Ethereum?

[brickmii82]

So, I regularly keep an eye on eBay to try and spot trends in electronics sales happening and I believe I've found one. I have a RX 480 4GB graphics card I bought in March for about 180$ US. Well, the cheapest on eBay at the time of this post is 315$ ..... the prices are the same between the 4 and 8GB models in some cases.

Soooo I wanted to see what's causing this massive spike in pricing and I believe it's Ethereum mining. It seems the new(ish) cryptocurrency has experienced over 1000% in value growth over the past month. Now people are hopping on the mining wagon again, and prices on AMD GPU's have risen because the most effective way to mine is to run the hash algorithm through the GPU rather than CPU. Apparently AMD GPU's perform better so ......

Anyways, I just had a few fleeting questions I thought I'd throw out here, and see what folks thought.

1. I read something about a Bitcoin "split" affecting the value of Eth. What is this "split", and how would it impact another cryptocurrency?

2. How bad is mining for a GPU?

3. With the way Bitcoin took off, would it be worth it to invest in a mining rig now?

4. Anyone else fool with Ethereum?

 

[FAST6191]

1) A split in this case is where miners disagree on the protocol to be followed, I have not seen the full workup of this, though the initial scan says it is a small disagreement and not one of the bigger things looming, but it is between classic bitcoin (BTC) and something called bitcoin unlimited (BTU). If enough of them can't get together and continue one with one or the other then it makes the market a bit uncertain. Uncertainty in one market may impact another, especially when they do broadly similar things (sending funds mostly anonymously and without much oversight).
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split/ has a bit more, https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/technologies/adjustable-block-size-cap has a bit on the tech for the new BTU possible replacement standard.

2) Depends how you mine. If you only mine at a low level (as a percentage of runtime) or otherwise keep the temps down then it will last longer than going full pelt in your cupboard without exhausting the heat.

3) There is a phrase. Only invest what you can afford to lose. I could go further and estimate time to make a return on investment (cost of buying and cost of power vs theoretical time to make a return using a mining pool or something, and also ageing rates of hardware if we are going to see another FPGA and ASIC rush that makes GPU obsolete).

4) There are a thousand other takes on the concept of cryptocurrency, though it seems Ethereum may be the one to do "smart contracts" that catches the eye of the public

Smart contracts intrigue me greatly but I am not bothering myself.