Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs 403
Vigile writes "For users that have known about the process of bitcoin mining the obvious tool for the job has been the GPU. Miners have been buying up graphics cards during sales across the web but which GPUs offer the most dollar efficient, power efficient and quickest payoff for the bitcoin currency? A series of tests over at PC Perspective goes through 16 different GPU configurations including older high-end cards through modern low-cost options and even a $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."
$1700+? (Score:2)
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Re:$1700+? (Score:4, Informative)
I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. [bitcoin.sipa.be] The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.
That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.
Thank god (Score:4, Funny)
Did you know that it's been nearly a week since the last Bitcoin story on Slashdot? I was worried that the standards were changing and blatant slashvertisements for bitcoin were no longer getting through! Never been happier to be proved wrong.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is the PERFECT Slashdot topic:
Open Source
Peer to peer
Cryptography
Computer Hardware
Libertarian
THAT'S why it shows up so much. What's not to like?
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I never understood why so many
I figured in the end it was so they can be in the elite, cynical 'I told you so!' chorus if it fails.
According to some, even the stories about MtGox being hacked were somehow "slashvertisments" for BTC
Correction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme [wikipedia.org]
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
No real investment, products or services? Check.
Promising participants payment? Check.
Priority in enrolling other people into the scheme? Check.
Non-sustainable business model?
Hmmm... Converting electricity into ones and zeroes of highly volatile value and no practical use beyond said value, which can't be readily converted to goods, services or even monetary units...? Oh, SO check.
There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.
Seriously?
You'll be the one to pull the "kids don't know what words mean" AND "metaphorically" card(s)?
When arguing about lite-FUCKING-ral meaning of a meta-FUCKING-phor for a FUCKING SCAM? [wikipedia.org]
For fucks sake... Kids these days...
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Another definition taken from Wikipedia (the fountain of all human knowledge don't you know):
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
I suspect tthat this kind of definition was what the AC was goi
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All those wasted CPU/GPU cycles that could have gone towards something actually useful, like F@H.
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Bitcoin isn't going to pay everyone's bills. That's impossible. If it pays yours, it's because someone else put in money into the system, which means that they are in the negative. If it pays theirs, it's because even more people put in money into the system, which means that they are in the negative.
Sooner or later you are going to run out of willing investors, at which point there will be a great number of losers and a small number of winners. Chances are that you're not going to be one of the winners
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Using the Phoenix miner with optimum settings and overclock, perhaps? (I get 380 MHash/s on 5870s and made a rig with 4 on one motherboard ... yeah you're damn right I had to set up liquid cooling...)
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How long before you've made enough money to pay for that machine.
Did you buy it with bitcoins perhaps?
You're dead serious aren't you. You're actually running the expensive setup to mine bitcoins as if there was free money lying around to be harvested for non-bankers?
I'm flabbergasted.
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What better measurement is there? Nothing like direct experience.
And I guess that means the answer to his questions is that all of your profits is still in bitcoins.
See, that's how schemes like this work. The first group of bitcoin miners cashed out in 2009 and the last of you will watch their value crash to nothing. The guys that developed the mining software got paid.
Now bitcoins are not a classical Ponzi scheme
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Now bitcoins are not a classical Ponzi scheme - that's not my point here. It's a classical short-term bubble.
That's just splitting hairs. It looks pretty much like a Ponzi scheme to me, but if you'd rather compare it to Tulip Fever or the South Sea Bubble, (with the difference that the original "inventors" knew exactly what they were doing rather than just getting caught up in the excitement of the thing) that's fine by me.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Funny)
Listen pal, I'm talking to you as a friend here.
You need to get out and mine for some pussy instead. I realize the odds are just as bad but you never know when you run into some gal just on the edge of alcohol poisoning and you might end up with a little something... At most it'll cost you $100 (plus the antibiotics a few days later) which is a lot less than a pair of 5870s and SSD drives and all that bitmining kit.
And you never know. It's how I met my wife 21 years ago.
(Hey, I'm just kidding, hon. Having a little fun with the slashdot fellas. I realize I was the one on the verge of alcohol poisoning and you were the one trying to empty my wallet while I was passed out.)
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Funny)
Listen pal, I'm talking to you as a friend here.
You need to get out and mine for some pussy instead. I realize the odds are just as bad but you never know when you run into some gal just on the edge of alcohol poisoning and you might end up with a little something... At most it'll cost you $100 (plus the antibiotics a few days later) which is a lot less than a pair of 5870s and SSD drives and all that bitmining kit.
And you never know. It's how I met my wife 21 years ago.
(Hey, I'm just kidding, hon. Having a little fun with the slashdot fellas. I realize I was the one on the verge of alcohol poisoning and you were the one trying to empty my wallet while I was passed out.)
Hell, that's how I met your wife last night.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Funny)
When was the last time those issues were the main topics on slashdot? 2003? These days, its mostly focused on inflammatory YRO articles, and how the evil government is trying to take you down.
Right, libertarians. Right there on the list, see?
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Loose money *is* easy to lose.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
Several reasons:
- It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment.
- The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
- You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players).
- Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.
I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come, which is exactly why I see this for what it is. Bitcon.
If it makes you happy to play this game, by all means go ahead, but do yourself a favour and don't invest more than you can comfortably afford to lose.
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The same arguments can be made about Gold/USD/Euro/etc.
You better bring something better to the argument.
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The same arguments can be made about Gold/USD/Euro/etc.
No, it' can't. A real currency is linked to the sum of goods and services in the countries using that currency. By having your hair cut or harvesting your apples, you help shore up the value of the notes in everybody's wallets.
BItcon is only backed by speculation value. There is no relation to the GNP, because there is neither N nor P.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
And you'd be an idiot to spend bitcoins.
There are a fixed number of bitcoins that will ever be in circulation. This is by design. By definition, adding more people wanting bitcoin drives up its value, which means a haircut that cost 2 bitcoins will cost less in the future.
Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it, which means all you have are a bunch of people invest by mining and keeping, knowing they will go up in the future. And this is a problem - and why governments are deathly afraid of deflationary economic environments.
The fact that it's so volatile should be an indication - people come in, buy them cheap and sell 'em expensive. It's basically the stock market, except at least with stocks you hold a part of something tangible.
Someone could come up with Bitcoin2.0 and see the value of the original Bitcoin vanish overnight. In fact, once you get near the end of the mining, it'll be held completely by speculators. Hell, you can expect that there will other Bitcoin like things set up once the speculators start coming in en masse and making money (we had this during the dot-com boom - many companies created virtual currencies for microtransactions. All folded). After all, all you need is some code and a website.
Hell, Bitcoin might very well be the IT industry's $cientology. It too was created by an awful sci-fi author and got tons of people believing in it.
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Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it
Your argument defies reality. Every currency has the problem of what happens if people hoard currency. It's why we hear in the news reports about "consumer spending" all the time. The fact is much as we would all like to sit on a big pot of gold and hope it goes up in value the fact is we need goods and services to live. Plenty of people sold bitcoins at $1, at $2, at $5. They didn't 'lose' anything because it's now $14 or whatever. As for
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It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment.
Wow, just like stocks!
- The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
Wow, just like stocks!
- You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players).
Wow, just like stocks!
- Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.
Wow, just like stocks whose issuers go bankrupt!
If it makes you happy to play this game, by all means go ahead, but do yourself a favour and don't invest more than you can comfortably afford to lose.
Wow, just like stocks!
I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come
Ah, that's why you don't like stocks. Those evil pyramid schemes that just enrich the folks that got in on the ground floor, require sustained interest to gain value, motivate their holders to promote them, and leave you with nothing if it all goes bust.
(Don't bother listing the differences between stocks and bitcoins -- yes, they exist, but the two are not different *with
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the stock market, or rather capitalism is pyramid based gambling too. It's just less so than Bitcon, due to multiple reasons:
The majority of companies having actual assets.
The majority of companies paying out dividends.
Companies you invest in differ - some are unique.
Bitcoin is like a stock market with a single stock, for a company with no assets, and paying no dividends. Would you rush to pour your money into that?
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Most people would not want to put their entire salary straight into highly volatile stocks each month, they just want to know they can buy food and so on.
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And before that, the last article was two weeks previous.
Seriously, people are exaggerating how often we get a bitcoin story. Yes, for a short period we got them near daily, but now they're a lot more infrequent.
Cryptographically signed /. First Posts are my new (Score:3)
currency! First one to post a verifiable signature on a Slashdot story gets a Slashcoin. Taco and crew are then our new federal reserve--they can inflate the currency to pay our debt to China by posting more duplicate stories!
Our problems are solved!
folding@home etc (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:folding@home etc (Score:5, Informative)
We did a follow up based on finding out how much it costs to run these Bitcoin operations and looked at retail energy prices across the US! I think the results are a big hindrance for mining... http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Bitcoin-Mining-Update-Power-Usage-Costs-Across-United-States [pcper.com]
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Strange, then, that the 'bitcoin isn't worth the energy it's minted on!' article isn't the one that made Slashdot headlines...
Number 2 is your answer (Score:3)
People aren't good at math and they don't consider all the costs. They see a get rich quick scheme and/or think that Cryptonomicron will be a reality and forget to check their figures and make sure all costs are accounted for.
I'm amazed how many people forget power costs for things. I've got that for things like F@H and distributed.net. People will say I should do it because I have a very high end computer at home, or suggest I set the lab system at work to do it at night. They can't understand why not sinc
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That's what bugs me about Bitcoin. Perfectly good CPUs and GPUs that people are willing to run at full pelt are wasted. Instead of contributing something useful to society (like with F@H as you mentioned), these processors are participating in nothing more than a lottery.
Misleading Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that the difficulty increases exponentially [googleapis.com] you're not going to be making their calculated B$/day for the whole year, so while the quickest to pay of is 70 days if the difficulty increases at the usual rate, you'd probably want to add on another month or two.
For the ones taking nearly half a year to pay off at the current rate, you'll probably spend closer to a year before you'll even break even.
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But the value of a Bitcoin can vary with the difficulty. Right now its about 1 B$ = 14 USD but if the difficulty doubled the value could double to 28 USD.
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The hacking is not what caused the the price to tank. The sell off was spurred by their moronic decision to shut the exchange off when they noticed a large sale of stolen coins.
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I thought the same way, back in the good ol' days (March of this year...). I figured that the increase in difficulty would kill my profits, but a while later it turned out that the dollar price of bitcoins increased right in step with the difficulty so that the dollar return each day stayed roughly constant. (On 1.6 GHash/s, it hovered around $40/day despite huge increases in difficulty.) This persisted until about a few weeks ago, when it seemed to stick around $14/BTC.
I agree that it's less certain that
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But then, the risk goes both ways -- if bitcoins catch their "big break" and make it mainstream, the value can go up (again) faster than the difficulty.
Except that it's all a bunch of guys sitting around saying "Pretty please start using our money, we've now printed trillions of monopoly money but are ready to sell you a hundred dollar bill" - you have to be pretty stupid to realize you will get screwed. And the longer it goes on and the less coins - compared to all the "old money" - you get, the harder you'll be screwed. Unless you can find a bigger sucker and get out in time. Pyramid schemes look good too, until the bottom falls out.
you forgot about the power use cost (Score:2)
you forgot about the power use cost
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Check this update out: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Bitcoin-Mining-Update-Power-Usage-Costs-Across-United-States [pcper.com]
Why should we care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than being a decent applied cryptography experiment, BitCoin has no real use in the real world. It isn't anonymous, it isn't backed by anyone that matters. The currency is too unstable to trust for anything. Its architecture gives a lot more power to people who come on early, and whom likely are going to cash out if people catch on.
I'd rather hear about an Amiga emulator, checkered ball spinning while formatting an 880K floppy disk running on the nVidia hardware than yet another BitCoin article, because BitCoin reminds me a lot of the old MAKE.MONEY.FAST posts of yore.
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Other than being a decent applied cryptography experiment, BitCoin has no real use in the real world. It isn't anonymous, it isn't backed by anyone that matters. The currency is too unstable to trust for anything. Its architecture gives a lot more power to people who come on early, and whom likely are going to cash out if people catch on.
More power to people who come early.... sounds a lot like the domain name system....
Speaking of which, perhaps Bitcoin transactions could be used to facilitate a repla
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Speaking of which, perhaps Bitcoin transactions could be used to facilitate a replacement for hierarchical DNS, due to the public and forever verifiable nature of Bitcoin transactions, you have a distributed database much like DNS, that is also peer-to-peer and universally verifiable, a technology like Bitcoin would always be able to "prove" who asked to register for a name first, and if a bitcoin transaction was required for it to happen, the registration action be free, abuse/squatting would be self-limiting, "expiration" after X years of registration would not be required, and it could be made impossible for a central authority to revoke a name registration based on "legal" demands, DMCA, etc....
Namecoin [wikipedia.org]
Looking at that, it looks like it could actually work if adopted. They've got most of the basics down as far as I can tell, and what they really need now is user-friendly interfaces (currently CLI only).
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That's precisely what it is (Score:5, Insightful)
All this hype is not coincidence, and it is not because bitcoins became useful suddenly. It is people hyping it to try and get others in to the market. They want to cash out, but can't in any large amount without tanking the value. Need to get new suckers lined up.
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That's a theory. I have a theory too. People who poo poo bitcoin despite it's obvious success, haven't actually done their due diligence on what it is and how it works.
Bitcoin works for me. I use it to get work done and buy things. I can do this now, I don't need you to be involved, and I don't need to "cash out."
Re:What, precisely? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I find those arguments highly uncompelling.
First off, no I can't send them to almost anyone. I can send them to almost noone. Ok well let's be a bit more precise: I can PAY them to almost no one. Money is only money if you can spend it, and nobody I wish to spend money with accepts bitcoins.
In terms of currency, that is not an issue. Credit cards are global and my bank will convert currency on my behalf, in realtime. I've used my cards in other countries with ease.
The no chargeback/third party is a disadvantage, not an advantage. I have no one to help protect me and my money. If my credit card is compromised somehow, I bear no financial responsibility. If someone across the world rips me off, I have a recourse. I have none of that with bitcions. They get stolen, I'm SOL. If someone outside of the laws of my country screws me, I can do nothing.
Credit card transactions happen in seconds these days.
It is NOT easy to spend bitcoins. You can only spend a currency people take. I know of NOWHERE that I shop that takes them.
Your portability argument is extremely silly. why the hell would I want to keep millions on an easily lost, stolen, or damaged SD card? Part of the usefulness of digital banking is money is secure in databases, you don't actually carry it with you. I carry the means to access all my wealth (passwords, SecureID tokens, ID cards, etc) with me. However the money itself is tracked in banks, so that it cannot be easily taken.
As for the disadvantages, I've seen no response. Where is the cryptographic analysis? Let's see some analysis from people like Schneier and Rijmen. Let's see the reports from institutions like the NSA and IBM? Crypto takes a long time and a lot of analysis to prove. AES went through 5 years of evaluation by the top minds before becoming a standard.
Also, please tell me how it at all prevents a multiple-spending attack: Someone sends bitcions to multiple different entities, in rapid succession. How do you verify this doesn't happen? I understand that yes, eventually this can be traced, I mean as the person accepting them, how do you make sure this didn't happen and you aren't stuck holding the bag?
You've said a lot about what you'd like bitcoins to be. That changes nothing of what they are.
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Ah, so it's like the stock market expect people can make money with it?
Re:Why should we care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly bitcoin is working despite all the arguments for or against it. The only valid question with regard to the viability of bitcoin as a currency today, is "Is it a currency today?" and the answer is without question YES.
Aside from the uses, for which there are now many (I have personally paid for survives, from freelancers around the world with bitcoin), approximately 7200 new bitcoins are introduced into the supply every day, and yet the value of the bitcoins has be rising over the past months. Even lately with the price off it's highs the constant influx of new bitcoins is not causing the bitcoin to lose significant value.
Fairness of early adopters doesn't enter into it. Early adopters helped to lay the foundation of the security which backs bitcoins, and were compensated for that service. You can participate and be compensated for that service too.
I would love to have been an Apple stock, gold or even U.S. dollar early adopter. But just because I wasn't doesn't me I should adopt now.
If you don't like the idea of it as a currency, or a commodity, then just think of it as a software tool that allows you to move money electronically without friction (unlike any other monetary device in the world), and therein you will find it's value.
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Bitcoins is still far more speculative than the worst of the dotcom stocks, that it has a small market where other speculators will work or provide services for bitcoins - or simply to "prove" they're not worthless - doesn't make it a currency. That imaginary value will disappear in an instant when the bubble bursts. I don't claim to predict when or how it'll happen, but it will. Though I suppose if you can time it correctly, you can turn into a millionaire like many of the dotcom founders...
Really? It's working (Score:4, Insightful)
I see no evidence of this at all. No major stores take it, so you can't use it for any kind of serious commerce. It isn't exchanged on any reputable currency exchange. I've seen nothing done to address some serious flaws brought up (like the possibility of spending a coin multiple times before it is noticed or the built in deflation). I've seen no analysis of the cryptography by leading authorities.
All I see is speculators playing around and people who think Cryptonomicron is an instruction manual not an entertainment novel.
You compare it to Apple stock, I compare it to Flooz.com stock. Sure, there was a time when it was "worth" something and if you had gotten in and out in the right time you could make money. However as it was a stupid idea with nothing really behind it, it collapsed to nothing.
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I take it your concept of success is not very incremental. An all or nothing kind of thing. I on the other hand see a technology that has only moved forward in terms of its uptake and usability, the exchange rate is immaterial to that although it as also moved up.
I agree I would love to hear Bruce Schneier give it a bit of a public go over, but it is open source and anyone can review the code and the white paper. Many people have so far and no one has published a flaw. You can't double spend, don't know
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Bitcoin is not a scam. Have you reviewed the while paper, or the source code? I have. I cannot find a flaw not that I'm anyone important. More importantly I can't find anyone else who can find one either. Not one person mind you. Much less an intention to defraud people.
Oh sure I can find people who haven't even read the FAQ spout volumes about what's wrong with it. But I can't find a single knowledgeable person who can find a single real world flaw.
So now, would you now kindly explain what emperor's
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Bitcoin has one characteristic that could make it desirable and useful. It is a non-inflatable currency.
It's deflatable as hell, though. Not sure why anyone would think it was a good idea for a growing economy.
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Each bitcoin is mathematically verifiable, so you can't just print a duplicate or 10,000 duplicates, and each chain yields only a finite number of them(presumably a slowly-shrinking pool; because some will be lost to bit-rot over time).
However, there isn't any particular reason why you couldn't start additional chains. The products of such would be distinguishable as children of different chains that the original bitcoins(just as many bills/c
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I get it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil can be burned for energy. Gold is always in demand as a means of exchange, is a de facto symbol of wealth and is used in jewelry and has great use in electronics. Housing has a purpose - shelter. Tell me again what the point of bitcoin is, apart from greed? Even something as silly as a US dollar has more point to it than bitcoin - because people do not acquire US dollars with the intention of dumping their US dollars as soon as some exchange rate reaches a pre-determined level. They see US dollars as a store of value and a means of exchange, not a means of wealth acquisition.
People who are mining bitcoins have the SOLE INTENTION of dumping their bitcoins at some time in the future. They far outnumber people who use bitcoin for everyday trade. Therefore the collapse of the bubble is built in to the inflation of the bubble. The minute sellers > buyers, the price will go down. And the minute the price goes down, everyone who was counting on an ever inflating price is going to panic and try to cash out right away. In fact this has already happened.
Re:I get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashgold? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.
I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".
So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!
As in:
Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"
Factoring in energy costs... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always thought Bitcoin was stupid, but let's do some more analysis on the energy costs here, which this site really should have included.
The best GPU perf/watt was the 5870x2 (Ares OC) at 1.584 (Mhash/s)/watt. Not sure where they got their total watt figures from, but from a review site, it is 500W [pcper.com], unoverclocked. This site says it's 50W more overclocked. I'll be generous and not include this since the CPU isn't being taxed as much. So 500W power consumption.
So, typing 500 watts * 1 year * (10 cents / (kilowatt*hour) [eia.gov]) into Google: about $482. Taking their $1,666 one year profit figure (mining profits - cost of card), it is now really a cost of $1,184. Which isn't as bad as I thought it'd be.
They didn't include the effect of increasing difficulty on decreased mining speed, but theoretically the currency should become more valuable as it goes on.
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the currency should become more valuable as it goes on.
That is a bad thing. Deflation has very destructive effects on an economy.
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GUIMiner is most likely optimized for AMD cards (Score:2)
The performance of GPU-based codes is highly dependent on the video cards. I highly doubt the dismal performance of NVIDIA cards. I think the authors most likely optimized the kernel code to AMD cards. This is evident when you look at the CL kernel code and you see that there are so many hardwired constants and fixed arrays (aligned to 128 ints or longs). Moreover, the authors GUIMiner don't seem to take advantage of NVIDIA's more local workthreads (compared to AMD's).
I'd say that declaring AMD a victor is
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Nobody cares about bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody cares about bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about bitcoin. Please stop posting stories about bitcoin. I don't know how many other ways there are to say it, but we don't give a fsck about bitcoin.
Re:Nobody cares about bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody cares about bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about bitcoin. Please stop posting stories about bitcoin. I don't know how many other ways there are to say it, but we don't give a fsck about bitcoin.
Obviously, we do, based on the number of posts here.
I can't say why others do, but in my case it's pure schadenfreude, seeing grown men go "I want to believe!" and setting themselves up for losing their money, and inventing the weirdest explanations for why this is not a zero-sum game doomed to collapse.
In short, it's amusing to see just how many are born every minute.
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I'm going to issue my own Fiat currrency (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.
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Just for a baseline I paid $400 for a 69 Fiat 850 sport convertible with a VW drive train incompetently retrofitted.
That's about -$300 value for the Fiat. The 1600 dual port and IRS trans is worth more then the car with it in it. But that's because the guy who did the install was a moron. After I rip it out and redo it (by welding the top of the Fiat to a bug pan) it will pull 1/8 mile wheelies. Maybe not with the 1600...
If I didn't live in CA the sound of rust from my driveway would keep me awake at n
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Oh noes! I've been heckled on the Internet and caught totally flat-footed. I'm dyin' up here.
Question (Score:2)
What's to stop a large corporation with a lot of computing power to generate bitcoins? What if I have a cluster doing the work?
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Nothing would stop them. They'd make money, other miners would make slightly less money, and Bitcoin would go on.
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Assuming it was substantial enough of a cluster, it would push the difficulty of generating them even higher.
Essentially its setup so that there is a set number of them created in a given time. The more people trying to make them, the more computer power required to make one. So, if you double the amount of people trying to make coins, you also double the amount of computer time needed to make one. Thusly, the more people who join this fad, the less anyone is going to make.
Bitcoin Mining Is Not Profitable (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't start mining Bitcoin. You will not turn a profit. It's hard work. It's no fun. Don't do it.
(the difficulty is high enough, we don't need another influx of miners)
FPGA compatibility? (Score:2)
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People are on it: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22426.0 [bitcoin.org]
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I think that if there's any likelihood of Bitcoin becoming significant, there's also going to be an increasing likelihood of someone dividing the problem space in such a way that it's addressable with appropriately-designed FPGAs and thereby killing that likelihood of significance. Right now it's unlikely to be worth anyone's time & money (unless it's being examined in classes), but if there are significant $ there someone's going to be pursuing them.
There is no way to know without doing the FPGA design, at least at a high level. What you might make up for in one area, you might lose in another. The fact that the AMD's run at such a high clock rate with so many ALU's makes me doubt it would be worth it - but again, there is no way to know for sure without doing considerable work. Just going on number of ALU's (which is not really a proper way to compare, but is the only thing we for this discussion), only the latest HUGE and really expensive Virtex 7
Fairness is irrelevant (Score:3)
The assertion that early adopters have an unfair amount of bitcoins is on the one hand completely irrelevant to the issues of usability, and on the other hand is completely typical of all inventions, commodities and the world in general.
This continued repetition of this idea stems from the misconception that Bitcoin is a Ponzi, pyramid or other type of scheme designed with the intent to defraud later adopters. That is not the design intent of bitcoin. It is an online medium of exchange that compensates people who improve it's security. The fact that people improved the security early on helps the security for everyone later. They got paid pennies at the time, and people who are helping now are getting paid pennies too. It has turned out that those pennies (if they kept them) have become valuable now. This is EXACTLY like being an early adopter of Apple stock, and could just as easily not have happened.
The reason bitcoin is being talked about so much is not because someone is trying to scam you and "cash out" their early adopter advantage. People are talking about it because regardless of the value of a bitcoin, it is a frictionless* way to exchange value over the internet. You needn't hold bitcoins to participate in bitcoins. You can change them to cash the second you receive them. Bitcoins are useable now. They are a currency now.
I would respectfully recommend that people who want to talk about what's wrong with bitcoin do their due diligence, before commenting on something that they clearly have little understanding of.
*frictionless means: 1) you can open a business and start excepting payments this very second anywhere in the world, with customers anywhere else in the world, (excepting money is no more difficult then paying money - try that with credit cards), 2) money you transfer to anyone in the world is instantaneous, in as little as an hour you can be 100% sure that you have received bitcoins that can never be taken away from you or reversed in any way. 3) It cost almost nothing to pay anyone any amount with bitcoins.
All of these elements provide value whither you call it currency, commodity or just software. I use it to do work, and I find that valuable to me right now. The value of bitcoins is not a theory, predictions of it's failure are what is theoretical.
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^^ what he said.
If you don't mind, I'm going to use that response in the future.
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stems from the misconception that Bitcoin is a Ponzi, pyramid or other type of scheme designed with the intent to defraud later adopters. That is not the design intent of bitcoin.
That wasn't the original intent. That's just how it turned out.
The concept was supposed to be that Bitcoin would be a widely used currency for micropayments. In practice, the Bitcoin world is mostly speculators and "miners"; its use as a medium of exchange is trivial.
It takes about $100,000 per day in new cash to keep up the price of Bitcoins as more are "mined". So there's considerable interest among current holders in finding new suckers before the whole thing goes bust.
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It is a misconception that Bitcoins are good for are where ever intended to be used as micro-payments. As little as it is there are still fees involved, and although they are optional now it is a part of the design that all transactions will eventually required fees. The features of bitcoin lay elsewhere as I have discussed.
It is also a misconception that the only use of bitcoins now is as a commodity. That is increasingly less true, and soon will be the smaller part of the bitcoin economy, because of th
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Right, the fact that any one of the early adopters sitting on a few thousand coins (or 'Satoshi' and his millions) could destroy the market in seconds, that's not an issue for you? The complete lack of stability implied by that?
An effect that can and will become worse over time as bitcoin prices rise and bitcoin generation for new entrants generates ever smaller amounts.
And that's leaving out the general idiocy of building in such a tiny limit to the currency and ensuring massive deflation over time.
Also th
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Yes, that's right, gold always appreciates, always. Just put all your money into gold, you can't possibly lose!
*facepalm*
I have a question (Score:2)
So - a lot of people are thinking bitcoin will be REALLY huge in the future, so let's pretend it does get really huge - let's say it's the only currency that the entire world uses, for example. What would happen is... as soon as I do a single transaction with an individual, I would be able to use sophisticated software (just bear with me) to figure out their entire
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No, the database just tells what address has how much, when. If you do a transaction with someone, all you can look up is how much that address currently has. Since anyone can have any number of addresses, all that does is give you a lower bound on their holdings ... which becomes useless the moment that address is emptied and the bitcoins transferred to other addresses, which may or may not be owned (i.e private key known) by the same person.
You can do more sophisticated strategies, like tracing the path
let's be careful (Score:3)
The Bitcoin Algorithm is a peer-to-peer transaction protocol. The algorithm was self-published by S Nakamoto as "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system" in 2008. To my knowledge, the paper has not been accepted in a peer reviewed Computer Science journal. Nevertheless, there appears to be growing acceptance that the underlying technology is sound. However, that says nothing about the validity of applications based on the peering transaction protocol.
The Economics of Bitcoin is about how the original coins are generated, how new coins are minted, how the currency is regulated, etc. Nakamoto's paper has nothing to say about these issues. In particular, many people feel that Bitcoins have been distributed in a manner that makes them a Ponzi scheme. I am not aware of any paper published in a peer reviewed Economics journal that contradicts this.
The lack of a peer reviewed CS publication is terrible, but not fatal. Bitcoin has enough popularity now that we can expect crypto researchers to be looking at it as an easy target for a quick pub. The lack of a pub on a flaw in the technology of Bitcoin is not bad. This technology might be useful for something.
However, the lack of a peer reviewed Economics pub addressing the Ponzi Scheme issue is fatal. In addition, I'm pretty sure that there are other important things that need to be investigated by Economists. I can't say much more about this since I am a computer scientist.
I hope people will understand that there is a distinction between Bitcoin technology and Bitcoin coins. It is possible to have a different opinion on each and an opinion on one does not imply anything about the other. I urge people in future Slashdot discussions to take care to make it clear in their posts whether or not they are talking about the technology or the coins. Thank you.
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Yes mostly. Your best bet at this point if would be to (in true Slashdot list style)
1. Create a rival currency.
2. Get a lot of 'miners' to jump aboard hoping to get in early enough and maximize profits.
3. Dump your hidden cache of new-bitcoins oops I mean ????
4. Disappear with your profits
Wow. You just described the S&P 500 (Score:2)
Rival currency being share certificates.
Miners being traders leveraged to their eyeballs.
It's all a big ponzi.
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It is goatse. It's always the same link or an easily recognizable variation of it.
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You can buy drugs with them, and also socks with the bitcoin logo on them.
Their value is backed by internet drama.
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Actually, there's something else you can buy : http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/ [wired.com]
And the big advantages of bitcoins? Let's go over the advantages, shall we :
(advantages list taken from another post)
You can send them in any amount to anyone on the internet, and with almost no fees.
- International drug lords can be paid from anywhere
Your customer base is therefore the entire world not just people with your "coin of the realm"
-makes it easy to launder that drug money
If a customer pays