rpietila Altcoin Observer

[superresistant]

what do you think about nxt clones? Will any of these succed?

The problem of Nxt clones is that it is impossible to change the code without breaking everything if you didn't participate as a Nxt core dev.
All Nxt clones tend to die quick. You need to hire someone like Come_From_Beyond is you want a Nxt clone to succeed.

People are too focused on Price for altcoins. If they don't have anything you can do with them but trade for bitcoin. They are useless.

Most altcoins are definitely useless but we need some of them for innovation.

[1714648906]

1714648906

[1714648906]

1714648906

[1714648906]

1714648906

[1714648906]

1714648906

[1714648906]

1714648906

[dga]

Hey, folks - since my comment was cited in this thread, I figured I'd chime in.

Let me first admit my bias:  I now own 6700 BBR, so I'm no longer an unbiased observer.  I'm actively contributing code back to the standalone BBR miner in order to try to increase the value of those holdings by making sure that people with small setups can fairly mine compared to the huge operators and cloud miners.

I stand by my analysis of the GPU efficiency gap for this one.  As I stated in another post, my _hunch_ on these coins is that XMR's algorithm will prove better for GPU/CPU efficiency.  Once all of the bytecoin slowdowns were stripped out, it's one of the most elegant PoW algorithms I've ever seen for achieving this goal.  (yvg1900 tells me I need to look more at MMC before I make up my mind, and he's probably right.)  It's brilliant.  I wish I'd designed it.  It has the drawback of slow validation, though.  It's painful on both GPU and ASIC, unless I've missed some tricks.

BBR's blockchain scratchpad idea will be a pain for ASICs without slowing down validation.  It doesn't quite have the elegance against GPUs, but it will be better than things like scrypt or Momentum.

(I stated in that earlier post that I thought BBR might be better against ASICs.  I've changed my mind.  I think both will actually be a pain.)

I'm also still pretty certain about my analysis that cbuchner1's GPU miner is only 2-3x faster than a CPU for the same cost.  There are a lot of caveats attached to that, and I'd encourage people to read my full post before trusting this too much ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.msg7362060#msg7362060 ).  Part of the reason that I'm more confident that there's not a GPU-equipped dragon sitting in a cave with 100k BBR it is that I and several others (some publicly, even) continue to mine BBR on EC2 from time to time.  I've posted about a few of those opportunities ... after the fact.  Now, it could be that this is because of the diff adjustment, and the GPU-dragon is simply annoyed during these times because he can't get all the coins, but I'm a little skeptical.   But I may also be naive.

I think the more fundamental question with BBR is whether the blockchain changes (improved anonymity and reduced blockchain size) are technically sound and effective.  I've told Zoidberg that I'm willing to help with a user-friendly presentation of these, because I want to understand them better myself.

[adhitthana]

Hopefully nobody bought QCN. Don't think it's going to rise again...

I did. I was trying to accumulate between .0002 and .0005 roughly, though not many went through below .0003. Presently it's about .0007 which makes it roughly 80 times cheaper than XMR. The developer is trying to find improvements where he can, so I think there is some value in that for more than just QCN. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600658.msg7380771#msg7380771
The only thing IMHO that could make it rise signifigantly, is a good development team.
But then again, after many years of trading various instruments I find that what I think should happen, doesn't always correlate to what does happen. 

[Keyboard-Mash]

Hopefully nobody bought QCN. Don't think it's going to rise again...

I did. I was trying to accumulate between .0002 and .0005 roughly, though not many went through below .0003. Presently it's about .0007 which makes it roughly 80 times cheaper than XMR. The developer is trying to find improvements where he can, so I think there is some value in that for more than just QCN. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600658.msg7380771#msg7380771
The only thing IMHO that could make it rise again, is a good development team

I find that when I divide .00536199 by .000719 I get 7.46. Is my calculator broke?

[adhitthana]

Hopefully nobody bought QCN. Don't think it's going to rise again...

I did. I was trying to accumulate between .0002 and .0005 roughly, though not many went through below .0003. Presently it's about .0007 which makes it roughly 80 times cheaper than XMR. The developer is trying to find improvements where he can, so I think there is some value in that for more than just QCN. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600658.msg7380771#msg7380771
The only thing IMHO that could make it rise again, is a good development team

I find that when I divide .00536199 by .000719 I get 7.46. Is my calculator broke?

. How did that zero get in there? I meant to write 8. My bad.

[aminorex]

BBR's blockchain scratchpad idea will be a pain for ASICs without slowing down validation.  It doesn't quite have the elegance against GPUs, but it will be better than things like scrypt or Momentum.

(I stated in that earlier post that I thought BBR might be better against ASICs.  I've changed my mind.  I think both will actually be a pain.)

It just means you need a PCIe block on your ASIC.  Or enough memory to store the blockchain.  Not in any way insurmountable.  At 2-3x speedup (existing example being the best estimator) it is also much less of a threat than it is for bitcoin.

there's not a GPU-equipped dragon sitting in a cave with 100k BBR

cb said he was mining 5k BBR daily at one point.  Now it could be more (more hardware) or less (more difficulty).  100k would not be a high bar for him.
I see a lot of latent supply risk in holding.

[dga]

BBR's blockchain scratchpad idea will be a pain for ASICs without slowing down validation.  It doesn't quite have the elegance against GPUs, but it will be better than things like scrypt or Momentum.

(I stated in that earlier post that I thought BBR might be better against ASICs.  I've changed my mind.  I think both will actually be a pain.)

It just means you need a PCIe block on your ASIC.  Or enough memory to store the blockchain.  Not in any way insurmountable.  At 2-3x speedup (existing example being the best estimator) it is also much less of a threat than it is for bitcoin.

there's not a GPU-equipped dragon sitting in a cave with 100k BBR

cb said he was mining 5k BBR daily at one point.  Now it could be more (more hardware) or less (more difficulty).  100k would not be a high bar for him.
I see a lot of latent supply risk in holding.

Partly agreed re ASIC.  But it'll just move the bottleneck to the memory controller(s) on the ASIC.  You can probably pack quite a bit of memory bandwidth in there, but off-chip b/w will be the limit.  The power efficiency will, of course, be much better -- perhaps 10-20W for ASIC+DRAM vs 90-100 for a CPU, once the CPU miners are fully optimized (the current miner uses only 55W on my 85W TDP i7).

If all of the implementations are pin-bandwidth limited, the big advantage of an ASIC will be that you can pack the asics and dram densely at low power, close together, but that kind of advantage is numerically relatively weak compared to the asic advantage in bitcoin.  If we really want to be nitty detailed, current DRAM designs may also present the bottleneck:  The 2Kbit row buffer is inefficiently used by random 256 bit accesses.

The more interesting long-term question is whether the linear scratchpad growth is an appropriate match for whatever happens in the (very uncertain) moore's law space.  That's a toughie.  Right now, the linear growth will probably take the scratchpad beyond CPU L3 sizes pretty quickly, but in the longer term, my crystal ball fails.

I don't really have an expert opinion regarding the GPU dragon beyond the efficiency gains and what I've observed from cloud mining - I'll leave the economic issues to others.

[dunchy]

What about fpga implementations? Would power efficiency be enough to justify the development? If yes, what would be the right dev board for cryptonight?

[darlidada]

This is the problem with BBR.. 85K coins! At anytime you can be dumped on!



It's not there anymore though.

[pinky]

This is the problem with BBR.. 85K coins! At anytime you can be dumped on!



It's not there anymore though.

And you think this is not true with XMR or BTC? I think you know the answer.

[Its About Sharing]

Interesting, we are at over .006 BTC now and if you look at the Poloniex orderbook there just are not many sells. https://www.poloniex.com/exchange/btc_xmr
The first notable wall is at .007 and 35 or so BTC, then a "wall" of 9 BTC at .008.

There are 57,000 XMR for sale on Poloniex and just giving a rough price of .007, that is only like 400 BTC worth.
This has explosive written all over it.

But something doesn't make sense. If Bots are large miners of XMR, why are we not seeing large dumps (or are we)?
I guess the buy volume is meeting the demand...

[darlidada]

This is the problem with BBR.. 85K coins! At anytime you can be dumped on!



It's not there anymore though.

And you think this is not true with XMR or BTC? I think you know the answer.

I should have explained my message better. BBR has a GPU mining problem as its GPU isnt open source. The one using is has a way better advantage against the CPU miner since its using a different algorythm that crytonight (wild kekak i think). It has the consequences of centralizing most coins in one single entity. 95K BBR is HUGE comparatively of the current supply. And if the the guy isnt dumping, according to his posts on the GPU thread, he has 7k more BBR each day.

Bitcoin must have had this problem during the mining arm races. I dont know how they resolved it though as I wasnt there! My idea: patience is all.

[aminorex]

Definitely not dumping.

I think memristor blocks are probably already available - definitely in 2015 - and would make a keccak/cryptonight asic much better at scale -- no dram required, no pin bw bottleneck.

[AlexGR]

This is the problem with BBR.. 85K coins! At anytime you can be dumped on!



It's not there anymore though.

And you think this is not true with XMR or BTC? I think you know the answer.

I should have explained my message better. BBR has a GPU mining problem as its GPU isnt open source. The one using is has a way better advantage against the CPU miner since its using a different algorythm that crytonight (wild kekak i think).

Why don't they just issue a bounty to have a GPU *public* miner done for them?

DRK did that before even private GPU miners came to X11 (a cpu whale scared everyone into thinking a GPU miner was on the loose - but as it proved later on, GPU miners weren't that fast with X11) so as to avoid the selfish GPU miner scenario. I think it was ~3500 DRK as a bounty back in mid Feb...

[darlidada]

This is the problem with BBR.. 85K coins! At anytime you can be dumped on!



It's not there anymore though.

And you think this is not true with XMR or BTC? I think you know the answer.

I should have explained my message better. BBR has a GPU mining problem as its GPU isnt open source. The one using is has a way better advantage against the CPU miner since its using a different algorythm that crytonight (wild kekak i think).

Why don't they just issue a bounty to have a GPU *public* miner done for them?

DRK did that before even private GPU miners came to X11 (a cpu whale scared everyone into thinking a GPU miner was on the loose - but as it proved later on, GPU miners weren't that fast with X11) so as to avoid the selfish GPU miner scenario. I think it was ~3500 DRK as a bounty back in mid Feb...

Christian the GPU miner is mining 7K+ each day. At market price that is 14 btc a day. It is hard to compete with... BBR dev is working on a solution though, but plan B is a fork.

[ripplebtc]

we're mining 5000-7000 coins a day

by the way the quoted mining number was from earlier days when the difficulty was in the 60-80G range. I think it has tripled since.
A lot more actors are in the cloud mining game now it seems.

There is no big buy wall support here..Price will down to 130K I think...

Are kidding me?

0.00160000   24201.54008983   38.72246414

How big do you want?  

That wall could be eaten any time. Yesterday 43 BTC buy wall at 0.002+ was destroyed in a single sale and i guess the dumper is probably Christian. His team is mining roughly 50% of newly minted BBR each day with his private GPU mining script. If he is happy to dump at 0.002, there is a chance he will continue to dump at 0.0016. He will keep doing so as long as he still make profit.

Not us. We're seldom holding more than 10000 BBR at a time. Also we're not interested in crashing the price (should be obvious).
Also note the majority of our BBR mining is actually CPU. The GPUs on EC2 aren't actually all that powerful.

The biggest sell order I've seen thus far was for 47000 BBR, but it wasn't executed while I watched. But it shows how many coins some people have amassed in their wallets. Probably whales with lots of BTC who bought in early and cheaply. I suspect one of these whales cashed out part of their holdings, destroying that buy wall yesterday. We were amazed like everyone else.

Christian

My question would be, what are you doing with all the coins?? Not that it's any of my business, but the trading volume seems to suggest you are holding them.

A combination of trickle sale and putting them for sale above the current market price.
I don't think we've ever held more than 10000 BBR at once.

Christian

[aminorex]

hard to believe they are selling on poloniex if you watch that book

[Its About Sharing]

hard to believe they are selling on poloniex if you watch that book

The order book there has been reduced by about 2,000 or so today. A roughly 1% reduction.
The volume is 641 BTC 

Not a bad rise considering all that volume. Clearly there are lots being sold but demand is
higher than supply (Duh). Someone is accumulating, or rather lots as following
the volume is a great way to find "pumps", which I don't think this coin is. But of course people
will take the opportunity.

IAS

[aminorex]

hard to believe they are selling on poloniex if you watch that book

The order book there has been reduced by about 2,000 or so today. A roughly 1% reduction.
The volume is 641 BTC  

That's XMR volume.  I was referring to CB's gpu mined BBR.  24 volume in BBR is 57btc.

Remarkable that XMR is 80% of the volume on PLX.  About 4 times more XMR xns than all other alts combined.  This really is the new bitcoin.

[aminorex]

XMR has roughly doubled in 3 days.  On those grounds in isolation I would be inclined to sell, but I can't sell much, because it is not overvalued relative to the marginal cost of production.

I estimate the cost of mining via ec2 c3.8xlarge spot instances at 0.0067 right now (including 7% orphans).

If it goes 20% over this or 20% under this I will buy or sell.  Meanwhile, I wait.

If you are not invested in XMR yet, it is not unreasonable to start dollar cost averaging now, even after the 2x in 3 days, simply because difficulty continues to increase, and the possibility of missing the train is about as painful as the possibility of a drawdown.  However, I would not do it too fast.  Dollar cost averaging is the best advice.