Bitcoin Forum
December 07, 2024, 09:11:20 AM *
News: Latest Bitcoin Core release: 28.0 [Torrent]
 
  Home Help Search Login Register More  
  Show Posts
Pages: [1] 2 3 »
1  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: what else can the mining rig do while its mining? on: August 08, 2011, 01:56:16 PM
Anything where you dont need to use the video card

web server, file server, tor node, torrent, bot trading
2  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bounty for the MyBitcoin.com hacker (~25BTC) on: August 08, 2011, 01:44:02 PM
I'm willing to hold the bitcoins in escrow while the bounty is being established, and I will dispense the bounty when the target is captured.

If you need character references PM me.
3  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: .25 BTC Bounty on: June 29, 2011, 08:26:00 PM
http://www.anitec.ca/product/887187/xfx-hd-699a-enf9-hd-6990-4-gb-pci-express-2-1-x16-graphics-card-hd699aenf9

4  Bitcoin / Mining support / Re: How to build your own power supply? on: June 28, 2011, 08:46:14 AM
I don't know much about electricity yet... but it sounds like a pretty simply job.
That's the last phrase of someone gunning for the Darwin award.

Seriously, playing with electricity that contains enough amps to kill you outright is NOT something that is recommended, unless that is your job and you've got education to back it up.

Not at all, ampere don't kill you. Even heard about someone being electrocuted by a car battery? I guess not. And you can easly get hundreds of Amperes out of them

Electricity starts to be harmful at about 50 Volts.

BTW, PSU are not transformer, they are AC/DC switching units (note the plural). You can't just connect some of them together, you'll just end up frying all your hardware.

what about "volts jolt, amps kill"?
5  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: hey miners whats your price to dump a large ammout of BTC on market ? on: June 26, 2011, 05:17:49 AM
Good question

I'd say somewhere around $45
6  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Mining strike on: June 24, 2011, 06:18:05 AM
Any kind of cartel action to raise mining prices will just encourage more mining.

Higher prices = more investment in mining. Artificially raising the price through collusion would just result in lost profits due to more competition.

What you really need to have a good cartel are barriers to entry.
7  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Non-Verbal Analysis of statements by Mark and Adam (MtGox) on: June 23, 2011, 05:26:25 AM
bitsalame - I'm a psychology nerd too, and I've found that it's almost impossible to discuss even basic psychology with most people on the internet. Especially internet forums.

My hypothesis is that internet forums are a social ghetto for neurotic people, and almost any kind of psychology discussion that deals in facts is threatening to someone reading.

It hits home, it makes them think of possibilities they hadn't considered, and is generally just dangerous to their idealized self-images. Half the people in these internet forums think they are automatically informed on any topic because they know how to google, or because they read a crappy news article once.

Their self-esteem defence mechanism (among other things) is always a poorly cobbled together recitation of logical fallacies (which they mis-apply) and shallow wikipedia scans which they misinterpret.

Follow the adage: "Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
8  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: "I hacked mt gox and all I got was this security awareness" on: June 21, 2011, 02:05:05 AM
I love it when 16 year olds tell people to sacrifice $5,000,000 "for the team"

Sacrifice ? What a nonsense. Ruin the mtgox, do what ever you want with them , but that rollback was done right. Nobody asked Kavin to give back that 600  BTC, well - that is not true, i am asking.  At least nobody demand it. I am not concerned about mtgox future, let mtgox burn in hell. But what mtgox doing right now is absolutely legit. I am looked at this from complete different sides of view, and do not find any flaw in their position on rollback. I am do not care about mtgox, but  compared to mtgox and bitcoins, that Kavin just not exist in my opinion. Well not exist until he can prove that he suffered losses in that force major. And as i see - he did not.


I like how you think your opinion matters, like you get to vote on what happens to this money.

The courts are going to decide where the money goes.

Until then, all the 16 year olds and people who can't spell "Kevin" will keep spouting off like they matter.
9  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: "I hacked mt gox and all I got was this security awareness" on: June 21, 2011, 01:46:31 AM
I love it when 16 year olds tell people to sacrifice $5,000,000 "for the team"
10  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What have we all learnt from the Mt Gox incident? on: June 20, 2011, 05:23:52 PM
Aside from the fact that I'm glad I used a unique password for my Mt. Gox account, I look at this incident in much the same way I look at the Amazon Web Services outage of a couple months ago (which I was also affected by.) Some AWS users left claiming they had lost faith in Amazon's ability to keep their systems up, even though up to that time Amazon's record had been exemplary. My feeling was and still is that this sort of thing would only strengthen Amazon, and that while failures do inevitably happen, this failure would be extremely unlikely to happen ever again, and a whole class of related potential failures would never happen at all. So, unless Amazon, and by the same argument Mt. Gox, shows a repeated pattern of failures in the same category, I think it wise to stick with them.

There's a lot of truth in Nietzsche's statement, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."



You're comparing Amazon.com with Magic The Gathering Online eXchange.

One of them is the biggest success of the internet age that employs the most talented computer scientists in the world to tackle the most difficult business and technical challenges on the internet.

The other is a glorified calculator, providing a service that was already perfected long ago, in a very amateur and incompetent way. They've made errors that freshman computer science students know not to make. They've proven their deep incompetence.

AWS went down because AWS is like the space shuttle of internet technology. It is cutting edge: AWS EBS is trying to solve a problem that most other experts literally consider impossible. Despite their downtime, they haven't even violated their SLA.

Magic The Gather Online eXchange is too incompetent to use bcrypt and not expose their fucking accounts database to insecure parties. Magic The Gathering doesn't even have an SLA. Because they are fucking incompetent and untrustworthy.
11  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 03:53:10 AM
Quote from: Hook^
Difficulty increases aren't just an assumption, look at the graph of the last year.  What I am saying is that as long as difficulty increases are growing at the current rate, mining will never be as profitable as investing directly.  At the current rate, you have to have an increase in bitcoin value to compensate for the increase in difficulty to just break even.  So indirectly, you are speculating on the increasing value of bitcoins when you mine.

Now, if the growth of computing horsepower slows down to 2% or less, then mining obviously is the better option.  Like for the first year of bitcoin's existence when the growth was flat.

Mining is lower profit, but it's also lower risk. You can sell your rig, you can use it on other projects, or you could play games with it. Mining can also remain profitable even if the price goes down, especially if, as the price goes down, network growth rate decreases.

Your extrapolation of the difficulty growth is still just a guess. There is no reason why difficulty has to keep growing at that rate. It could easily fall to 2%.

In conclusion, mining makes as much sense now as it did on May 1st. Which is to say, it's anyone's guess what will happen.
You are absolutely correct that in the worst case, you still have hardware you can sell or use.  In the worst case of investing directly you have nothing.

As far as network growth, I wouldn't say it easily go down to 2%/day because it hasn't in the last year.  That being said, it will have to slow down at some point because there are only so many GPUs out there.  When that happens no one knows, but betting it will happen next week is a risky bet.  Of course, once someone makes some custom ASIC arrays the game is over for everyone.



When it comes abstract mathematical metrics derived from the interaction of complex human behaviour, past performance does not predict future performance. This is economics 101.

Difficulty is not a physical object. It does not obey Newton's first law. Abstract, arbitrary metrics generally don't. (And when they look like they do, it's usually just because they haven't changed yet. See: LTCM. See: Housing prices. See: Tulips. When stuff looks predictable, it's usually because you're suffering from selection bias.)
12  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 03:39:54 AM
Quote from: Hook^
Difficulty increases aren't just an assumption, look at the graph of the last year.  What I am saying is that as long as difficulty increases are growing at the current rate, mining will never be as profitable as investing directly.  At the current rate, you have to have an increase in bitcoin value to compensate for the increase in difficulty to just break even.  So indirectly, you are speculating on the increasing value of bitcoins when you mine.

Now, if the growth of computing horsepower slows down to 2% or less, then mining obviously is the better option.  Like for the first year of bitcoin's existence when the growth was flat.

Mining is lower profit, but it's also lower risk. You can sell your rig, you can use it on other projects, or you could play games with it. Mining can also remain profitable even if the price goes down, especially if, as the price goes down, network growth rate decreases.

Your extrapolation of the difficulty growth is still just a guess. There is no reason why difficulty has to keep growing at that rate. It could easily fall to 2%.

In conclusion, mining makes as much sense now as it did on May 1st. Which is to say, it's anyone's guess what will happen.
13  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 03:19:11 AM
Again, I'm not going to lower myself to calling names.

Where have I lied? No one has showed me a single "lie" that I have posted.

I'm just telling them to use their heads and be rational. That is all.

Nobody needs to "encourage" any newbie -- greed (which is part of human nature) does that role just fine. My "job" is to balance things, to help people think more clearly.


I am having the same problem in my mining thread.  One guy follows my threads around to tell me how I am a troll and liar, but won't refute the facts I have put out.

The fact remains that because the network is doubling every 18 days, your output halves every 18 days and you won't ever break even because of that.  The mining calculators don't take that into consideration.

Stating facts isn't the bullshit part.

The bullshit part is when you tell people "you won't ever break even" when YOU DON'T KNOW THAT.

Did you tell those people that by your same calculations, mining would be considered unproftaible in may? In april? In march?

Because all these calculations are the exact same calculations done for the last year, and these calculations say very little, because the people who do these calculations (you!) cannot predct the single important factor that actually matters: price.

All ROI calculations are bogus because all ROI calculations make assumptions about price. Any conclusion other than "I don't know what's going to happen, your guess is as good as mine. Just depends where you think the price will go." is bullshit.
Sorry, I misspoke.  I should have said that mining isn't profitable at the current price, and is less profitable than investing in bitcoins directly with increasing prices.  The only thing I am predicting is that the network continues to grow at 4%/day, which it has on average over the last year.  Almost perfectly.

Check out http://bitcoin.sipa.be/  to see just how perfectly.  As long as that remains the same, you won't make as much money as just investing in bitcoins.

So yes, I would have said in April that mining is less profitable too.  If you had bought $1,000 in bitcoins you would have $20,000 in bitcoins now.  Did anyone buying $1000 worth of mining equipment make $20,000 in that same time period?


I think it's cool that you're trying to learn how to be an amateur investment advisor.

So here's a lesson: risk is the single most important variable in an investment.

Buying bitcoins is, by a fundamental law of the universe, always going to be more potentially profitable than mining because it is higher risk.

Mining is lower risk, but also lower expected returns.

An investor's choice of where they should put their money and time depends on their risk profile.

Is the investor looking for a high risk, high yield investment, and is comfortable taking losses but still acting rationally? He should buy bitcoins.

Is the investor running tighter on money and can't afford to lose much, but also isn't aiming to make more? Is the investor willing to invest personal time and effort managing his investment? If yes he should consider mining.

Variables that matter for deciding about an investment in bitcoins:
- Your risk profile
- Your beliefs about future price
- Your skills (Are you capable of trading wisely? Avoiding panic? Not getting scammed?)*
- Your interests (Does system administration turn you on?)**

Things that don't matter:
- Other people's calculations about difficulty increases
- Bogus ROI calculations based on unknowable assumptions
- Stuff your competition says to discourage you from competing with them


*Lots of people who attempt to become traders end up losing their shirts because they panic. The ideal trader is a person who is rational and level-headed even when others scream that the sky is falling. Not every personality type is a good trader: people with the letter "F" in their MBTI are often naturally bad traders for instance and tend to buy high and sell low despite their best intentions. If you have an "F" in your MBTI you should consider if you can handle the pressure of knowing you could lose all your money.

**Running a bitcoin machine is like buying a pet. It takes regular maintenance and a non-zero recurring time investment. It also requires a variety of computer skills that many miners take for granted, but which newbies may not have and may not have an interest in learning.
14  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Uber simple ATX case on: June 19, 2011, 03:03:08 AM
very nice!
15  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 03:00:13 AM
Again, I'm not going to lower myself to calling names.

Where have I lied? No one has showed me a single "lie" that I have posted.

I'm just telling them to use their heads and be rational. That is all.

Nobody needs to "encourage" any newbie -- greed (which is part of human nature) does that role just fine. My "job" is to balance things, to help people think more clearly.


I am having the same problem in my mining thread.  One guy follows my threads around to tell me how I am a troll and liar, but won't refute the facts I have put out.

The fact remains that because the network is doubling every 18 days, your output halves every 18 days and you won't ever break even because of that.  The mining calculators don't take that into consideration.

Stating facts isn't the bullshit part.

The bullshit part is when you tell people "you won't ever break even" when YOU DON'T KNOW THAT.

Did you tell those people that by your same calculations, mining would be considered unproftaible in may? In april? In march?

Because all these calculations are the exact same calculations done for the last year, and these calculations say very little, because the people who do these calculations (you!) cannot predct the single important factor that actually matters: price.

All ROI calculations are bogus because all ROI calculations make assumptions about price. Any conclusion other than "I don't know what's going to happen, your guess is as good as mine. Just depends where you think the price will go." is bullshit.
16  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 02:53:45 AM
Oh, and I think you must be pretty dense to not realize that EVERYONE KNOWS THAT IT'S IN MINERS' BEST INTEREST TO DISCOURAGE OTHERS. It's not like you're letting the cat out of the bag or anything.

"Oh no, the jig is up!"  ...Not hardly.

Everyone knows that anything negative spouted on this forum about mining is partly to defend our own future profitability. You think some people don't know that?

A reader needs to take everything on its own merit -- either it's true or it isn't. And yes, a person should read the pros AND THE CONS of something like bitcoin mining before jumping in head-first.  It's called getting a balanced view.

You think all the stuff I pointed out is just so much BS calculated to scare you away from mining? Go ahead and believe that at your own peril. I didn't post *anything* that isn't 100% true. Heck, half the time I post mathematical figures, which don't lie.


Mining is betting that the bitcoin price will stay above a certain threshold. Buying coins is betting that the bitcoin price will go up.

Also, I just generally am pissed off by all you douche bags with your fear mongering and discouragement. I don't like you lying assholes on a personal level - the way you say one thing and do something else.
It is also betting that difficulty increases don't grow fast enough to destroy your profits.  Right now the difficulty doubles every 18 days, so your output halves every 18 days.  That is a big problem

The threshold I mentioned contains the difficulty information. But really the difficulty doesn't matter. All that matters is the price. If the difficulty mattered, then people would have stopped mining at 250k. Bitcoins were actually MORE profitable when the difficulty rose to 450k and then 550k, and LESS profitable at 250k. Why? Because all that matters is the price.
17  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 19, 2011, 01:29:14 AM
Oh, and I think you must be pretty dense to not realize that EVERYONE KNOWS THAT IT'S IN MINERS' BEST INTEREST TO DISCOURAGE OTHERS. It's not like you're letting the cat out of the bag or anything.

"Oh no, the jig is up!"  ...Not hardly.

Everyone knows that anything negative spouted on this forum about mining is partly to defend our own future profitability. You think some people don't know that?

A reader needs to take everything on its own merit -- either it's true or it isn't. And yes, a person should read the pros AND THE CONS of something like bitcoin mining before jumping in head-first.  It's called getting a balanced view.

You think all the stuff I pointed out is just so much BS calculated to scare you away from mining? Go ahead and believe that at your own peril. I didn't post *anything* that isn't 100% true. Heck, half the time I post mathematical figures, which don't lie.


Your calculations are stupid for the same reason that the same calculations were stupid back in may, and in april before that, and in march before that. They're the same calculations.

Profitability depends on one thing: price of bitcoins. Since you can't predict this, you can't predict profitability.

Mining is betting that the bitcoin price will stay above a certain threshold. Buying coins is betting that the bitcoin price will go up.

Each bet has different risk profiles and can be approached differently, but both of them are just bets on the price of bitcoins, same as they were back in may.

There is nothing inherantly less profitable about the current moment than there was back in May - in fact it is easy to argue that bitcoins are a smarter and safer bet now than they were then.

Since I'm a miner, telling the truth goes against my self-interest. But the reason I don't mind telling the truth is because I do this primarily as a hobby, for fun, and because I think bitcoins are cool and have a future. I also think the long-term health of bitcoins will be bolstered by more people invested in them, by more miners, more decentralization, more activity, more interest.

So if a newbie reads my post and goes and buys mining hardware I will lose a bit of money in the short-term because of that, but in the long-term I don't mind.

Also, I just generally am pissed off by all you douche bags with your fear mongering and discouragement. I don't like you lying assholes on a personal level - the way you say one thing and do something else.
18  Bitcoin / Mining / Re: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 18, 2011, 09:55:45 PM
I'm not selling my mining rigs, and they aren't either, because we all know that mining is profitable and fun and will most likely remain profitable.
Of course. Just look at how Namecoin mining continues to be more profitable than BTC mining after people started bragging about it on the forum.

Oh, wait...

Right, miners have realized that since mining is competitive, by bragging about it they ruin their own golden goose.

That's why there is now a concerted effort to discourage newbies from starting up. Newbies are threats to profit.
19  Bitcoin / Mining / Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. on: June 18, 2011, 09:46:26 PM
A bunch of harpies who are angry at reduced profits due to difficulty increases have taken it upon themselves to whine loudly on the forum about how mining is a bad investment.

These people invariably have their own mining rigs: they don't follow their own advice. They're trying to avoid further difficulty increases, which may make them lose money.

Mining is still very profitable, and if it wasn't, these assholes wouldn't be spending their free time trying to convince you not to do it.

In conclusion, if you think it would be fun to participate, go for it. Hopefully you know something about hardware, software, and trading. You'll probably make your money back no problem. It may take a few months. Bitcoins probably aren't going anywhere though.

Just remember: all of these people trying to convince you not to do it, are themselves not following their own advice. If they did follow their own advice, they would sell their bitcoin machines RIGHT NOW to other miners via craigslist.

I'm not selling my mining rigs, and they aren't either, because we all know that mining is profitable and fun and will most likely remain profitable.
20  Economy / Economics / Re: Bitcoin will only succeed once it takes the right approach to the decimal place. on: June 13, 2011, 06:58:59 PM
there are 210 trillion satoshis available. (American trillions. Note that euros have a different meaning for "trillion")

The currency should be changed so that:

1 bitcoin becomes 1 satoshi

Code:
CURRENT VALUE                    FUTURE VALUE
1 satoshi                        1 bitcoin
500 satoshi                      500 bitcoins
500k satoshi                     500 thousand bitcoins (500k)
500 million satoshi              500 million bitcoins (500mil)
500 billion satoshi              500 billion bitcoins (500bil)
210 trillion satoshi             210 trillion bitcoins (210tril)


Just change the meaning of what we currently call a bitcoin to what is currently called a satoshi.

Bitcoins and satoshis become the same thing and the problem will be solved. The public will understand, and will be excited to get their hands on 10, 100, 1k, 100k, 1mil, 100mil, 500mil bitcoins.

Fractions are poison for the currency.
Pages: [1] 2 3 »
Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.19 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!