Block creation will eventually become more stable and predictable

[Jaime Frontero]

as long as you don't have more than a dozen, it would probably not waste much electricity at all.a fan does not have much mass so starting it would would not be too much burden.

it's not just the fans on the GPUs.

put a Kill-A-Watt on a miner sometime, and compare the power draw in the first five minutes of operation to the draw at steady-state.

write up a lab report for me and ill belive you. you fail to state the state the "miner" was in before you started the meter. stopping and starting a mining operation, as long as all the data stays in ram, and the gpu just stops doing numbers, hardly any energy would be wasted by not mining, other than keeping all the equipment idle. with 3-5 gpus the savings would be great because you only have 1 set of ram, cpu and mobo and 3-5 gpus that won't be working. with only 1 or 2 gpus on a mobo i could see it as being a waste, but with 3-5+ i could see it working assuming the original assumption was correct.

i have two GPUs/mobo.  the reason for that is that it's a much more cost effective build.  the PSU to run a couple of 5870s doesn't scale at twice the dollars to running four - that PSU is much more than twice as expensive.  ditto for a two PCIe-slot mobo vs. a four (really five) slot mobo.  and etc.

hardware cost doesn't scale arithmetically - it scales geometrically.

so yes, i can see it working for a 3-5 GPU setup too.  but the upfront costs would be ridiculous.  talking about the comparatively minuscule differences in profitability due to starting and stopping vs. not starting and stopping would be a waste of time - if one took all costs into consideration.

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[phillipsjk]

There is something that may mitigate this somewhat: Most power plants can't start and stop instantaneously. Nuclear power is the slowest and often only used for baseload for that reason. Industrial miners using solar/wind power would face storage or transmission losses if they elect to wait before trying to process a block.

I think even the fastest power plants have a turn-around time of at least a minute.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Google "Poisson distribution". Get educated.

Read the OP. Then make an on-topic comment.

Block finding is a non-homogeneous Poisson process with rate parameter proportional to the worldwide hashing power dedicated to finding a valid block. If it was homogeneous, time between blocks would follow the exponential distribution. The OP is suggesting that, due to the financial incentives of the miners in a post-minting world, the hashrate will drop after every block and gradually climb back, making the time between blocks distribution less variable than the exponential.

[Atheros]

Thank you for your replies, especially FreeMoney and Meni Rosenfeld.

So it seems definite that this will happen to large degree provided that the thermal cycles are not damaging to the hardware. If a secondary equally rewarding use of computing power exists then this behavior, which I will call "miner-pause behavior" will definitely happen. Block generation will slowly switch from being a homogenous Poisson process to a non-homogenous Poisson process. We should be able to calculate the exact amount of time after a block is found that it is worth it for miners to start mining but the fact that people pay different amounts for electricity, including 0, would make it quite complicated to estimate at this time.


I accidentally worded that very officially. :-|

[opticbit]

how would pool hopping play into this,- jumping after the first 43.5%...

[Atheros]

how would pool hopping play into this,- jumping after the first 43.5%...

I'm not completely familiar with pools but I've just read that "Proportional pools try to combat [pool hopping] by not immediately publishing when a new round has begun but this is not 100% effective. " In this pool, you would want to mine all the time. However all of the miners would be at a disadvantage in this pool because no one could do 'miner-pause behavior'. Individuals would be smart to abandon this kind of pool and do solo mining or a type of pooled mining where miners can all benefit from miner-pause behavior. If no one comes up with a fair way to do pools AND miner-pause behavior, then large miners would never want to be in a pool.
But I don't know much about pools yet. I don't know how they keep track of the work miners do.

[FreeMoney]

I'm not completely familiar with pools but I've just read that "Proportional pools try to combat [pool hopping] by not immediately publishing when a new round has begun but this is not 100% effective. " In this pool, you would want to mine all the time. However all of the miners would be at a disadvantage in this pool because no one could do 'miner-pause behavior'. Individuals would be smart to abandon this kind of pool and do solo mining or a type of pooled mining where miners can all benefit from miner-pause behavior. If no one comes up with a fair way to do pools AND miner-pause behavior, then large miners would never want to be in a pool.
But I don't know much about pools yet. I don't know how they keep track of the work miners do.

That's right. The answer is to use the current power method instead of the persistent shares. The very first pool did this, but that didn't win out for psychological reasons. People hate not getting paid because they disconnected for a minute, but it doesn't really matter since it evens out so fast. Serious profit maximizing miners will move to current power pools as soon as this effect starts to show.