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Yes, of course. Thanks for that explanation, I should have known better.
Statistics can be a little counter intuitive and the sunk cost fallacy seems engrained in the human psyche. Perhaps it has some evolutionary advantage, or maybe its just tagging on for the ride through life's slings and arrows ...
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Think... create a small hadoop cluster with Intel 320s, dual 2667s and 128gb of ram... you would deplete the BitCoin 21m coins in the matter of hours.
The block rate is so small and being you could crunch millions of blocks in a second, that rate would literally be over 8000 coins a minute.
I wouldn't call that a small cluster. The current nethash rate is what, around to 100TH/s mark (roughly speaking), giving 25 coiins every 600 seconds. So for 8000 coins per second you'd need 19 ExaHash/sec I reckon. Some cluster that. A million of the #1 supercomputer might just about do it. And anyway, once 2016 blocks (50400 coins) are mined the difficulty adjusts and the rate is back to 10 coins a minute one block every 10 minutes (all from that one HyperCluster, so yes bitcoin is doomed by the >>51% monopoly, but not coin exhausion?) Am I right? Just a very recently ex-noob looking for enlightenment. [Edit] Oops, so I get my 8000 coins per minute mixed up with per second. but its still a thousand hypercomputer cluster, yes? And no I didn't work out how many hashes a 20 PetaFlop machine can actually do, so its all a bit of a guess, but somewhere in the ballpark? Perhaps I should quit the math after all  |
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The mined block header have a merkle root, which is a hash of all transactions in it. You can't simply change it, because the hash will change too. Until block is mined, it is easy to add transactions, because we can just change merkle root and continue hashing.
Hmm, I'm not convinced about this. The block hash is a search with a chance of 1 / (difficulty * 4294967296) success per operation. So if you throw away the block and start again you're just wasting effort. Or is this the fallacy of sunk cost?. Genuinely interested. My logic has been challenged once already since I escaped noobie land, so I'm open to education |
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[a let's group buy 1k BTC off of Coinlabs and figure out what Cruise Ship is the most expensive for our after party. <Insert party hat>
I'm in  But this is getting rather seriously OT now, lets leave it to the noobs (I'm 80% of the way to becoming a full member now, not bad for 3 days, YAY! Now what does that say about the rating system?). |
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Very useful, I'll bookmark that for my current hobbyhorse of ASCI ROI postings. Cheers |
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Oh... I wanted to mine LTC because of its lower diff. Guess I will need to wait for a cheaper asic to come out near september.
I edited my original post to include the BTC return 0.0097 / day (at current difficulty). Seemed churlish not to. It will be a while before ltc ASIC miners are available (if ever). There are people currently working on FPGA ltc miners, but its tricky and needs new board designs (current BTC FPGA/ASIC miners won't work on ltc due to the memory requirements) |
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Hmm. The Asicminer usb would get me how many ltc per day?
Zilch, nada, not one ltc cent. It mines bitcoin not ltc. But you can always trade BTC for ltc if you want. PS I fed 300MHash/sec into http://www.coinish.com/calc/ and it says 0.0097 BTC per day ($1.16) Beware the difficulty increase, use the expert view to estimate your ROI. |
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I mean you pretty much just agreed with me here so I can't really retort. Thanks for I guess admitting your own logical fallacy originally and agreeing with mine? Also, I do like your cookie analogy, but I never disagreed with that point of view. In fact I elaborated on it, and re-explained it. If you actually read Part 2, you saw why Price is an important decision, and why you disregarding it defies the entire core value of this question and Bitcoin as a whole. But from your response you did not, so again, Thank you for another Victory.
Cool, everybody's happy then  Well, your language is a little combative, but if that's what floats your boat, then Victory Is Yours. Can I come to the celebration party? Its just that I've recently lost this posting battle on the net and I need cheering up |
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Yes, eg LTCM... Looks like an interesting film. My question, while partly joking, was also semi-serious: has the market for ASICs changed at all, or are you still throwing money at companies hoping they give you something in many months time?
Its improving. Avalon, ASICMINER, BFL all have working product and are shipping, to various degrees. IMHO of them all ASCIMINER are the easiest to get hold of (300MHash/sec USB Erupter), Avalon order/ship in batches and BFL, well what to say there. If you've an early order you should be fine, but newbies, its anybody's guess as to delivery. All are very expensive for the ROI, so you're taking a gamble on the difficulty not shooting up (which seems a poor bet to me). The best ROI seems to be with the chip orders (eg Klondike et al who will offer to build them into boards), take a look in the custom hardware threads. Again caveat emptor. |
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Solo mining risks orphaned blocks unless you're well connected to the network. No money. Probably not worth the risk unless you have a huge hash rate.
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Is it easier to get your hands on an ASIC or a time machine these days?
Primer ... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/They started with ASIC (well JTAG actually but its sort of relevant) and ended up with a time machine. Didn't end well though. Sort of ... be careful what you wish for, and geeks and ethics don't mix. Anyway I liked the film. [/OT mods delete if you like] |
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If you want you can take one unit and test it )
Can someone please add a link to these usb devices? I saw some discussion here some time ago but at that point theye were not selling them one unit at a time, one had to order something like a thousand units at least AFAI remembe...r but there are group buys (go up a level into custom hardware threads). NowNOT worth it IMHO, but its your call. Do the math on the ROI. [Edit] after all I've been bleating on about the last couple of days. I put in a typo that contradicts myself. Sigh.  It might be worth it at 1.0 BTC, but not 2.0 BTC |
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Ah, sorry, I missed the bit about the SPI memory. I also see it has 64MB of sdram on board, you won't be relying on the host's ram after all.
I did consider having a punt at scrypt on my DE0-Nano which also has some sdram on board, but I reckoned the throughput would only be about 60 MByte/sec in burst mode (or 200MBytes/sec if I'm mis-calculating the precharge latency ... I don't have the docs to hand right now and I'm not going to go looking it up just for this little post). Anyway you've got a 100kB lookup table to build and swizzle for each hash, so I reckoned the resulting hash rate wouldn't be worth the huge number of J35st3r-hours to get it working). A fun looking project though, and an A* for your effort. Good luck.
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I came here primarily because I want to get into mining. The grand plan right now is to get in on a group buy of ASIC mining units. Preferably something already assembled because, despite my recent aqcuisition of a degree in electrical engineering, I have no idea how I would go about getting a bunch of SMT mining chips assembled onto actual PCBs. So my questions are really about group buys. How I get involved is fairly obvious, if they're at all like this one, so I'm not too concerned about that. The instructions are clear enough so I probably wont get my dick caught in the fan. Question: How do you find group buys to get involved in? It seems like a waste of time to read through every thread in the custom hardware subforum. Or is it? Yes SMT is a bitch to do as a hobbyist, you'll know that as an EE, but its a heads up for any aspiring builders. You really do have to wade through those threads, and there is also some good advice on getting your own boards assembled if you want to practice your EE skills. Hint: don't do it yourself, get a PCB prototyping manufacturer to do it for you, its not that expensive if you can supply the gerber files. PS Don't even think about doing BGA packages in your home toaster oven or skillet. Just don't. |
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Thanks for that. Cool calculator. Unfortunately it doesn't have the Blade USBs on there, but it is neat to see those calculations.
The specs are here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195004.msg2025318#msg2025318Just plug in 300MHash/sec, 2.0 BTC and your electric costs. Be sure to use expert mode to include the difficulty increase or else you'll get a wildly overoptimistic payback time. |
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Is the mining difficulty so high that these devices won't pay for themselves?
Its not the current difficulty that counts. If it stayed the same you'd get your BTC back in 200 days. But it won't stay the same, so how to you rate your crystal ball? Have a play with http://coinish.com/calc (NB use expert mode to see the effect of increase in difficulty), and take a look at these threads https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0 |
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Lovely rant, and the ad hom's were priceless. Can I be your friend, youll be handy in tough places But seriously, I was rather hoping someone would call me out on my math to see where I may have gone wrong. I especially liked OnkelPaul's calculator as is showed I was actually overestimating the ROI (it conformed my existing bias, so cool by me). To the point, I agree that nethash prediction is the key. And this was the point I was making, that your ROI must take into account changes in difficulty, which are insanely difficult to predict. The 26% per fortnight that I quoted was actually a back-prediction from the 250 BTC price to indicate the maximum rate of difficulty increase that would give a positive ROI. It was actually meant as an illustration of the sort of math you'd need to do to justify that investment (and incidentally was wildly over-optimistic as Paul's calculator shows). I won't concede your point on inflation (or deflation as is the desired outcome for BTC). Here's why. Mining is like a cookie jar. On day one you buy a magic cookie jar. It cost you 100 cookies in the first place (or you may have got your mom to buy it for you using her dollar credit/debit card), but its worth it because its magic. But you can only take out a few cookies cookies every day (that's mining for you). The first day you get to take 16 cookies, yum. But the second day you can only take 8, and on the third you get 4 cookies. Now how many cookies will you eat before you die of old age (allowing fractions of course)? Did you get your 100 cookies back? That's the nub of the difficulty increase argument. Now your point is that those cookies are rare, rare treats that nobody can bake any more, the recipe is lost. After a few years they are so valuable that you can command almost any price. Luckily your magic cookie jar is still churning out a few crumbs of dust every day, so you're rich. But you'd be so, so much richer if you'd never bought that damn jar in the first place and just kept your 100 cookies in a nice safe cupboard. Of course if your magic cookie jar had let you take only eight cookies per day, but halved it every week rather than every day, you'd be in profit, but only just. So can you predict what your jar will allow you to take before handing over your cookies? That was fun, can we do it again? |
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Not worth it mate, ASIC or bust.
Agreed, but IMHO it will be "ASIC and bust" for most of the punters. |
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Not mining certainly - ancient technology (Cyclone I and II).
You might be able to squeeze a tiny fractional mining core into the Cyclone II, but it probably won't even run above a few hundred kHash/sec (NOT MHash or GHash!!), as for the other one, I'm not sure if it will mine at all.
If you can get either one to mine, you'll just be mining dust. Don't bother.
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