Actually the private key without the public is worthless, correct? As long as he keeps the public key on another plate he should be safe.

C

Actually power efficiency will become more and more important. GPUs were turned off or switched to junkcoins, but the problem is the entire GPU world is probably a couple of antminers in power :-). My curiousity is that the new generation of miners is going to be about 4 times as efficient as my 65nm technology, which will buy a few months but that's it. Then what?

Oddly enough what is happening to Bitcoin is what's going to happen to the universe in a heat death scenario. In a few billion years when we're huddled around the last of the black holes for energy we will be getting about 500 watts per km tops. Not enough to make a good bowl of popcorn; how are we going to keep the blockchain going?

C

Sure, but as soon as they turn on the power the diff will go right back up. And there will be a certain percentage of miners who will mine at a total loss, so profits probably still will not happen.

We shall see.

Mining is a perfectly competitive market. Therefore it is *impossible* to make any sort of long term profit. This does not mean you can't make short term profits, but over the long term the barrier to entry is too low, the skills are non-existent, and miners compete with each other in a race to the bottom.

Note that if you can enhance the value of mining, or do it in a different way you could make a profit, but that is by using your value-added brain, not by simply mining.

As to turning off miners, I'm watching as the event horizon for electricity prices vs. bitcoin generated is being approached. It is economic suicide to run a miner when the cost of electricity and heat going in matches or exceeds the value of bitcoin coming out. This is not sunk cost, this is sunk operating cost and the only rational solution is to shut down. That should cause difficulty to stabilize, but since people suck at math I expect mining to continue to increase :-)

We'll see. End of May is when I have scheduled to turn off my miners. But even if you have a super efficient ant miner, you will reach this point soon as well.

Sweet, but I would want something that is not tied to either a monthly service or an outside web site. Wonder if I can host it myself instead of the "cloud".

Probably not. Time to write my own I guess. :-)

So breaking into an abandoned dam is off-topic?

C

Sure, but since each roll of the dice is totally independent of any other roll, it's as if this person was never mining at all, so there is no difference overall. You just have one person "missing" so the difficulty goes down.

You could check for this by looking at the network hash rate and comparing it to the difficulty. Difficulty being ess than the hashrate would give you the percentage of dud miners. But it would not affect live miners.

An example: Say somone decides to "attack" a 5th site. They run 4th worth of with-holders, and get nothing for their efforts other than running the pool to 5th. The remaining 1th of users still mine as normal and get the same payouts. Their variance will be higher (they're thinking they get 5th to smooth out the variance when there is really only one) but it doesn't change anyone's overall payouts.

C

Thanks Mr. Teal. I'm about to start bringing down the speed of my 60gh Singles, probably in the next month or two. By shorting out the trimmer capacitors on the fluctuation line I have found that I can drop the voltage to the chips from 1.018 down to about .9 or so. Which will cause a Single to fail at speed 7 but will allow hashing at about 45gh at speed 1. The difference in power and heat though is very. very. substantial, should allow a few months more mining.

C

One of the best scenes ever. My brains are melting into my FEET!!!!

But in fluid dynamics like water or air, it is always better to pull than to push. Pushing causes turbulence when you hit an obstruction. Also causes noise.

C

Indeed, it brings out that little bit of adventure in all of us.

So I got it home and put it through it's paces: Was clocked at the factory at 290mhz, which lead to about a 6% error rate and a speed of 7.3gh. Too high on the errors, backed it to speed 7 with my firmware release and it's down to 274mhz with 0.2% errors and a 7.3gh hashing speed. Less errors=less power.

Added three chips, no problem. However witrh the sides off and the fan on the top it's clocking at 70c temps, which is a little bit warm. I have the copper heat sinks on all the FETs so it's ok, but once again I see a serious difference in temps between 4 chip jallies and 5 chip ones. 5 seems to be the tipping point for a stock heat sink; once you get to that level stuff gets more complex. However it is putting out a very solid 20gh, so the added chips are all hashing at >4gh each.

I also have three jallies in from Sweeden, one had a broken off power connector, the other two hashed at 5gh. Flashing them brought one to 7gh, the other was still at 5 (has a pair of C class chips). The one with the broken power connector was a simple fix, and it also went to 7.

The user enclosed 4 chips, so I boosted each one with two more chips, bringing them to 14.9 and 15.8gh. Not bad actually, and they run fine without extra heat sinking. For the third one I'm going to see how adding two then three chips works, should be able to get it past 16gh.

Never dull. If you want your jally to be boosted, drop me a line. Despite bitcoin price drops I am honoring my standard prices (.1btc to add two user supplied chips). I also have a few chips available that I will sell for install as well (for much less than the Ebay guy who is being a bit irrational).

Never dull :-)

This is why I love Bitcoins. I had to get a miner from a local guy, who wanted me to add 3 chips to the unit, so I asked him to drop it off while I and the kids were playing XP Laser sport in MD. This is my wife's point of view:

Oddly though, before all that, my husboo tells me before the game starts, "I'll be getting a package dropped off for me by a man at the front desk while we're playing. I'll need you to pick it up." We agreed that my code word would be "aluminum." I TOTALLY thought he was kidding. He and the kids went in to play, and I went up to observe them from the upper balcony. Another guy was up there too, a friendly, middle-aged-looking guy, watching the laser tag game and laughing. It's dark up there, kind of hard to see. At a certain point, he squints at me, comes over, and asks me "Are you with C?" I agree that I was. I figured this was one of his old laser tag buddies from when he used to regularly game. The guy tells me "I have the package for him."  I tell him "Oh right, I'm supposed to say 'aluminum' for the password." like I actually know what's going on. He laughs and says "Yes, and I said I'd flap my arms like wings." So he does. Then he hands me the box and says, "I'll just pay up front, I just went to the ATM.", and counts me out a hundred mumble dollars. I take it and put it in my pocket like I have some fucking clue what's going on. He says this was like a spy movie, and I agree it was all very cloak and dagger and we chuckle, say good-bye, and he leaves. Hmm.

Of course part of me knows that Lightfoot fixes bit coin miners for people, and I figured at a certain point that this nonsense was related to that, but really. How was I supposed to know he was REALLY going to get a delivery from someone at the laser tag place while he was gaming with the kids?  This is my life.

I simply... love... bitcoin. :-)

I wouldn't bet on that too much. I've been doing the math, and I will be shunting my 65nm equipment down to "minimum power draw" mode at the end of May. Reducing the voltage to the chips and the clock rate will cut the power use in half, along with the heat generated while dropping the hashing speed by 20-25%. That should keep me going till August, at which point I will shut the miners down.

There is no economic reason to mine once the cost of electricity is more than the bitcoin value generated. It's not even a dollar auction, the hole you're digging is getting deeper because of the electricity costs.

The economic answer is to buy someone else's bitcoins. Which will push up the price of BTC which will cause miners to come back which will re-establish equilibrium.

Anyone still mining btc with a GPU is being totally economically irrational. What the GPU people seem to have done is hit on this whole Litecoin baloney thing which gives their equipment a pseudo reason to exist. Why people pay good bitcoins for Script is not something I quite understand.



If you're in it for a long position then why not stop mining and buy the bitcoin on the market once it doesn't cover electricity costs? Let someone else pay the difference for you.


Exactly. This is not economically rational, people do it anyway. If you do choose to be such, own it and accept it. It's fine, it's entertainment and all that.

C

Read the catcoin threads on this one: Once you start setting low retarget times it's simple for people to game the coin by switching to it when difficulty is low, running the diff way up, then abandoning it to the suckers when the diff is high. Wash rinse repeat, a longer retarget helps to mitigate this.

It's amazing how people will try to game anything possible out there.

Sure, this is what happened with Catcoin. It could cause a vapor lock type effect, however the remaining miners could opt to change the difficulty retarget level or something to try and bring it back. Which could lead to massive ping-pong but that's another issue.

Luck lasts a lifetime if you die young. :-)

Actually this poster is displaying one of the most amazing of human traits, "Risk aversion". She believes that luck is something that appears in batches, and is determined to chase after it from craps table to table, not realizing that each throw of the dice is completely independent of the last.

In mining this is mostly harmless, other than going with pools that have large fees. The fun comes when you buy high and sell low. This is IMO the main reason some people are "poor" and others "rich". :-)

C
C

Yuck. Aside from the burps and farts that has to be the scrawniest, smallest boobed, and least interesting chick I have seen. Even the cumshot is of low quality.

But it's the Kenmore, the cheap, wheezy, cheezy, sleezy Kenmore AC unit popped through the wall in the background that transforms this from trash to schlock. Incredible touch...

The winners post when they are winning. When they lose they are quiet. They lose more often than they win. It is the nature of luck.

I see it all the time at craps tables.

I'm more concerned with the damn difficulty. What the hell is going on with all the new miners?

C

Good reason to split hashing between pools, eclipse had a pair of ball busters: 2 days of hashing with 600gh for what: 2 cents? :-)

Luck will stabilize out. However as difficulty goes up we *will* see more variance.

C

Jobs was an idiot. From personal experience. However I don't steal, I share things. Go ahead, take it. Copying doesn't threaten me, in fact it makes me stronger. :-)

C