Bitcoin Forum

This is bullshit, why the hell isn't bitcoin following the basic laws of supply and demand ?

What the hell is going on with the hashrate ? It can't be FPGA's yet and why the hell would people be throwing money at GPU's right now?

just weird.

Botnets / mysterminer, not much more makes sense at this time.

my 24h earning just drop from 40 to 35€cent, it's ok.

Because the demand is driven by speculation and not driven by the desire to purchase goods/services.  Thus, the price of Bitcoin currently functions largely as a product of psychology and not much else, though this is slowly changing.

Also, I realize difficulty doesn't effect supply as the same amount of coins are always created until reward halving occurs.

Just saying this can be a hell of a squeeze for miners.

... butterfly / largecoin testing the rigs?

a lot of singles getting turned on?

lower electricity cost means they can sell cheaper to try and get rid of the GPU miners to get more coins for themselves...

I find it just a bit coincidental that when BIP16 came out about 1.5-2TH got removed from the network and then the same amount reappeared a while later which bumped the difficulty up to where it is now.

I suspect its the same user(s) who returned.

Agreed.  I think about 25% of mining is botnets. 

Supply: 7,200 BTC/day
Mt.Gox Daily Volume: Normally around 50k/day (30 day volume of 1,570,000)

Supply has very little to do with the price.

Price is determined by bitcoins actually being used for something, i.e. trading with it, and the perceived value by doing so along with speculation about its relative worth. Mining has zero effect on the value of bitcoins themself, but mining difficulty tends to slowly lag behind and parallel value since there is a point where people still find it profitable. As the bitcoin miners get more and more elaborate and professional about their operations, it gets harder and harder for the amateur miner to make a profit and will one day be impossible for anything but the hard hitters. Unfortunately for these hard hitters, making mining less and less profitable is not going to make bitcoins more valuable.

If miners decide to go long with their coin because they feel current exchange rates won't provide enough profit, then supply could be affected. Probably marginally, even if all miners go long, but there could still be a significant effect if a more people join the economy and demand rises.

I still think most miners are mining to mine and dump with no long term outlook/prospect.

It is following them. But the thing is, miners have little to do with supply and nothing to do with demand.

Dark operators of botnets leeching off of Bitcoin only promotes the need for legit miners to short their coins to recoup costs at higher difficulties.

Get rid of botnets.

Easier said then done, I'm afraid.

Obviously we've found a way. Tweak the protocol every so often to throw the bot nets off and make it hard for them to adapt the changes to the zombie network, they'll give up eventually .

That would suck since looking at the BIP16 change that caused a ton of headaches for over a week on multiple pools.

It will take care of itself…as more and more mining starts to be done with specialized hardware (that is much more efficient than GPUs), botnets will become irrelevant (they might still be operated, but they'll quickly diminish in terms of their percentage of mining activity).

They aren't leeching. They secure the network just like everyone else, and are paid for it by the network... just like everyone else.

To be fair, they're more likely not to sell their coins, because they have no costs to recoup (unlike your friendly neighbourhood BFL miner).

LOL. They steal hardware resources and money paid for energy bills, but they're nice, because they secure the network! Let more botnets live and increase difficulty up to 1000%, its good for bitcoin anyway! So the whole network will be driven by botnets. It is good, isn't it?

You would think that competing botnets would want to eliminate their competition so they would get more bitcoin.

I couldn't give a shit less about idiots who a) let their computer get infected in the firstplace, and b) don't notice the bump in CPU/GPU usage.
The higher the difficulty, the happier I am. Even if the entire network is eventually driven by botnets, and that's a big if, because it assumes that coins are extremely worthless, which assumes that terry's missed a huge opportunity to gobble up some cheap coins. Even if, it's several botnets, so a 51% attack is unlikely.

They're doing it in process already, real miners are filtering out. Anyway, botnets owners getting cash for free, so they don't care about competition.

So, you don't believe in success of Bitcoin? What will happen when reward halves and price will continue to drop. Even FPGA's won't help. No matter how effective they will be, botnets cannot be beaten in efficiency anyway. Probability of death of Bitcoin is never been so high. The only thing which keep the price not to fall below zero is Silk Road.

Are you really this stupid? The only thing they do is cost everyone money. They are a threat to the network themselves. I hope they hijack your pc for being so ignorant.

We pay just as much to your average miner for the exact same service. I don't give a shit who it is.

"Are you really this stupid?"

Nice, someone who doesn't appear to know about network security preaching about ignorance.

The fact is, it does indeed add to network security, because a higher difficulty means it is harder to attack the bitcoin ecosystem, whether by 51% attacks, finney attacks, and so forth. And furthermore, there are individual users here (many of them, in fact) that have significantly more than just 13-20 ghash/s under their belt, no botnet needed.

As I said, I don't care who secures the network, as long as it's done. Botmasters have found a way that is extremely cost-effective - good for them!

Honest miners keeping network secure for Silkroad criminals, what an irony! Basically miners helping criminals to kill somebody, they have blood on their hands too. Botnets will be perfect pair for SL for sure. Bitcoin may finally go to hell.

Are you abandoning your (useless) argument about mining and trying another angle with this Silk Road shit?

No, I'm just trolling out of boredom. Actually, I would like to break all bones of botnets owners, that would be a real pleasure.

QFT

I don't care when they are securing the network with others' power and CPU/GPU time, but I draw the line at selling identities.

They don't do the same as regular miners. They only add to the hashrate, they don't even have a copy of the block chain... If the price drops, people turn there rigs off, botnets stay on. How secure are we when the price hits 5 cents and some botnet controls 70% of the hashrate?

any ways to get botnets off the network ?

They are working on it, there have a been a few ideas. Requiring miners to have a copy of the blockchain has came up. Only the programmers can figure out the best method. I don't think its even clear yet if there are bot nets mining.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81356.0
 Can't be more obvious.

Would you rather have the network secured by those with a more vested interest, i.e. those who own hardware and have considerable expenses. 

Or would you rather have a large percentage of the network security provided by botnets that have less vested interest and are vulnerable to disappearing or large hash capacity reductions due to being discovered and cleaned.

Co-opting botnets for increased network security is a justification or rationalization.  Whether this rationalization is truly healthy for Bitcoin is the question that requires the most consideration.

Or to put this another way.  If you could have owners vs. botnets and get the same amount of network security which would you choose?

Don't care? 

This is a valid point, but it's not as instantaneous as you make it sound. Most botnets are gaining more nodes than they lose, and these situations happen only when there is some kind of large campaign by the security companies. The difficulty may drop, but it wouldn't be nearly as high without the botnets in the first place, because they can operate at zero cost to the owner.

I think we will see a "rotation" or a "shift" of miners when the difficulty goes up.

The new and more efficient miners will push the less efficient/profitable miners out of the market. The difficulty will probably keep going up slowly, but this effect should keep it in check somewhat.

oh, the people that mine for a loss will drive the profitable miners out of the market?  surely you arent talking about those $500 FPGAs

i'd rather get pushed out by the hordes of zombified computers

I mine with FPGA's and I live where the electricity is dirt cheap. My FPGA's should pay themselves off in a few months, I am VERY far from mining at a loss.

I imagine others like me will push out people mining with GPUs where the electricity is costly. I can keep mining at a profit with a high difficulty/low price, botnets and other FPGA miners permitting.

How much do you pay for electricity?
 Wondering what is lifecycle of fpgas. 2 years, even lesser maybe? Warranty for BFL Singles is just 6 months, a fucking joke. Hope it will not die a bit later after it'll end.

I pay about 0.05 $ CAD (canadian dollars) per kWh.

I pay about 0.05 $ CAD (canadian dollars) per kWh.
[/quote]

Which city are you in?

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Although I have only one 5850 it is quite profitable here in Austin, Texas too.

Electricity is CHEAP $0.0355/KWh

Even with current difficulty levels I have a pretty reasonable profit. (Around 80% efficiency)

$0.35 or $0.035? 35 cents per kwh is EXPENSIVE, not cheap.

EDIT: I see your edit now. Yes that is a very good price.

$0.06/KWh here near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. :(

Still a huge profit margin even on that price, no need to stress just yet :)

I pay .0208/KWh in the northwest. The heat from gpu's is the biggest issue around here.

I am limited by the maximum power available to use electrically and then dissipate thermally. This is also my main logistical limitation.

I'm near Pgh, PA as well.. and paying .07.  What provider are you using?

M

What I do is just put the rig in the garage, open the back door and let the heat flow outside, while still protecting the rig from the elements.

what's the collective thought on liquid cooling to deal with the heat? figured i'd ask here, since you're discussing heat...

I can't speak for the collective, but I can speak for myself.

Liquid cooling will obviously keep your cards cooler.

However, I think you'll still have the same amount of heat, it just might be easier to manage it.  That is, instead of the cards warming up more and blowing how air all over the place, you'll have a radiator of sorts to dissipate the heat from the water. 

And there's the added expense to going liquid cooling.  And the risk of something going wrong and frying a bunch of components.  Unless you submerge the whole thing in non conductive oil. :)

My .1 BTC worth.

M

yea... reason i said liquid instead of water. no way am i using something that conducts electricity like that...

i'll look into it more. thanks.

I think many miners mine to hoard.

I see a lot of shit hitting ...the stove apprently  ;D, calm down guys. Back to the topic. Ok, difficulty and price are not 100% correlated!!! Stop whining and make some decent web sites offering products for bitcoins and maybe invest into bitcoin ATMs

I don't thing your number are right. I calculated from one year electricity bill and paid CAN 0.08$ /kWh

The official rates are confusing but it's higher than 0.05$

http://www.hydroquebec.com/residentiel/tarif-residentiel.html

If you live in Canada open a spa with a sauna and use the heat from a mass GPU mining op to heat it. Make money in 2 ways  ;D