Yes. Let's not forget that the only company doing 22nm is Intel (amd has not been able to get a 22nm process for their CPUs, and I believe Intel boxes them out of fabs for 22nm as well). And the last Intel 65nm CPU was the Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor QX6700 which came out in Nov-07. 5 years to go from 65nm -> 22nm for a Multi-BILLION dollar microprocessing giant. Admittedly once it has been done, it becomes easier to do again, but the cutting edge of ASIC technology is ~7 years behind.

The point of the analogy is that destructiveness is destructive, regardless of the degree. The difference is of course that one is necessary while the other is not as you mentioned, but it does not negate the main point. If there is a path towards less, or no destructiveness, then one might argue that there is a moral imperative to approach it.

I did not say that BTC is a bad thing, I merely suggested that people be aware, and promote awareness in others of the community, that the system is certainly a consumer of resource, and that it would be beneficial to promote the solutions that are readily available. How is THAT a bad thing? Electricity consumption does not matter, the source of it certainly does.

I don't really have any easy access to resources that would provide numbers for such a thing, or I would certainly enjoy doing so. That aside, BTC supporters should be worried about what production of BTC causes and their direct contribution thereof, not the ratio of efficiency between two distinct systems. If I kill 1 person for fun, it's not ok to point at another dude who killed 10 and say "See what he did? So I'm ok."

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/30/us/tropical-weather-state-by-state/index.html

Snarky responses aside, NY and NJ are not the only states in the US on the eastern seaboard.

In reference to the OP, I definitely feel like there should be some community awareness of the consumption side of bitcoin mining. Whether it be investing directly in renewable sources for your energy, or indirectly assisting coalitions or whomever in getting states more active in utility-scale renewable farms.

Something to think about:

Approx 2,460kWh of energy is extracted from 1 TON of Coal.

Even the smallest mining operation is likely to utilize many multiples of that amount (a 500W system roughly every 3 months).
An off-the-cuff calc of the current network, averaging 65,000 5870s @ 180W a piece is ~12kW system, consuming ~8.5 GigaWattHours (8.5mil kWh) / month, or 3,420TONS of coal / 12,500 Barrels of Oil / 17,000 Barrels of liquified natural gas, every month. 

ASICs will be more efficient, but the amount to be deployed will still have a significant power draw, and as bitcoin increases in success, will continue to draw more.


So, just thought htis was a good location to throw out the good spirit of renewables, in helping offset our personal contribution to the detriment of the air

That's a very good point, that I hadn't really considered previously, so thanks for bringing it up. It's actually an interesting distortion to the curve, a cost-bending to hardware to combat the almost inevitable hardware sale stagnation. One can only hope that it would be done in a timely fashion, as too immediate a drop would be tantamount to spitting in the early-adopters faces ("thanks for bankrolling development, now all the johnny come-lately folks get a free ride on your buck, and knock down your ROI").

If companies take the long view though, and BTC remains relatively stable/successful, I can see this leading to good things as the new tech becomes more accessible to all, and of course, as stronger hash rates shore up the security of bitcoin.

Interesting model, I will look it over more when I'm not running out the door. I think it's most interesting that your model vs. real world has a tendency for the modelling to over-estimate large swings as events occur. Perhaps a dampening term would make it even more impressively accurate. Makes sense too as miners are reluctant to switch off even in the face of sour events, as well as being hesitant to make huge risks en masse simply because things are going well for a while.

Kudos however for the work.

Someone said above that all PSUs are "hit or miss". This is largely untrue, and this post really brings this to mind. The ThermalTake 750 TR2 RX, is in fact, one of the worst PSUs ever, has a huge failure rate, can barely deliver what it promises, etc. So... the take away is, ThermalTake sucks right? No, the TR2 line does suck rocks, but the ToughPower series is actually quite good (low failure rates, running within spec or better, etc.). And this is consistent amongst both lines.

The takeaway is you need to figure out which lines are quality, where you can save a dollar, and where that savings is a loss when your "budget" PSU crumbles like coffee cake.

Rosewill is another company like this, many extraordinarily terrible PSUs, and a number of rebranded high-quality PSUs that are excellent performers. Just google some reviews for which are which before you buy.

Moore's law is not a law, as much as a target. It has been fine for a multibillion dollar microprocessing industry, but for the bitcoin world?

The rest though, of course. Though I suspect that with the fluctuation of BTC you will see ebbs and flows of evolution not paralleled in other industries

Seasonic is definitely one of the best, if not the best maker of PSU around. Corsair has a number of lines that are rebranded Seasonics, which is good, since Corsair has consistently had possibly the best customer service stories around.

As with most things however, I recommend you don't just take a "brand name" and think "oh this is teh awesomez", do a quick review on the SPECIFIC MODEL you are thinking of purchasing. If you can't find reviews, that is often a bad sign.

Rosewill for example makes a number of lines of wholly inferior worthless PSUs, and they have a number of spectacular performing models, that can save a chunk of dough off brand name. Thermaltake has a line of junk, and a line of good performers (I myself own a ToughPower series which I used on my mining rigs, an 850W that I picked up for $60 on sale). CWT, Delta, Antec, OCZ, they can all be hit or miss (some do miss more often than others ofc).
I would possibly only universally badmouth a company HEC, which makes fairly across the board sh*t.

Glad to see some people are finally taking power delivery seriously. There is definitely a lot more to PSUs than just pushing a number of Watts down a cable.

Well, that's not really right, which is why I phrased my answer as I did earlier. To explain why your explanation isn't wholly appropriate think of it as follows:

Imagine a pool has 100 Hashing units, you control 1% or 1 hashing unit. You then double your hashing power, to 2 hashing units, giving the pool a total of 101 hashing units. 2 / 101 * 100 = 1.98% or essentially 2%.

It only breaks down when you are a significant fraction of a pools total hashing power, at which point it is quite unlikely you will be doubling your hashing power at any rate.

Most of these are pretty stupid yes. Whoever ships first, proves that 1) Asics are real and 2) they can deliver a mature product. Both of which incentivize people to make orders (with them, since they are the only ones getting orders out). Unless all the companies are the same person, or the other companies pay the first one to market to hold orders back, there is no reason not to ship ASAP.

ASICs are a ploy by the govt to end bitcoin through a series of overly complicated manuevers? As has been said for at least year (probably more), it would make more sense to spend the 2 or 3 million in development costs, to create a supply of ASICs and annihilate the blockchain, essentially ending bitcoin once and for all, rather than feed into its' development. The anonymous nature of BTC would provide the perfect alibi such that no one could ever prove who did it.

In fact, ASICs help secure the block chain from precisely this type of attack, as it drives up the cost to overwhelm the network (which is the point of the bitcoin).


To destroy bitcoin is easy, to maintain it is hard. If bitcoin ever really steps on anyones toes in a big way, it will have a real hard time; the main power right now is its small-timeness.

I don't think that's ADD, I think that is how everyone is who takes 'understanding' seriously.
For myself though, I 'understand' bitcoin, as well as I need to, because I accept my high-level ignorance in favor of a more practical understanding. I read some of the early treatises of bitcoin explanations (you might want to dig into the forum archives, people were more interested in discussing the low-level bitcoin foibles in '09, '10), and recognized my limitations on understanding and caring.
Once you find your own level of acceptance I think that will help with bitcoin adoption. There are many reductions of bitcoin, and very few of them require understanding of SHA-256 protocol in-depth, simply acceptance that it does what it needs to.


Hope that is somehow helpful.

Seems a fair response, although it doesn't answer my other question of the connection between being (A/THE) Buddha, and being (A/THE) hermaphrodite 

Since I enjoy charting and numbers, I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring.

I did a lot of hand calculation, since I feel that for certain periods of time, formulas are not applicable (just as for certain periods they are). So this is my view of what will happen if and when BFL hits the market with their projected quantities and dates.

Assumptions: 20,000 fully functional ASIC chips, at 7.5GH/sec a piece, arriving ~Nov 25th, being shipped in 1/3rd installments roughly once per week to their pre-orders and post-orders (so 50TH delivered in chunks each week, coming online at roughly the same time).
Rounding: A fair amount, but nothing critical to the numbers.
The columns you see are: Total Network Hashing power (in GHash/sec); Difficulty; Date; BTC Generated (for 60GH/sec per day); USD equiv (@$10.5USD / BTC); Cumulative BTC generation.

The graphs are ugly but self-explanatory. I believe this area of time (it can be translated to any point in time until the other producers begin to ship, so dates don't matter) is the most interesting and graph worthy. Early adopters will make out like bandits, but once the 150TH has been rolled out, things are much less interesting, and begins to mirror the GPU world, for generation/ROI and so forth, and the trend becomes easy to see (the top isn't easy to predict, but I'm figuring ~200-250TH/sec as the initial goldrush surge fades). Thoughts and comments, and criticisms welcome, within reason.

The hash of password1 will always be the same, and the hash of password999 will always be the same, so the question doesn't make sense. The two hashes will always be what they are, and if one is less than the other (depending how you are defining less) that is what they will always be.

I'm curious as to why you want to start from first principles? Doesn't really sound like you have the background to do such a thing. Not meaning to sound insulting or anything.

Wait wait wait wait wait... wait.

Just wait a second. Asiics aside; Buddha was a hermaphrodite? Or that was two completely independent thoughts linked together without a paragraph spacing?

No, I do not mean that; I specifically stated that 875 was wall-draw. There is a difference between power drawn from the wall, and power delivered to the components of your computer, and PSUs are rated for power delivered to components. A gold rated PSU will run at roughly 87%-90% efficiency (depending on the one you purchase) at > 75% load. I believe the one I had, being one of the most superior models on market, was running close to 89% or so (don't recall where I got that now, so I will take it on faith) -

.89 * 875 * 100 / 750 = 103.833333; or roughly 104% give or take.

Responses like this are part of what annoy me about the OPs model choice (I linked him a review by one of the most reputable PSU info sources detailing his PSU as a "must-pass for 1kw+"). People remain willfully ignorant of things that are so important to them as to seek out assistance. I also linked him a model that would perfectly meet his needs, save him money on his power costs, is a far superior build, as rated by experts, not retards on a forum who say "omgz my PSU didnt blow up so that means its awesomez", and cost roughly the same amount as what he purchased.

So to the OP, no, I don't give a crap about your purchase, but your mentality is what bothers me. But, as P.T. barnum said, you'll never go broke under-estimating the intelligence of people. Words to live by.

Seems obvious to me, but I suppose I can restate; storms knock out power, infrastructure, takes people out of commission for days and/or weeks. Shuts down businesses and shipping. Even before hand, people smart enough to want to protect their equipment will take it out of service in order to move it away from danger zones.

Those with no connection, and / or spotty connections, will be removed or fractionalized from the pool either negating a gain somewhere else or diminishing it, increasing time to hash, reducing change in difficulty. Not a huge effect, but one to consider.

The amount of BTC you earn depends on the method of mining you choose, are you doing Solo mining? Are you mining on a pool? Is the pool PPS, is it proportional? Is there a fee? Etc.

Pay-per-share is the only one where you can say that your BTC earned doubles when you double your mining speed (until they change the amount they pay per share of course). Other methods typically depend on what proportion of the mining power you generate (and some luck as well). For most small time miners however, doubling your hash power will effectively double your earnings, assuming other factors remain the same.

When difficulty doubles, you will earn roughly half as many BTC, that one is more cut and dry.

So the answer is "yes" with a buncha caveats. Difficulty changes constantly, as others in the mining game add or subtract their relative hashing power.

I suggest that you pay close attention the the ASIIC discussions going on, as that has a huge impact on profitability, whether you are GPU farming, or jumping on the ASIIC bus as well