The Future of Mining

[eleuthria]

I for one welcome our new terahash ASIC-powered overlords.

[Beyondo]

What is thy bidding, my hashmaster?

What, shut off my GPU Miners because they're slowing down the pool....oh, ok, I'll get right on that 

[crazyates]

[creativex]

K spill it man! Which Chinese benefactors are these? ASICMiner right?

[organofcorti]

K spill it man! Which Chinese benefactors are these? ASICMiner right?

Only if they're starting slow. They're supposed to have 12 Thps up their wide oriental sleeves.

[dstriker]

I hope that's me one day.

[Joshwaa]

Can you tell us what equipment he is using?

[crazyates]

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

[Sitarow]

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

Seems every device being added increases speed by 250 and is now at 1.3TH

Edit: it is at 1.5TH as of 12pm MST 2/13/2013

[jojo69]

wow

finally

[cypherdoc]

that's bullish.

[Gabit]

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

Seems every device being added increases speed by 250 and is now at 1.3TH

Edit: it is at 1.5TH as of 12pm MST 2/13/2013

That would actually mach my calculations... as in 1 (unit) x 10 boards x 64 x 355MH/chips = 227,2GHash (ASICMINER).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.1480.

[organofcorti]

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

There's still a lot af variance. At 1Thps and 3 300 000 Difficulty, you'd expected to see ~ 6 blocks per day. But for such a small number the variance will be quite large - standard deviation of blocks per unit time is proportional to square root of of the average, so the smaller the average, the larger the standard deviation is in proportion.

In this case we can say that for the above parameters, in 95 days out of 100 the number of blocks per day will be more than 2 and less than 11. If you're relying on 6 blocks per day, that could be a problem.

OTOH if you can wait a month for the earnings to stabilise, and if your proportion of the network doesn't change, then for 95 months out of 100 you'll have ~ 150 to 210 blocks per month.

Simply put, the variance is going to be quite large. If you don't want more than (for example) expected +/- 5% variability (of blocks found in a given time period), then you'll want to be expecting about 1500 blocks in that given time period. So even if you have half the network, the time to reduce variability to within 5% of the mean will still be about 3 weeks.

PPS pools are already very familiar with this bit of maths.

[repentance]

Read it and weep.

[MaGNeT]

Unless you ordered before august, you won't see difficulty under 10,000,000 when your ASIC arrives.

[organofcorti]

Unless you ordered before august, you won't see difficulty under 10,000,000 when your ASIC arrives.

You base this on what? Please show working.

[shmadz]

this "mega-miner" is now above 2.2 TH - unless he somehow has roughly 35 Avalon devices, I'm guessing that this is ASICminer now online and steadily ramping up production.

even without adding those 12 estimated TH to OOC's charts it looks like we should go past 10 million sometime in early march.

I suspect that it's possible that some of the people who got in on the second batch of Avalons might get theirs before march, (though I still haven't seen much evidence of batch one) but I highly doubt that any bfl orders placed after July 31 will arrive before the 10 million mark.

I'm expecting to receive my ASIC (which was ordered very late) on exactly my birthday (an undisclosed day in May) And I'd be ecstatic if the difficulty were still below 100 million! (OOC's charts say we should be around 30 mil by that point, but those are long range forecasts and have a pretty high degree of uncertainty at this point)

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

[eleuthria]

this "mega-miner" is now above 2.2 TH - unless he somehow has roughly 35 Avalon devices, I'm guessing that this is ASICminer now online and steadily ramping up production.

even without adding those 12 estimated TH to OOC's charts it looks like we should go past 10 million sometime in early march.

I suspect that it's possible that some of the people who got in on the second batch of Avalons might get theirs before march, (though I still haven't seen much evidence of batch one) but I highly doubt that any bfl orders placed after July 31 will arrive before the 10 million mark.

I'm expecting to receive my ASIC (which was ordered very late) on exactly my birthday (an undisclosed day in May) And I'd be ecstatic if the difficulty were still below 100 million! (OOC's charts say we should be around 30 mil by that point, but those are long range forecasts and have a pretty high degree of uncertainty at this point)

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

It has been confirmed this miner on BTC Guild is ASICMINER.  So far there have only been two high profile confirmations of any Avalon units (Bitcoin Foundation and Jeff Garzik).

[organofcorti]

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

Hey shmadz, I've got a family emergency atm.

I have the second part of the "Weekend Dip" trading strategy posts lined up and ready to publish, and I'll have time for the usual weekly posts. I'll try to make time for the next "ASIC choices" post soonish, and definitely before the next retarget. Sorry it can't be sooner.

It will consist of bitcoin earnings, difficulty, and cumulative cost per day, to make it more relevant to more people, and for longer (especially since I have no idea what btc will do).

/OT (apologies to eleuthria)

[lunarboy]

With only 4 or 5 main companies producing ASCI chips The future of mining seems very centralised and in my opinion is the biggest danger bitcoin currently faces.

1 CPU 1 Vote that was the initial idea but the reality is far from that now.

can anyone point me to threads with decent discussion on how to prevent this nearly fatal flaw in the bitcoin protocol.

Dan Kaminsky predicts 

that the current proof-of-work function isn’t going to be used by the end of the year — he assigns 0% probability it’s going to be used

if this is indeed the serious problem many believe it is what is the solution.?

how do we restore the power to the individual 'average computer user' now that the network is already in the hands of the few big asci producers, and their army of pre orders and hence already deeply invested followers who have essentially bought their dominating vote of the bitcoin network?