GPU Mining is Back?! .:. Late Night Blogging

A short disclaimer at the beginning of this post... I'm VERY BIASED on this topic as of my past in computer hardware and GPU mining ETH back in 2017... Also, I'm hodler of the Nosana token... So, all in all, not sure that this post will be completely objective, so please DYOR and don't trust me... 😃

When I came (back) to crypto in 2017, I came back as a "crypto miner." I was accumulating GPUs, creating mining rigs, earning ETH, and diversifying in BTC and other cryptos... In the same year, I went to a few cryptocurrency (and blockchain) conferences where I was trying to understand what I am doing... lol... For some reason, two important things clicked right away as huge use cases for blockchain tech and crypto... One was NFTs, and the other was GPU mining, or, more accurately, the decentralized utilization of computer hardware worldwide. Neither of those two exploded... yet...

Okay, we did have an NFT crazy cycle, but that wasn't the (right) use-case (in my opinion), but rather a speculation on NFT assets... What I was expecting to happen earlier is RWA combined with NFTs, the use of them across different apps, games, etc. Well, we will see if that will happen (in mainstream) sooner or later...

The other thing, the GPU mining already happened, where hardware was used for "running" the PoW blockchains... Tbh, when I heard about GPU mining, the first thing that came to my mind was that others will use my GPU for computer rendering, animation, or such... Well, that didn't happen... then...

What did happen is a huge AI breakout and an AI "gold rush"! Big AI companies are competing to see which one will build bigger data centers, and which one will have more computing power, while on the other side, something else is happening... The idea of using idle PC (users') computer power all around the world for the same job became more and more real... If I remember well, RENDER was one of the first who began developing such a "system", but they went more into "big boys company", forgetting about smaller GPU owners...

Luckily, some other projects filled the gap and continued working on it... If you think objectively, it makes so much sense to go decentralized for AI computing... Why would a new AI company risk huge amounts of money to build a data center, buy a huge amount of expensive hardware, when on the other side, they can RENT GPU power WHEN they need, and HOW MUCH they need at a certain point of time... Leave the hardware hassle and risk to small "investors", who will compete among each other for providing the best quality for the cheapest price...

Now, if you add all this to my recent doubts about the "value" of crypto, you will come to the point where I am... 😃 It's nice to have these big L1 blockchains that are doing different (or the same) things, successfully or not, that's irrelevant... It's hard to put the "price" on them... On some of them (including HIVE), you can run apps on top, which is super useful... But, how much is that worth? I mean, money-wise... $1? $10? $0.01? What are the incentives to buy such tokens, except than speculation on price (which "should" mirror the network effect/growth)?

At these moments, there are probably millions of different tokens and hundreds of different blockchains, and it's harder and harder to "predict" which one will survive, which one is unique, which one has an INCENTIVE to be HODLed (except for speculation)? IMO, if you add on top of these tokens additional use cases and burning token mechanisms, you can lower the (going to zero) risk a lot! That's one of the reasons why I plan to research more tokens and projects that are "building" with that vision... An inflationary economy could be good, but it can get out of control easily and make a big mess...

Anyways, I have recorded a short video about one of the projects that is doing GPU renting, and I liked their tokenomics... Check out the video, and if you are curious, research more about the topic... I would like to hear your opinion on this in the comment section! Btw. HIVE could easily "host" a token and project like this! I mean, the business is happening outside the chain, but the chain is used for "accounting"...

PS. I do plan to work on similar content in the future, but I'm not sure if HIVE is a suitable platform for doing that... Because of that, I will try to bring a "personal touch" here, while sharing more "broad" content on the YT channel where you will find this video... If you would like to stay tuned with all, don't forget to subscribe to that channel... Hopefully, if it grows, it could attract people back to HIVE!

Thank you for your time.

--ph--