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."
folding@home etc (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"
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?
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.
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)
Re:Nobody cares about bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
Re:Thank god (Score:2, Insightful)
The same arguments can be made about Gold/USD/Euro/etc.
You better bring something better to the argument.
Re:I get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thank god (Score:2, Insightful)
Because snake oil is still snake oil, even if it has an electronic stopper on the bottle.
Because a pyramid scheme is still a pyramid scheme, even if the pyramids blocks are made of silicon.
You may somehow like everything just because there is a tech angle to it. Some of us see that even some tech things are bogus/wrong.
Re:Misleading Article (Score:2, Insightful)
It has never fallen to 0. There was a hack at one of the exchanges that made it look like 0, temporarily, but those weren't real prices.
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.
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.
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...