ASIC is not a *who* - it stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit - basically a *chip* designed to just mine Bitcoin that is *way* faster than a whole
"wang ba" of top-notch GPUs.
So it is. I looked at this: http://www.bitcoinx.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/The ASICs can do 1 Mhash/J, that's about 50 times more efficient than a computer. "wang ba" can never match that. People using ASIC will be running then 24x7 - if you are interested in mining with GPU then you might want to consider mining LTC rather than BTC.
Thanks. Now I know about LTC. I am rather interested in understanding the mining economy. |
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Now that ASIC has appeared no "wang ba" chain could really even make a dent in mining
Ahhh, who is ASIC? and you can't play games with an ASIC machine - it's just a box that does hashing).
Sure, but I said 'in the night', particularly because in the night electricity bill is cheaper. |
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I am sure I am the first one who think about this, but a search on this forum revealed little discussion about it.
Internet Café owners, especially those who have more than 100 computers for MMORPG (very common here in China), would mine bitcoin in the night when they have less customers, eventually driving away any market niche for home miners. That would result most bitcoin being minted from China and India. If they becomes a chained business, they have as much power to change game rule as pools, and they are more evil than the pools - a potential threat to consider.
Power cost is 0.04 USD per kW/h in the evening here.
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and can stand 4 years of labour without any gain
4 years is a bit much, you might not find a block until after the reward halves, in which case a pool would actually have payed more Is that really so? If you mean, the current bitcoin costs less USD than in the future, that getting something now is better than getting some thing in the future, then, you have to factor in that getting bitcoin solely now is also easier than getting it in the future. It is not sure pool pays more. |
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Hello. I was told mining in a pool is to let you gain steadily, not to let you gain more. That infers, mining in a pool gains averagly the same as mining solely.
That cannot explain why 90% users mine in pools. If it is in their nature to avoid risk, then they probably wouldn't invest in mining bitcoin in the first place. So is it really true that besides the advantage of stability of gain, there is no advantage of gain itself, in average, by joining a pool?
I am going to mine solely because I prefer the thrill of getting a lot of coins and can stand 4 years of labour without any gain, but only if the gain is averagely the same.
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One of the things that I think was overlooked was that every currency that has been successful in the passed that is fiat has done so by having some mechanism by which to initially peg a value to that currency. In the case of the dollar it was gold and silver and in the case of post WWII europe it was the dollar. Only in the seventies did the currencies begin to float with nothing backing them at all. I am wondering how price stability will be achieved for bitcoin overtime.
Oh, this is very important to know. This means, although U.S. allows autonomy government to issue their own currency, that money need to peg its value to gold or USD, and if it succeeds competing with USD, it eventually would begin to float. A few other posters explained gold is not easy to carry. At the moment, Gold is not any harder to carry than bitcoin. A gold certificate is just paper. few are stupid enough to take the gold out of the bank and carry with him - think about the anti-fraud validating process to go through when you store the gold back to the bank. It is not harder to trade neither, because it is easier to find someone who would accept a piece of gold certificate than someone to accept bitcoin. You may say in the future this may change, but it as well can be changed by having a bank issuing gold certificate as a currency - the condition for this to happen has been met long before. Guess I have to put a bold statement to inspire some really meaningful argument. So here is one: Bitcoin is invented to replace fiat money, but if people don't trust fiat money, they don't have to wait for the invention of bitcoin to start replacing it. Thus: Not true: The popularity of bitcoin is because: People distrust fit money always, now they finally have a tool to fight fiat money. Perhaps true: The popularity of bitcoin is because: people speculate without knowing fiat money is a bad thing. Some others think they are fighting fiat money and sing praise of them. The difference is non-trivial. Whether or not people consider alternative to fiat money is good, is going to be tested when bitcoin value plummet. Only those who believes in its value would keep trading them, preventing a sudden death of bitcoin. Speculators don't believe in value of anything. |
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The fact gold price is falling in the recent days is irreverent to this discussion. The question I am asking, is, if people hold bitcoin in order to combat/compete/avoid fiat money - which is a popular idea among bloggers - why people didn't do it before bitcoin. This question is to test if there is a bubble, a false faith in bitcoin, that people buy bitcoin because they thought the believe the value of alternative of fiat money, when they actually don't.
Even in discussion of gold price, it appears there are multiple views too:
Asians Snap Up Bargain Gold, 16th, April.
[Suspicious link removed]j.com/article/SB10001424127887324030704578426254272013188.html
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It's clear one cannot buy bitcoin with paypal, but there are many service providers who offer to transfer from paypal to liberty reserve or okpay, which can in turn be transferred to MtGox List of exchangers for Liberty reserve: http://www.libertyreserve.com/en/exchangersList of exchangers for okpay: https://www.okpay.com/partners/exchangers/index.htmlAll these service introduce a service fee. But should be less than transferring money than if paypal Wire transfer funds to my China bank account (charges 35USD per transaction). Has anyone tried one of these exchanger? I studied more than 8 of these exchangers, each spend 8 minutes, either I couldn't find information on "from paypal to something", or they stated clearly that they can only transfer to, not "from", paypal -- with only one exception, http://www.payrmb.net/Faq.aspx states it would do the transaction from paypay to liberty reserve by waiting 7 days, after seeing no charge-back attempt -- and I don't trust them because their website is half broken on Firefox and their help section is IE oriented. Is this a dead-end too? |
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Bitcoin intended to address an inherent problem of fiat money: fiat money can be created out of thin air, resulting inflation.
Is bitcoin the only solution to this? No, there are lots of alternative solutions, so why the bitcoin heat?
- If you don't like fiat money to store value, you can use securities backed by gold. At least gold certificate is easy to buy here in China, i.e. you have certain amount of gold; the bank holds it for you. Although you cannot buy things with gold certificates, you can easily convert gold certificates to cash and back. There is no storage fee (you can take the gold physically home if you own more than 1 kilo) and the exchange fee isn't too much (my impression is 2.8%, I could be wrong but not too wrong). Besides, banks here competes fiercely for customer to purchase gold, some bank even do it for free for new customers (there is such an ad right before my window). I feel in other places in the world gold certificates are not hard to buy neither.
- If you don't like long time contracts signed with fiat money, you can write it in a way requesting transactions be done in fiat money of the market value of certain amount of gold agreed beforehand. A few people already do that kind of contract, and I presume it is legal.
- If you like, you can manually link your salary account with your gold reserve in the same bank. When you receive salary, convert them to gold in 1 minute with a few mouse clicks.
- I read newspaper report saying in the U.S. autonomy government are allowed create their own currency. It's apparently illegal here in China, but U.S. people can do that. Why not some cities controlled by wise leaders issue their currency pegged to gold, and compete with USD, even in a smaller scale? That's the solution suggested by Hayek in 1976 in his "Denationalisation of Money", what stops this from happening? According to Hayek, if competition is allowed, the more stable currency would easily win.
Somehow I feel all these alternative are not happening because people don't realize the problem with fiat money -- if this is the case, it won't easily change because of bitcoin -- people's minds are slow to change. Had people realized the problem and distrust fiat money, there should haven been rushes to buy gold like it is happening in Asia.
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And you are certain that 'AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor' is not just the CPU?
Well, Okay, I misread it. I thought it is a GPU. But that reenforced the question: why miners only see one GPU? It is clearly identified as many graphic cards in aticonfig output. I should see more "Cypress" there, but there was only one. The mystery is still not solved. |
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I am not sure what it means, "invalid nonce"? The word "nonce" suggests this is a message that I can ignore, but perhaps it is a specific term in bitcoin? cgminer version 2.11.4 - Started: [2013-04-14 09:20:36]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(5s):218.1M (avg):222.1Mh/s | A:0 R:0 HW:180 U:0.0/m WU:2.8/m
ST: 4 SS: 0 NB: 6 LW: 0 GF: 0 RF: 0
Connected to localhost diff 7.67M without LP as user un
Block: 00c6aa8eb9fde2e0... Diff:7.67M Started: [10:18:18] Best share: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[P]ool management [G]PU management [S]ettings [D]isplay options [Q]uit
GPU 0: | 215.9M/222.4Mh/s | A:0 R:0 HW:180 U:0.00/m I: 4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2013-04-14 10:09:51] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:12] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:24] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:32] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:40] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:46] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:10:49] New block detected on network
[2013-04-14 10:11:34] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
[2013-04-14 10:11:42] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
...
Using Ubuntu Linux 12.10. |
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Hello. I've got two display cards: $ aticonfig --list-adapters
* 0. 01:00.0 ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
1. 04:00.0 ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
* - Default adapter
But CGMiner only see one device: $ ./cgminer --ndevs
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] CL Platform 0 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] CL Platform 0 name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] CL Platform 0 version: OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1113.2)
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] Platform 0 devices: 1
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] 0 Cypress
[2013-04-14 10:35:21] 1 GPU devices max detected
Poclbm on the other hand, shows some enigmatic message: $ python2.7 poclbm.py
WARNING: no adl3 module found (github.com/mjmvisser/adl3), temperature control is disabled
OpenCL devices:
[0] Cypress
[1] AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor
No devices specified, using all GPU devices
It confuses me much. If my Radeon HD 5800 is recognized as "Cypress", then both should be Cypress. If my Radeon HD 5800 is recognized as "AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor", both should be that, too. They are two identical card bought the same time from the same vendor, from the same shipment. Having one as "Cypress" and the other as "AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor" makes me believe poclbm also only recognized one of the video cards. I would be able to verify this if I can mine with poclbm, but I cannot, which is another topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175691.msg1828977Thanks! |
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Hello When I run poclbm, I get localhost:8332 07/04/2013 19:45:02, Failed to subscribe localhost:8332 07/04/2013 19:45:04, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2 Full commandline and output is at the end of this message. What I have checked - bitcoin-qt is running in server-mode (version 4.8.3) - device is supported. poclbm can identify my Radeon HD5800 as "AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor" - netstat(  shows bitcoin-qt is listening to localhost:8332 (it's apparent, because if it doesn't, I should get 'Connection refused' insteead of 'Failed to subscribe') - all python components are installed, including opencl, serial, numpy ... - poclbm is the latest, in fact, git cloned from https://github.com/Kiv/poclbm just a few hours ago. - fglrx and AMDAPP-sdk installed. poclbm didn't complain about them. - also tried using bitcoind instead of bitcoin-qt (version 0.8.1) - password and username are of course checked for correctness, verified by accessing http://localhost:8332/ with a web browser, which says {"result":null,"error":{"code":-32700,"message":"Parse error"},"id":null}
So is there anything I missed to check? What could be the problem? $ python2.7 poclbm.py -d 1 un:pw@localhost:8332
WARNING: no adl3 module found (github.com/mjmvisser/adl3), temperature control is disabled
13/04/2013 22:30:55, started OpenCL miner on platform 0, device 1 (AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor)
13/04/2013 22:30:55, Setting server (un @ localhost:8332)
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:05, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:07, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:17, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:19, IO errors - 2, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:29, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:31, IO errors - 3, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:31, No more backup servers left. Using primary and starting over.
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:31, Setting server (un @ localhost:8332)
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:41, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:43, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:53, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:31:55, IO errors - 2, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:05, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:07, IO errors - 3, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:07, No more backup servers left. Using primary and starting over.
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:07, Setting server (un @ localhost:8332)
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:17, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:19, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:29, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:31, IO errors - 2, tolerance 2
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:41, Failed to subscribe
localhost:8332 13/04/2013 22:32:43, IO errors - 3, tolerance 2
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