It's less a rational debate than it is reactionary childish hysteria in response to a changing world, hence I give it what it deserves.

One thing that is certain is that the United States has dumbed down considerably in the last 30 years or so and a retreat into superstitious thinking is a big part of that dumbing down. In particular, you have an age group that came of age in the 1980s who were carefully protected from critical thought to the point of not even being let in on the joke that the ideology which they actually believe was never more than an empty rationale, a lawyer's strategem in a negotiation. Prominent examples of of such individuals are Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Eric Cantor, two superstitious rubes and a wannabee Zionist traitor.

Americans are on the average dumb, easily misled, and have the attention span of parakeets. Getting them stirred up with whatever bogeyman serves your goals is about as hard as making a baby cry with a red hot salad fork.

The definition of waste is key here. If most of the various trial calculations in a molecular chemistry project only help by excluding non-solutions, they aren't wasted, they are necessary, otherwise they wouldn't be performed at all.

On the other hand, there's bitcoin, where the computational obstacle is an entirely artificial construct of a man-made game theory exercise, and is actually superfluous to the implementation and use of a medium of economic exchange. Various mediums of exchange that do not require such an obstacle are existence proofs of this superfluousness.

tl;dr

Fear the dumb beasts, particularly those who publicly masturbate about their hard working virtuosity and moral superiority, for they are indeed jerk offs, and not in season nearly often enough.

Guns are love, it's time to love one another right now 

I'd love to hear more on this. I'm still leaning towards believing the use of intrinsically valueless computational intensity as a obstacle/control is a design flaw, maybe even an awkward and artificial hack    I'm also unconvinced that the desired characteristics of a medium of exchange like bitcoin should require it.

Do I have a better idea at a detail level? Not so far, but the way various spin offs of bitcoin all seem to embrace this "feature" as part of the territory makes me wonder if bitcoin itself is a restrictive paradigm calling for the application of some outside-the-box reconsideration.

Good thread, I have been wondering about the rationality of bitcoin mining, not that I expect anyone to behave rationally, particularly since I don't offer a definition of what that might be 

The computing power arms race seems to be headed for a place, the FPGA, where the incremental hardware cost to generate bitcoins cannot be allocated to any other use for the system. A CPU is a generally useful thing, GPU mining at least gives you a bitchin' game machine , but right now there's not much else for most people to do with an FPGA.

I've built and worked on enough largish systems ( 250+ node Intel clusters, HP Superdomes, vast IBM Mainframes, Cray vector machines, you name it, I've done it ) that simply having a lot of cranking going on for its own sake does not impress me.

For that matter, I'm entertaining a thesis that the return on bitcoin mining should gravitate to near zero. I've yet to formalize an argument leading to that conclusion and I'm curious if anyone else has had this thought.

All that said, I've personally donated decades of CPU time to distributed projects like World Community Grid, and used the opportunity of a failed video card to acquire 343 Mhash/sec of ATI bitcoinage at an incremental hardware cost of $149, 2.3Mh/$, I see no reason to go further than this.

One thing I've seen done in the WCG projects is that the "payout" is based on the portion of your resources that are committed. The CPU client benchmarks the local system periodically and your return is adjusted to reflect this. I don't know the details of the scoring system, but a simplistic leveling illustration would be that the payout is the same for allocating 99% of a cell phone CPU as for allocating 99% of the bitcoin mining monstrosity du jour. Obviously there are some details to address such as mitigating capacity fraud. I do recall that being an issue with the open source BOINC client a long time ago.

If the computation actually added value such as the molecular biology work done on WCG does, then a scale that rewards gross total computing power to some extent could be implemented.

This would be approximate with respect to energy consumption. Were there benchmarks available that would let applications like BOINC or bitcoin measure the energy efficiency of a contributing system one could scale returns for that as well, but I don't know of a reliable way to do this across diverse hardware.

Bad assumption. I'm down to one dual boot machine with Windows XP Pro, the 100% bug is not present with the ATI video driver 11.6, but is in later releases I tested; I think the current one is still 11.11. Windows has been obsolete here for several years, so I've never messed with the 64 bit versions.

OTOH, Either 11.6 or 11.11 work *without* the 100% bug on 64 bit linux, however, versions in between, e.g. 11.8, manifested the bug. We retired the last 32 bit linux box about a year ago, so no experience there either.

Also, it's trivial to set processor affinity in linux, see schedtool. This works well in scripts, which work well in systems that are not tended by computer-directed mouse actuators 

I use Gentoo linux on the x86_64 platform, I'm currently running kernel 3.1.4 with the Con Kolivas patches. Either the ATI driver 11.6 or the recently released 11.11 driver work fine for me *without* the 100% cpu use bug. Neither is the current "production" gentoo version of the driver, which is 11.8 .

As an aside, I do have an older system that dual boots to Windows XP Pro 32 bit. I tried the 11.11 driver there and the 100% cpu bug was present. 11.6 works fine. I have not tried a 32 bit linux platform.

Video driver compatibility has most to do with your linux kernel version and options. It's likely any recent ATI driver should at least mostly work for any kernel that you are likely to have in use.

"Wearing out" due to being kept at full charge constantly and not being discharged thoroughly will cause the older nickel-cadmium cells to no longer release their full charge, hence the advice to avoid leaving them charging all the time makes sense. Full discharges followed by a charge to capacity are good for such batteries.

The lithium ion batteries common in cell phones, cameras, and laptops ( the 18650 cell is most common in laptop batteries ) have rated lifetimes in terms of the number of charge/discharge cycles and actually benefit from fewer "deep" discharge cycles. Leaving them on charge with an intelligent charger ( as most are ) shouldn't be an issue if heating is not a problem.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

FWIW, there is a single line in the Mining Hardware Comparison mentioning a single core ARM processor. At current rates, a fraction of a megahash per second will take a long time to add up to much. The ARM architecture went for energy efficiency vs. raw speed a long time ago, it's a different animal for a different purpose.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Model     Mhash/s    Mhash/J    Mhash/s/$    ACP [W]    Clock    Version    Comment
ARM        0.187    ?    ?    ?    1200 MHz    cpuminer    Seagate Dockstar ArchLinux

A mining effort that could utilize such small devices as cell phones might avoid the seemingly entropic decay of the return on mining as mining computing power has increased. Weighting the return based on the computing power of the source, such as is done with some projects using the BOINC distributed computing client, would make the game much more interesting.

What jursidiction? What data? There are some many issues with the statement above that it doesn't really mean anything. We do all the filesharing we want here in Somalia, and no one bothers us about it

A concern not particular to socialism. Someone is always going to be "forcing" someone else to do something, particularly if one recognizes that a forceful outcome can be achieved at something less than the point of a gun.

he endless freaking out by people about being "forced" to do something is the same noise whether it comes from someone experiencing legitimate legal sanction or someone who may actually have a valid complaint of unnecessary interference in their wholly private affairs. It means nothing, other than to suggest that the complainer may want to do something that others might construe as antisocial and should be watched accordingly.

Next, why guns are love, and bigger is better 

I second that motion, this is a subject that is well covered elsewhere.

Grow green gauzy wings and fly to the moon.

Stick it with a fork, it's done.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU

Decent comparison ATI vs. Nvidia. The Nvidia hardware does better on some tasks. Bitcoin is not one of them. The instruction set of the R5xxx and higher ATI chipsets makes Bitcoin very efficient.

See if I can find a couple of albino hairdressers with a trained slug who will do unspeakable things with Junior Mints for bitcoins, of course.

I've been reading, mining, trading, etc for much longer than that already. What I've observed has made me more skeptical of the long term viability of bitcoin.

I knew a couple of penny stock scammers back in the 90s, they would select stocks with small market cap such that they could easily buy up the market and manipulate the share price. Right now bitcoin is still at a scale where this is easily possible, so it's a bit difficult to take it more seriously, than say, fantasy football or betting on celebrity death pools :-)

I'm here, but I won't be troubling myself to gain posting privileges here, too much of a PITA for an at most mildly interesting internet sideshow like bitcoin. In any case 99% of the value proposition of this forum for me is met by reader access only. Thank you for providing this. Have a good week.