@banhammer: You are uninformed. US Banks no longer back their currencies with gold and long ago abandoned the gold standard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard ) Go check! It takes significant effort to mine a bitcoin (as an example) and it CANNOT be counterfeited, unlike normal cash. The blockchain guarantees that a transaction is legitimate, and in fact you can trace the entire history of a bitcoin.
Anything in life is only worth the value people ascribe to it. Why is a diamond valuable? It's just a rock. Gold similarly is just ore. Oil, wheat, cows, land - can all be reduced to "things". The fact that crypto exists digitally is no different to how your account ina bank is stored. You don't honestly think that you can go change your money into gold in a bank do you? Go try it!
Do you think that nothing that is stores and transmitted digitally has any value? Online gaming, mobile and cloud services, the internet? I'm unsure who's been telling you about crypto, but whoever it is is woefully misinformed...
@banhammer: They do as they have no control of the biggest crypto currencies. They are introducing their own competing currencies, and (it's suspected) are deliberately manipulating the prices by block buying/selling to take over large parts of the market. Yes, they are technically investing in crypto, but only by virtue of necessity - not because they like it. It's similar to how companies take over competitors to remove competition. The ideal for banks is that there is no crypto - only currencies that THEY control.
@boomstick1887: You think you have a point, but you don't. It has as much real value as anything that takes effort to produce. When you pay for things using your normal credit card, you're not moving physical money from one place to another - it's just databases being updated - the banks no longer even back up "real money" with gold any more, so it has even less value than crypto, since banks can essentially manifest it from nothing whenever they like. Crypto is being traded on the stock markets, and can be converted between currencies. You seem to have a complete lack of knowledge about this subject, to be honest.
@rijad92: I'm an electronics engineer, and have been involved with crypto mining for years. I also design FPGA chips and circuit boards in my daily work, and get very well paid for it. I simplified my answer, as there's no need for get into the technocal details, but the essence is that heat degrades electronic components. Even if you are cooling the card, the temperature *on the die* will be much higher when it's operating at 100% than when it's idle, or in normal desktop use - all your cooling setup is doing is pulling that extra heat away faster. People don't game 24/7 for days or weeks at a time, and so GPUs are not designed for this type of use. There are GPUs for this purpose, such as the Nvidia Tesla range, and their price reflects this. The other issue I alluded to is the dramatic increase in power consumption when running GPUs at 100% load over long periods of time. This can nullify any benefits of mining.
So, yes, I do "have my facts straight". Please do your own research before attempting to insult someone here.
@houtx1836: For some currencies, yes. It's pointless to mine bitcoin on a GPU now, so people use specialised ASIC boxes which can only mine bitcoin - but do it much much faster than any other method.
For some of the newer crypto currencies, it's more feasible to mine on a GPU, and in many cases is the only option, as no ASICs are yet available, or are too costly. It's definitely a gamble, but if it pays off, it usually makes a LOT of money for someone mining. There's a reason some companies have spent literally millions on custom mining hardware recently. These are not companies that tend to lose money...
@boomstick1887: I don't think you understand what cryptocurrency is. It actually takes AWAY control from the banks, and puts it into the hands of the community using the currency. Bitcoins etc transactions are stored in a blockchain, which has nothing to do with banks. In fact banks HATE crypto, as it is totally out of their control and has NOTHING to do with online banking as they see it.
@BlendThree: Graphic cards run programs on their shader units - shaders are individual processors on your card that are specialised for performing mathematical operations. In games these are usually used to generate the images you see on screen (the math eventually results in a pixel being changed to a particular colour), but they can also be used to process other types of data (this is supplied to the graphic card like a texture would be in a game). The output from the shaders is then not rendered to the screen, but is used in another program. There's nothing that you as a user needs to do for this to work. The crypto mining programs make use of your GPU if it's compatible, as GPUs are orders of magnitude faster than your CPU for the type of processing that crypto mining requires.
This said, unless you're really serious about crypto mining, I would NOT suggest doing it on your GPU, as you will be running it at 100% load for hours or days at a time, using a lot of power and shortening the lifespan of your rig considerably. People who are crypto mining don't care too much about this, but as a gamer you probably do!
@Austerus @xDARKGUITARISTx It's actually quite a difference in resolution. 720 vs 900 means the PS4 is actually displaying 50% more pixels on the screen (as the width is also multiplied to keep the same aspect ratio). This is pretty much a given though as the PS4's graphics hardware is 50% faster/more powerful than the XBone's, based on the specs.
@lost2bfound If it's a game you spend a lot of time playing, and enjoy, then it's worth the high score. The fact that it will sell millions of copies, and make back far more money than it cost to make, makes it a "good game". So it's deserving of the score. Some people like random games - hell, maybe someone even likes "Big Rigs over the Road Racing", but that doesn't mean it deserves a 10...
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