What assumptions are people using to justify adding mining rigs?

[xenon481]

Well we would know who they are, they are already on this list http://www.top500.org/

Sorry to sound sarcastic but even if they knock down the 2 biggest groups they would not practically be able to overcome the remainder of the network.

Overcoming the entire network right now is easily within reach of any large or governmental organization.  The last calculations that I remember seeing about this recently said that it would take less than $2,000,000USD worth of hardware.

[gigabytecoin]

Nope, you're right on.
The only thing people are using to justify investing large amounts of money into this...
Is Bitcoin price speculation.

I justify my miner purchases knowing that I will be able to sell them for at least 50% of what I paid within the year.

[fnord123]

Well we would know who they are, they are already on this list http://www.top500.org/

Sorry to sound sarcastic but even if they knock down the 2 biggest groups they would not practically be able to overcome the remainder of the network.

If any significant botnet owner decided to they could DDOS pretty much all the major pools. Most (all?) of the pool servers are run by small time operators who don't have the infrastructure needed to survive a big DDOS attack.  Ditto hacking wise - one guy setting up a server and typing yum update now and then does not make a robust system.  Once all the mining pools are offline the size of the problem is a lot smaller.

[fnord123]

The replacement exchange will need to some time to recover from the loss of the US market.

Can I modify? If the price on whatever the prominent exchange is, is not prominently trending up within 2 months of losing the USD link then I lose. I do however win if it falls to 0 first but recovers to a readable, upwards trending price within the 2month period.
Can we define upwards trend as higher than 2 weeks before the end of the 2 months?

On payment, are you suggesting that because you are law abiding or because you fear you will get caught?

If I understand your suggestion correctly, if Dwolla goes away tomorrow and BTC drops to $0.01, then two weeks later is worth $0.02, I would lose the bet.  I don't want to make that bet.  

In terms of bet legality - I meant if laws were passed (or regulations issued, court precedents set, etc.) that specifically apply to bitcoin transactions, mostly because I don't like breaking the law.  In terms of getting caught, we could easily get caught - any competent investigator could subpoena the operator of this forum to determine our IP addresses, get our home/business/whatever location from our ISP, get a warrant for our computers, and find the wallet file used to generate the address.  Once they show that our wallet has the private key associated with the address receiving payment, I'd be willing to bet that would be sufficient evidence for a prosecutor to convince a jury that I (or you) was the one who received the coins.

[Sjalq]

LOL, I meant BETTING is illegal.

Let's make it something like falls to x and recovers to 5x within 4 weeks then? Where x is something real darn small.

Where I live the investigators are mostly concerned with violent crime.

Again, is your regard for the law based on moral concerns or repercussion concerns?

[fnord123]

LOL, I meant BETTING is illegal.

Let's make it something like falls to x and recovers to 5x within 4 weeks then? Where x is something real darn small.

Where I live the investigators are mostly concerned with violent crime.

Again, is your regard for the law based on moral concerns or repercussion concerns?

My regard for the law is partially moral and partially repercussion-based.  Morally, I don't like to break laws unless I think they are really stupid.  Betting laws I think are really stupid. Laws against other currencies I am not yet sure are really stupid.  In terms of repercussions, the USA has put people in jail for alternative currencies before.

x/5x doesn't work for me - if BTC is $10 today, $0.01 tomorrow, and $0.05 in 4 weeks, I would lose the bet. Given in such a scenario I would be right that it would be a bad investment to buy mining equipment, I've no interest in the bet.  My feeling is the bitcoin market would never recover (e.g. hit $10/BTC again) if no alternate BTC <--> $ ACH capable link was established. 

[Sjalq]

We've stumbled upon something far more interesting than a bet. Why on earth would you entertain the validity of forbidding alternative currency as a 'non-stupid' law?

How about making the bet that BTC is worth it's prebreak price six months after a dollar break? So of its illegal tomorrow it's worth $10 dollars again by Jan 2012, as calculated converting from BTC to trading currency to USD.

[inh]

Welp, this thread was interesting, up until the end of the last page 

[fnord123]

We've stumbled upon something far more interesting than a bet. Why on earth would you entertain the validity of forbidding alternative currency as a 'non-stupid' law?

There are cases in my mind where giving governments the ability to freeze assets makes sense to me. For instance, freezing all of Ghaddafi's assets.  This wouldn't be possible with Bitcoins I believe. I am certainly aware there are benefits to have a means of exchange that isn't controlled by governments, but I'm not 100% convinced yet.

How about making the bet that BTC is worth it's prebreak price six months after a dollar break? So of its illegal tomorrow it's worth $10 dollars again by Jan 2012, as calculated converting from BTC to trading currency to USD.

I will take that bet if it includes that there is still no Dwolla/MtGox-like ACH way re-established within the 6 month period.

[no_alone]

I think that to survive the option of a DDOS attack the next version of the minner should have the option that if there is no connection to the server to try and connect to another pool ...
and finally if there is no connection to try and do solo minning.. I can build a guiminer that will do it but I see no point in rebuilding everything from scratch ..
I think this is very important!!

[BitLex]

who can say 'no' to free hardware?
my excuse is, that the hardware will probably pay off for itself sooner or later (may it be 1month, or 6),
after that point, i can do with that practically free hardware, whatever i want, give it to family-members or friends for free (or for a favor), sell it for profit, or just let it keep mining for even more profit.

There are cases in my mind where giving governments the ability to freeze assets makes sense to me. For instance, freezing all of Ghaddafi's assets.

and why should the government be able to freeze Ghaddafi's assets?
why only his, why not yours too? do you have different rights than he has?

[jme621]

Getting my next rig for free/close to free

its my bday soon and sent all the people who give me gifts a recommendation item to get me hehe, and i know half of them did already

[Lars]

I justify my miner purchases knowing that I will be able to sell them for at least 50% of what I paid within the year.

This.. The OP is (wrongly imho) assuming a full depreciation of his equipment after only 3 months. The GPUs should be easy to sell for at least 50% of what you paid for them, even after a full year.

[Ulysses]

Overcoming the entire network right now is easily within reach of any large or governmental organization.  The last calculations that I remember seeing about this recently said that it would take less than $2,000,000USD worth of hardware.

The problem with this calculation, is that by the time they got through bureaucracy & installation, they need 10 times this amount

[Meatball]

Here's the key assumption you need to go in with.

Imagine whatever you spend you'll never get back and don't spend any more money than you can afford to live without.  If you make back your original investment down the road, great, if even more, that's gravy.

Whatever you do, don't go out and max your credit cards out expecting you'll get the cash to pay it back in a month or two.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from mining or BTC's.  I'd highly suggest you get into mining however you can because it's a blast and you'll learn a lot.  But just go in with the assumption that you'll never get your money back and have fun with it.

[minerX]

Currently, there are about 5-6 pools who mine around 75% of the whole Bitcoins. If you target those pools with DDoS attacks, you can make them unstable, failing, etc. The result would be 4 times slower Bitcoin network.

Sure, new pools may show up. It will take some time, though. And they can be targeted, too.

Actually, I think that the above is already being performed by SOMEONE.

This completely wrong.  I'm tired of people spouting off this nonsense.   If all the pools dropped, people would mine solo.

If you look at deepbit, when it was hit by DDOS, everyone switched.  There was no "loss" of pooling.   

Or are you assuming all of us mining are NOT greedy bastards and would flounder around saying "AHHH POOLS ARE DOWN NO MORE MINING!?"  If anything we are greedy and would start mining like mad thinking that deepbit is down and therefore 1/4 the total pool.  (Completely wrong.)

No, there's no worry about DDOS and then someone taking over the network that way.

[rezin777]

If you look at deepbit, when it was hit by DDOS, everyone switched.  There was no "loss" of pooling.   

There was indeed a noticeable effect when deepbit first went down to the DDOS.

In the hour after the attack the network only solved 2 blocks. It improved from that point on, but it still wasn't great. That certainly isn't desirable or what I would call healthy.

127555    2201f7d916...    2011-05-29 22:41:30    43    1472.65095723    21.143
127554    15fa32c760...    2011-05-29 22:13:38    37    877.09812426    23.145
127553    1de06a4a0a...    2011-05-29 21:46:22    47    2052.27689526    17.552

Miners are slow to notice, slow to react, and I suspect some didn't bother switching at all.

I wonder how many miners would even bother (or are capable) to set up back-up solo mining if a coordinated attack was able to shut down 4-5 major pools.

[Hawkix]

This completely wrong.  I'm tired of people spouting off this nonsense.   If all the pools dropped, people would mine solo.

If you look at deepbit, when it was hit by DDOS, everyone switched.  There was no "loss" of pooling.   

Or are you assuming all of us mining are NOT greedy bastards and would flounder around saying "AHHH POOLS ARE DOWN NO MORE MINING!?"  If anything we are greedy and would start mining like mad thinking that deepbit is down and therefore 1/4 the total pool.  (Completely wrong.)

No, there's no worry about DDOS and then someone taking over the network that way.

Yeah, one pool down means everybody switches. But, when all pools have problems?

I am not sure, but a lot of people with < 1GH/s would not go solo. Waiting a month for single block on average requires a lot of patience and good nerves to not loose faith.

If the pools would not be invented last year, I guess the network would be 1/10 or less than it is today.

Plus, the attacker can "prepare" his own new pool while attacking all remaining. All would switch to his pool, and he would easily gain >50% of network. You would not know at all, he can "fake" his pool stats. Then, he rules the network.

[Sjalq]

That's disturbing, all the hashing power inuse today can be
bought for only 2 to 8 million and a fake pool could have us all working for the attacker? So how can we secure the pools? Maybe open-source pooling software of some sort?

[mwally]

I want Bitcoins and I want to help secure and process Bitcoin transactions. I assume others will exchange Bitcoins with me in the future. I justify this with the fact that I don't like other people to control my currency and I assume there are others like me.

Bingo.  The goal here is to participate in the revolution.

Shall I drop $4k into a top-of-the-line tri-GPU monster, without any guarantees of return?  You sure-as-hell bet I will!

With WikiLeaks busy leaking, DarkNets in production, and NameCoin/BitCoin all working together to revolutionize and free the world's communications and monetary systems, a couple of high-end gaming computers is the *least* I can contribute.

Oh, and, there's still a chance for profit, too!  Win/Win.