Read some articles about the possible weakness of the system.
That if someone gets over 50% of the computing power of the bitcoin network they would be able to manipulate the system in various ways.
But the more computer power that are non frauding the hard it gets to do something bad.
Therefor should everyone who use bitcoins have their computer on mining just to make the network safer? Or do you contribute to the overall security by just starting the bitcoin program?
I don't think that it is necessary for everybody to contribute their computing power. As somebody pointed out, one GPU dedicated to mining can replace 1000 average computers. For the average person (if bitcoin becomes popular) leaving the computer mining would be akin to buying a lottery ticket.
In
this thread I was convinced that the average user
should mine, but only at 1-5% CPU/GPU time. With millions of users, this incremental CPU power would add up, making the network more secure.
I don't have any bitcoins yet, but if I am a thousandaire in a year, I will be investing in "big iron." IIRC, the some of the newer Spark-based servers can process up to 1024 threads at once and are very good at integer calculations (used in mining). I suspect one of those servers can hold its own against a GPU miner, albeit at a slightly higher current draw.
My strategy would be to only mine to protect the integrity of the network. To do that I would only turn on threads in proportion to the network hash rate. For example, if the
historical network peak hash rate was 4 TeraHashes/second, I would only run: 256 threads when the network is at 3TH/s, 512 at 2TH/s, 768 at 1TH/s, finally only using every available thread if the hash rate drops to something like 3 Gigahashes per second.
Of course, I would use such a box for other things as well, such as acting as a gateway for an open access mesh network. Such a machine should be able to handle multiple VPN connections very well.
