Difficulty does have a small effect on price. When difficulty is high relative to the price, people looking to invest in bitcoin are more likely to buy bitcoins than hardware.
Yes quite. Difficulty provides the bottom line to the price channel. |
|
|
|
|
I'm ambivalent ... standards can become a strait-jacket for innovation. ... or they can work great. Blind adherence to "the standard" can lead to some pretty draconian outcomes ... maybe put the common sense standard trumps all others at the top of the page.
|
|
|
|
|
It would be great if people started doing this, they get profits for making the markets more efficient ... there is money to be made here, in the interim ... bigger risk/reward now than later.
|
|
|
|
|
quite the coming out party we got here .... hope they don't have a bitcoin round up any time soon, although the more people adding their names the less likely it becomes. Admire your mettle guys, hope you appreciate what you are up against.
(I prefer to remain pseudo-anonymous for now for commercial and private reasons ... people who matter can easily find out and the people that don't can't.)
|
|
|
|
|
Sting was awesome ... bit greenie now for my liking though ... Andy Summers was pretty cool too.
|
|
|
|
I'm all in favor of small groups spinning off the bitcoin code. There are parts of the user spectrum that don't need to be in the main branch. The very light side (small towns) and the very dark side (criminal organizations.)
They should both develop their own branches.
we can tell other people what they should and shouldn't be doing as much as we want .... doesn't make a damn bit of difference in my experience. |
|
|
|
|
Not as bad as the guy who reformatted his hard-drive with 1500 BTC on it ... didn't think they were worth anything.
So this is one good counter to all these sour grapes tools going on about "early adopter" advantage ... there was clearly a huge risk they would be worthless, some early adopters actually trashed there bitcoins.
No advantage, just market forces at work.
|
|
|
|
Why is everyone getting upset over FPGAs? They're not a threat at all, and when they do become a "threat", they will be freely marketed to miners.
The best price (academic) I can get on an Altera 115K is $330. It is theorized they can do about 100mhash/s (currently only 80mhash). That comes out to $3.30 per mhash, compared to the $0.50 per mhash of a 5870. Thus it would take over six times as long to breakeven on the hardware, which increases variability (risk) by a ton. Not only that, but FPGAs have little resale value. I can easily turn around and sell my 5870/5970 for what I purchased it for.
Where are these FPGA's with "little resale value" being resold? Looks like Moa beat me to the punch... maybe they end up at auction houses in silicon valley or there are government regulations mandating their disposal... I could imagine going to my local auction and they suddenly have a pallet of them and no one bids on them because they have no idea what the hell they are. Yep, could easily happen. Wall St. and City of London have been knee-deep in them for at least the last 5 years. They use them for real-time, super-fast, algorithm trading. Sure to be some scrap coming outta there since they are always upgrading to latest to keep up with the competition ... hey why does that sound familiar? |
|
|
|
FPGAs are only cost effective if you already have them for other purposes.
That was my original contention .... now I wonder where there are scrap-yards full of discarded FPGAs?? |
|
|
|
A couple of months ago I did a calculation. If 21 million Bitcoins are to take the place of the current global money supply (expressed in contemporary US$), what would BTC 1 be worth?
The answer, at that time, was around US$50,000.
Needless to say, this made me hot.
Is that like a "hot under the collar" kind of hot or the other kind of "hot" ... ? |
|
|
|
I remember people complaining about how closed source GPU miners are so unfair to those mining with CPUs.
Now everyone mines with a GPU we end up with a much stronger network.
You can still have a stronger network with proprietary and open source FPGAs even if there was a limit. But if there is a limit, then you can never know if it's the strongest. Logicly speaking, any limit on the choice of tech will effectively result in a network somewhat less secure than otherwise. I fully understand that one solution is to buy and add more hardware, as I said in my original post, all the time. The (potentially) billions of dollars eventually spent on hardware doesn't add any value to the Bitcoin community beyond a certain strength level. There comes a point when the network is strong enough to offer good security. What we are doing is like continuously adding additional firewalls to protect a PC from intrusion. The first layers add good security, but the additional security diminishes with each new layer. I don't think you have grasped the fundamental point that if Bitcoin doesn't use the best hardware then someone else will use it against bitcoin. The network needs to made up of a bigger proportion of honest nodes, regardless of hardware ... it is the hardware belonging to honest nodes that backs the bitcoin value, literally (technically) and economically. |
|
|
|
yeah, we'll get back to ya .... edit: RestartaCoin ... thatsa good one (below)  |
|
|
|
|
What we need now are some bounties posted to get FPGA technology open sourced ... links to good cards and s/ware and set-up guides ... exactly as was done for GPU back in Jan/Feb.
If the bounties are posted in BTC then the cost to the outside world becomes slightly less relevant since the the current hardware has probably paid for itself, BTCwise. It is just another demonstration that BTC is actually backed by the hardware/software and electricity going into keeping the network competitive, secure.
FPGA miner bounty, who's up for it?
|
|
|
|
|
Anybody using the "phatk" kernel on HD 5970 ??
Did a quick test on one of my cores and didn't see any noticeable difference over pocblm (less if anything..... SDK 2.1, fglrx 11.2, clocks 800/300)
|
|
|
|
Nice, very nice .. like the ambiance, maybe a selection of music, that lounge thing gets old (especially when you losing  ) Just out of curiosity how does the randomness (shuffling) on cards dealt get done in the s/ware ... could that part of the code be on display to assuage any doubts about "dealer bias"? |
|
|
|
1. I still can't see how newcomers pay any price for getting into the new BTC economy. This is markedly different from adopting a gold standard, since nobody is forcing anybody to back anything by anything or to buy anything. It is true that the early adopters gain, but who loses? Maybe the people who hold $, EUR, etc., because their value should (slightly) decrease. But this effect should be minimal and would occur just the same with InflaCoin.
2. One problem that I can see with the huge rally in prices that so many of us are expecting: At current BTC prices, about $50,000 a day are given away in mined coins. Were 1 BTC to cost $7000, this would be $50,000,000 every day. Mining is profitable until that much money is burnt every day in electricity and other mining costs.
2.a) It will take a while until that much money can be burnt - especially since unfortunately it does not pay for normal users to just mine on their CPU. So I think it will take a while for the BTC/$ price to rise.
2.b) Do we really need to burn $50,000,000 every day on electricity? Is there a plausible scenario where this "protection cost" is spent in something else, like buying special hashing devices for every user (or, preferably, not at all)? IMHO these are the real social costs of bitcoin. Has anyone tried calculating (bounding) comparable social costs for other currencies (banks, military ...) per unit? I have no idea if this is a bargain (which would be a great argument for bitcoin) or a terrible waste.
It is a bargain .... we have no idea how much waste is going into keeping the current corpse of a monetary system barely breathing. It is on the order of U$D trillions. |
|
|
|
I warned earlier ... can't find the post, about getting too heavily into GPUs because of threat they would go the way of CPU when FPGA came on-line ... scrapped my GPU expansion plans out of sheer nerves last week ... EDIT: here it is http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6903.msg101253#msg101253
Re: Bitcoin mining more profitable than January.
01 May 2011, 13:15:05
Reply with quote Edit message Delete message #7
Bitcoin minting ... i prefer that term to the mining term i think ... with a pool it is more like minting, while going solo it is more like mining (due to the variance differences).
What the current crop of GPU miners need to be aware of is the fpga threat on the horizon. As the CPU miners were out-moded when capital values involved in bitcoin became high enough, then so to maybe GPUs become out-moded when capital values of bitcoin minting gets to high enough levels to justify fpga investment. It has been more about capital equipment cost (silicon chip) than electricity.
Some banks and trading houses already have fpga hardware, some may even have it sitting around idle after the financial crash, so some programming and electricity and they are in business bitcoin minting without significant capital expenditure ... (ps PM me if you would like to know how to do this, if you can pay in BTC).
Edit: big GPU clusters may be around for a long time too, hard to know |
|
|
|
Apologies but no more development information will be posted. I've been offered a 25% share from someone that owns 2 FPGA clusters. If you haven't seen that type of hardware before think a 156 FPGAs per machine.
Okay, so the most likely existing FPGA user with this kind of hardware is either a crypto set-up or banking/financial house that used it for algo trading. So I'm gonna have a guess that it was an existing financial entity of some sort ... which means they will have an incentive to set-up a decent bitcoin exchange with easy interface with existing currency markets to go along with their mining operation. Basically a 'rogue' from the current oligopolies is breaking ranks and going to "have a go". If this is the case, it is great news. Edit: oy yeah, if there is one finance house out there ready to mobilise their existing FPGAs to spin a bitcoin profit there will be dozens ... a lot of these guys are "on the bones of their arse broke" after the financial collapse of fiat money, just hanging out for every QE injection from the bernank. |
|
|
|
I think positioning bitcoin as "revolutionizing the financial system" is the goal-- not more radical statement I've heard (like "destabilizing governments"). Most people either like or are indifferent to their governments (I know, I know, sheeple and all that... lets not go there). I don't think most people get the warm fuzzies when thinking about bankers and Big Corporations; bitcoin as "The People's Money" is the right way to think about it. The accelerating interconnectedness of recent governments with their banking systems is what is creating the increasing possibility for bitcoin to destabilise governments, not bitcoin itself. It is just a technological tool, we don't do politics here.  I'm undecided about how up-front you should be with the mainstream for these possibilities as the odds are unclear and changing rapidly with social behaviour, i.e. unpredictably. However, it is probably a fair assumption that the entrenched financial interests currently in power will not be so friendly in how they portray bitcoin. It is after all, a threat to the monopoly that they need on money issuance, to keep current buy-in on the fiat inflation scheme widespread. At some point, probably if bitcoin becomes adopted wider, the fact that bitcoin establishes a mechanism for citizens to enforce their right to financial privacy is going to have to be made clear, in a PR-friendly manner or otherwise. Intrusive governments violating their citizens right to financial and communication privacy are prone to destabilisation, from past history, so I think this is the most "destablising" aspect of the technology. It would be good if Jon Matonis could weigh in somewhere about a good approach of how this news should be broken to the establishment so they don't freak out too much. It saddens me when I see some half-wit reporter in Slate denigrating bitcoin potential users as "privacy freaks". |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
