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Graphics Bitcoin Communications Power The Almighty Buck Technology

Cryptocurrency Miners Are 'Limiting' the Search For Alien Life Now (vice.com) 135

Posted by BeauHD from the limited-supply dept.
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.'"
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Cryptocurrency Miners Are 'Limiting' the Search For Alien Life Now More

Cryptocurrency Miners Are 'Limiting' the Search For Alien Life Now

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  • Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:11AM (#56127330)

    "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)

      by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:12AM (#56127336)
      Unfortunately they only take bitcoin

      • Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15, 2018 @08:50AM (#56127720)

        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 :)

        • 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.

          • 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:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            The pointless search for nonexistent intelligences is one of the biggest white whales in history. Or is that white elephant? I always forget...

      • Why unfortunately? That means that graphics cards are getting cheaper and not more expensive at the moment!

    • Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @09:35AM (#56127858)

      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)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        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

        • Right... because scientific endeavors can totally afford to scale up budgets dramatically just because one special interest drove up prices to astronomical levels. That's totally how budgets applied for years in advance work... /s

          • astronomical levels

            Hmm... I guess SETI should be used to that.

          • 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)

            by mysidia ( 191772 )

            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)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Which results in severe long term contraction of their main market, and after crypto boom ends, long term contraction for the company itself.

        • 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.

    • 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)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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.

  • Fermi Paradox - (Score:4, Funny)

    by sheramil ( 921315 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:11AM (#56127332)

    - answered. They're all too busy mining cryptocurrency. Good lord! Charles Stross was right!

  • Duplicate content (Score:5, Informative)

    by Matt_H ( 34421 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:15AM (#56127346) Homepage

    This is a duplicate of this story [slashdot.org]

    • BeauHD is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:37AM (#56127398) Journal
      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?

      • He must be running out of Net Neutrality news to push.

      • 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.)

    • Cryptocurrency Miners are Limiting the Search for Dupes Now.

  • Use FPGA boards instead? (Score:4)

    by randomErr ( 172078 ) <.ervin.kosch. .at. .gmail.com.> on Thursday February 15, 2018 @06:33AM (#56127386) Journal

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Why not use both and mine twice as much?

  • SETIcoin (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Create a cryptocurency SETIcoin, where the miners has to search aliens in order to get coins.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by xonen ( 774419 )

      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.

  • 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)

      by Rande ( 255599 )

      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)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @08:57AM (#56127752) Journal

        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)

          by Boronx ( 228853 )

          You think animals don't know humans exist?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MrKaos ( 858439 )

            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.

      • 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.

    • 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).

      • 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)

          by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          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)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        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.

  • because aliens have already been found - they populate most of the political scene in the West. Wherever you look - Obama, Trump, Junckers etc These alien parasites destroy our countries and nobody cares. That is a much bigger problem. Come to think of it: contrary to what SETI is, political elite being all aliens is an actual problem.

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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?

        • >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.

      • Turn in your geek card - human beings were being used in whole as a massive, distributed power supply, not for processing power.

        • 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)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @08:04AM (#56127612)

    They could be used to process the incredibly large number of stories on Slashdot to detect dupes instead.

  • Searching for "alien life" is probably one of the most useless human activities ever invented. I hate to have to say this, but we are the Universe asking itself what it is, and I seriously doubt that the Universe has multiple personalities asking the same question.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by azrael29a ( 1349629 ) on Thursday February 15, 2018 @08:59AM (#56127758)

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

      • Good point. Who gives all this money to SETI anyway? How about this: SETI should just give up and goes back to watching old episodes of the original Star Trek. Then they can give their leftover money to the crypto-currency miners, so that way they can pay for the next WoW expansion without wasting all that electricity. And then maybe that will hinder global warming just enough so that when the aliens do come to kill us all, we will still be alive to enjoy it...

    • I seriously doubt that the Universe has multiple personalities asking the same question.

      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.

    • 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.

  • Nvidia is working on releasing headless mining cards to curb the price gouging on current GPU's, and most of the naive people who are eventually going to give up once they realize that their 12 GPU rig they paid $15,000 for isn't going to make them fast money. * With the current GPU prices, I'd say you have a better chance of making some money buying Nvidia stock.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iTrawl ( 4142459 )

      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


  • 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
  • Now we have to watch out, aliens could come to Earth undetected and mine all our cryptocurrency.

    • 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.

  • With a delay of year or two there will be an excess of cheap used GPU-s, overall the alien searchers can get more computed even if it means delay of 1-2 years. For a long term project like that, such a delay doesn't really matter.

  • 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 )

  • 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

  • The ETs have been monitoring our electromagnetic communications since we discovered how to communicate that way.
    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

  • 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

  • Why are GPUs even used? I thought custom ASIC boards outperformed GPUs so much they were relegated to the same garbage pile as CPUs.

  • 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, 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.

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