Bitcoin Forum

Currently at 1508590.. set to jump to estimated 1731286 in 15 blocks according to bitcoin charts.  If I do my math right, that's about a 15% increase.

Yup, it is going to be biggest increase since June:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed.png

 - http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed.png

 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc&authkey=CMrV-rYE

interesting to view it like that, thanks

I wonder if bitsingles are responsible for it...

Highly doubt 2000-2500 BFL singles are operating.

it's official...

1,733,208

And if you've seen the BFL waiting list, you know its gonna get much higher, very quickly.

If thats the case, more reason to hold every single BTC earned right now.

Much more likely is that Mystery miner, or some botnet got bip16 coded right and is back in business.

think about it, if there were thousands of machines that needed to be updated it would be a slow increment as they were updated and rebooted by owners or whatever. It wouldn't magically all come online at once.

Just keep in mind that Bitcoin price isn't effected by mining, it is affected by investment.

Its just like stocks or any other commodity, how many people want it vs how many are selling it. If everyone stopped selling the value would go up as long as demand could stand the price and the holders could wait out speculating for a higher profit. Likewise, if the price jumped drastically so many would sell that the market would get flooded and the price would drop.

We'll probably see another difficulty drop after this.  A large jump like this will definitely push more GPU miners out of the game... and along with it, summer heat too!

Makes me wonder if it might make economical sense to turn your mining rig off for every other retarget cycle.  Turn it off when target goes up so next retarget it does down. Then turn rig on and you get more blocks per time and better profit margin. Clearly only workable if you have a sizable chunk of the total hash power.

No.  Even if you were 30% of global hashing power it wouldn't make sense.
So you turn off rig - revenue = 0x
Difficulty falls 30%
Turn on rig - revenue = 1.42x
Difficulty rises 30%.
Repeat

Over four weeks (two difficulty periods) weeks you earn 1.42x the revenue of a normal difficulty period.  vs staying online for the two difficulty periods  you would earn 2x.  It would only make sense if electricity is >60%+ of your gross revenue and if it is you shouldn't be mining anways.  

However if people want to do that I will change my answer to "Yes"*




* I am not going to argue with people helping to drop the difficulty for me.  :)

Why shouldn't you be mining if > 60% of your gross revenue is electricity?  As long as < 100% of your gross revenue is electricity, it still makes sense to mine in my book...

Well if you consider your time, equipment and risk worth nothing then mine until your non-electrical margins are <1%. :)  I value my time and I know my existing hardware has value.  If someone with cheaper electricity can unlock more value from that hardware the optimum solution would be to sell the hardware to them right?

Ok, fair enough.  ;)

And if you've seen the BFL WAITING list, you know it's gonna get much higher, very slooooowly*.

*Fixed

nope, just botnets.

I know ppl throw botnets around alot on the forum, but is there any actually proof? anyone bother did forensic search?

I cant imagine all the botnets happend to have GPUs (high end ones), last time i look CPU mining is utterly low .

Did anyone do a "forensic search"? With no ill intent, do you have any idea what you're talking about?

He/She may be ESL?

you mean someone with Extra Special Linguistics?

I obviously meant digital forensic investigation.


Maybe this is why this forum is full of FUDs.

dont let me DDOS you man.
I'm deep in street, i DDOS for fun yo!

We're not disputing the meaning of the term, the last time I checked. And FUD is not a singular noun, you don't add an s. ;)

So whats your disputing?
Being a grammar police doesnt help jack.

so let me ask, do you have any idea of what you're talking about?

What am I disputing, not what's I disputing, and "police" is plural, not singular. Correcting your grammar may not endear me to you, but it will help your English grade.

I am disputing the claim you made in the post I quoted:


Doing a "forensic search", since it seems to be something you're quite the expert on, is not a trivial task, nor is it without risk. Even assuming someone wished to conduct such a search, the existence of a botnet is not necessarily easy to prove. I do not agree with many of the threads you term FUD in these forums, but some of them are based off information indicating a likely botnet. If a botnet got to the point where one could consider it's existence "proved" without a reasonable doubt, chances are we would be inable to do anything about it. Proactive concern is not always productive, but it's far better than the alternative.

bullshiet, your intention of correcting my grammar was clear : to belittle someone in an argument. What you've done so far was to show English isnt my mother tongue. Jackass.




Requesting more details of a claim somehow turns into "being quite the expert" ? Or was that your ill brain to pick on someone?

I love the " without ill intent" part.

Maybe English is native to you, but frankly your brain isnt as wonderful as you hoped it to be. Botnets always exist because the nature of the term. But saying the hashrate increase is due to botnets is what i'm troubling to see. My post clearly hinted why? CPU mining isnt fast. You're suspecting there are hundreds thousands of bitcoin botnets.

With no ill intent, you must have a sad life.

I'm not trying to be mean, nor am I insulting your language. Call me whatever you want, I'm trying to help you here. I understand I come off as a total jerk, making grammar suggestions in long, complicated, extremely polite sentences just takes too long. Apologies for any offense caused.


That was rude and unnecessary, I apologize.

I'm glad you appreciate my meager attempt to be polite. Obviously I needed to up the ante a bit.

I'm not sure how the discussion turned to my brain, but I agree, I certainly wish I had an eidetic memory, which alas I do not. And I don't see where I stated anything about "hundreds of thousands" of Bitcoin botnets. By all means please argue with me, but I'd prefer you don't misquote me.

My brain, then my life. You switch topics rather quickly. I find my life rather enjoyable, but you can consider it whatever you want to. That's not really relevant, though.






[/quote]

So was my poor English.... You knew it , understood it. I love now you talk about how things are not relevant.

I dont think i misquote you. My logical thinking tells me if you're disputing my claim, then you're implying otherwise. Dont play political talk. I guess you can say " i never said such thing".. ::)

 

I was not insulting your English, I was trying to help you. Of course it is irrelevant, it wasn't intended to be relevant.

As for misquoting me, I invite you to find where I said anything about "hundreds of thousands" of Bitcoin botnets, or where you stated that there were not "hundreds of thousands" of Bitcoin botnets and I disagreed with you.

But this is beside the point. I disagreed with your claim and I'm glad to debate it. I don't wish to spend my time arguing over what I did and didn't say. You can insult me, accuse me, and compare me with politicians all you want. If you consider me an idiot and interpret all of what I say according to that, nothing I could do or say will change that, ergo continuing this discussion is pointless for both of us.

Good, to set the record one last time. Dont bother to apologize next time when you pull this.

Now as for the "disagreement", i dont have to explicitly say how many bitcoin botnets there are. Anyone who agrees bitcoin botnets are the cause of this difficulty increase could easily estimate how many bitcoin botnets required. You're just too busy teaching English to someone on the internet to see it.

 

Assuming at least a GH per botnet, a "hundred thousand botnets" would equate to 100 TH, about 7 times the current speed of the entire network.

Just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I'm wrong. It might mean I simply did the math. ;)

You sure did your math,.................. as well as how you did your reading


Yes 1 GH/s per botnet is a rational way to debate this.

I'm done. I cant argue with you there. You can sleep now,

I think what seriouscoin is trying to say is that in order to see the difficulty increases we've been seeing, there would need to be a hundred thousand PCs inside one single botnet. 

Of course those PCs would only be capable of ~2-5MH/s so a hundred thousand of them would be 200-500 GH/s.

STFU AND STOP BITCHING.

Jeez man..

A hundred thousand PCs is perfectly reasonable. A hundred thousand botnets, not so much. Thanks for clarifying though, I suspect that might be what he meant, though I'm not entirely sure.

Nah uh,,....

Someone with superior intelligence thinks 1GHs / botnet is more reasonable.

Why do i always see retards making a solid case for himself.


To clarify, each botnet is a payload on individual machine. Thats how i understand a botnet. In distributed computing, you can say its a node but its not technically correct to say a distributed network a botnet.

Making a botnet is trivial, inserting such payload on a machine is not. Therefore, its not reasonable to think there are hundred thousands of botnets.

My theory is simple, there are more investors in mining business. Big miners will just get bigger. They can estimate well the cashflow. Ppl who say its botnets are in denial.

You done bitching?

nope,  ::)

The payload is the virus on the machine, the botnet is the collective whole of all infected machines. "Bot" is short for "robot" and "net" means "network" - i.e., a network of robots.

I stand corrected regarding the term. Having hundreds thousands of infected machines is reasonable to anyone?

Sure.  There are botnets with millions of computers in them.
http://www.damballa.com/downloads/r_pubs/Damballa_2010_Top_10_Botnets_Report.pdf

Yes. 

What makes you think that.  The vast majority of those (by hashing power) already existed prior to the bond being issued.

Not to mention that the rest are sitting on a wait for the BFL to get their shipping time down and deliver the units.

Of course. There's just a world of difference between a few hundred thousand infected machines and a few hundred thousand botnets. In any case, I'm glad we now understand each other.

Most modern CPU's have a hashing power of 10 MH/s to 66 MH/s.
See Column 3, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#CPUs.2FAPUs

4x Opteron 6174 - 115 MH/s
Phenom II X4 810 - 11.5 MH/s
Core 2 Quad Q9650 - 18.67 MH/s
Core i5 2500K - 20.6 MH/s
Xeon E7450 (quad) - 60 MH/s

From the numbers above it doesn't look like the botnet would need to be 100K strong, just 70K at 18.67 MH/s.
Koobface and TDL were in the 1 million range each, I think. For actual figures on botnet sizes you can check Damballa or Threat Expert.

You forget that most people don't have modern CPU's.  ;)

Not exactly sure how future delivery of hashing equipment has caused the difficulty to already rise ???

+1.  I remember is the last article I read the botnet they took down was roughly 80%+ Windows XP machines.  Given XP hasn't been sold for 4 year most of those machines are at least 4-8 years old.   Try looking up the hashing power of a Pentium IV or Core 2 CPU.  Also anyone hanging on to a 6 year old machine is unlikely to be someone who buys cutting edge gear.   So a lot more likely to see celerons and lower clocked P4s than Extreme Edition chips

Very reasonable. You can buy them.

To add on top of that, most people who are enthusiasts that buy the latest and greatest computing gear often know how to keep malware off of their computers.

I actually think it's a shame that difficulty has increased this much for relatively so few miners. As I said in my cgminer thread, the original vision of bitcoin mining was that anyone who wanted to use bitcoin could also contribute a few spare hashes to make the network more secure and gain a few bit cents along the way. The fact that it is getting harder every day to justify throwing any computing power to make those few bit cents and it is becoming the domain of "professional setups" is far from that original vision. I know human nature will tend to concentrate on the profit side of things and they will always try to find a way of increasing said profit, but it's still a shame.

I don't think that's a shame at all.  My $0.02.

I think it's an inevitable byproduct of the evolution of Bitcoin from tech gimmick to serious currency. While it may signal the death of the former, it's certainly beneficial for the latter. Bittersweet, in my opinion.

It's fine for me, as it's basically competition, and only miners with great efficiency or low power cost will survive. (0.01$/KWh here).

Where do you get power so cheap? That's a quarter of the lowest I've ever seen.

Venezuela. Gasoline is 0.1$/gal, diesel even cheaper.

Thanks, that's quite useful information. Sounds like an excellent place for a mining operation.

*moves to Venezuela*

The country also routinely seizes private property for the "common good".  It would be the last place I would consider for a mining operation.   Hell it would be the last place I would consider a hotdog cart. 

"Sorry BinaryMage, the people of Venezuala are better served by directly managing your server farm.  These documents transfer ownership of your buildings, computing hardware, software, records, bank accounts, and wallets to the people of Venezuela.   Feel happy knowing that your contribution will make the country a better place for all its citizens.  These Police Officers will provide you escort to the airport, your visa has been revoked".

There is a reason why economic growth in Venezuala is essentially flat lined while the majority of the continent is enjoying massive GDP growth.

Well, that certainly changes things quite a bit. Seemed a little odd. Thanks D&T for enlightening me.

Not odd when you consider the country is highly socialist

http://www.usbcnews.com/socialism-throttles-investment-in-venezuela.html

and Hugo Chavez has such gems as:


and


:)

I was referring to the low rates and lack of economy as odd, not the governmental stance. I'm no expert in Venezuelan politics. (obviously)

Well the two are linked.  The govt seizes wealth and then uses some of the "profit" to subsidize energy and fuel prices in an attempt to bolster the economy.   

Still be plenty of peeps mining with free power, or who use the waste heat to heat their homes. 

Also I think there will be small miners who are converting electricity into bitcoins, its still a pita to convert small amounts of fiat into BTC, if you just need a lil bit and have a decent gpu, its easier to just mine it even if the power costs the same or slightly more then the value of the BTC.

Speaking of Hugo Chavez:

Will he be re-elected?
 - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=302

Will he even be president by the time the election comes around?
 - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=332

Looks like we're going to get a difficulty drop again here shortly...

Socialist it may be,  some perspective never hurts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/10/venezuela-economics

This demonizing of Chavez is getting a bit old. Id rather live in Venezuela than Colombia.

I would rather live in Brazil (or 95% of Latin America) than Venezuala.  Colombia is a casualty of the failed war on drugs.  Still I would pick Belize over all of them.

Did you find the article funny? When "only" having 21% inflation, the 4th highest murder rate in the world, and positive but significantly lower GDP growth than its Latin American peers are the "positives" well it kinda feels like the author is reaching.

That doesn't even get into the moral issue.  Even if you "could" improve the common good by seizing the wealth of others through the use/threat of violence is it moral/ethical?  I would say no, the ends never justify the means.

And back on topic the drop looks to be significant.

Avg time between blocks since the last change has been >11.5 minutes and this site is predicting a 15% drop.
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Probably a combination of GPU miners being kicked out due to difficulty vs price getting too high, and summer heat causing people to turn off miners for the summer.

I look at the charts more than anything else to predict the next difficulty.  Seems like the difficulty predictions are always way off unless the difficulty changeover is near.  But looking at the graph, it is easy to see where the average MH/s lies, and where the expected difficulty will be on the next changeover.

But apparently don't feel the same way about the companies that accumulated that wealth by their corrupt practices that lead to them getting it in the first place, to the determent of the people/countries they operate in.