and one thread to guild them...
why not have a child thread for LTC, who would disagree?
It has enough network backing to justify this |
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But women are clearly inferior to men. Clearly.
Obviously.... The Qur'an even told me so. Now, if I can just convince my wife.You'll be sleeping on the couch  |
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Hardware by far! It would pay itself off after 5-7 months (that's including the electric bill) By my Calculations, even at a measly 5% difficulty increase per re-target, the hardware wouldn't have paid off even after a year. And that's assuming you could get $5000 worth of Mini-rig Value hashing power delivered today. From my calcs, you'd only have 821 BTC after a year, whereas you could buy 1000 BTC now and save yourself the electricity/heat/hassle of dealing with the hardware. This calculation is assuming: - $5000 worth of "MiniRig Value" hardware
- No Delivery Wait Time
- No Electricity cost
- Difficulty increase of 5% every 13 days
- Block split in 210 days
- 1000 BTC bought today at $5 ea
"Growth factor" should read "Daily reward multiplier"  EDIT: This is not an attack on people buying/making hardware or bitcoins. I'm looking for a logical discussion. I am fully aware that a 5% difficulty increase cannot be/is impossible to guarantee/foresee, but it's the best estimate I can come up with. |
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This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.
I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?
First of all, Valve would never do this, but IF they build in a BTC miner into their steam client that ran on low priority while you weren't gaming, and stopped when you fired up a 3D intensive program, then they let you buy games/hats/etc with your balance, that would catapult BitCoin into the stratosphere. Actually, if I were Valve and I controlled the Steam client, I wouldn't mention BTC at all (bad for bitcoin), I'd rename the miner something like "The Piston". It would run as described, when the user isn't in a 3D application, and it would mine BTC for me, while the user would earn "PSI" points, equivalent to 10 PSI per $ or something, they could then spend those on select digital goods that cost me next to nothing to make (hats n stuff). The electricity bill would piss some people off, but imagine having the whole Steam community mining for you like a huge farm...  |
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As the topic states, if you had $5000 that you wanted to invest, would you buy coins outright, or mining hardware? What and why? I'm sure a few people on these boards are facing a similar conundrum. EDIT: This calculation is assuming: - $5000 worth of "MiniRig Value" hardware
- No Delivery Wait Time
- No Electricity cost
- Difficulty increase of 5% every 13 days
- Block split in 210 days
- 1000 BTC bought today at $5 ea
"Growth factor" should read "Daily reward multiplier" EDIT: This is not an attack on people buying/making hardware or bitcoins. I'm looking for a logical discussion. I am fully aware that a 5% difficulty increase cannot be/is impossible to guarantee/foresee, but it's the best estimate I can come up with. |
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The biggest threat to BTC as I see it is non-GPU miners.
For me, the main attraction of BTC was that I could mine it myself. I could literally "generate" money with my own computer.
And so could anyone else with a half decent computer. Thus it was easy for people to obtain bitcoins, and then spend them.
Once the FPGAs take over, squeezing out the GPU miners, the only effective way to obtain BTCs will be by buying them with cash, which is hard to convince people to do.
EDIT: What I'm getting at is that a huge attraction of bitcoin is the ability for just about anyone who want's to to mine it. Once you have to start paying cash to obtain them, they lose a lot of their convenience.
Um, it's enormously inconvenient and pretty costly compared to buying them outright to acquire any significant amount of bitcoins (more than, say, 10) by mining them these days. You're right that FPGAs are a threat to bitcoin, but not in the way you think. As FPGAs and botnet miners take over the network the price is going to plummet. Why? Because FPGA and botnet miners have much lower operating costs and can tolerate selling for lower prices and they'll essentially compete with each other to sell their bitcoins, creating a race to the bottom. You might be tempted to get all giddy at the prospect of buying "cheap" coins, but the falling price will generate more bad press for bitcoin, thus pushing further away the sorts of people this project needs - regular people. As people will be less inclined to participate in bitcoin, because they see a history of falling prices since it's received most of its public attention, demand will continue to wane even as supply continues to increase; and, as I've said, most of that new supply will be going into the hands of FPGA and botnet miners who can afford to race each other off a cliff. The best thing for bitcion is for these "regular people" to be able to mine bitcoins themselves. The introduction of FPGAs takes the mining power away from "regular people" and puts into into the hands of the few that operate FPGA farms. As for the falling price due to lower power consumed/coin mined, I hope the block split this December alleviates some of that. |
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The biggest threat to BTC as I see it is non-GPU miners.
For me, the main attraction of BTC was that I could mine it myself. I could literally "generate" money with my own computer.
And so could anyone else with a half decent computer. Thus it was easy for people to obtain bitcoins, and then spend them.
Once the FPGAs take over, squeezing out the GPU miners, the only effective way to obtain BTCs will be by buying them with cash, which is hard to convince people to do.
EDIT: What I'm getting at is that a huge attraction of bitcoin is the ability for just about anyone who want's to to mine it. Once you have to start paying cash to obtain them, they lose a lot of their convenience.
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Maybe abc is hashing for GPUMAX, and since it's down, so is the pool?
interesting. ABC seems to be up now. Is gpumax? |
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it's official...
1,733,208
And if you've seen the BFL waiting list, you know its gonna get much higher, very quickly. |
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If it survives, it will become a secondary transaction medium once bitcoins become impossible for the average person to mine, and too valuable to spend directly.
It does after all have a much faster verification rate and higher "total coin" limit, making it better for day to day transactions.
That won't be for a long while though, so don't hold your breath.
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Is there a way to find out how many coins haven't moved since bitcoin reached parity with the USD? I'm assuming that's about the time that people started to take their BTCs seriously.
Can you imagine how many wallets/BTCs people have lost in the first few years, thinking this was just an interesting fad before formatting their drives?
We are talking about time frame of only ~ 2 years till bitcoin gained significant value. I really don't believe that large part of computer-savvy users managed to lose their wallet.dat in such short time, do you? I'm not saying they lost them by accident, I just don't think they took the project seriously enough to keep an interest in it and backed up their wallets. And a gain, that doesn't go for ALL the miners in the first few years, just some. I've lost quite a few SolidCoins simply because I never took that cryptocurrency seriously. In the long term, lost coins will be mined (because wallet security will be easy enough to break for future hardware). The consensus is that this won't happen within our lifetime. What consensus? Citation needed... Feel free to worry about it if you wish, but I'm no longer concerned. |
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Is there a way to find out how many coins haven't moved since bitcoin reached parity with the USD? I'm assuming that's about the time that people started to take their BTCs seriously. Can you imagine how many wallets/BTCs people have lost in the first few years, thinking this was just an interesting fad before formatting their drives? In the long term, lost coins will be mined (because wallet security will be easy enough to break for future hardware). The consensus is that this won't happen within our lifetime. |
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Miners broadcast blocks they mine to other nodes, who then broadcast those blocks to other nodes, and so on in that fashion until all the nodes have all the blocks (that's how P2P networks work). The only difference between mining nodes and non-mining nodes is that miners occasionally generate new blocks in addition to passing on blocks received from other nodes.
It's beginning to sound like the chicken and the egg conundrum. Clients can't generate new blocks to confirm transactions, while miners can't proliferate blocks generated under different rules. |
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Not only would the majority of miners have to agree, but so would all the users and businesses have to agree to use that fork.
What say do they have? Their transactions are broadcast only, no? It's just a matter of whether the coins they spend exist in the chain they broadcast to. They broadcast blocks. I was under the impression that only miners broadcast blocks once they'd solved one. |
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Well, it takes a big, tall, handsome, wise and intelligent man to admit when he's wrong...
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No, a majority of miners cannot decide to change some aspect of the protocol. If they do, they will be mining on their own fork.
So it can be done. Despite the fact that it would create a rift in the network, a change can be made part way through the mining of a Bitcoin chain. Not only would the majority of miners have to agree, but so would all the users and businesses have to agree to use that fork.
What say do they have? Their transactions are broadcast only, no? It's just a matter of whether the coins they spend exist in the chain they broadcast to. Technically, yes: if the change is made and 51% of miners support it, it will be so (or at the very least it would create a permanent fork).
Politically, no: such a change would undermine all confidence in the currency; such a move is unlikely to achieve the necessary support.
Guess that's what I was going for. As much as I would like to see the pandemonium of such an event, like a bad train wreck, I also understand that politically, it would end up doing more harm than good. |
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I was under the impression that whatever rules the majority of miners agreed to run on would control the network, hence the concern over a 51% attack. Therefore, if the majority of miners decided to change some aspect of the bitcoin protocol, they could do so, for better or worse.
There's a HUGE debate raging in the noobs section over whether things like the max number of coins can ever be changed.
Is this possible? Or is the 21 million coin limit a stone set rule?
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oops, Didn't see this was the noob section. Should know better than to argue the ignorance here. EDIT: Actually, out of curiosity, I'm gonna post this question elsewhere. I'd like to see if this is actually viable or not. |
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