Surge In Litecoin Mining Leads To Graphics Card Shortage 213
New submitter Kenseilon writes "Extremetech reports that the recent price hike of Litecoins has triggered yet another arms race for the *coinminers out there, leading to a shortage of AMD graphics cards. While Bitcoin mining is quickly becoming unfeasible for GPU rigs with general purpose graphics cards, there are several alternative currencies with opportunities. The primary candidate is now Litecoin, which has the aim of 'being silver if Bitcoin is gold' Swedish Tech site Sweclockers also reports [in Swedish] that GPU manufacturer Club3D have told them that miners are becoming a new important group of potential customers. However, concerns are being raised that this is a temporary boom that may hurt AMD in the long run, since gamers, their core consumer group, may not be able to acquire the cards and instead opt for Nvidia."
Obligatory first post: (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:ReFlash (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To the not-so-rich ... (Score:5, Insightful)
After the gold rush was over, there was still plenty of money to be made selling picks, shovels and mules to the prospectors.
Ummm Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
All my usual retailers have stock, this is just an article to pump up litecoin activity and interest.
It isn't silver to BTC gold, it offers no great advantages over BTC hat can't be integrated into the bitcoin protocol if deamed worthy and you cant buy anything with it except other crypto-currencies.
This article is spam at best , a pump and dump endorsement at worst.
Re:Ummm Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Newegg has them priced $50-100 over retail, the demand is huge and when they restock, they tend to sell out within an hour or two.
Re:Ummm Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
What in fact has happened is the availability of a number of optimal* cards - particularly the Radeon 7950 - have massively decreased due to miners buying them. As you would expect market demand has resulted in a significant price hike. Radeon cards provide higher hash rates than nVidia cards and so they are more popular to miners in general. There are a number of benefits to litecoin, particularly the faster transaction time. If you're a litecoin miner decryption is optimised for GPUs rather than ASICs (which have a much, much higher uptake in bitcoin mining) and thus is not the realm of high-cost ASICs or FPGAs.
Whilst I do appreciate that bitcoin and litecoin are 'hot topics' at the moment there are many interesting consequences that have emerged as a result of the uptake in both the currency and technology required to maintain the currency. Thus, I do think there is something to talk about here.
* The cards are optimal in that they give the fastest hash-rate to power-consumption ratio.
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Now you have your graphics cards and hard mined coin what do you do next?
Do you sit on them in the hope they grow; Do you purchase something with them or do you arbitrage them https://medium.com/bitcoin-bits-1/fc0098ac0511 [medium.com]?
Decisions, decisions, decisions. . .
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There are a number of benefits to litecoin, particularly the faster transaction time."
Transaction times are the same as for Bitcoin - practically instant. The confirmations are faster, but I don't see why that's a benefit. Bitcoin could have a faster confirmation time, too. If you cut confirmation time in, say, half each confirmation would only provide half the security of the longer time since a confirmation would be twice as easy to get into the blockchain, all other things being equal.
Now, you do get that first confirmation faster if the confirmation time target is lower, but if you'
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How can you design an algorithm that works better on GPUs than ASICs? The only explanation I can think of is that the expectation is that it will never be popular enough to make designing the ASICs worthwhile as too few people would buy them.
But that explanation implies that it will also not have the kind of trading volume that would make it stable enough to be worthwhile as a currency....
Re:How about the latest batch of the Rx 200 cards? (Score:5, Interesting)
The general consensus is that the newer cards are faster but they are also drawing more power per 'unit of work' and thus are not as good a solution. Note that this has not stopped people using these cards (and indeed, older, less powerful cards) as one can still make a small profit on relatively modest hardware.
Ultimately the aim of the coin miner is to find the hardware that provides a reasonable mining rate whilst costing as little to run as possible. At some point the value of a litecoin may increase to the point where electricity costs become less of a factor in the choice of mining hardware. You'll start to see people moving to the newer cards if this happens.
Another thing to consider is ASICs. These devices are generally expensive in terms of R&D but their performance can be orders of magnitude higher than GPUs. The problem described in the article is that ASICs are not ideal at solving scrypt. However, I think it's inevitable that hardware specifically designed to mine litecoin is inevitable if the value continues to rise.
Re:How about the latest batch of the Rx 200 cards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not all of us who are mining LTC now bought new cards solely for that purpose.
Personally, I just happened to derive some unexpected profits from the few BTC I had lying around for ages, and, having looked at LTC mining feasibility, decided that I'll use that cash to entertain myself with a new graphics card for my gaming rig - and will also use it to mine LTC while it's reasonably profitable, to recoup as much of the card's cost as possible. So I've got Radeon 280X, not because it had the best hashrate, but because it seemed like the best deal in terms of price to perf right now, within the lower performance limit that I've set.
Not Ideal? (Score:3)
The problem described in the article is that ASICs are not ideal at solving scrypt.
ASIC Bitcoin miners can't solve scrypt at all - you can't mine Litecoin with them. I guess you could call that "not ideal".
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Apparently, Radeons have an instruction that's really important for Scrypt mining, which nVidia cards lack. That's why Radeons of the same price generally reach perhaps 10 times as many hashes per second.
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Probably, though I wouldn't know. I hadn't looked into mining until Bitcoins got so difficult to mine that graphics cards were completely irrelevant already. It's all ASICs now, and if you try to buy one you won't get it until it's become worthless. Expect to be scammed. That's mostly why Scrypt was made, afaik: to put power back in the users' hands, by making it difficult to mine by graphics card (failed) and by ASIC (hasn't failed yet; might later)
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It isn't silver to BTC gold, it offers no great advantages over BTC hat can't be integrated into the bitcoin protocol if deamed worthy and you cant buy anything with it except other crypto-currencies.
This article is spam at best , a pump and dump endorsement at worst.
Sure, that's what they used to say about Bitcoin but look where Bitcoin is now.
Litecoin is the future!
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> it offers no great advantages over BTC
At present it offers the great advantage of being worth mining. With bitcoin, the cost of production already exceeds value of the result, so there is no way to get rich quick. With litecoin there is. Until, that is, somebody comes up with yet another supercoin that everyone will start mining in hopes of a quick profit.
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You can always find one for sale, if you're willing to pay over the moon for it.
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An Honest Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:An Honest Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically, if the NSA wanted to mess with bitcoin, just spending a few weeks mining would really mess up the income of a lot of miners.
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Simple: At the moment the electricity you need for Bitcoin mining costs more then the coins you get out of it, unless you have very specific hardware that is completely tuned to this task. Mining with graphics cards costs you money.
The other thing is of course that Bitcoin is not a real currency and may crash at any time and without warning. All it takes is one large owner to cash in and the market panics. Even rumors of this happening could be enough. People that operate supercomputers are a bit more ratio
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People that operate supercomputers are a bit more rational than the Bitcoin fanatics.
Unless the owner of a supercomputer wants to crash the Bitcoin market. :)
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Simple: At the moment the electricity you need for Bitcoin mining costs more then the coins you get out of it, unless you have very specific hardware that is completely tuned to this task. Mining with graphics cards costs you money.
That's why you mine other altcoins that are still minable on commodity hardware, like Litecoin. Their value goes up and down together with BTC, so the current sky-high BTC price also means that others are similarly high.
The other thing is of course that Bitcoin is not a real currency and may crash at any time and without warning. All it takes is one large owner to cash in and the market panics. Even rumors of this happening could be enough.
True, but if you pick the right coin, and you already have the hardware, you can completely recoup all present and future power costs for a month ahead in a couple of days right now. Cash those out (as in, money in your account in the bank), and from there on anything you mine is basically f
Re:An Honest Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple: At the moment the electricity you need for Bitcoin mining costs more then the coins you get out of it, unless you have very specific hardware that is completely tuned to this task. Mining with graphics cards costs you money.
That's why you mine other altcoins that are still minable on commodity hardware, like Litecoin. Their value goes up and down together with BTC, so the current sky-high BTC price also means that others are similarly high.
Pure fantasy, designed to drive more people into the pyramid-scheme.
The other thing is of course that Bitcoin is not a real currency and may crash at any time and without warning. All it takes is one large owner to cash in and the market panics. Even rumors of this happening could be enough.
True, but if you pick the right coin, and you already have the hardware, you can completely recoup all present and future power costs for a month ahead in a couple of days right now. Cash those out (as in, money in your account in the bank), and from there on anything you mine is basically free money, with no risk whatsoever.
You don't have to be a "Bitcoin fanatic" to be able to add up the numbers and conclude that, right now, this is a profitable game to play. Ideology has zero relevance here so long as there's real money to be had.
No, it is not "profitable" at all. It is a pyramid scam, even if it is a complicated one. The fact of the matter is that in a pyramid scam, almost everybody involved looses big-time, while a few in early make tons of money. It also requires people like you driving more greedy, but stupid sheep in there, or otherwise the few early ones do not get their desired earnings.
So, no, even if a few people manage to scam a lot of money with Bitcoin or Litecoin or any other Scamcoin, most that were not in it from very early on will just lose everything they invested.
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Pure fantasy, designed to drive more people into the pyramid-scheme. ... No, it is not "profitable" at all. It is a pyramid scam, even if it is a complicated one.
$100 in my bank account say otherwise. What do you have to back your theories?
And yes, sure, it is a pyramid scheme right now (well, actually, just a plain old bubble). I never contradicted that or claimed anything long-term, only that there's money to be had right now in this. The point is that with mining, this bubble can be milked with practically zero risk, right now. And I mean anyone mining, not just "a few".
I already gave the specific numbers, I don't know why you persist in pretending that they don'
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No, it is not "profitable" at all. It is a pyramid scam, even if it is a complicated one.
Thank you for using the word pyramid. I've seen "Ponzi" so many times in relation to Bitcoin, despite being utterly unrelated. And then the Bitcoin defenders come out and say, "No, it isn't a Ponzi scheme." and of course they're correct, even though that's missing the point entirely.
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Oh, I do not dispute that the scam in here is cleverly disguised. The possibility to "mine" Bitcoins is a truly impressive misdirection and supports the legend that this "currency" is made by users. But as soon as you look at the increase in mining effort, the pyramid in this scheme becomes blatantly obvious again. The matter of the fact is that the Bitcoin mining difficulty was cleverly designed to make mining hard just when the currency takes off. In addition, the early miners (the very top of the pyramid
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Why not? It's free money that takes zero effort to get, I'm not particularly attached to it. If more people come to get their slice of it, and I get a few less dollars at the end of the month because the difficulty grows faster due to extra miners, no big deal.
Besides, here on Slashdot, the majority largely falls into two camps: Bitcoin believers, who are already mining it anyway (but won't sell it just yet, which is nice of them, since that keeps the supply lower and the prices higher), and Bitcoin haters,
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What attribute of a "real" currency prevents collapse? Governments (looking at you Venezuela) will claim to enforce exchange rates, but once they run out of hard currency to trade at their declared rate (or just refuse to exchange at that rate), the collapse happens anyway. It's unlikely that there is anyone who would attempt to maintain a charade around a collapsed Bitcoin, but just because someone is willing to pretend doesn't make something real.
Re:An Honest Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Every bubble is built on suckers like you, always trying to convince themselves the scam is real. Bitcoin does not even have the value the current used to create it had, as that cannot be recovered.
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Cash out before the bubble bursts and you do well.
Gambling does have some winners.
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Re:An Honest Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I can easily envision three ways in which it could become worthless:
1. A mathematical weakness in the protocol is found allowing for effective fraud. Not super-fast mining, but something like coin duplication or impersonation.
2. A systematic crackdown by one or more major governments renders it impractical to openly accept bitcoins as payment. Right now, governments tolerate bitcoin because it's not really a force of any note. If it really took off? You can count on them to ban bitcoin in commercial operations. Later on, they will declare that posesssion of bitcoins is a sign of intent to purchase drugs or commit fraud, much in the same way that carrying around $10,000 in a briefcase might get you an interview with police today. Even if the crackdown was only half-effective, the fear would lead to a collapse in value - those $1000 coins would be selling for $5 each.
3. Confidence crash. Bitcoin currently has value not so much because it can be spent (There isn't a great deal you can buy with it) as it does because of speculation. That's a dangerous situation - it's a perfect bubble. If the price should drop, even a little, then a lot of people are going to fear a decline and start selling off their coins - which will cause exactly the decline they fear. It's happened before many times. Ask anyone who's traded Noxcium in EVE.
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I can easily envision three ways in which it could become worthless:
3. Confidence crash. Bitcoin currently has value not so much because it can be spent (There isn't a great deal you can buy with it) as it does because of speculation. That's a dangerous situation - it's a perfect bubble. If the price should drop, even a little, then a lot of people are going to fear a decline and start selling off their coins - which will cause exactly the decline they fear. It's happened before many times.
You mean like whatever-it-was that nearly halved its value last week?
Yeah, that.
Bitcoin has found its level. It's not going up any more, it's just going to oscillate around $1000 (a magic 'psychological' number that pretty much proves it's all speculation). There's nothing more to see here, time to move on to the Next Big Thing.
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Why is the ever increasing value a problem?
In general? Because it discourages spending and encourages hoarding and speculation. Speculative bubbles can get people very badly burned, and currency speculation is a way to lose a lot of money.
There are vicious sharks in these waters, and nobody's going to bail you out.
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ever-increasing value of a bitcoin
This can also be seen as the ever-decreasing value of the USD. The Federal Reserve has been been buying $80+billion in Treasury Bonds every month since the third round of Quantitative Easing [wikipedia.org] started in September 2012. Lets see if they follow through on the tapering program [reuters.com] this time.
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1) Molecular-level replicators. We will have them in the next few decades.
2) A systematic "stay the course" approach to the current totally-fucking-insane fiscal policy of The US government, eventually making our money about as valuable as Reichsmark or Zimbabwean dollars.
3) Confidence crash. USD has value not so much because it can be spent as it does because of confidence in a group of inbred whackjobs most Americans consider little
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Confidence crash. USD has value not so much because it can be spent as it does because of confidence in a group of inbred whackjobs most Americans consider little short of "enemies of the state".
I don't know why you associate stability of the USD with the US Government and Congress. The USD is stable for one simple reason: you can buy stuff with it. You can buy it today, and in any volume. You can buy the entire oil output of Saudi Arabia with it. In fact, that's exactly what is happening. The USD is sta
Re: An Honest Question (Score:4, Interesting)
I love how people compare bitcoin to gold, since there are limited bitcoins that can be created, yet as litecoin, peercoin, fastcoin etc have shown, there is no limit to the number of crypto coins, yet there is a limit to precious metals (on earth anyway). Haven'tseenanyone come out with a gold2 version of the metal
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Oh, for a mod point.
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Quite right. It's not like you can dig them out of the ground or anything like that.
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It accumulates to certain individuals who instead of keeping the cash flowing and market running hoard it like Scrooge McDuck.
The imagined lack of availability with increased interest drives the price point up for those who participate at the market and this creates valuation bubble.
Bitcointalk has nice estimates of the distribution in this thread [bitcointalk.org]
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It accumulates to certain individuals who instead of keeping the cash flowing and market running hoard it like Scrooge McDuck.
That isn't a problem. It just means few coins will exchange for more goods or services due to availability or lack there of.
Sure long term deflation that does not end would be a problematic but there isn't much historic precedent out there for long term deflationary patterns. Where they have happened its been after a major inflationary event like a war, and the deflation mostly stops when the currency reaches prewar values such as the panics after the war of 1812.
Ultimately deflation at the macro level is
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What policy forces people to have debt and who is "we" that determined it? People have debt because of their own doing. Blame yourself for your debt, not someone else.
You are right sir. I guess most of the world population could just live in the street... or you know, not eat. That way they would be free of debt. FREEDOM!
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So in other words: People are the issue.
Lol
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Supercomputers are generally built of a large number of general purpose CPUs, which aren't all that good at bitcoin mining compared to dedicated ASICs... Even with hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you will consume more in power than you ever make in bitcoin.
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why aren't all the world's supercomputers on the job making a thousand bucks a minute?
A dozen basement dweller with a few dozen specialized ASICs each is probably as good as a "supercomputer" at mining bitcoins.
People who pay for supercomputers have better things to do than try to make a couple of hundred bucks in a lottery^W market speculation.
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When a block of Bitcoin is solved, the bonus goes to the machine that solved the block and then everyone starts over. You're basically in a race each block to be the one to solve it. By having a larger portion of the total computing power, you increase your chances of hitting each block, but are by no means guaranteed to ever hit (much as you can put money down on both red and black on a roulette table and still lose since the house is playing green). At most, someone could approach generating BTC2.5/min as
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Indeed, the best way to get rich with cryptocurrency is to create your own version, mine an initial amount for yourself, get enough people to join, and then sell yours before the bubble bursts. ;-)
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That seems to be a good explanation of why the the originator of Bitcoin currently is anonymous: I assume they've done just that.
It hurt AMD today... (Score:3, Interesting)
NewEgg shipped my new pair of 780 TI cards today, equipped with Gigabyte Windforce aftermarket coolers, I'll finally get rid of most of the crappy FPS problem on my 3 Dell 30" monitors thanks to only having a single AMD 7970 card.
Why not just buy a second 7970 card and Crossfire them? I considered it, but since they are impossible to find for a reasonable price, forget it (2 months ago they were under $300, today they are closer to $500). The microstutter problem also remains when Crossfiring two cards and also running Eyefinity.
Given that the problem has been known for a year and still isn't fixed, I'm not giving AMD any more time.
Off to NVidia for me! Oh well, shame on you AMD, loyal customer here, but you just didn't leave me any options.
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You could have crossfired an amd 7970 with a r9 280x.
Yes, but two problems with that... the 280x cards are expensive and hard to find, and the microstutter when running on 3 monitors has not been solved by AMD yet.
They did solve it in hardware on the 290/290x cards, so crossfiring those would have been fine, but the 7970/280x cards still have microstutter and it is annoying.
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Im fairly certain the actual drivers are NOT .NET. The interface might be, but Id hazard that the actual drivers are C, C++, or assembly. like 99% of the drivers out there.
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I left ATI (now acquired by AMD) 9 years ago. And just the other day, I find their drivers are still written in .NET.
Hahhhahhaaa... drivers written in .NET, sure... :D
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He means their Control Panel integration.
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Regardless, I don't think any subset of a driver package should be written in .NET or an language that requires a co-dependency with a framework separate from the underlaying OS it runs on.
FWIW, .NET has been a part of the OS (not removable by any supported means) since Vista.
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Yea, ok, it is... a bit... :)
People spend money on funny things, I've posted here before what I drive and where I live, so, well, this isn't the end of the world. Hopefully I get 2 to 3 years of good gaming out of these cards.
Frankly, I would have been happy crossfiring a second 7970 (or 280x) with my current card, if the prices ha
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A trio of 30" monitors just to play a video game isn't insane enough?
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A trio of 30" monitors just to play a video game isn't insane enough?
No, not really... :)
A have a friend who is serious into bicycles, he has single bicycles that cost over $2K and has over $10K worth in his garage.
We each have our hobbies...
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You guys have nothing, I mean nothing, on people who do 'recreational' boating.
If you look at the etymology of the word 'boat' you'll find all sorts of silly things. It's simply an acronym:
Bring On Another Thousand.
$1400? I sneeze on your three digit gizmo.
Don't worry (Score:3, Insightful)
When the bubble bursts, cheap cards will be available in large numbers. And the bubble will burst, even Bitcoin is subject to economic rules and historically demonstrated facts. Its very volatility shows that its value has no basis in reality.
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I don't dispute that. And if you have disposable income to use here and understand what the nature of the game is, that is fine.
The problem is that many, many people do not get that this is how the game is rigged, and for them it becomes a non-classical Pyramid scam. Sure, stupidity has its cost, but this is not mere stupidity. It is people all over the Internet deliberately lying about the nature of Bitcoin, in the hopes of attracting more suckers so their payout will be larger. As in a classical pyramid-s
Make mining useful (Score:5, Insightful)
When will a *coin virtual currency make calculations useful for science? I can't help but feel this whole thing is total a waste of energy.
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When will a *coin virtual currency make calculations useful for science? I can't help but feel this whole thing is total a waste of energy.
There already is, Timekoin is the most efficient digital currency out there, any spare CPU time can be used for a whole range of science research from any number of old servers given new life.
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There's PrimeCoin where the miners generate prime numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin [wikipedia.org]
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Alternate cryptocurrencies (Score:2)
As I understand it, the supply of maximum number of Bitcoin is limited, which is supposed to preserve the value, much as the limit on the amount of available gold, and the cost of mining additional gold, preserves its value. But aren't there an unlimited possible number of cryptocurrencies like Litecoin?
In the world of metals, by analogy, it would be as if there were a limited supply of silver and gold, but a new precious metal (with its own limited supply) could be created at any time. Would metals then
Big sales of your product are a bad thing? Really? (Score:2)
However, concerns are being raised that this is a temporary boom that may hurt AMD in the long run, since gamers, their core consumer group, may not be able to acquire the cards and instead opt for Nvidia
Concerns? Sounds like concern trolling to me. Since when is it a bad thing that your products are so popular that you can barely keep them on the shelf, and they're selling well above MSRP? Most vendors would kill to attain that level of popularity. It's not just due to short supply, either – the Ta
Re:Lol@fads. (Score:5, Informative)
I bought into Litecoin at under $5 with some hobby money some months ago and it's hanging out at $30. I cashed out my original investment (leaving several times that in Litecoin, yay profit), bought ten Radeon cards and some cheap motherboards with the money, threw together some Debian USB sticks in an evening and am now mining on P2Pool for shits and giggles.
In a few weeks the equipment will have paid for itself, even accounting for the insane difficulty increases. Power is cheap here, so I will do pretty well for a while yet. Bonus: the rigs run hot so I'm basically making a little money heating my house.
You can laugh all you want. I'm having a blast, I've made a tidy profit, I have a bunch of new toys to play with, and if Litecoin ever does go ballistic like Bitcoin did I won't be left on the sidelines like you will. Don't really care about the likelihood of *coins taking over the world, or whatever - there is money to be made and I'm happy to make it.
It's a fun hobby. Honestly, it's play money to me and I've multiplied it several times. Not complaining. More fun than hitting the casino like some people I know, even if it's gambling all the same.
Re:Lol@fads. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why I think Bitcoin will collapse. Or perhaps, "should". There are quite a few with high percentage of all the money, one with at least 20%.
Sooner or later some of them are going to dump. Getting $1'000'000 for "nothing" is very tempting.
Later, much later, the gullible are going to understand they were ripped of, several times. Then, again it might be so that they never understand as they see Bitcoin as "mathematically proven" money missing the problems entirely.
I hope you have luck. I just cannot do the same for ethical & moral reasons. Damn, parents!
Lol@posturing (Score:2)
It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair. I make no claims about Litecoin as an investment. I make my own decisions, other people can do the same.
As for mining - I am paid for verifying transactions on the network. That's honest work.
I really don't understand why you think participating in a marketplace is immoral. So there are some whales out there with big balances... So what? They didn't set Bitcoin's value. If you've been watching the exchanges recently, you somet
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My moral prohibits me from taking advantage of the buyer, no matter whether I "misrepresent" the goods or not.
If I have the knowledge that something is not as valuable as the price is, due to reasons the buyer does not understand, I just skip it. I will not sell a lemon car even if the buyer does not have the mechanical knowledge to find out it is lemon.
Hey, those values I share! The only difference between us is that I don't believe accepting market value for anything, from wool socks to XBoxes, is "taking advantage of the buyer." When I sell a coin, I get $30, my buyer gets 1 LTC, and both parties are happy. If that's taking advantage of someone, I hope you don't work anywhere that sells a product - that might comprimise your morals! So much cognitive dissonance.
I don't have any knowledge that LTC or BTC are somehow flawed. I know how they work, but peop
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It would be a bit dumb to whoever has 20% of the coin to just dump it. He would loose a huge amount of money that way.
What would happen - assuming that person had an average or above average IQ - is that he will start selling it's bitcoins slowly.
At the moment, if you sell 1000 BTC in MtGox over the course of a day (so, 20 BTC per hour), the impact in the price is minimal, so that person could cash out 1 million dollars per day without affecting the price considerably./b>
Re:Lol@fads. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that's the right attitude to have. You know it's a bunch of people buying an investment (not a currency), hoping it will appreciate so that they can cash out once it hits a high enough price point.
Bitcoin/Litecoin is an (irrational) investment, not a currency.
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All crypto currency needs to become a real currency is a government to declare it legal tender for all debts public and private. Then it would be just as valid as paper money with one major exception - it's extremely difficult to counterfeit.
And governments might do it, despite that limitation (from the point of view of the central banks, it's a limitation...), because it has an offsetting benefit of being traceable.
I'm really not sure what to root for, either. Un-counterfeitable money would be a great wa
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I bought into Litecoin at under $5 with some hobby money some months ago and it's hanging out at $30. I cashed out my original investment (leaving several times that in Litecoin, yay profit), bought ten Radeon cards and some cheap motherboards with the money, threw together some Debian USB sticks in an evening and am now mining on P2Pool for shits and giggles.
In a few weeks the equipment will have paid for itself, even accounting for the insane difficulty increases. Power is cheap here, so I will do pretty well for a while yet. Bonus: the rigs run hot so I'm basically making a little money heating my house.
You can laugh all you want. I'm having a blast, I've made a tidy profit, I have a bunch of new toys to play with, and if Litecoin ever does go ballistic like Bitcoin did I won't be left on the sidelines like you will. Don't really care about the likelihood of *coins taking over the world, or whatever - there is money to be made and I'm happy to make it.
It's a fun hobby. Honestly, it's play money to me and I've multiplied it several times. Not complaining. More fun than hitting the casino like some people I know, even if it's gambling all the same.
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ [paulocoelhoblog.com]
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village...
One might argue that verifying Bitcoins is less meaningful a computation than contributing to a BOINC project. That said, yes, you do get money out of the one but not the other. But lets look at what you gained. You bought goods that before you didn't have a need for, and you now have a hobby that fills some of your spare time, which is partly technology and partly, as you put it, gambling.
No thanks, I'd rather spend my spare time thi
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How do you turn those coins into money? All the online credit card things accepted by mtgrox or something like that look like russian scam sites.
You trade them on an exchange, like vircurex.com or others. You send your coins into the exchange and trade them for bitcoins (or litecoins if the exchange does that).
Now you take your bitcoins to some place like localbitcoins.com and find someone willing to send you $$$ for them. You find a buyer on the site, for me I find someone that'll do cash deposits into my bank, once you post the sell your bitcoins go into escrow. The buyer then confirms they can do the trade, at which point your bitcoin gets lo
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Why would you need to kite [wiktionary.org] a coin? It's not like it would know how to nuke you with an AOE.
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These are just get rich quick scheme that only benefits the early adopters, it's too late for anyone to just join in and actually make it rich.
Make it rich, no.
Buy a new shiny video card and recoup its cost is totally doable, though.
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A lot of people are. We saw what looked like some crazy flash-in-the-pan project. By the time we realised this might actually be worth taking seriously, it was already too late to make the mega-bucks.
I've looked at it, but by the time I did it was already at the point where GPU mining was barely covering the cost of power. ASICs still turn a profit, but that's a big investment in something that might well collapse any day now. It's a bubble, everyone knows it, and when it bursts it'll burst fast.
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Is it also too late to invest in tulip bulbs? [wikipedia.org]
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Who cares about the absolute value of any particular coin? What matters is the ratio of its value to mining difficulty - i.e. how much $$$ you can mine per day. CoinWarz maintains a list [coinwarz.com], and there are mining pools now which automatically switch coins based on which one is the most profitable currently (and immediately exchange them for BTC at the end of the round).
Is the pound better than the euro? (Score:2)
Who cares about the absolute value of any particular coin?
Anyopne speculating with them, I guess. And anyone using it as a payment system.
So is the U.S. dollar a hundred times "better" than the yen in some sense? Is the euro "better" than the dollar because 1 EUR is worth more than 1 USD? Is the pound "better" than the euro because 1 GBP is worth more than 1 EUR? What really matters to the users of a currency is the rate of change in exchange rates between two currencies over time, or between a currency and goods and services over time.
Absolute vs. relative value (Score:2)
And if I don't know the absolute value of the bitcoins in euros
I don't see how that's an absolute value. The value of bitcoins relative to euros is 1 BTC = 649.50 EUR as of today, but the "absolute" value of 1 BTC depends on how you define the "absolute" value of the goods that 649.50 EUR will buy you.
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Anyone speculating with them, I guess.
Anyone speculating only cares about percentage increases. If what I have is $1k, it doesn't matter if I buy 10 coins with it or 1000; it only matters that the amount I buy, I can later sell for $2k.
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only if you are retarded, Dell server 3KW psu is about $40 on ebay.