If you can generate your own electricity why bother with mining? I thought about adding solar Panels to my home too compensate for the mining rigs, then thought why not just add more panels and sell electricity back to the power company? No reason to bother with a mining rig right? turns out eh cost of a decently large solar installation, say 5Kw is a lot of money even if the tax rebate is included and the Florida incentives are added in.
Not all states allow for resale of electricity to the grid. There are some states that have a "zero-net" energy policy, they'll allow you to generate your own energy, consume and resell but you can't profit from it, the best you can do is a $0 energy bill. But yeah, solar energy ain't cheap regardless. As I said, if alternatives were really competitive or superior, they'd have taken over traditional. There are other benefits however, so they aren't a totally dead idea. |
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I'm not trying to be hostile, just speaking the truth. I get tired of all the lies about green energy that are spread around.
I think he was misquoting and intended to reply to me instead. I was hostile to his snarky dickhead reply, and he seems surprised by that. I don't think your more calm normal responses are interpreted as hostile. |
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HAHA sterling engine:
Actually don't laugh. A mining card will convert over 90% of it's spent energy as heat. You can run a stirling engine outside your PC case to recover 40-50% of the wasted heat as mechanical work or oscillating energy then convert that into electricity and back into the power supply  It also doubles as automatically tuned cooling installation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not the sterling engine subject to carnot efficiency? 1- T_C / T_H ? Assuming you have something like ambient temp for T_C, and an efficient heat exchange between cards and whatever reservoir you are using for your sterling engine, I don't see how you would get more than 20% efficiency from a sterling engine even in the most extremely hypothetically favorable case. This is correct. Please consider that you also get the benefit of active cooling, thus you do not require additional installations and costs for cooling your rigs if you have access to outside atmosphere. You may also supplement the cooling with some of the recycled energy. Also, about your percentage, did you use 20% as recovered electrical power or 20% as recovered energy? I simply calculated the efficiency of the engine using carnots theoretical limit, ambient temp (estimated at 22C) as your cold reservoir, and a small hot reservoir that equalizes its temperature at about 90C, I feel these to be reasonable if not generous numbers. This should be equivalent to the ratio of Work_Done / Heat_into_System however. In my imaginings you would couple the hot side to some sort of active water cooling for the cards, but you may have a more efficient method in mind to lower cost. |
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HAHA sterling engine:
Actually don't laugh. A mining card will convert over 90% of it's spent energy as heat. You can run a stirling engine outside your PC case to recover 40-50% of the wasted heat as mechanical work or oscillating energy then convert that into electricity and back into the power supply It also doubles as automatically tuned cooling installation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not the sterling engine subject to carnot efficiency? 1- T_C / T_H ? Assuming you have something like ambient temp for T_C, and an efficient heat exchange between cards and whatever reservoir you are using for your sterling engine, I don't see how you would get more than 20% efficiency from a sterling engine even in the most extremely hypothetically favorable case. So reclaiming 20% of otherwise wasted energy is a worthless waste of time? Shit guys we better tell... Well shit, everyone. Because EVERY COMPANY IN THE WORLD would jump on a chance to recoup 20% of otherwise unavoidable wastes, assuming the buy-in isn't absurdly high. I don't know if a sterling engine WOULD work well or not but it's worth a crack and if someone would like to experiment with it, I'm not going to call them an idiot because my gedanken experiment couldn't achieve better than 20% efficiency. Feel free to quote where I said it was a worthless waste of time. Or where I called someone an idiot. Quoting this post doesn't count. You're an idiot. I was merely questioning his statement, asking where his numbers were from, when the theoretical maximum (carnot himself understood that no such engine can even exist) is half of the claimed numbers. In all likelihood you will get a fraction of that value in a real world scenario. I will add to boot that the buy-in will be absurdly high for a small user to find a custom sterling engine of suitable size, heat transfer setup and whatnot, unless you are running a massive mining cluster. I'm not saying that it isn't worth playing with, or that seeing someone set one up wouldn't be quite interesting. But don't expect that anyone can just jump on board and cool their 4 radeon 5870s while dropping their power bill in half at little to no cost. |
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HAHA sterling engine:
Actually don't laugh. A mining card will convert over 90% of it's spent energy as heat. You can run a stirling engine outside your PC case to recover 40-50% of the wasted heat as mechanical work or oscillating energy then convert that into electricity and back into the power supply It also doubles as automatically tuned cooling installation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not the sterling engine subject to carnot efficiency? 1- T_C / T_H ? Assuming you have something like ambient temp for T_C, and an efficient heat exchange between cards and whatever reservoir you are using for your sterling engine, I don't see how you would get more than 20% efficiency from a sterling engine even in the most extremely hypothetically favorable case. |
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As with all in-development technology, this is decidedly cool, but we'll see what the real world practical applications actually end up being. It might cost $10,000 / gram, and see no actual use, or it might not scale, or who knows. The raw materials are not crazily expensive anyway, cobalt is the most expensive thing in there (~$40/lb currently) but there's not too much of it. Nickel and tin are in the $10-12 range and manganese is dirt cheap in comparison.  . Atomic cost is not the decider of materials cost. The materials that make up a diamond are carbon atoms, I could probably get those for free. It's the process of shaping those carbon atoms into a diamond which is difficult, and yields a higher price than carbon alone. There is no mention of the process used to form this new item, whether it is complex or simple, energy intensive or relaxed, whether it can be done only on small scales or whether industrial scaling can be done. These are all considerations of cost beyond materials. This is why so many awesome things come out of the lab but fail to find any traction in the real world. |
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deepbit can already detect botnets
Well first off, a pool has no vested interest in botnets. More hashing power to them means more money to them. Tycho has more or less been a standup guy in the bitcoin community, which is cool, but if botnets become more profitable I wouldn't be surprised or vexxed if he suddenly "stopped finding" botnets. Secondly a botnet isn't exactly hard to detect. When one account suddenly has 5000-500000 IP addresses popping data in for it, you'd have to be blind to not 'detect' it. |
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Looks good. Now we need someone to write one that does do a conservative estimate of additional difficulty increases. Difficulty increases aren't completely predictable, but writing an estimator that uses the exponential curve that best fits previous increases would be a good start.
I would gladly write that in if somebody would help me with the mathematical calculations to do this. Anybody have an idea on how to do this? Take a look at this. https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13339.msg183351#msg183351The thing is, it is not like figuring out an exact Difficulty in the future, but a probability distribution. This is what you need to determine risk vs. reward for an investment. Figure out what your risk tolerance is and then decide how much you are willing to risk. It is not OK to do this: "Price and Difficulty will be X two months from now so I can calculate my return from that." But it is OK to do this: "There is a 50% probability that Price and Difficulty will be above/below level X two months from now. That is/is not an acceptable risk to me." The numbers you linked to look interesting, but could you explain the calculations and how you got the numbers? A good place to start is to look at the correlation between a moving average of price with Difficulty. I think you will find that a 10-12 week moving average will give you a fairly linear correlation. You can apply Pearson to give you an objective measure of the degree of correlation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient Once you have that you will find that Difficulty can be approximated by multiplying the moving average of price (the one you found to have a high degree of correaltion) with some factor. Let's say you use a factor that is in between all the ratios of Difficulty to the moving average of price going back as far as your data goes. You will find that these ratios fall on a more or less normal probability distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution So, you can characterize the likelihood that the actual Difficulty will fall so far from your projection. There are several methods you can use from there to dial in results that give you less variance and a more reliable outcome. One method I use is to max out the degree to which the moving average of price is correlated with Difficulty by applying a custom weighting to the average. You could try to go for accuracy and optimize it by minimum average deviation. It will occasionally give you some spectacularly close hits, but this is statistically fragile. That is, it can produce more outliers. So, what I prefer to do is to minimize the expected maximum deviation. This method specifically targets outliers to help ensure your projection falls within a certain range of probability. It won't always give you the most accurate result, but it will give you more reliable results with in an advertised range. All this can give you pretty reliable results for a projection that is one re-target out, like I have been getting. But the real trick is to try and figure out what Difficulty is likely to be going further out. This is because future Difficulty is highly dependent on what the exchange rate is going to be. What I have been experimenting with to try and go out farther with the projection, without trying to determine what price is going to be, is to simply drop terms from the moving average going forward. But the shorter the average gets the less correlated it gets and the more variance it produces. So I have to use a bunch of tricks to try and keep the variance down. One of those is to apply a weighting to the truncated average, another is to optimize it to reduce outliers as described above. Yet another is to eliminate outliers by discarding earlier data samples that do not correlate well. But this is a slippery slope, because it can make your data more statistically fragile and actually produce more outliers. The next step, which I am still working on, is to come up with meaningful way to do actual price projections. And more importantly, to attribute a meaningful probability distribution to price projections. This is a work in progress. I wish there were some kind of simple formula to use but as soon as you put something like that together it breaks. I continually re-evaluate and update the models I use as more data comes in. An interesting project, and I feel one that has had some impressive results, but I wonder if your goals aren't a bit too lofty. Modelling human greed/ambition/deceit and so on has a pretty poor track record (consider the billions poured into the biggest brains on wall street). If you enjoy it though, more power to you, and I'll be subbing your projection thread to watch with interest your progress. |
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I have no more idea what is going on than anyone else, but I like to sound important so I'm going to phrase the fact that I don't know anything in vague but impressive sounding semantically empty sentences.
Matthew
Network trends vary, obviously anything COULD be happening, but why not present data instead and let people come to their own conclusions?  Latest data, steady, big surge, huge drop, surge, drop. To me that mostly looks like a moderately increasing hashrate with some variance of luck. But then I guess you already knew that because you're so "quick" as you put it. |
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The PCB manufacturer doesn't produce the GPU. All the GPUs will perform roughly the same within the luck tolerance of binned chips. You should not look by manufacturer but by card design to the one that has the best cooling solution to give you a better chance at a higher overclock (or I believe reference has voltage unlocked and you can add custom cooling to it). As suggested the CU II has a nice profile.
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As with all in-development technology, this is decidedly cool, but we'll see what the real world practical applications actually end up being. It might cost $10,000 / gram, and see no actual use, or it might not scale, or who knows. Always nice to keep an eyeon these things though. Would be nice if this damn oven room was producing the electricity it needed to run. Also if it absorbs heat it can used as a cooler, yay. |
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I don't think now is the time... Things are starting to turn, but it's not there yet. Once you see difficulty going down and video cards in stock on all the major retailer sites, then it will be time to scoop up GPUs for next to nothing. Right now you'd be buying from the first wave of sellers that are cashing out their rigs before the bloodbath begins...
Are you seriously recommending him to to buy when everyone else will be doing it? Did you really think that through? When difficulty starts going down, people will come back to mining in a heartbeat, and difficulty will skyrocket again. There is something to be said for being forward thinking, and there is something to be said for being too forward thinking. As your quotee mentions, right now GPU prices are hyperinflated by people trying to cash out at high prices to make as much off bitcoin as possible. Starve them out, or let others buy in first, or even if difficulty stabilizes or drops a bit you will still not see a return on your investment. You always need to build efficiently, regardless of what point you want to buy in to bitcoin. I made my money back because my rigs produce about 2.4Mhash / $ invested on average. Many rigs today are closer to 1.1MHash/$, and those poor souls are the ones struggling to make back anything. If you start scooping up 5830s for $150+ you're going to find yourself struggling very badly, at ~1.3Mhash/$ around this difficulty. |
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Depends. A mining rig is about 100% efficient at heating a house. If I recall correctly, the carnot cycle, the most efficient method of converting thermal energy to work is about 50% efficient? So real world application probably below 30%.
But then again there are other factors to be remembered. For example you are not necessarily removing every bit of energy produced by your rigs via A/C. Simple convection can help you a bit. In general though A/C uses a ton of energy. In many cases your best bet would be to isolate your mining rigs into a single area, that vents hot air to the environment, while taking in a moderate flow of cooler house air, and keeping the rest of the house insulated with cool A/C air running. In this way you do not need to air condition every watt necessarily. The Mining room will be warm of course.
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No, if you want to save the environment then don't start mining.
Just like in the real world with coal.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. Bitcoin is actually a better way to save the environment than paper money is. Except you don't have a choice about paper money - it's already here. You're simply adding to the wasted energy not removing it. well bitcoin has the potential to replace paper money. Also I'd like to inform everyone that running the rig on renewable energy is not about being environmentally friendly. Its all about the economics of it. Why buy energy when you can get it for free (from untapped renewable energy resources). Because from a business perspective alone there are almost no options where alternative forms of energy are preferrable, excepting rare cases like being out in the wilderness of who-knows-where by yourself where costs of transmission are prohibitive and you can tap some natural resource. For the majority of folk however looking PURELY at business side renewable is not cost-effective. If it were, everyone would have it. Even as "free energy" the cost for equipment and set up and all that whatnot puts the cost / watt generated higher than traditional forms of energy. That's why you have to include other concerns, the environment, your local health concern, future resource supply shifts, etc. into the mix. But just looking at buying energy vs, generating it? You lose. |
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That one dude who selling all his 5870s and whatnot for too much bling on this forum got an offer from Angelius for his rig. Tells you something about which side of the mouth one talks out of. Yes people bailing on mining helps me out too, but I prefer to just be an honest injun about stuff. There is still money to be made mining. It's not a great time to buy in but it's not necessarily a death trap either. You need to be smart about how you invest and don't expect money to fall into your lap and give you a happy ending while it's at it. Easy peasy, didn't need 20 new threads to say that. blah blah blah, stop mining so the difficulty will go down for me, don't let the door hit you on the way out
Between the "your dumb because you're paying too much for your 5830s" and this, we know, you really want to scare people to quit
Actually, I don't believe the parent is trying to scare anyone away from mining. He is simply pointing out, and rightly so that depreciation costs represent a substantial cost over that of electricity for mining. Depreciation is hard to get right with mining though as even though we are seeing some of the lower end video gear being sold, (still not many 5970/6990), there is still a scarcity of good mining hardware. I think another factor though which encourages me personally to continue mining is that I would like to believe that bitcoin has a real chance to succeed as an internet currency. To that end, I would like to remain a part of that. Wrong, you haven't been around to see the OPs 5000000 other topics about OMG THE SKY IS FALLING YOU'RE GOING TO GET AIDS IF YOU MINE, etc. |
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around 4 million difficulty with no further price increase is my cutoff point.
But I'll continue to mine through the winter even if we surpass that since I need the heat. Next summer I will shut down.
haha I posted something about seasonal mining elsewhere. In the summer you have to pay for cooling, but in the winter mining rigs end up subsidizing your heating costs Indeed. I really wish I had found out about bitcoin a few months earlier, not only because I'd be flush with so many bitcoins I'd be swimmin in em, but because we had one of the most brutally cold winters in my states history riiiight before I turned my room into an oven (I literally warm my whole house when I ventilate the heat to home). Shame not all things work out as we might like them heh. |
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Using 100% renewable energy without any CO2 emissions here, but I am thinking about moving to other sources. Renewable isn't enough, it should have minimum (negative) impact on nature. Currently I am trying to figure out which source is the best to achieve this.
Use 100% renewable to run a huge bitcoin farm, then funnel all the excess heat into a small steam turbine to run a desalinzation plant. No co2 and you even make some fresh water. Yay! |
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No, actually.
I have found a way to circumvent the difficulty.
I can still mine at a difficulty of 1 if I want to, but I don't.
Not to be a jerk but these posts serve no purpose. "Ooh I can get around difficulty, but I won't say how." Then don't tell us in the first place. I'm happy for you but it really adds nothing constructive to the conversation. @Nagle -- No, just no. Let's not even get into this again. Just because something requires growth doesn't make it a ponzi scheme, using what I'm thinking you are defining as a ponzi scheme. Elsewise all fiat currency under current capitalism is ponzi. @Cluster2k -- GPU mining will be killed off within weeks, say wha? FPGAs are low watt, low hash, HIGH COST items. Unless FPGAs take off with huge huge huge investment no such thing will happen. That one FPGA guy back in the day might have seemed like big potatoes back when the network was 1THash, but he doesn't seem so interesting now (and I assume there is a reason why he couldn't leave his FPGA cluster running for more than a few weeks, such as it being borrowed from some lab or something). But then again if there is ever any serious dumping of huge amounts of money into mining it will drive out most everyone else, regardless of platform. |
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My mining is roughly 40% renewable energy, mostly hydro and a bit of wind.
the other 60% is mostly coal, with a side of peaking natural gas.
Are those sources under your control, or is that just the layout spread of your local power concern? Energy is cheap and until it's no longer cheap there's not a lot of motivation to change. I think you just summed up the whole problem with renewable energy right there. It doesn't matter how efficient we can make solar/wind/hydro/anyrenewable as long as fossil fuels are cheaper. I'm just wondering when renewable will be cheaper, so we can finally realize how idiotic the fossil fuels are, like lead paint, Radium Revigators, and asbestos. Well, it would help if renewables got a fraction of the money being pumped into fossil fuels. Both in terms of research and just materials demand. Doesn't help that China is sitting on top of 90% of the production of REM, and have put a squeeze on exports either. The world needs to grow up and stop being a little baby. |
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