No because over time mining will become a more and more specialized industry. Simply having a GPU is insufficient. You need the right GPU, an efficient rig, proper cooling, understanding of thermal stress and effects of 24/7 operation at high load, and a better than average electrical rate.
As Bitcoin grows and more money is put into mining the margins will continue to shrink. It is inevitable that FPGA will replace GPU and as they do drive the price:difficulty ratio so low as to make GPU mining uneconomical (much like GPU did to CPU).
Much like most consumers never operating a VISA processing server in the future most consumers will never perform blockchain hashing.
Today is not the grand future. Casual mining is still a reality and still probably will be for at least another year. It's true that you're not going to run some big serious profitable mining operation without some ninja mining skills... but there are plenty of reasons besides that. If you just want a little bitcoin to play around with or to offset various fees w/ bitcoin services then a little mining can provide that easily (even on a CPU!). The fact that your setup might not be technically "profitable" on a strict electric power vs bitcoin exchange rate is moot— sending money to an exchange or some OTC trading partner is quite costly in terms of time (and sometimes fees)... while doing a little mining and paying for it in your power bill is painless and even if your operation isn't the most efficient the "fee" you pay vs buying the coin is fairly modest. |
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What is the banning feature supposed to protect against? Aren't invalid blocks ignored anyways? Is it to protect against DOS like attacks against specific clients?
The blocks are only invalid because they have no hope of being part of the longest chain. They pass the checks otherwise and are stored just in case they might become part of the longest chain someday. Thus the dos vulnerability. |
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If anyone has read Quarantine by Greg Bear ... thats what the box reminds me of. Can people suggest (via PM) the most informative posts from the first thread to add to the top post here? I'm going to go find some now. |
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This is about http://butterflylabs.com/products/ a company claiming to offer some very high performance dedicated mining hardware. Initially pre-orders were offered for $500 but the price has since been raised to $699. No units have shipped. They also clam to be taking preorders for a 50GH/s unit for $24,980. There is a lot of justified skepticism about the realness of the advertised products. I created the original thread because I thought, on the basis of the available data, that it was obviously a scam and I was worried that other bitcoiners were getting ripped off. At that point in time there was only a flashy website and a lot of tall promises. The subsequent disclosures have made me reconsider my initial quick judgement— today there is good evidence that some kind of actual hardware exists. The other thread was becoming a bit large: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48863.0Of course, speculation is going to be contentious, we're not going to all agree on the relative merits of the various bits of data available — but it would be best if people stuck to the facts and evidence. If you have an irreconcilable difference in conclusions with someone, don't flame— take comfort in the fact that your superior knowledge will allow you to place profitable bets on the outcome. (Fair warning: Unproductive back and forth flame-wars will get deleted here) Useful links |
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You seem to be mistaken as to what a red herring is... all of your arguments are red herrings and I demonstrated exactly WHY they were all red herrings. Me pointing out that you can buy stuff from illegitimate companies and legitimate companies can scam you is a direct response to YOUR red herring and therefore can't be considered a red herring.
I started this thread mostly because I thought it was obviously a scam — and I was concerned about my bitcoin friends being ripped off and I thought some discussion would be good. As more information has become available, I think that it's probably not a scam— and if it were one it would be a truly fantastically epic one. I'm not sending in money yet either— simply because there are lots of reasons that it could fail or be delayed even excluding scams. I agree with inaba here, the points raised are red herrings— they're not actually relevant to the questions that matter to people here. |
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Question 1: If these are indeed FPGAs (I.E., reprogrammable),
I really don't think so, but if so and you figure out what FPGA then you could make some estimates. Going from the SHA256 numbers directly is a bit harder. Question 2: Also assuming these are reprogrammable, what would the expected performance loss be from flashing them for a single round of SHA256 (instead of double) and then using external software and/or hardware take care of doubling the hashes and fiddling with the nonces? Is this at all feasible, or is having everything all done at once in a single chip the only way to do it?
External? Not feasible. A block header is 80 bytes. The result is 32 bytes. Do the data rate calculations for a billion of them a second. The data rate for a miner is only small because the ability to increment the nonce 'locally' (on chip) reduces the required data rate by a factor of 4 billion. (The same thing applies to GPUs). |
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So if they have no software capable of 1.05 GH how do they know it can do 1.05 GH?
I mean 1.05 GH not ~1GH or at least 1 GH. 1.05GH indicates some level of confidence and validation that obviously doesn't exist.
You can validate the subsystem .. e.g. you give it a work unit it and it completes all 2^32 nonce values in XX seconds. without having a completely working system. Doing so you can be relatively confident of the performance of the final system, as much as you can be with any pre-production setup. |
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* transactions which contain fees more than the minimum recommended have to be included in the next 3 blocks (~ 1/2 hour).
* transactions which contain fees have to be included in the next 72 blocks (~12 hours).
* all transactions must be included in the next 144 blocks (~24 hours).
I wonder what you will do about the blockchain being 25920 megabytes larger 181 days from now? |
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I copied the encrypted wallet. Put the original back in the safe. Unencrypted the copy. Put the wallet copy in an empty client. Sent some coins. Deleted the copy.
Are you able to find the transaction for the coins you sent in block explorer? (I don't need to see it, but if you can find it we can check to see if you have the keys for the account used to collect the change from that transaction). Also, as others asked— how many times did you send+ hit getnewaddress since you made the encrypted copy? A few or potentially as many as 100? |
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I'm missing something here. Doesn't the wallet key pool prevent this from happening unless you have over 100 transactions since you last backup?? Yes, if the pool isn't empty. But if you've never sent any bitcoins, the pool will be empty. That was never true, at least not since there was a pool—prior to 0.3.23 the pool remained empty until you hit the getaddress button for the first time. Since then, however bitcoin fills the pool instantly on startup even if you've never gotten an address out of it. |
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Sure, the Gov can always spend money at will. The US gov simply has to print more money. I am sure $10M is nothing since the gov has already printed trillions
Sure but there are cheaper ways to screw up bitcoin .. declare using it and mining it illegal and punishable by death. Free attention from the press— say its a childpornterrorist tool—, a couple helicopters with flir, a few raids, some additional proposed legislation in a few more friendly countries, and a public execution or two and the bitcoin security is gone _real quick_ ... and not even a million bucks spent. No fussy costly and highly public technical attacks that are going to result in civil litigation and might by thwarted counter measures that risk making the powers that be look incompetent.... just the core tools of authority: ink on paper and jackbooted thugs, tried and proven. ("Goverment builds $10m building bitcoin busting ASIC farm, bitcoiner's change one value in their POW algorithm and do a network wide updated and the $10m farm is worthless", a counter measure we won't have forever but it's one we'll have up until the good guys are using asic/sasic in mass) The long term security of bitcoin depends on it being to unimportant, uninteresting, and unconventional for that kind of adversary to bother with it.. until such a time as bitcoin is too important for them to afford and beloved to afford messing with it. If you look at how slowly most large institutions have adapted to technology this outcome doesn't seem unlikely. Bitcoin isn't all negatives for the status-quo authorities— it should increase economic efficiency, and it removes the unfortunate attraction of printing money which all politicians hate (or at least hate when its for someone elses program) but almost universally can't resist when its for their own programs—... and if the public at large wants it, suppressing it would look bad indeed and wouldn't work out well in places that claim to have freedom. |
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My point is that the network right now is mostly GPU while in the past was mostly CPUs. If somebody makes a custom ASIC / product like BFL Labs that gets each unit minimum of 1 Ghash/s until we all upgrade to that technology the network is vulnerable to a 51% by the guys with the new tech etc. Can someone confirm ? Thanks.
I'm sorry that this was surprising to you. It's long been known to many other people that if someone wanted to sink a few million in NRE for a fully custom ASIC on a modern process (e.g. 45nm) they could churn out chips that do e.g. 10GH for a marginal cost of tens of dollars per chip (e.g. similar costs to a GPU chip, but massively more hash power. Actual performance figures are fuzzy only because the design of a custom asic would be thermally limited, so it's a question of how cheap you can get good packaging and how well can keep it cool). This is why the introduction of improved efficiency miners (like the BFL, if it's real) to the public is a good and important thing. It's also a reason why GPU miners are good— while a custom asic would have a big advantage over GPUs their advantage over CPUs is even greater. |
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The principle isn´t a very old principle which used for example to encrypt files, drives or data streams. In all cases every side must have the hashcode for the right checksum.
So it is a little bit curious that the bitcoin wasn´t found much earlier.
Maybe one reason is that the worldwide web, online shopping, smart phones which were increased significantly.
Another reason is that the fiat money system is blowing up and more and more guys search an alternative money system.
There is a lot more to bitcoin than just how addresses are computed. The byzantine agreement algorithm bitcoin uses is novel and was the missing piece that prevented bitcoin from being invented in the 90s. |
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Here is the background/technical information:
Please provide clear step by step details of what you did. It's completely unclear to me from what you've described why you believe that your backup practices had anything to do with this. Did you delete your wallet at any step or restore from backup at any step? |
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b) only SIII based prototypes exist, once they get enough pre-orders HCIIIs get ordered (about 8wk if you rush assembly... possible.)
or
c) they somehow got a whole bunch of large SIIIs really cheap.
or
d) something entirely different.
You'd agree what we could probably identify (b),(c) from the power usage though, no? |
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on the basis of the pics, this is a very high quality product, with professional design.
it looks like 2 FPGAs with a MCU on a 4 layers PCB. and i see that 3 voltage test points, 1.1V/2.5V/3.3V.
which high-end FPGA uses 1.1V for the core?
not altera S4 (0.9V),
possible xilinx V6 is 1.05V (1.1V is OK),
possible xilinx V5 is 1.05V (1.1V is OK)
V6 isn't going to do 1GH with 20w. |
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The demo plan is that I will:
A) connect it to a non-routable development side of the pool, so that the box is unable to communicate with the internet. I will then let it submit shares to the pool and I will have one of the getwork servers in debug mode and I will see what is sent out and what's sent back. As I found no evidence of any wireless communications on the board, and since the computer it's connected to will not be on the internet, it won't have any way of falsifying the shares submitted.
B) I will take a unit home that evening, disassemble and take more robust pictures. I will NOT be removing any heat sinks, however.
C) I will do further testing that evening on my own with a packet analyzer to see what packets are being transmitted, when and where they are going and coming from.
That's the plan as of right now, at any rate.
Please make sure at some point during the actual mining you run it on a power meter so you can get a measurement under actual mining load. There are various ways to fake this sort of thing and match one of {rate,power} but not both. (e.g. you could use a big-fast-expensive FPGA to get 1GH/s, but if they did that they couldn't deliver on their advertised price) |
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To be clear, merkle pruning only applies to clients that need to conserve space. You still need the entire chain to mine.
You can prune all the spent outputs and mine away. What you can't do is run a lite headers-only node to mine— unless you just want to mine for the subsidy and not process any transactions. Though with a commitment to open transactions in the prior block, you could mine txn which provide the connecting fragments for the prior block for all of their inputs. |
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however this method still requires storage of all blockheaders, meaning there is still a unlimited cap on the blockchain size.
One hundred years of headers is about 400 mbytes of data. Why are you wasting our time with this drivel? At certain points in time the client generates a snapshot of the of every unspent tx output in the chain.
Superior versions of what you're describing have been suggested before: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=21995.0I say superior, because arranging the ledger summary into a hash tree allows nodes to participate without even knowing the complete ledger— other nodes can present ledger fragments to them with the branches which connect the ledger to the tree root— and the whole ledger is constantly current. Bytecoin went further and suggested that you can actually flip the direction of the chain and track the ledgers alone, leaving the coin holders to track the fragments connecting their own coins to the chain. But none of this is required because of block header sizes. |
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