Bitcoin Forum

Of all the facets of Bitcoin, the one I've had the least experience with is mining. The fact that miners have an incentive to discourage other miners is not lost on me. I suppose I just took anecdotes as I heard them (I'm sure you've heard of so and so who would have been better off financially in the short term if they had just bought their BTC rather than mined it). Thing is, mining is the most distributed and fair way to get Bitcoins, the majority of which haven't been issued, into the hands of of the masses. There's a reason it's such a central part of Satoshi's introduction of Bitcoin into the world.

There are millions upon millions of people with video cards that would give them a fair shot at mining.

Now, let's imagine just one million 200MH/s gpus came online. That would be an additional 200 TH/s added to the network bringing the total to 212 TH/s. After the difficulty adjusted, each 200MH/s user would be awarded with 0.0068 BTC/day. At today's exchange rate($5), this is worth about $0.03. Do you think all those people would sell what is effectively $0.50-$1 worth of work for $0.03? I bet they would hold it until they could trade it for something just as valuable as what they put in.

If this is true - if people will value something for what they put into it rather than what someone else is willing to pay - the main challenge becomes convincing gamers to keep their GPUs on, generating Internet freedom currency while their games sleep.

What do you think? Is the mining cartel keeping Bitcoin down? Is it too big a leap of faith to think gamers might generate and hold their BTC? Should power bill increases be celebrated instead of feared?

While I'm at it...in the US there is a deeply held belief in consumer culture that many problems can be solved through purchase. Can economic problems be solved by purchasing mining hardware and electricity to run it?

-weex

The biggest threat to BTC as I see it is non-GPU miners.

For me, the main attraction of BTC was that I could mine it myself. I could literally "generate" money with my own computer.

And so could anyone else with a half decent computer. Thus it was easy for people to obtain bitcoins, and then spend them.

Once the FPGAs take over, squeezing out the GPU miners, the only effective way to obtain BTCs will be by buying them with cash, which is hard to convince people to do.

EDIT: What I'm getting at is that a huge attraction of bitcoin is the ability for just about anyone who want's to to mine it. Once you have to start paying cash to obtain them, they lose a lot of their convenience.

No, they would just stop mining and sell their rigs. This would in turn cause the difficulty to decrease, and the remaining miners make more money. Difficulty adjustment will always cause the cost of bitcoin mining to (on average) be equal to the value of the bitcoins mined.

There is no mining cartel. Anyone who wants to mine can do so.

Nobody's going to generate and hold bitcoins if the power bill increase is drastically more than the value of their bitcoins. They might be willing to mine at a slight loss for various reasons, but if the losses are substantial enough, they're just going to quit.

Not directly. It is good for Bitcoin, though whether Bitcoin solves economic problems is a whole 'nother story.

---

Are you serious? The whole point of Bitcoin is that nobody can generate it out of thin air (since that would cause its value to drop to nothing), instead it requires substantial computer power to do so. The fact that people without substantial computer power cannot generate bitcoins is not a "threat", in fact it is the main source of its value. Think about it: why would a merchant accept Bitcoins if he could easily generate some on his computer?

There's no problem if FPGAs take over (in fact it's a good thing, because it reduces the energy requirements of securing the Bitcoin network), because there's a free market for FPGA hardware and software. Anyone who wants to mine with an FPGA can go out and buy one for a fair price. No problem.

We're already seeing Quad FPGA chips on a single board for $1k and other designs with expandable daughterboards etc similarly priced for the number of chips and total hashing power. And they will have to compete with each other for customers thus lowering the price of FPGAs. Then we'll see some custom FGPA multicore processor maybe with 4, 8, or maybe 4096 FPGAs all in a single chip. And then maybe the first quantum computer that can be used to solve sha256 will get purposed for Bitcoin mining. And every increment of overall tech performance will push up the difficulty, and force people who want to keep being competitive at mining to upgrade their hardware, and the network will end up more secured as a result.

And even when quantum computers are mining, and the difficulty is 1 billion, there will always be some poor noob mining away on his Pentium 4 in his mother's basement, hoping to strike it rich. ;D

What I'm hearing is don't mine and that I expected. My question is setting aside any self-interest to profit from mining, does it make sense for as many people as possible to be encouraged to mine? I mean even small amount of BTC in many people's hands would be a good thing for adoption, no?

Nope. When you get right down to it, mining is a business: you verify transactions and secure the network, and you get paid for providing this service. Since the barrier to entry is practically nonexistant, it is an extremely competitive business, and anyone who can't mine efficiently is just not going to make a profit from it. The incentive structure in Bitcoin is designed to encourage people to mine as efficiently as possible, since this provides the maximum security for the network. That's what mining is all about: you get paid to secure the network. Do a better job of securing the network, and get you paid more. There is not, and will never be, any incentive for people to mine inefficiently, since that doesn't help anything.

Strictly speaking, more hashes/second means greater security for the network. It's about honest miners owning more hashing power than any attacker. Cost doesn't figure into it except as a term in the difficulty feedback equation.

I don't get your point.  
The 100 Mhashes of some inefficient GPU miner are indistinguishable to the network from some random 100 Mhashes belonging to a monster mining farm.
Mathematically - every hash adds to the security.

The 100Mh inefficient miner's 'incentive' may be that they only need a trickle of BTC anyway, are not worried about the electricity consumed, and have no means/desire to buy on exchanges. They are still contributing to the overall hashpower as I understand it.

More efficient mining produces more hashes for a given amount of energy. Nobody says "I'm going to mine at X MHash/s, regardless of how much power it takes", they say "I can spare X kilowatts, how many MHash/s can I get from that?" There is a clear incentive for people to mine efficiently, which is good, because there is only so much energy available to secure the network, so more efficiency = more security.

Yes, they are contributing hashing power, but they are consuming a disproportionate amount of electrical power, of which only a finite amount exists in the world, and somebody at some point has to pay for that electricity one way or another. People should not be encouraged to use electricity inefficiently. That's just wasteful and stupid.

Um, it's enormously inconvenient and pretty costly compared to buying them outright to acquire any significant amount of bitcoins (more than, say, 10) by mining them these days.  You're right that FPGAs are a threat to bitcoin, but not in the way you think.  As FPGAs and botnet miners take over the network the price is going to plummet.  Why?  Because FPGA and botnet miners have much lower operating costs and can tolerate selling for lower prices and they'll essentially compete with each other to sell their bitcoins, creating a race to the bottom.  You might be tempted to get all giddy at the prospect of buying "cheap" coins, but the falling price will generate more bad press for bitcoin, thus pushing further away the sorts of people this project needs - regular people.  As people will be less inclined to participate in bitcoin, because they see a history of falling prices since it's received most of its public attention, demand will continue to wane even as supply continues to increase; and, as I've said, most of that new supply will be going into the hands of FPGA and botnet miners who can afford to race each other off a cliff.

Interesting point of view.  You don't think that serious investors would buy anyway and that everything would equalize?  I mean, the reward halving in December coupled with falling prices would mean that it wouldn't take a whole lot of cash to buy the equivalent of an entire day/week of block rewards.

To me, it seems that in most plausible scenarios where a Bitcoin price drop seems likely there exists plausible counter-scenarios to create balance within the economy.

The rise in difficulty from the increased hashing power will reduce the number of bitcoins per gigahash, keeping the price stable.

Bitcoin has a balance that must be achieved within a range almost continuously for long-term success. One is to increase hashing power quickly enough to thwart any attackers by the time they see it as a threat. The other is to get enough people using it to support that hashing power.

The hashing power is straightforward to measure. Adoption is harder...I for one would like to see more people use it and it just makes sense to me that GPU mining remains an untapped resource. Again, there are MILLIONS of people with GPUs that idle most of the time. Give those people just a trickle of BTC through something they've actively done(simple download and setup) and they become real users of Bitcoin.

Well, over the past year bitcoin difficulty has risen from increased hasing power and that has reduced the number of bitcoins per gigahash...

No, I don't think that serious investors would buy anyway.  Buy anyway?  Why would they buy if the the price momentum is downward?  The reward halving, IMO, further compounds the problem I've described.  Unless the price doubles when the reward halves, lots of miners are going to take a serious hit to their profit margin.  This will be especially true for GPU miners, whose operating costs are higher.  Botnet and FPGA/ASIC miners will, of course, take the same hit, but as their operating costs are lower, they'll be apt to stay in the game longer; but as I've already described will end up competing with each other to sell their coins to cover their operating costs and attempt to profit.  This will drive the price down.  That the price will continue down will in all likelihood scare off the newcomers the project needs.  The project is significantly more robust and the infrastructure significantly more secure, yet demand hasn't increased over last year.  The best explanation for why demand has been so weak is because of all the shit that happened last year, and that apparently continues to happen, and because the price has been in decline for so long.

The best thing for bitcion is for these "regular people" to be able to mine bitcoins themselves. The introduction of FPGAs takes the mining power away from "regular people" and puts into into the hands of the few that operate FPGA farms.

As for the falling price due to lower power consumed/coin mined, I hope the block split this December alleviates some of that.

The time for regular people to mine for themselves is long, long past; and as I just described the block reward halving in December isn't going to rescue bitcoin, if anything it's going to make the problem worse by pushing out all but those with the lowest operating costs - i.e. FPGA/ASIC and botnet miners.  If the price keeps falling after that, then the only ones who'll be able to keep the network afloat will be kids using their parents' "free" electricity and botnet miners.

At this point in time in order to make any serious BTC/USD from Bitcoin mining you have to maximize MH/w efficiency and MH/$ efficiency. You'll also have to invest in more than just a casual gaming computer if you plan on buying anything, be it USD or goods, solely from the BTC you mine.

Any place there is a profit to be made people will find a way to make it work. With the profits that miners can achieve now, aggressively pursuing a greater share of the networking throughput makes perfect sense. So long as you keep your MH/w and MH/$ efficiencies on par or higher than the average then you will come ahead in the rat race. Rat race isn't a completely accurate term, it is more a "keeping up with the Joneses" situation. A few thousand dollars, invested in the right hardware, will return a few thousand dollars within a year. Those types of margins make mining very attractive at this point in time. After the reward drop that may not be the case but I guarantee the difficulty and price will eventually stabilize to where miners are making a slight profit.

The time for the gamer to earn any significant amount of BTC by mining when not gaming with their GPUs was between the first GPU miner and before the spike to $30USD/BTC. After that spike the difficulty increase effectively pushed out single GPU miners as the network grew to 10+ TH/s. Who knows what is going to happen in the coming months with many miners aggressively switching over to FPGAs with MH/w efficiencies of 10:1 and higher.

When you invest a lot of USD in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin tanks, you will lose a lot of money.  Thus, if you have a significant amount of money already invested, you will have an incentive to reinvest.  Why did people 'buy anyway' on the way down from $33?  Why did they buy at $12?  Why did they buy at $10?  At $8?   At $4?  At $2?

Let's say you buy 1 oz. of gold at $1600.  Then the price drops to $1400.  So, you buy 1 more oz. of gold.  That way, all it would take for you to break even on your investment (instead of being down $200) is the price going back up to $1500.

This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

The impact will be extra hashpower to the network and an increased difficulty. This will benefit the network overall. The only gamer GPUs that will be profitable for their operators will be newer AMD chips cards. All other gamers will get puny rewards in comparison (unless, the system unfairly rewards inefficient GPUs ... but then AMD chip owners would do better to just run guiminer and connect to a pool). The effect of hundreds of thousands of new people trying to cash out bitcoins will be more contact points with outsiders getting their first taste of bitcoin. Anyone who takes the effort to understand how to cash out via an exchange will have no problem doing so and there will be no effect on the market because whatever bitcoins they mined that they are now going to sell would have just been mined and put up for sale by someone else (ie: existing miners) anyway.

So overall, more hashing power, more people using bitcoin = win.

Likelihood = Low.

Impact = Look at most of 2011.

You're welcome.

This is true, but hinges on the assumption that you can convince gamers that it's a good idea to mine bitcoins even when the value of the bitcoins mined is nowhere near enough to cover the increased electricity costs, as is usually the case with a machine not specifically designed for bitcoin mining. This is why the thread turned into a discussion on mining profitability. If mining with gaming machines is not only unprofitable, but causes people to actually lose significant amounts of money through electricity costs, then nobody is going to do it, simple as that.

First of all, Valve would never do this, but IF they build in a BTC miner into their steam client that ran on low priority while you weren't gaming, and stopped when you fired up a 3D intensive program, then they let you buy games/hats/etc with your balance, that would catapult BitCoin into the stratosphere.

Actually, if I were Valve and I controlled the Steam client, I wouldn't mention BTC at all (bad for bitcoin), I'd rename the miner something like "The Piston". It would run as described, when the user isn't in a 3D application, and it would mine BTC for me, while the user would earn "PSI" points, equivalent to 10 PSI per $ or something, they could then spend those on select digital goods that cost me next to nothing to make (hats n stuff).

The electricity bill would piss some people off, but imagine having the whole Steam community mining for you like a huge farm...  ;D