How much hash power would it take to push liquidcoin testnet in a box to one second or faster?
If the problem is your CPU is particularly slow and you have no GPU, maybe you could get someone with a GPU to throw some their GPU's power it it to drive it to such a speed? Or does it take two or three GPUs to achieve such speeds?
Remember that even the old code testnets have 1/16 the difficulty of main-nets, did you make the mistake of using a mainnet in a box instead of a testnet in a box when you discovered you did not have enough hashing power to perform the experiment?
-MarkM-
I have no idea how much hash power it would take, just making the assumption that I don't have enough hashpower because I only have one GPU capable of mining at the moment. |
|
|
|
We will probably never support firstbits addresses, think about it for a minute, by inputting someone's address I can instantly find out whether this person transacted with Instawire, what this person's IBAN and name are. Probably not the best idea when firstbits are often part of forum signatures.
How does requiring the full address lessen this exposure? If the reason you don't support firstbits is because you divulge personal information given a bitcoin address with the assumption that only the correct account holder will be able to provide the entire bitcoin address, how do you reconcile that with the fact that anyone can look up the full address for any firstbits on the internet and query with that instead? In fact, the total set of bitcoin addresses ever used is very finite and publicly available, and someone could just query your server for every bitcoin address that has ever been used since your service started and datamine your entire database. My take on it was that people would more easily use firstbits familiar to them, possibly ones that had been previous posted on the internet. It's a bit of a heavy-handed approach, but I can't deny that users are generally stupid, and protecting them from themselves is sometimes appropriate. |
|
|
|
I just don't see the point of using Litecoin instead of Bitcoin. What is the point of Litecoin even existing, when Bitcoin can already do everything Litecoin can do?
The only real plus is the block times! There's just something nice about having a fully confirmed transaction in 20 mins or so. I don't get this. 20 minutes of hash-power securing the chain is still only that much hash-power that an adversary needs to work against. All this is doing is lowering the chain's security level of what is called 'fully confirmed' surely. What matters is the first confirmation, because of usually exessive hasing power this means that for almost all transactions one confirmation is sufficent. An ideal cryptocurrency would even provide a confirmation after a fraction of a second, it would just need someone to come up with a clever trick so the system is scaleable and efficient. Spellcheck dude. While I agree that the first confirmation is what matters, litecoin's 2 minute blocks don't provide much true advantage over bitcoin's 10 minute blocks. If litecoin had 10 second blocks or less, then we might be talking. And actually, I'd love to see someone try that (with maybe 2 second blocks) just to see how it works with the Bitcoin protocol as-is. Block headers really aren't that large, so I don't think there'd be a huge file size difference between the two. Chains would obviously fight each other to be longest here and there, tons of orphan blocks, etc, but ultimately, a person's transaction is going to be confirmed very quickly, even if it is confirmed and reversed a couple of times before being truly set in stone. So, back to litecoin vs bitcoin. 2 minutes is still far too long for any reasonable point of sale operation to wait, so despite the advantage on the surface, I can't think of any scenarios where this offers a large advantage over Bitcoin. 2 minutes is still a long and awkward time to wait. Geist Geld had about 10 second blocks...and look how that turned out. It was a mess. That fast ins't necessarily better. That's why GG was created...to test... Why was Geist Geld a mess? What happened? I wasn't involved in that project. |
|
|
|
|
Roman - any update on the potential investors/payback of the lost BTC?
|
|
|
|
|
Good points regarding firstbits davout, thanks for the reply!
|
|
|
|
You guys are still calculating math on current time prices. You're not adding to the table if there are 10x more coins for sale the price will drop, today you can get 11k for 1k bitcoins, after this launches, you might get 2k for 1k bitcoins.
Difficulty will adjust so that the supply is still steady at 7200 (soon 3600) coins per day. There will be a temporary influx in supply as ASIC miners come online, but no greater than we've already seen in the past. It has been speculated that people will sell more of their coins to pay off their ASICs, though that is simply speculation as well. |
|
|
|
|
Geistgold is interesting... but a factor of 15 times slower than QUICKCOIN!™ I am still curious what happens if blocks are generated every second. That said, it does sound similar in goals to what I am proposing. So, the question is, why does no one use it? And more importantly, who came up with that horrible name? It reminds me of a yeast infection every time I read it.
@ercolinux, I understand that 1 second is slower than network latency/propogation, but why would that really be a problem? Sure, blocks would be orphaned a lot, and forks would dead-end even after several blocks fairly often, but I don't see either of those as a show-stopper.
@markm - I don't know anything about liquidcoin, and, while it sounds like an interesting experiment as well, I likely do not have the hashpower available to push it to its limit. Thus, I cannot experiment with such an alt in the way you describe.
You seem to have misunderstood my intent. This is a call for an experiment - nothing more, nothing less. It would only be a few lines of code changed from the Bitcoin-QT client to actually see this happen. I would do it myself if it wasn't for the difficulty in compiling Bitcoin for Windows (and I'm not much of a linux user either).
|
|
|
|
|
Ok, so I don't have anything created or compiled or made, but I think it would be extremely interesting to see how a bitcoin-clone with blocks confirming every second would actually work. Sure, confirmations would get reversed all the time, then rebuilt, then reversed again, but eventually, a transaction would make its way into a generally accepted longest chain. And, it might take a lot less time than it does to get 1 solid confirmation from Bitcoin.
It's been theorized to be a terrible idea, but is it so terrible in practice? Let's try it for fun anyway!
|
|
|
|
|
What are some of the best options for paper printing Bitcoins these days? Especially looking for aesthetically pleasing designs!
|
|
|
|
By that, I mean I'll have to write a mini-pool to use the testnet in a box bitcoind basically.
Fortunately, I have a little bit of experience in that area from somewhere...
I thought it might. Thanks for the clarification.  |
|
|
|
So you don't think black people are generally better runners than white people?
Correct, scientific evaluation shows: that 98 out of the top 100 runners, grew up at higher altitudes (like Kenya), there foot and calf mussels development, without artificial support, (no shoes). They specialized in running before age 7 (a as a primarily form or transportation) running on average 5km to and from school every day. As professionals once competitive they train in high altitude running camps running 60% more than there western counterparts, every day. By contrast Western competitive runners don't commit until after age 14 and live a some what sheltered existence. No genetic advantage, but an environmental advantage one that will be eliminated when they get the benefits of cars and shoes. (BTW most still regard a cow as money a status symbol) Fascinating, I hadn't heard of that. I'll put hold on my previous statements for the time being. |
|
|
|
There are a lot of "legit" reasons why they do not mine with their own product.
1. They have capital investments, and that means they have capital investors that need returns at specific risk profiles. Building then using $10 million worth of machines is a HUGE risk to have for a company. Yes, it might work out, but it's not nearly as liquid as preselling machines for a price that reflects only a 7%-10% return when factoring the increase in difficulty rating and lowering of block sizes (to 25). They are probably locking in 40% on building and selling these things, and their investors are practically already paid for their (relatively) risky investment into a new venture.
2. "Competition risk": If you have the largest farm in the world, someone is going to try and copy/beat you. If that happens, the value of the BTC mined, as well as the ASIC's made would fall due to supply increases. By pre-selling these machines and not using them, they lock in their profits at a respectable level and have to put no more work into it.
3. Energy/Equipment/Land: These costs could be prohibiting them from producing a decent profit on the ASIC platform. I can bet you that their profits/KWH are higher just building and selling than mining and selling coins
4. Insurance: You have $10 million of breakable, unprotected ASIC chips clustered together to mine BTC. One bad accident can destroy the entire investment, and it is also probably very expensive to insure such items.
5. Taxes: If you sell ASIC platforms via bitcoins, they can be transferred anywhere in the world before being converted into currency. That's a great way to deposit funds into tax shelters to me (if you do it right). Plus, there is obfuscation of profits on items sold for any international currency (They can write off "losses").
6. Exchange rate risk: Just like gold, bitcoins are basically a reserve currency. They can be instantly traded into any other currency without having to worry about Forex/international shifts of the host. Imagine selling $10 million usd of ASIC's to find out that the currency of your home company has just gained 20% over the dollar overnight. In order to repatriate your income, you have to take an automatic 20% cut off the top... or wait until the possibility that the currency regains value. That's a huge risk, and all international companies have to take this into account if they are to be successful.
Good points. I have one more to add: 7. They could not mine more Bitcoins than are produced per day on a sustained basis. The sustainable amount of Bitcoins to be mined, by the time they have the ASICs ready to mine with, will be 3600/day. But, they can't take 100% of that, because there are other miners. Say they can take 90% of it. Ok, 3,240 Bitcoins/day then. That's about $1.16M/month. Sounds all rosy and great, right? Well, no. If they had 90% of the hashing power of the Bitcoin network, and people knew that they did, the price would drop like a rock. Suddenly, those 3,240 Bitcoins/day might only be worth $100/month. So, they have a maximum percentage that they can mine, safely, without causing a confidence issue in the people buying Bitcoins. I'd say they could mine no more than 25% of them without causing some serious confidence loss. Now they're down to 900 Bitcoins/day, or about $324,000/month. And they have a capital investment to recover, potentially up to $10M. It'll take them almost 3 years to recover that capital investment at that rate, and that's assuming other players don't also come in to try and eat up a share of those profits. Bottom line is, BFL attempting to mine is very risky, and doesn't look financially viable at all when you drill down to the details, despite it looking good on paper. |
|
|
|
Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to post the link. It's odd that Josh says they will use test-net-in-a-box to test the units, then says that test-net-in-a-box is unsuitable, and he will develop a proprietary solution. Either way though, it doesn't sound like they are planning to mine on the main net anymore, judging by the wording of that post. |
|
|
|
I just don't see the point of using Litecoin instead of Bitcoin. What is the point of Litecoin even existing, when Bitcoin can already do everything Litecoin can do?
The only real plus is the block times! There's just something nice about having a fully confirmed transaction in 20 mins or so. I don't get this. 20 minutes of hash-power securing the chain is still only that much hash-power that an adversary needs to work against. All this is doing is lowering the chain's security level of what is called 'fully confirmed' surely. What matters is the first confirmation, because of usually exessive hasing power this means that for almost all transactions one confirmation is sufficent. An ideal cryptocurrency would even provide a confirmation after a fraction of a second, it would just need someone to come up with a clever trick so the system is scaleable and efficient. Spellcheck dude. While I agree that the first confirmation is what matters, litecoin's 2 minute blocks don't provide much true advantage over bitcoin's 10 minute blocks. If litecoin had 10 second blocks or less, then we might be talking. And actually, I'd love to see someone try that (with maybe 2 second blocks) just to see how it works with the Bitcoin protocol as-is. Block headers really aren't that large, so I don't think there'd be a huge file size difference between the two. Chains would obviously fight each other to be longest here and there, tons of orphan blocks, etc, but ultimately, a person's transaction is going to be confirmed very quickly, even if it is confirmed and reversed a couple of times before being truly set in stone. So, back to litecoin vs bitcoin. 2 minutes is still far too long for any reasonable point of sale operation to wait, so despite the advantage on the surface, I can't think of any scenarios where this offers a large advantage over Bitcoin. 2 minutes is still a long and awkward time to wait. |
|
|
|
Do some searching you will find it.  The search feature sucks. I'd prefer that someone else who knows where it is simply link to it here. |
|
|
|
|
It'd be nice if they outfitted the drones with laser sensors, and created a super-detailed topography of the entire united states.
|
|
|
|
I found this info in their site: http://www.butterflylabs.com/landing/landing-aw.phpThe BitForce SC chip is now in final stage development. Initial product delivery is scheduled for November, 2012. However, I'm curious about if they will start shipping in the expected date... Josh said that, barring any unforseen setbacks, they are still on schedule to deliver in early November. He expects some unforseen setbacks though, and thus tells us to expect delivery in late November. Ship *all* preorders by late November, or just some? No, just the initial batch. Though he has stated elsewhere that he hopes to have all preorders cleared before the new year. Is there any info on how they're structuring the batching? Again, I'm trying to figure out what the likely ship date would be if I ordered today. Thanks! nym As far as number of units? Nope, Josh still says that is an unknown. However, they are making the first batch using their hand-assembled process currently used for assembling their FPGA devices, and will switch to the automated, machine-driven production afterward. I wouldn't expect production rates to exceed current production rates of FPGA assembly, and I wouldn't expect them to spend more than a couple of weeks assembling them by hand before their larger batch shipments of parts arrive and they can begin using the machinery. If you assume 50 units/day hand-assembled, that'd be maybe 500 units shipped (less 25 for each minirig shipped). I'd expect to see a few minirigs, and a couple hundred singles and jalepenos shipped out. But that's just a complete guess, and it depends entirely on when the bulk shipments of all the little parts arrive and are ready for mass production. |
|
|
|
I found this info in their site: http://www.butterflylabs.com/landing/landing-aw.phpThe BitForce SC chip is now in final stage development. Initial product delivery is scheduled for November, 2012. However, I'm curious about if they will start shipping in the expected date... Josh said that, barring any unforseen setbacks, they are still on schedule to deliver in early November. He expects some unforseen setbacks though, and thus tells us to expect delivery in late November. Ship *all* preorders by late November, or just some? No, just the initial batch. Though he has stated elsewhere that he hopes to have all preorders cleared before the new year. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
