zero scaling ability USB hubs vs. PCIe splitters... just look up the prices! Ethernet or USB (2.0 or 3.0) would be the way to go for sure (with Ethernet, you could do PoE and USB also allows electricity transport...) As least USB 2.0 is limited to 2.5 Watts (5V, 500mA) I think USB 3.0 may have a high current mode, but am not sure. Power over Ethernet is limited to about 15 watts (48V, 350mA). In the FPGA thread they are talking 8 watts per chip. While less than the ~200Watts drawn by the GPU miners, it is still significant enough to kill the scalability you cite. |
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My strategy is to buy bitcoin this year, then possibly invest in mining/general-purpose hardware to protect the network in about a year. I plan on wasting about 12Watts on (intermittent laptop) mining this year (currently burning closer to 100 using desktop CPU mining). By the end of the year, I may even investing in panels and batteries to run 12Watts exclusively from solar power  I guess my point is, you can choose how much you "waste" on mining with no expected return. Note that my CPU miner strengthens the network, even if it never processes any blocks. With (currently) 70 connections, it relays transaction announcements and block history to other nodes. |
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How would you audit a project like that for security? If enough miners adopted the same ASIC, a >50% hashing power problem could present itself. It seems you'd have to trust the vendor.
The problem is deeper than you realize. Modern computers are inherently insecure, and since at least 1996 software has been designed to work against the user. In the past decade, more and more hardware has been designed to work against the user as well. Even if you trust Intel and AMD not to add a back-door that phones home for instructions upon seeing a specific 256bit number, do you trust the Chinese (or American) government not to tamper with the design and manufacture of those components? Even if such tampering can be found, it can likely be explained away as an oversight or design defect; especially if the mechanism is subtle. Currently, no computer manufacturer will absolutely guarantee their systems will work as advertised. With GPUs, the full specs are not even publicly available. Building trusted, proven correct computers will likely take generations (like 150 years). If a computer is proven to implement a certain specification, you can sue if any "bugs" are found: since the design is 'proven correct', any 'bug' must be deliberate sabotage. |
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I would recommend solo mining. Think of it being like buying lottery tickets  |
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I am pretty sure you have some money to replace two breakers if you can afford 2x5870...
Um, the breakers are supposed to trip before the wires catch fire. |
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- Based upon the Push Pool and Simplecoin open source mining software - thank you to their developers!
- 50% of our profit purchases trees through Trees For Our Future - a 501(c)3 non profit.
- 50% of our profit purchases rainforest land through the World Land Trust - a 501(c)3 non profit.
- As we begin purchasing trees and land, we will provide receipts and other documentation here and on our site as proof.
I think you should make it more clear in the original post how much of the pool profit goes to running the servers. I realize you plan to "eat" the initial cost. Somebody asked about donations mentioned in the simple coin interface. Should those be ear-marked for running the servers? |
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Will this be enough [bandwidth] - or does this thing really need TRUE Gigabit hardwire capability?
If you have to ask that question, I am jealous of you Internet connection. Yanz is probably correct: you likely want some kind of wired connection if possible, but the speed is not critical. |
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#!/bin/sh
./bitcoin -gen -datadir=/path/to/datastorage
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The point is that there is no motive for it. Someone who has that much control over the network received it from willful participants. This same person is also making hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a day. Why would he give that up just to ruin himself?
There doesn't need to be a motive. Even an honest node can send money to an invalid address in the event of a hardware failure. Are the DeepBit servers using more expensive ECC memory to guard against such corruption? Is the DeepBit server a mainframe that does every calculation twice; checking for errors? The decentralized design means that honest nodes check each other's numbers. This can not happen if more than half the hashing power is turned over to a single entity, honest or not. |
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If you want to generate, you need to use the "-gen" command-line option.
It has been decided that mining should be de-emphasised for the average user.
With the dangerous concentration of mining with the deepbit mining pool, I have been personally been convinced the average user should still mine at 1-5% of CPU time. I don't think the client supports this.
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I would not boot from a live CD for mining unless you are sure the Optical drive maintains the disk below its maximum storage temperature of about 40C. Solid-state like a USB stick is better, but often does not have the advantage of being read-only.
Disclaimer: Posting from a live CD doing test mining. The degradation of the disk takes months in my experience.
PS: I don't trust "SD cards" at the moment because they include CPRM with device revocation. Don't want that to happen to your wallet.dat! I have to research what exactly happens when the card or reader is revoked.
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Keep in mind that the base unit (1 shatoshi or 0.00000001 BTC) is 10 nanocoins. It makes no sense to talk about 1 nanobitcoin. Talking about 10-990 nanobitcoins would be engineering notation.
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Hey Americans, how is the metrification of your country going? I saw that you already accepted some prefixes, like using $4k to mean $4000. What about some of the other prefixes like M (Mega, 1'000'000) and m (milli, 1/1'000'000)? Do you think that the average American Internet user will be able to cope with those?
Since nobody caught the 3 orders of magnitude error, I will say "No." |
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Reading that article I kept thinking: But... Bitcion is not a virtual currency; it is a real currency you can use to buy real goods. Of course, something may have gotten lost in the translation/summarizing. The definition of a virtual currency appears to be tautological. A virtual currency is a currency that can only be bought at a fixed exchange rate, and can only exchanged for virtual goods. As such, it is illegal to use such a "Virtual currency" to buy real goods. I can't read the original Chinese, but those rules may not apply to bitcoin because the exchange rate floats, and there is no single issuer that only accepts it in exchange for virtual goods. Obviously if you are living in china, you will want to look at the regulations more carefully than I just did. |
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Hashing power dropping in half is not a sign of a healthy network. If Bitcoin is still around in a year, I plan on investing in hardware that will only be used to mine in response to a drop in the network hash rate (most the time, it would be used for other things, or even sit idle). If I write a nice script, other people may do the same thing Edit: SomeoneWeird, difficulty takes 2 weeks to adjust. |
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Try calculating per-month solo mining.
Edit: when I estimated mining would stabilize with 50,000 distinct entities, I assumed the average entity would be willing to wait a year on average for a pay-out, not an hour...
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Those coins you sold for less than a buck probably convinced enough people that bitcoin was a real currency to raise the value.
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Yeh, figured you wouldnt understand. You have little/no knowledge of currency history or the workings of economics, that is what is starting to make me discount the underlying theories of BTC completely. No sound future contingencies or appreciation of the past 5000 years of what happens to fiat currency or the technicalities of its workings. If you divide up the pie, yes, there is the same amount of pie. My contention is that the pie can be divided INFINITELY. Why not just move the decimal .0000000000000000000000? or maybe
.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
Then there are so many BTC that they devalue based on supply demand curve. Have you not watched whats happening to the dollar? Read the zimbabwe story, and you will probably start to get it, but my feeling is that you dont want to get it. Keynesians hear no see no speak no evil... Keynesian economics can be controlled by central planners for a certain amount of time. But eventually it still goes belly up. This currency has no central regulation, other than adding more 0's. In summary this currency modus operandi ends in complete collapse.
Meh.
I think what you are missing is that bitcoins are divided and merged when needed. The "problem" is hyperdeflation. This deflation is happening because more and more people are finding out about bitcoin and want to buy some. As BTC becomes a medium of exchange, the stored value of all minted bitcoins will increase. Your Zimbabwe example is an example of hyper-inflation; the opposite problem. I fail to see where Keynesian economics comes into this. Do you think the economy can really grow indefinitely? Each bitcoin can be sub-divided to 8 decimal places (I think it is a hard limit). Only about 21 million will ever be produced. Just 1000 1,000,000 bitcoins can probably carry the entire world economy. (Edit: does 100 Trillion units sound about right?) Edit: Micro-transactions or isolated economies will likely use their own block-chain, if bitcoin lasts that long. |
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Is calling 0.000001 BTC a "microbitcoin" so complicated? Personally, I like the plan up until the "let's drop the 'u' over time."
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I've noticed that the referral numbers are predictable: what if you use your own (expected) referral number? do you pay yourself a percentage on all transactions you do?
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