The average rate of block generation should be 1 per 10 minutes. The last 725 blocks were generated in 8600 instead of 7250 minutes. If this rate continues the difficulty will be adjusted to 64200, and this figure is the estimate given by bitcoincharts. (Well, I think those numbers are correct, I'm extrapolating a bit). This is the discussion about the lag : http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4339.0 |
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It seems like the difficulty keeps increasing, reducing the profits available significantly.
Currently the difficulty is expected to decrease in the next update (e.g. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/). It has been suggested that difficulty lags about a month after the BTC/USD exchange rate. It looks like for now the exchange rate has stabilized and so did the difficulty. I don't expect the profitability of mining to significantly change for the time being. |
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Since one Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, couldn't you back an entire in-game economy with any number of Bitcoins you wish? Even one?
Take EVE for example. I think ~10M ISK can be exchanged for $1 worth of subscription. Let's say there are a total of 10^12 ISK. If CCP wanted to back this entire amount with 1 BTC, it means 10M will be backed by 0.00001 BTC which can be exchanged for ~$0.00001. This is much less than can be obtained by other means, so no-one will want to exercise it and the backing will be worthless. The value of bitcoins is controlled from above (how many bitcoins there are total), not from below (the smallest possible denomination). it fluctuates but its usually between 350-370 is 15$ but yea your right you could back an entire game currency with one btc Who is right? You quoted me, and I said you couldn't back an entire game currency with one btc. |
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Since one Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, couldn't you back an entire in-game economy with any number of Bitcoins you wish? Even one?
Take EVE for example. I think ~10M ISK can be exchanged for $1 worth of subscription. Let's say there are a total of 10^12 ISK. If CCP wanted to back this entire amount with 1 BTC, it means 10M will be backed by 0.00001 BTC which can be exchanged for ~$0.00001. This is much less than can be obtained by other means, so no-one will want to exercise it and the backing will be worthless. The value of bitcoins is controlled from above (how many bitcoins there are total), not from below (the smallest possible denomination). |
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Snedie, did you have to do anything to start all 4 cores in windows, or did it just work? Did you have to swap your monitor cables around or run 2 monitors (i from each card?)?
Its a real bitch to get all my 4 cores started mining, sometimes it takes me an hour of swapping cables around.
Maybe making one of these (VGA dummy plug) can help. |
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You can use Kiv's GUI frontend for poclbm. If you use a pool, that (and the ATI stream SDK) is all you need. If you want to mine solo you need some form of bitcoin client. I had no problem using the default client on Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit. |
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Sorry, I meant of course GPU mining (say, 2 X 5870). The CPU still needs to tell the GPUs what to do.
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Will mining performance suffer if I forgo dual-channel RAM and put just a single stick? I know system memory is considered inconsequential for mining, but I wondered if that might be taking it too far.
If it matters, I'm thinking about Intel's Sandy Bridge platform.
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FLOPs are floating point operations per second, so I don't think they're what we're supposed to look at.
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Based on travex's other posts, I think he really meant 400 MH/s.
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You assume that the software random generator has enough entropy, but it does not. That is only pseudo-random, and that's why i was saying that transactions add more randomness by adding more entropy to the pool. I disagree, for this purpose the PRNG doesn't need a lot of entropy to be in practice indistinguishable from truly random. This can be verified by experiment - generate for a test block chain with no transactions, and see if any deviation from randomness can be found. Has such experiment been ever done by anybody ? Just in case this question is directed to me, I didn't mean to suggest I know of the experiment having been made, only that I have little doubt what its results would be. I am also interested to know if someone already did it. Truecrypt did experiments on their alrogithms, and the result was around 70% entropy. I seriously doubt that any no-human-interaction algorithm can do much better. Again, I am speaking specifically about frequency of generating blocks. Standard PRNGs don't generate high-quality randomness, but generation doesn't need it either. |
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You assume that the software random generator has enough entropy, but it does not. That is only pseudo-random, and that's why i was saying that transactions add more randomness by adding more entropy to the pool. I disagree, for this purpose the PRNG doesn't need a lot of entropy to be in practice indistinguishable from truly random. This can be verified by experiment - generate for a test block chain with no transactions, and see if any deviation from randomness can be found. Has such experiment been ever done by anybody ? Just in case this question is directed to me, I didn't mean to suggest I know of the experiment having been made, only that I have little doubt what its results would be. I am also interested to know if someone already did it. |
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You assume that the software random generator has enough entropy, but it does not. That is only pseudo-random, and that's why i was saying that transactions add more randomness by adding more entropy to the pool. I disagree, for this purpose the PRNG doesn't need a lot of entropy to be in practice indistinguishable from truly random. This can be verified by experiment - generate for a test block chain with no transactions, and see if any deviation from randomness can be found. If more entropy was required then yes, I guess the transactions could help a little. |
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You can also exchange USD for bitcoins.
If, for whatever reason, you are interested particularly in mining bitcoins, you can read up on that and ask questions in the relevant forum section. The first thing you'll be told is that you should use a GPU miner for that, not the Bitcoin client.
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FWIW, if you average 2 blocks/day, your probability of having at least 7 in a given day is 0.45%. Of course, if you run the setup for several days, your chance of it happening in one of them is much higher. You know how prime numbers tend to group together? I wonder if it is truly random...
It is random as long as it depends on human actions. Human actions are generally very random. So it is random, because transactions are random enough. Unless of course, transaction data is not included in the hash, but AFAIK it is. Hm? The transactions that occur have very little to do with your probability to find blocks. It depends on whether your PRNG generates a right nonce. To the extent that PRNGs can be considered random, so is block generation. If transactions are also hashed, then they do have an influence on randomness. AFAIK, the candidate block changes every time a new transaction is to be included in it, so it changes the "source" the algorithm has to hash from. They have an influence on whether you actually found a block or not. If at some point my PRNG generated the number, say, 523789, this will or will not lead me to a valid block depending on the transactions. But they don't change the probability or statistical properties of generation. If the PRNG is random, then the transactions can't make generation any more or less random. For example, even if there are no transactions at all, generation will still be random with the same expectation. |
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FWIW, if you average 2 blocks/day, your probability of having at least 7 in a given day is 0.45%. Of course, if you run the setup for several days, your chance of it happening in one of them is much higher. You know how prime numbers tend to group together? I wonder if it is truly random...
It is random as long as it depends on human actions. Human actions are generally very random. So it is random, because transactions are random enough. Unless of course, transaction data is not included in the hash, but AFAIK it is. Hm? The transactions that occur have very little to do with your probability to find blocks. It depends on whether your PRNG generates a right nonce. To the extent that PRNGs can be considered random, so is block generation. |
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The ideal system would use base 12 for both measurements and numerals. Or even base 60.
I'd rather have 16 (or some other power of 2). In this age, being compatible with computers trumps making division a bit easier. |
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The return on mining is going down 40% in a few days, and will continue to go down.
Why do you say that? What happens (happened?) in a few days? The difficulty will be updated. In a nutshell, the Bitcoin network tries to keep block generation at an average of 6 blocks per hour which is 2016 blocks per 14 days. If 2016 blocks were generated in less time than that the difficulty is increased proportionally. Edit: I noticed in another of your posts that you already know all this, so your question was a bit odd. |
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