Cheaper than what? What parts would you use? Can the problem be reduced to simpler hardware? Is that your question?


On one page they describe a project that costs $175.  But I think they all use a spartan chip.

I too was wondering if the problem can be solved by 200 $0.50 chips or something like that.

I haven't seen a page that shows the hardware depreciation also as a function of POW difficulty increase over time.
I will have to ask the taxman if I can start a business, buy mining hardware and use conventional depreciation as allowed currently (U.S.) to write-off the hardware costs and also increase the rate of depreciation due to POW difficulty increasing.

If difficulty doubles than that hardware does half the work all of the sudden and the investment goes into the toilet.

All good points. But how many reCaptchas occur per day? Google could also use page hits to google as well. But this is parallel to my idea to use a separate captcha to mine BTC.  Let's call it caBTCha.

Will try to dig out some more info.

Didn't know that, so will google be sending us all tax forms for the work we provided? I'm not sure what the tax implications are but they must have to include all reCaptcha work time submitted and file that with their taxes.  I didn't volunteer so some other contract law comes into play. I'll have to consult the tax man. I'm thinking on the lines of a 1099 in U.S. Surely google are aware of this already. I would settle for BTC I guess.

As you may already know reCaptcha uses that info you provide to correct scanned books/documents. You do the work for free. Those documents will
eventually drive traffic to them. I heard they may start paying in BTC for work submitted. Does anyone know more?

I would like to make a captcha that helps to solve a hash.  I'm not sure if it will work yet.

If a govt did mine all remaining (or most remaining) what would happen? Would it be the end? Would the BTC price go up? Probably an old topic but I'm new to BTC.  Would the price go up and then the govt would dump their lot onto the market to wipe it out? Maybe they don't want to reveal what they are capable of doing so they don't?  Maybe it's not signficant to govts. I'm still having doubts that BTC is legit. BTC smells funny to me. Could all mining actually be solving some other unforseen problem?

But that's only the computers they tell us about. You don't really think they'd tell us all their secrets, do you?

Yep, thanks, have read those links, I will presume that the folks putting together the FPGA miners have found the optimal solution. But I am curious how far and wide they have looked.  There must be some novel approaches to still be considered as well.

I've looked at some of the FPGA miners available and am curious to know how to determine if an FPGA is well suited to mining.
What characteristics make an FPGA suitable or not?

Everywhere you look there's risk. If it's too risky for you back away.

But think about what would happen if govt's decided to put all their processing power to mining bitcoins.
Maybe they will bring a quantum computer to the problem and overnight own all remaining bitcoins. Would that end the age of bitcoin?
Or start a new age?
Let's say they get a huge proportion, then what? Do they sit on them? Then what?

Maybe bitcoin is a govt. psyop.  Where's the original developer these days? Maybe the govt. is mining something else while everyone thinks they are mining bitcoins? But what could they be mining?  Maybe they just want to give people a reason to buy hardware? Or maybe they want to know
what's possible, collectively, by the masses.

If bitcoins worried them they would have done something by now. Right? The govt. has huge processing power at their disposal and cost doesn't ever seem to be an issue for them. So they could have done something by now. Maybe bitcoin is a proof of concept for something else? Is it something good or something evil?