@Synaptic: Two questions...
1) Does your proposal result in a limited number of ?coins being produced?
2) Does your proposal attempt to distribute ?coins at a constant rate, or a variable rate? And if variable, what determines the rate of distribution?
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@Minsc: I don't see how you're going to avoid what you're perceiving as a problem.
Mining needs to be based on something. In the case of Bitcoin, it's based on computational power. Whatever resource you propose to replace computational power, is going to be more available to those with more wealth.
Even if mining required answering Captchas, who will be more successful at this: someone trying to mine alone as a hobby, or someone who can hire a roomful of folks to do it for him? Greater wealth always means greater power. There's no way to avoid this in the physical realm.
Excellent questions, and I wish you would have posted them in the alt-crypto thread instead, but here goes: 1) The limits are variable. Yes, there is a limit. No, it's not a hard limit. Maybe, I can elaborate further in the reference thread later. 2) Variable rate. Read the whole thread, I address this. Block generation is tied to economic indices. No, you know what is really obnoxious? People who bitch and moan about something, but don't do anything to correct it. You say you have an idea for something better, but you don't have the skills to implement it, and won't release the idea so that someone with the skills could consider implementing it. So, Bravo, you've done nothing (except puff yourself up in alternate threads like a jackass). At least coinhunter in all his clownery had something out there competing with bitcoin when talking all his talk. |
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If the global hashrate were to suddenly drop, there'd a a huge uptick in the value of a single miner - e.g. my 400MH/s would suddenly be able to generate blocks quite quickly and I'd earn several hundred BTC in a fraction of the time it takes now.
Well - my question was how quickly this would happen, because if you think that this would happen immediately - then you are mistaken. It is simple math, difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks, and it adjusts by Expected_time_to_complete/Actual_Time_To_Complete * Difficulty, with a max of 4x up/down. The "time to adjust" depends on when the drop off occurred, how big a drop off, etc. For example, say for block 1-1008 hashing went along at 1 block/10min. Then at block 1008-2016, half the hashrate disappeared, giving 1block/20min. It would take 3 weeks to complete 2016 blocks. 2weeks/3weeks = 2/3rds of difficulty, even though hashrate dropped by half, meaning another 2.25 or so weeks before a drop to proper difficulty (but at 1block/15min). Had half dropped at block 1, it would have been 1/2difficulty after 4 weeks of 1block/20min. And so on. |
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Most of that has been known for a long time. What that doesn't mention - amongst other things - is that it looks like they're going to support BFI_INT on the vector units (and bitalign too). Pretty much the only use for BFI_INT is really fast hash computation, for stuff like Bitcoin mining, password cracking, and similar problems. Actually as far as I know, there has been very little information on the 78xx released. Though I suppose in this world of insta-news feeds a week or two may now constitute a "long time"  . I guess that it is good news that the 7000 series will have the same support as the 5000 series though. |
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Can I guys have your feedback on MSI Radeon HD6950 2048MB DDR5? Any idea what mhash/s does it have?
425m/h here. 945/320  I tried reaching those clocks but my system froze.I wonder if this has to do with my PSU not being able to deliver the amps properly? Because on mine,it says 36A can be drawn from the 12V line max and my card (I think) exceeds this when heavily OC'd,Overvolted and shader unlocked.Watts are not a problem here,just the amps.I found somewhere that my Radeon HD6950 needs 34A minimum,plus a 'green' HDD is on that rail also (I don't know if it's running when this happens) as my win7 is on SSD (uses 5V rail not 12V) How important are amps for a PSU to run a GPU properly (as PSUs that don't deliver enough power tend to crash the system afaics)? Sorry for being off-topic but I need the help in finding out what's responsible for the freezing.I only reply here to let the poster (not OP) know that I got the same results as him when using his settings but it then crashed my system. Just 2 posts above your post is my post pointing out how not all cards are equal. Some overclock better than others. There is absolutely no way your single card can pull more than 36Amps, W=V*A, your card runs off the 12V line, so assuming you're pulling maybe 200W for your card (its probably less) that'd be 16.7A. Your card just isn't up to snuff most likely. |
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its annoying to see this same deal reposted through so many sites, since they're in CA they still charge tax even through buy.com, bleh.
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I just noticed today that BTC took another 5% dump. It's true that BTC "could" go to da moon, and "could" go to 10 cents. But which is more likely -- or, is a third option more likely? The charts HAVE to give us some indication. Does anyone remember what BTC were selling for right after the Mt Gox hack? $16! The it dropped a dollar or two every week or so. Recently, it dipped to 7 before recovering to around $12.50 (briefly) then was pretty stable at $11.50 for a while. Now $11 seems like a distant dream! Even $8.50 is out of reach at the moment. So I must say that an explosion in value would require a "black swan" (out of left field) event, whereas the status quo is lower and lower every couple weeks -- who knows how low it will go before stopping and/or reversing. It SHOULD stop when miners stop selling -- but, as many people point out, BTC mining is still profitable (if you're good at it, have cheap electricity, etc.) at the crappy price of $8 per BTC. As long as there's profit to be made, the difficulty will rise and/or the price will drop, until it reaches an equillibrium. Heck, I hear about guys buying 40 6990's today. Even with BTC at $8.10 each. Difficulty is going to rise -- unless a bunch of people jump ship at the same time of course. It's not too bold of a prediction I'm making -- namely, that returns are going to continue to diminish. But that's why I'm leery of 9, 10 and 12-month payoff periods. Believe me, I hope somebody invents a personal fusion reactor, or generator that runs on water, that the inventor decides to ONLY sell for Bitcoin -- 12 BTC each. That would be just the shot in the arm we need  I have some 6990s to sell  let em know who these guys are who want to buy 40 of them... maybe I can sell them some... He's probably talking about Striker, who posted that in this thread (long post, hard to read I know), as anecdotal evidence. EDIT: Just a reminder, price of coin and difficulty are not related (well, order matters, price doesn't rest on difficulty). |
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Pushing that to the side I've always been curious what card do you tend to use the most or is it a mix? I know you have a huge megahash or should I say gigahash but I have never heard what you use. Also did you take your original roi out so at the very least it didn't cost you anything? He started out (more or less) by selling hashing power contracts, which significantly helps ROI (if you rent 1GHash for 3 months at a price that buys 1GHash of hardware, that's basically a 3 month ROI guarantee). |
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No, he hasn't. That $150 isn't pure profit. Marketing, development, manufacturing, and labor costs come out of that. At 50,000 cards, we are nothing to them.
I would not say that. We are worth ramping up the production of the 6990 series or the 7xxx equivalent because "the market for the high end card is larger than pure gamers". And that is it. Someone changing the monthly number of highest end cards that is being produced because there is additional demand. 6990s are a terrible purchase for mining, at sub $1 / Mhash in some cases. Why would they ramp up production of the 6990? Even as an already limited release speciality item, it's still in stock in some places, since there isn't enough demand to sell it out, because most people realize what a bad buy it is for mining (except for density). And again, due to economy of scale, I'm not even sure that the super high end cards are more profitable than the midrange cards, where most of the sales are made. |
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Always remember that not all silicon is made equal. I had an unlocked 6950 2GB, and I got about 365MHash/sec at stock, I couldn't overclock it more than about 40MHz before it glitched out, and even at stock the fan would run about 70% and sounded like a damn jet engine turbine. Others I'm sure have had better experiences, but it serves as a reminder that just because someone else got XXX @ YYY, don't think that necessarily will happen to you too. (I had an HIS if you were wondering)
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If I buy an AMD Radeon 5570 to use as a doorstop because my windy door keeps blowing closed and locking me out, do I get my own $25/yr(?) intern working to figure out how to secure and expand my market? What if I have 5 doors? 10? 100? If I'm ignored I might buy a $2 doorstop or a rock I found on the ground and they'd lose my valuable market right?
When the AMD-Doorstop market gets to be 50k+ doorstops.... Ah, how lucky! Bitcoin just happens be exactly at the precise cut-off line! Ah, how fortunate for bitcoin that it reached the totally non-arbitrary and well reasoned out boundary for consideration. I'm sure there is a reason for that number, and not nothing of course. Seems fortune has smiled on your argument, good day to you sir. |
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... if you don't expect them to change their development process for bitcoin, then you can only mean for them to aggressively market to miners....
Nope. Just haven't got any reasoning on why they'd *ignore* the B market. Not big enough to completely overhaul their design process for miners? I agree. Not big enough to aggressively market to miners? Sure. So small they make more money flat-out ignoring it? AMD CEO: Hows our marketshare? AMD Marketshareguy: It's at X! AMD CEO: How about that B market? It popped up out of nowhere... do we still have it? AMD Marketshareguy: Nah, its too small, who gives a fuck amirite? AMD CEO: HELP WANTED - We need a new marketshareguy. ---------- Now if you're asking what I personally imagine is happening... AMD Marketshareguy: We've got an intern making $25/yr looking at ways to secure and grow this small market. Very caustic response, let me ask you then, at what point do you consider B market large or small enough to be the line for AMD CEO to start firing AMD Marketshareguy? If I buy an AMD Radeon 5570 to use as a doorstop because my windy door keeps blowing closed and locking me out, do I get my own $25/yr(?) intern working to figure out how to secure and expand my market? What if I have 5 doors? 10? 100? If I'm ignored I might buy a $2 doorstop or a rock I found on the ground and they'd lose my valuable market right? Either business is rational and chases statistically significant markets, or they're desperate money fiends that will go after anything that has a dollar to wave at them like a strung out crackwhore. You're free to decide for yourself which you find the most logical. |
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I'm seeing a lot of posts on the boards and chatter on IRC from people that just really don't understand what's going on with Bitcoins. While we don't mind helping folks out, after a while it get's to be a bit tedious to answer the same questions, over and over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but...
<snip>
Great post, I rarely concur with everything anyone says, but this is about as close as it comes.
It's pretty easy to ignore the sale of 50,000 cards...
Really? The people at AMD getting paid millions to ensure each little % of the market is just going to 'ignore' 50k+ cards? ..... why?We've already had this conversation, and I've explained it in detail. So I'll add one final point, if you don't expect them to change their development process for bitcoin, then you can only mean for them to aggressively market to miners. This also costs millions of dollars, to tap into a relatively non-expanding market, which essentially doesn't matter. If the OPs numbers are right, 50,000 / 35,000,000 = 0.14%. That's using 200MHash/second as your card rate, which is assuming miners are buying 5770s, $100 cards (or an average of about $5million of influx). Not to mention this assumes that 100% of all cards mining were purchased new specifically for mining (and not used). Assuming every miner bought the most expensive possible AMD card generating the most money for AMD, a 6990, which gets about 800MHash/sec (generous), 13THash = 16,250 6990s, or 11Million dollars at retail rates. Now assume AMD spends 5 million dollars to promote bitcoin and AMD cards for mining, it doubles the bitcoin market, to 16,250 more 6990s, AMD has now lost money, as unless they have a 50% markup, the 11million dollars is not returning 5million directly to AMD. They have also now doubled the hash rate and/or difficulty (to 26Thash and 3.4million respectively) causing huge resistance to mining in the future and likely a huge drop off of people interested in mining. How about you answer why? they would do this then? |
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Hey, thanks for necroing this thread. I normally would say that sarcastically, but I remembered this thread, however was unable to find it for the longest time. I like the info contained within for many uses.
On another note, every one of my 5870s can reach about 430MHash/sec, and if I had a better cooling solution could go above that (I don't overvolt because they're all stuffed together without extenders).
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A "smart" miner is defined as someone with hashing power over 10GH/s Stroking yourself (masturbation) is something best left to the confines of your own bedroom. Just because... (there are two separate points made here, not all are bolded) From Investopedia What Does Smart Money Mean?
Cash invested or wagered by those considered to be experienced, well-informed, "in-the-know" or all three. Although there is little empirical evidence to support the notion that smart-money investments perform any better than non-smart-money investments do, many speculation methods take such influxes of cash very seriously
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you start these things... so don't try talking as if your constant and consistent theme is somehow shared... it it not.
I for one hope that difficulty increases 3-4 fold. You know why? because that would mean bitcoin would be mainstream and adopted as a payment system.
unless bitcoin is adopted and becomes mainstream, we will just hover around where we are today.
I want it to explode. I want it to be the next paypal and without more adoption and more mining it ain't gonna happen.
Stop being so shortsighted. Where's your vision of bitcoin?
So every post that is in any way negative to Bitcoin somehow has me behind it? I didn't know I was that powerful. Especially since many "negative" threads are started and finished without one post of participation from me. I also hope that Bitcoin goes mainstream. I actually have a credit card merchant account, and believe me there are few things that are that much of a pain in the butt (maybe going to the dentist, or having a colo-rectal exam?) I kid you not; they add fees every month it seems! I can't wait until I can just accept Bitcoin and drop my merchant account. We are all allowed to discuss whatever comes to our minds on here last time I checked. I'm not going to shelve half the topics and posts I think up just because someone might get the wrong idea that I'm on a calculated campaign to discourage people. Too bad for them. I'm not a troll, my posts are perfectly in accordance with the ToS, I haven't been banned yet (and am not about to be), so there's no problem with me. If you don't like my posts, DON'T READ THEM. Truth never hurt anyone. I'm just discussing the situation as it evolves. It shouldn't be threatening to anyone who isn't doing something stupid. The last thing I called "ridiculous" on was $160 5830's on eBay. 2 weeks later, they were no longer a reality. I also called for sub-$1000 PCs back in 1996 (I even lost my computer store job to prove it -- I didn't sell enough high-end PCs, because I saw that a 133 Pentium was about the same as a 200 Pentium, even though the former was $1400 and the latter was $3000) I was also recommending people get out of the stock market and buy gold in 2007 (when it was $650 -- it's currently $1800 something) So I have been known to have decent "vision". don't take me the wrong way. I don't "disagree" with your posts in short term or if you consider what you are saying in a small or limited construct/view. Honestly, your posts give me the most chuckles for some reason. I am glad that you do see the big picture and want the same. Anyway, have fun with your posts... see you around. I look forward to your new posts and bemusing responses. Yes, I have plenty of faults and weaknesses but one of my strengths seems to be seeing the big picture -- taking a thousand points of data and forming a coherent picture from it. I would certainly say that everything I'm saying should be taken only at face-value. I *hate* it when people read things in, and put words in my mouth. If I say that the 7000 series should be prudently considered, I mean it should be prudently considered. I'm not "between the lines" saying anything about Bitcoin, mining, the South African government, or the relationship between Bert and Ernie. I'll try to keep posting amusing posts -- sometimes I get too busy to post, but I haven't given up the forum yet. Matthew It's not exactly a conspiracy theory, when the FBI blatantly states that it mounts every effort to disrupt and destroy anything that could compete with the usdollar via FUD and whatever. http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currencyAttempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Tompkins said in announcing the verdict. “While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” she added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government. Not saying I agree with the poster who called you out on it, but just saying it's not exactly a huge stretch of the imagination, or some crazy tinfoil hat wearers fevered dreams of persecution. As for the rest, well I shrug. |
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AMD got themselves a completely new market where they own the place at 100%. It was a pure accident, but it is the situation at the moment. If this business is managed correctly, they are probably studying this new market right now.
Sure, you're not going to see "Radeon 7000, only for mining" in store next week, but they are probably working on their marketing research right now. Well, I hope they have a good management. If they ignore this market, some competitors is going to see it and will try to get it.
If the network is at 13 000 000 MHash/s, and let's say that we take the Radeon 6770 sold at around 120$ for 200 MHash/s, you have a new market of around 7.8 millions dollars who just appeared from nowhere. And AMD probably owns 90% of this market right now, a market that appeared just 3 months ago. I really have a hard time that AMD is ignoring completely this market.
I'll reply to you since you seem the most rational of this bunch, you're assuming that this market is both easily differentiable from the gaming market easily to GPU manufacturers, and and that the market is as expandable as the gaming market, both of which I do not believe are true. The network is at 13,000,000 MHash/sec, for your numbers to be workable, that means you would need for the mining world to be willing to add another 13Mil MHash/sec at the same pricing point. Unlike gamers, who are happy to throw away their old cards in order to upgrade to newer shinier cards to run newer games, there is no similar incentive for the mining community. In fact, quite the opposite, increasing hash rate means a disincentive to invest further into the market (as people see their profits diminish from new purchases). Not to mention there is absolutely no competition to AMD. There are only 2 GPU producers right now, because the barrier to entry into such a refined production structure is too high for anyone to reasonably enter right now. Certainly far far higher than $8million. Look at FPGAs/ASICs, why aren't they taking over? You can take already created chips, program them specifically to hash SHA2, with little to no onboard memory, and a power consumption that is almost nil, making them far superior to GPUs. But because the cost to develop such a platform would be in the tens of millions of dollars, it's not attractive enough to anyone to do it. What makes AMD, a company who makes literally billions of dollars off GPU sales more willing to take such a risk on such a paltry return then? |
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Yes I do know that Tesla is based on the Fermi architecture, are you aware that they have 6GB of memory on them which would be totally useless?
You're talking about improving performance, I'm talking about cutting costs. I would have thought it would be pointless making an ATI "super GPU" equivalent to the Tesla, I'm saying it would be better to take a cheap consumer card (a HD 5850 for example) and cut the crap which isn't used. I'm pretty sure that the performance wouldn't budge, but that's got to have a fairly serious impact on the price.
Please don't take such an offensive stance, I am merely bouncing an idea off people.
An offensive stance is replying in a way that you don't like? That's sort of life. As for RAM, it is a slight cost certainly, but it's not at all the main cost of what makes a tesla a > $2k card, not by a long shot. Creating a custom layout to be printed for a tiny market is the main cost. Tens of thousands compared to tens of millions of units makes a huge difference. |
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For (hopefully) the last time, AMD doesn't fab any 5xxx gpus anymore. They're done, they were done years ago, they're not going to start again, hence they make $0 off sales of 5xxx series cards. Why then do they care about bitcoin selling cards used at high prices?
AMD is a multi-billion dollar company, with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars going into each fab line, they're ABSOLUTELY NOT going to cater to a tiny cluster of renegade miners who use their cards just fine as they already stand in comparison to the millions of paying gaming customers. Just deal with that.
Of course they aren't going to *cater* to mining. That'd be foolish. It'd also be foolish of them not to see 'Hey, WHY are those 5x series still selling for so much?". AMD is a multi-billion dollar company. And they pay their execs tons of money to get as much marketshare/profit as possible. Bitcoin mining is a part of that. No it isn't. It seriously just isn't. You don't seem to understand the process so I'll try to simplify it for you. ATI designs and fabricates incredibly complex processors, this costs millions of dollars, it then designs a rich and incredibly intricate architecture to utilize those processors, which costs millions more, producing a "reference board". It produces just those things, then sells off millions of processors and licenses the reference design to manufacturers like sapphire, xfx whoever to produce the cards for retail sale. So when you buy a sapphire 5870 from Electronics-Store #1, or jimbob off the street for $500, AMD doesn't care because it's not selling to you, it's selling to sapphire who sells to the store who sells to you. So what influences AMD? Marketshare, but share of what market? The gaming market, that has millions of cloying customers wanting the fastest most powerful GPU they can get their hands on, to run the shiniest newest game at the fastest speed possible. AMD is competing directly with NVidia and they need every last bit of their muscle to streamline for this aspect, to keep up with, and maybe even slightly outdo their competition. Any sideline would need to be VERY lucrative to even cause them for one second to give side attention. There are at best 30-40,000 miners if you look at the numbers, and > 10million gamers. That represents less than one half of one percent of the market for video cards. No one gives a crap about that market segment. Seriously, we've had this discussion a lot before, bitcoin is cool, but lift your head up from the tunnel vision of bitcoin and you'll see how insignificant it is in the scheme of any kind of market share. |
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I am talking about taking a standard gaming card (not a workstation card) and cutting the features down. I didn't mention an ATI-esque Tesla for mining, I was referring to a comment somone else made about the lack of ATI GPGPU cards.
Do you know what a tesla is? It's based on the fermi architecture just like any other gtx 5xx gaming card. If you want a GPGPU from ATI that's more or less the same idea. You are re-vamping an existing architecture for a much smaller audience, and so you are going to pay out the butt for it, and not necessarily get much improvement. |
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