with absolute certainty and no doubt at all so we should close down SETI because we all know it serves no purpose and never will.
There's a good chance that there are aliens out there somewhere. Maybe not advanced aliens in our part of the galaxy though. If we ever detect any through their use of radio waves though they'll probably be extinct by the time we receive their radio waves.
If aliens exist in the galaxy, it would probably be smart as a species NOT to let your presence be known. If as a species you're still using radio waves- it is perhaps best to disguise those waves from being broadcast into space (if that's possible).
Re: (Score:2)
If aliens exist in the galaxy, it would probably be smart as a species NOT to let your presence be known. If as a species you're still using radio waves- it is perhaps best to disguise those waves from being broadcast into space (if that's possible).
Not too long ago, the U.S. government's official position was that if we receive any kind of message from an extraterrestrial species, we would pretend not to have gotten it and not respond. I don't know if that's still the official position.
Re: (Score:2)
Not too long ago, the U.S. government's official position was that if we receive any kind of message from an extraterrestrial species, we would pretend not to have gotten it and not respond.
Thank goodness we have the government to protect and comfort us, we are so fortunate.
Re: (Score:2)
If aliens exist in the galaxy, it would probably be smart as a species NOT to let your presence be known. If as a species you're still using radio waves- it is perhaps best to disguise those waves from being broadcast into space (if that's possible).
Indeed, this is probably on of the greatest achievements of the internet.
No need for SETI (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
In the future.... (Score:2)
People will rent out part of their brain to mine cryptocurrencies as it will be one of the last jobs remaining for unskilled workers.
The really poor will rent out so much that they don't understand any longer how badly they are done by.
Re: (Score:2)
You know... mix that with the original Matrix concept of using human brains as processors and you'd have a decent premise for a sci-fi movie.
Especially that last part about the poor, but I'd also add in the uber-rich being augmented with 'cloud' processing they can skim from their poor workforce.
Then you need the poor guy/gal who gets disconnected - losing their only income - and ends up figuring out how to use their natural brain capacity to take down the system and save everyone.
There's a script in there.
Re: (Score:2)
You know... mix that with the original Matrix concept of using human brains as processors and you'd have a decent premise for a sci-fi movie.
Especially that last part about the poor, but I'd also add in the uber-rich being augmented with 'cloud' processing they can skim from their poor workforce.
Then you need the poor guy/gal who gets disconnected - losing their only income - and ends up figuring out how to use their natural brain capacity to take down the system and save everyone.
There's a script in there. Maybe even a good one, if a bit derivative.
Wasn't that essentially the plot of Johnny Mnemonic?
Re: (Score:2)
>Wasn't that essentially the plot of Johnny Mnemonic?
I wouldn't say that - it was a dystopian high/low tech future, but Johnny was a data courier with a kink bomb in his head, not a co-processor. And there wasn't any significant exploration of what that kind of tech would do to people, it was more a simple action movie in a weird setting.
Re: (Score:2)
Turn in your geek card - human beings were being used in whole as a massive, distributed power supply, not for processing power.
Re: (Score:2)
Turn in yours. That was the change they made when the studio insisted that it was too complicated for moviegoers to understand.
Waste of GPUs... (Score:5, Funny)
They could be used to process the incredibly large number of stories on Slashdot to detect dupes instead.
Good (Score:2)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Searching for "alien life" is probably one of the most useless human activities ever invented.
Yeah, right, because computing hashes of transactions of essentially worthless virtual money (or money-wannabe) is so much better.
Re: (Score:1)
Well it is more profitable then looking for aliens. And some (sia) seve ralwold functons bu you stick your head in the sand and ignor the reality.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good point, it would be absurd for more than one intelligent being to exist. I exist, therefore you don't. Nor are there any other kinds of intelligences on Earth like dolphins or birds or elephants, nor do any of the googols of habitable planets out there have any kind of intelligent life on them.
Re: (Score:2)
Searching for "alien life" is probably one of the most useless human activities ever invented.
It's only useless if we never find any, and never is a long time.
Temporary setback (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Citation needed, because as I see it the only thing the GPU makes can do is up production. That function tends to infinity though. The more they make, the more the miners buy, the more the price goes up, the more the price of crypto is inflated, go to 10.
Because unless the headless cards are priced the same the miners will just buy the cheaper one. And if that cheaper one is a full video card, guess who now has boatloads of headless stock nobody wants (alternatively, there is _still_ a shortage of video car
So true (Score:2)
We just don't find so many aliens these days, 'cause of all the crypto mining.
But seriously...for all we know all our searching is messing alien navigation systems and killing them off.
More important the search for alien life over GPU number crunching will only become more likely with crypto. Older GPUs less capable of keeping up with mining difficulty will become a second-hand bargain.
No one is stopping people from dedicating resources to the unlikely pursuit of searching for aliens as opposed to hav
The worst part (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Now we have to watch out, aliens could come to Earth undetected and mine all our cryptocurrency.
HEY! mining cryptocurrency is OUR job. I don't want no stinking aliens stealing our jobs.
Short term loss, long term gain (Score:2)
Dupe (Score:2)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Alternate thought (Score:2)
Add a financial " prize " for computing X number of cycles or blocks in the SETI project and folks will be more than happy to help you out.
( assuming your prize >= crypto currency mining )
Not in my lifetime, and not in yours either (Score:2)
I'm all for SETI. I've supported them in the past, I've contributed dollars and cycles and time and effort.
But there's absolutely zero chance that SETI can produce any return to anyone alive today.
Even if tomorrow, SETI discovers a guaranteed civilization, identical to ours, it would change absolutely nothing in our lives.
How many decades will it take to say "hi" back? Let alone get any real response of value.
Between language barriers, distance barriers, culture barriers, and who knows what other barriers
We won't find ETs, and here's why: (Score:2)
During some decades since then, they've been encouraged at our progress (civil rights movement, for instance -- even if that was offset by the Vietnam 'war').
But since January 2016, they've seen we've moved backwards by leaps and bounds, back towards a new Dark Age -- and they are disappointed in us, now.
As a result, they'll continue to hide from us, cloak their own electromagnetic emissions, s
SETI power consumption (Score:2)
Got into a debate with my brother about crypto currencies. He was appalled about how much power they use globally. He's kind of an eco-nut.
There are has statistics about SETI@Home like "Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time..... With over 145,000 active computers in the system (1.4 million total) in 233 countries, as of 23 June 2013, SETI@home had the ability to compute over 668 teraFLOPS."
Buuuut, how much power consumption is that? An
Custom (Score:2)
Why are GPUs even used? I thought custom ASIC boards outperformed GPUs so much they were relegated to the same garbage pile as CPUs.
Nvidia aren't struggling to keep up with demand. (Score:1)
They and the companies putting together the graphics cards are unwilling to bet on a future mining crazy and make enough graphics cards as is because if it ends then what are they going to do with all the excess cards? Plus all the used ones entering the market?
Nvidia can keep up with demand but does it make economical sense to produce even more?
"In a command economy" "in a market economy" (Score:1)
In a command economy, when more people want what you want, it makes it harder to get it.
In a market economy, when more people want what you want, it makes it easier to get.
Eventually. Waiting for the ramp-up can be a drag, sometimes.
But it sure beats the hell out of fighting or pleading to get it. And is even better still than fighting or pleading, and not getting it.