Open Source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL Stack Adds Bitcoin Mining 140
hypnosec writes "The open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has been modified to support Bitcoin mining through the use of mining application 'bfgminer.' To mine Bitcoins using the open source GPU driver, one must use Tom Stellard's non-stock branches of Mesa, LLVM and libclc OpenCL library. Further, bfgminer must be patched as well. Once the patches are applied and modified code of the stack is used, users will be able to mine Bitcoins using the Radeon HD 5000 and Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards; however the cards have to be pre-HD6900 Cayman in case of the HD 6000 series."
Will increased exposure make the market rational? (Score:3)
Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
Competition for commodities drives the market price down to near cost in a rational market. I wonder if increased competition will do that to this market as more and more way to mine get distributed. I doubt it though, but time will pop the bubble anyway.
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Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
The supply is limited, so you can't just produce more.
doubt it though, but time will pop the bubble anyway.
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
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So they are all mined out?
Then what are the big miners doing with all those ASICs?
You can still mine Bitcoins, so they should not ever cost more than it costs to mine another one.
The bubble is the absurdly high price vs the cost to mine/create one.
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So they are all mined out?
Won't happen: the supply rate decreases over time and approaches but does not reach zero.
The bubble is the absurdly high price vs the cost to mine/create one.
How much is the cost? It's gone up a lot. You have to buy either a stack of cards (expensive) and a lot of electricity, an FPGA (hugely expensive) and a moderate amount of electricity or an ASIC (if you can even find one) and a small amount of electricity.
If I wanted to purchase something in bitcoins, the easiest thing to do,
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How much is the cost? It's gone up a lot. You have to buy either a stack of cards (expensive) and a lot of electricity, an FPGA (hugely expensive) and a moderate amount of electricity or an ASIC (if you can even find one) and a small amount of electricity.
You can also build a particle collider and turn lead into gold, but that doesn't raise the price of gold to a few billion dollars per ounce. The cost that matters is the cost of people's effort to get a Bitcoin. If people are actively hoarding Bitcoins, the price rises until a cheaper long-run investment is to buy the mining equipment. If people are selling off Bitcoins, then the cost that matters is what they're selling them for.
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Yes, but the cost of mining one right now is what exactly? It is likely a 100 times less than what they are selling for. Which means in a rational market if I wanted a bitcoin I would either mine it myself or hire someone to do so. That would depress the price because my need was met at so much a lower price.
That is how rational markets for commodities work.
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If this was true we would not have just seen a $100 drop.
The current price of coins is held up by people hoarding them. When they unload the price will drop like it did today.
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If this was true we would not have just seen a $100 drop.
We haven't seen a $100 drop. We've seen a bubble caused by speculators inflate the price by about $150 over the course of about 3 weeks, and a correction back to a figure closer to the long term average value. See this chart [bitcoincharts.com]. The line at the bottom is the 200-day average value, which is basically a lagging indicator of the actual value once all the short-term fluctuations have been taken out. It has barely budged; it certainly hasn't dropped at any point recently.
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Or demand finds an equivalent good.
Bitcoins don't seem to have any good unique properties.
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I would imagine their choice to use scrypt. Which personally makes it better, but it sure will piss off the ASIC miners.
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Simply because Bitcoin was the first to get major market mind share. It is like the million dollar home page -- this was someones home page which had a 1000 x 1000 grid of pixels, and he was selling them for $1 each (effectively selling advertising space on his home page). But since it had gained a lot of exposure it was worth the $1 per pixel, whereas no one else could pull the same trick a second time (since they would have the mind share).
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But he can't even pull that trick again.
At some point the trick of bitcoins will suffer the same fate.
Now you would not use his home page, just setup your own site for advertising. All the bitcoin alternatives will likely do the same thing to bitcoin.
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The supply is limited, so you can't just produce more.
The system has a limit built in, yes, but production is not meant to completly cease for quite some time still. It will simply get exponentially harder, which will increase the bitcoin actual, objective worth (which is currently far, far below its going price).
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy.
Plenty of people perform illegal transactions. Extremely few, from an eco
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It will simply get exponentially harder, which will increase the bitcoin actual, objective worth
Does that not sound like a pyramid scheme to you?
The people on the ground floor get rich, everybody else does a lot of work for practically zero return.
Then there's the manipulability of the 'price' of bitcoins. All it takes is a story on the web to crash the price (see story earlier today), then another story will bring them right back up again - there's no regulation so insider trading carries no penalty! Does that sound like somebody, somewhere might be ripping people off? It sure sounds like it to me.
Th
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No, it doesn't sound like a pyramid scheme at all.
Newcomers aren't paying anything to existing members, there's no downline or referral type scheme, and there's no recruitment requirements.
It's more like someone who bought into a tech stock early. They had the foresight/luck to be an early adopter and are now being rewarded for it.
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It will simply get exponentially harder, which will increase the bitcoin actual, objective worth
Does that not sound like a pyramid scheme to you?
No, actually that sounds like the *opposite* of a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes get exponentially harder to find new buyers for because the good they sell, membership of the scheme, becomes exponentially easier to acquire as the scheme grows, causing a crash of value of the memberships over time. Bitcoin becomes exponentially harder to acquire new coins over time, which should cause an increase in value. Or to put it another way: the problem with pyramid schemes is that they have no limit to their grow
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> What bubble?
"Those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them."
http://www.activemanagersresource.com/images/TI/anatomy-of-a-bubble.png [activemana...source.com]
--
"EVERY civilization eventually collapses."
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“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein
Re:Will increased exposure make the market rationa (Score:4, Interesting)
What bubble? Plenty of people performed transactions for houses in 2006 and went away happy. How was that a bubble?
What bubble? Plenty of people performed transactions of dot-com stocks up through early 2010 and went away happy. How was that a bubble?
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Hey, people love tulip bulbs. They will never not love tulip bulbs.
Re:Will increased exposure make the market rationa (Score:5, Interesting)
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
People bought and sold houses during the housing bubble, and used dot-com companies every day in the dot-com bubble. Use has little to do whith being a bubble or not. The notion of a "bubble" is where the price of a commodity far exceeds its actual value. Yes, this can even apply to foreign currency like bitcoins. People are buying bitcoins more as an investment than for actual trade, so the price climbs higher, making everybody happy.
Then something happens. A few more big thefts, or a flaw in the protocol is discovered, or an economic externality makes people sell off just a few coins at less-than-market price, so they're sure to sell quickly. Other investors see the price fall, and they worry about the bubble starting to burst, so they sell quick, too... and that makes the price drop more, and the cycle repeats, sending the price crashing back to a price on par with its actual value.
The problem is that Bitcoins have very little intrinsic value. The value of national currencies is based on the stability ogf the government backing it, ultimately reflecting the currency's use for paying taxes and other government charges. Bitcoin isn't backed by a government, though, and even the prices for day-to-day trade are effectively just national currencies with an exchange rate and transaction fees applied. When the bubble finally bursts, Bitcoins' value will hover around the cost of the electricity & equipment to mine them, so investors can write off the purchase as a slight loss or slight profit.
Like all bubbles, there are some get-rich-quick millionaires who made a fortune getting in early, but their money will effectively come at the expense of those who come in later, buying the bitcoins they're selling off. Someone's always left holding the bag.
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Someone suggested Bitcoins should be called Dunning-Krugerands given the sort of people who think "investing" in this scam is a great idea.
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You don't have to be a professional economist to recognize that a "currency" that collapses and loses half its value in the space of minutes is a bad investment.
Shrug. I said a few weeks ago that the value of bitcoin seemed to be approximately correct at about $70-$80. If it's been higher in the interim, that's just because some speculators made bad purchase decisions. Chart... [bitcoincharts.com] looks to me like the current value is about right and the recent highs were a bubble. I'd wait a little to see if the price drops further before making a buy decision, but now doesn't look like a good time to sell. Bubbles happen, but don't affect the validity of the underlying instrumen
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When the bubble finally bursts, Bitcoins' value will hover around the cost of the electricity & equipment to mine them, so investors can write off the purchase as a slight loss or slight profit.
- disclosure (if you need it), from my point of view gold is the real money, not US dollars, not Bitcoins, not Euros, not any fiat.
however
I disagree with your premise that Bitcoins have no intrinsic value (just like I disagree with the notion that gold doesn't have intrinsic value, it obviously does or that the US dollar has intrinsic value, it obviously does not)
Bitcoins do have intrinsic value, which is tied to the value of the Internet or generally networking and being able to pass information around co
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Someone's always left holding the bag.
Maybe, but if the bag is small enough then it doesn't matter.
Imagine that there was only a single Zimbabwe dollar bill. The way people trade is to move that single dollar bill round very very very fast. $1e9 trades have been made but when it suddenly loses all its value, the person at the end was holding a $1 bag, and they've lost a tiny bit.
My point is what matters is how much bitcoin is used for trading versus how much is used for investment (i.e. hoarding).
If bitcoi
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Bitcoin's exchange rate against the USD has no bearing on its utility as a token of exchange.
With fast enough exchanges and sufficient enough liquidity ("enough" being the key word) the total amount of Bitcoins in circulation doesn't even have a large impact on trade volume. Bitcoins don't get consumed in the process of trading.
Th
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"Energy is the currency of the future." --CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
A currency based on something solid, pretty much impossible to fake, and hard to get confused about. Compare that to national currencies base on different people's varying fuzzy perceptions of the stability of the issuing
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>> The problem is that Bitcoins have very little intrinsic value. The value of national currencies is based on the stability ogf the government backing it, ultimately reflecting the currency's use for paying taxes and other government charges.
There is no intrinsic value to any fiat currency (except maybe as a fuel to burn). The value of national currencies is NOT based on the stability of the government, it is based on supply and demand for the unit of currency. People want dollars because they are
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Bitcoin will not succeed until it's pegged to OPEC oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock [wikipedia.org]
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The price can easily go far higher than the cost to mine. Consider gold. It costs well under $1000 for a large-scale mine to produce an ounce of gold, but because people are willing to pay a high price (hovering around $1500/oz) to get it now, the price is higher. It's the same with Bitcoins. People want them now, so the price risees. What keeps the bubble going is hype, making people want to get coins as quickly as possible, before the price rises even further.
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Until someone decides to sell, then the bubble pops.
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I mean value that won't diminish over time. As long as the US government accepts taxes at a certain rate with the dollar, the dollar will have some use. There's a reason to keep some dollars on hand. This is the intrinsic worth of any currency: The promise that if you accept it, you'll be able to spend it again later for something equitable. All currency is just an intermediate step in bartering. I sell my skilled labor today for my dinner next week, but in the middle I get a paycheck.
Bitcoins, though, have
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Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
The value of bitcoins has ranged between $25 and $250 within the last month. How is that not a bubble?
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Dollars/Euros/Rand in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
Lesson: A medium of exchange (aka currency) is NOT necessarily a commodity.
Scarcity of the commodity vs. demand for the commodity drives the market price up or down in a rational market. I wonder if increased competition will do that to this market as more and more way to mine get distributed. I doubt it though, but time will pop the bub
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No those are currencies, not commodities.
You cannot right now produce legal USD or Euro. You can produce bitcoins though. Once all the bitcoins are mined then you will be right, but for now there is no scarcity at all.
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Semantics. The coins do not exist in the market until the mining is done.
There are far more people who want USD or Euros, nor does anyone do fractional reserve banking with bitcoins.
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Semantics. The coins do not exist in the market until the mining is done.
Not semantics. You can't produce bitcoins because there is nothing you or I can do that will change the number of bitcoins that exist in the long term. Sure, we could acquire a huge number of ASICs and start mining, and we'd likely accumulate a huge pile of them. But all this will do is move them out of the hands of others who would have acquired them, the total number of bitcoins generated will remain the same as if we had taken no action at all. Therefore we didn't produce anything, we just moved stuf
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but for now there is no scarcity at all.
Then why don't you just drum up a few hundred thousand bitcoins and sell them? You'll be bloody rich, AND you will have the pleasure of crashing BitCoin market and show everyone how right you are and how wrong they were.
From here [wikipedia.org]:
Currently, 25 bitcoins are generated every 10 minutes. This will be halved to 12.5 BTC within the year 2017 and halved continuously every 4 years after until a hard-limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached within the year 2140.
To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.
So the supply is rather fixed globally. If the demand is higher than the supply, there will be scarcity, and prices will rise. They might bounce up and down while the market adjusts, but as long as the demand is higher the average price will rise, until it's high enough that the de
The market is rational (Score:2)
Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
They are probably mined as much as is economical to do. The main sign that this is happening is that mining without the latest generation of GPU is uneconomical. Any short term speculation that drives the price higher just makes it a better deal to mine more.
At the other end it's easy to imagine a situation where bitcoins aren't useful enough to be worth mining and the price drops below the cost to make them. As long as they're convenient for illegal transactions this won't happen.
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You mean like US $20 bills, which cost 7.5 cents each to print? Or more like pennies (worth 2.5 cents of copper) or nickels (worth 7 cents of copper)?
Though ironically enough, as an unregulated market, Bitcoins do have a value near their production cost, as measured in electricity. As the difficulty goes up, people switch to more energy efficient mining techniques (from CPU to GPU to ASIC) or quit
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Go try and make your own $20 bills.
Bitcoins now consume $100+ of electricity to make?
That only makes me think worse of them.
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Bitcoins now consume $100+ of electricity to make?
No, the energy cost is about 20c. But the investment in hardware required to get them at that price is about $2500 and would need to be ammortized into your calculations of costs over a reasonably short period (as the viable lifespan of that hardware can probably be measured in months at this point of time).
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Also:
Go try and make your own $20 bills.
Go try and make your own bitcoins. You can't: the network makes them at a predictable and (over the long term) fixed rate, and gives them as a reward to users who provide a particular service to the network. You can do all the mining you want, but it won't cause a bitcoin to be created that would not otherwise have been created anyway.
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So if all mining stopped right now, new bitcoins will still be made? Who gets them if no one is mining?
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"Mining" a block just means taking the previous block's hash, adding a few fields to it and signing it with a new hash low enough to qualify at the required difficulty level.
It sounds somewhat misleading to say that the network will still "make" blocks in the absence of mining - More accurately, the network uses the difficulty parameter to target ten minutes as the average block creation time. Until
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There is an article on the USA Today site regarding Bitcoin, what it is, and today's crash. USA Today is about as mainstream of coverage as you're going to get, so I would expect other mainstream newsources' articles and reports to be similar.
I read its tone as implying a $10 per bitcoin value (or less) as the norm with the recent spike attributed to horders and speculators that are purchasing coins. That article also mentions a boom/bust in 2011. However it also makes the case that the increasing difficult
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According to your view of the world Picasso's paintings should all cost, oh, about $500 bucks. All 1983 Bordeauxs should cost about $7. All circa 2006 mansions in las vegas built for $1MM (now selling for $500k), should always sell for $1MM. You need to take econ 101. Actually, just about everything in your post is incorrect.
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These are not resources that would be used on SETI if bitcoins did not exist.
What would solve that is SETIcoins.
Woops (Score:2)
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/10/bitcoin-prices-crash-over-100/ [venturebeat.com]
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What was the price three weeks ago? Three months?
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Unless you got in in the last 10 days or so, you're probably still looking good. Though it remains to be seen what happens when MtGox reopens in a couple of hours.
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And now?
Re:still won't compete with ASICS (Score:4, Insightful)
That's where the power consumption trade-off is best.
Well, at least this useless craze is adding more economic drivers for power-efficient compute
power, but I think we already had plenty of those drivers.
Otherwise it's kind of dispiriting to see the continued drain of computing and intellectual resources
by the financial sector, be it bitcoin using CPU cycles better used for medicine/science
or very smart people and advanced equipment chasing dollars in HF trading shops.
Sigh.
When you spend more time keeping core than you do playing, the game is broken.
ASICs may have caused the crash (Score:2)
Incidentally, I just realized how space based solar power could transfer the energy down to Earth. Just mine bitcoins in space, transfer them down and buy the electricity here.
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Except they try to maintain the rate of payouts by scaling the difficulty. The more people mine, the more difficult mining becomes.
In other words, it's an arms race. If you have better miners than your peers, you can grab a bigger slice of the pie. But once everyone has the same equipment, you're back where you started (and out a lot of money on gear).
On the other hand, anyone not able to afford specialized hardware will be pushed out of the mining game. The rumor mill is already pointing suggesting Litecoi
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But this is somewhat by design. More hashing power means a healthier Bitcoin network. The point of the mining reward is not to be egalitarian in distributing new bitcoins but rather to encourage the networking effects that are needed.
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Transaction fees.
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There has been an expectation that dirt cheap ASICs would drive down the price once the work units to produce a bitcoin were adjusted for them. Personally I think there has been some monkey buisness going on here as shipping of them supposedly began in November-December of 2012. A $150 ASIC box is reported to produce 100x as much as a dedicated Videocard. Did that value get adjusted today? Finally?
IMO, the current value of a bitcoin has nothing to do with the cost to produce it or it would be in the $10-20
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IMO, the current value of a bitcoin has nothing to do with the cost to produce it or it would be in the $10-20 range, and that would still be a profit for the majority of people that mined them.
Plugging in the numbers, the 7750, which is the most energy efficient of the GPUs listed, needs a $25 price to break even if the hardware is free. That assumes a $0.15/kWh energy price, so if the majority has electricity in the 7-12 cents/kWh range you might be right.
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Yeah I assume that a GPU miner is running an existing machine on off hours use (free) and my benchmark kWh is just what they charge me when I use more than normal, 9.5 per kWh over 400kWh and 11.5 per kWh over 800kWh.
I did what you did last time a bitcoin topic came up, same calculator.
I'd note however that I found a HardOCP review from summer of 2011, that estimated things a bit lower (~10% lower) than the calculator gave. TTAYW.
In any case I don't see the problem with trying to mine a few bucks with idle
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Move to Europe. Then your government will subsidise you to install solar cells on your roof that provide essentially free energy (modulo not getting the premium for selling back to the network, which is less than 7c/kWh).
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A $150 ASIC box is reported to produce 100x as much as a dedicated Videocard
Where are these mythical cheap ASICs? I don't see anyone selling them for short of $1300.
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https://products.butterflylabs.com/ [butterflylabs.com]
Though I'd note it looks like they raised the price of their cheapest unit. It's US$274 now for a 5000MH/S unit.
Money laundering (Score:2)
That's Cayman as in Cayman Islands, right?
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Then you use the fglrx driver that is packaged in ubuntu and ppa:bitcoin/ppa
The news is news because Gallium3D is open source. I do not know if this means that GPU mining with ATI cards on FreeBSD is possible now, but I would speculate that yes, it is.
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does this mean that my $50 Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 can mine bitcoins and blocks and stuff? it will probably take weeks or months to find a block though. lol
Solo mining has a very little chance to work out, so join a mining "pool". Solo mining is like winning the lottery: 25 BTC paid out every 10 minutes to a lucky guy while everyone else on the planet gets nothing for that round, IIRC. With pools you get paid BTC fractions calculated based on your work in the pool. When you hear "bitcoin" you're talking about milli and micro amounts.
You quickly get used to the oddly small fractions: 0.00011935 BTC per block processed despite hitting a reasonable 90 Mhash/s.
Any
Does it work without a dekstop? (Score:3)
I didn't look, don't know if they addressed it. I setup a miner a while back (should have kept it going...damn). What really took the most time setting it up, was that I didn't know it couldn't be done without a desktop running!
If I build a compute node, the last thing I want on it is a desktop. I don't want to have to login and start up the program....I want it to run on a headless box, and start from init.d or whatever the kids are using after I chase them off my lawn.
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I am not 100% sure about this, but you can usually trick those programs that want to connect to a display using xvfb.
It might not work. I use this trick to do headless capybara-webkit testing. Worst case scenario, you need to launch a real X-server with a display. You should not need a monitor (I could be wrong about this too), but you do need to fool the graphics card into letting you access its hardware for OpenCL purposes.
Editor.sh (Score:5, Insightful)
for submission in ${submissions[@]}; do
if [ ! -z `echo $submission | grep -i "Bitcoin"` ]; then
post $submission;
fi
done
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Please make standard-compliant shell-scripts, use #!/bin/sh
Something in freetard-land is standard? Oh please, do tell. Which standard? Who has to follow the standard? If no one has to follow it, then it's not a standard. Freetard fail.
All standards are optional. By your logic, there are no standards.
In this particular case of using a hash-bang with /bin/sh, I don't know of any actual written standard, but it's pretty well-known for the sake of portability (and POSIX defines the shell language for sh, not bash).
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for s in ${subs[@]}; do
[[ $s != *bitcoin* ]] && post "$s"
done
MH/s? (Score:2)
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Try it and see, will not likely cost you more than a couple dollars in lost mining revenue.
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With two 5830's in XFire I can hash at 520 MH/s, will this increase that?
Before I dumped all my hardware and got out of the mining business, I was getting 300MH/s from each of my 5830s in non cross-fire mode. I had one card that could run solid at 330MH/s, but the others became flakey at anything over 305 or so. Try slightly overclocking?
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Wasteful (Score:3)
I wonder how many megatons of CO2 will be put into the atmostphere due to people mining bitcoins by the time it's no longer profitable.
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Irrelevant, the amount of bitcoins are independent of the effort spent to find them. Even if it did, it would still be irrelevant because increasing the supply of currency does not increase the supply of real goods, as the Spanish learned while colonizing South America.
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Processing new blocks will still be profitable because of the built-in "transaction fee" mechanism. Miners in the year 2100 may simply refuse to include transactions that don't have a fee of 0.000001 BTC, for example. At which point, there will be so many of them, that itself could be profitable. The profit is then not the fact that you minted 1 BTC, but the fact that you collected all the fees in the transaction block.
yawn (Score:2)
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For someone to short there has to not only be a robust market, but also a person (or people) taking equal and opposite long positions you can borrow from.
Do any of the trusted and established exchanges offer shorts?
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Why Bitcoins will Fail (and not what you think) (Score:1)
Bitcoins won't fail due to a bubble. Maybe not even a hack. They will fail for basically the same reason any fledgling currency of any new country fails: instability. And you're seeing it now -- a pizza that cost once 10k bitcoins now costs 1/15th of one. These are MASSIVE stability swings. There is no stability. The buying power of a bitcoin is, and as far as I can tell, will always be, subject to huge swings. Why? Because there is no mechanism by which supply can ever be calibrated to demand. The