On Bitcoin mining

[weex]

This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

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[BladeMcCool]

This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

The impact will be extra hashpower to the network and an increased difficulty. This will benefit the network overall. The only gamer GPUs that will be profitable for their operators will be newer AMD chips cards. All other gamers will get puny rewards in comparison (unless, the system unfairly rewards inefficient GPUs ... but then AMD chip owners would do better to just run guiminer and connect to a pool). The effect of hundreds of thousands of new people trying to cash out bitcoins will be more contact points with outsiders getting their first taste of bitcoin. Anyone who takes the effort to understand how to cash out via an exchange will have no problem doing so and there will be no effect on the market because whatever bitcoins they mined that they are now going to sell would have just been mined and put up for sale by someone else (ie: existing miners) anyway.

So overall, more hashing power, more people using bitcoin = win.

[proudhon]

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

Likelihood = Low.

Impact = Look at most of 2011.

You're welcome.

[Foxpup]

This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

The impact will be extra hashpower to the network and an increased difficulty. This will benefit the network overall. The only gamer GPUs that will be profitable for their operators will be newer AMD chips cards. All other gamers will get puny rewards in comparison (unless, the system unfairly rewards inefficient GPUs ... but then AMD chip owners would do better to just run guiminer and connect to a pool). The effect of hundreds of thousands of new people trying to cash out bitcoins will be more contact points with outsiders getting their first taste of bitcoin. Anyone who takes the effort to understand how to cash out via an exchange will have no problem doing so and there will be no effect on the market because whatever bitcoins they mined that they are now going to sell would have just been mined and put up for sale by someone else (ie: existing miners) anyway.

So overall, more hashing power, more people using bitcoin = win.

This is true, but hinges on the assumption that you can convince gamers that it's a good idea to mine bitcoins even when the value of the bitcoins mined is nowhere near enough to cover the increased electricity costs, as is usually the case with a machine not specifically designed for bitcoin mining. This is why the thread turned into a discussion on mining profitability. If mining with gaming machines is not only unprofitable, but causes people to actually lose significant amounts of money through electricity costs, then nobody is going to do it, simple as that.

[Fuzzy]

This thread is going way OT, if you want to talk about the mining business or profitability this thread is not for you.

I want to understand instead the likelihood and impact on Bitcoin of getting a large number of gamers to turn on their GPUs and start mining. What if CoinLab's efforts lead to hundreds of thousands of additional people opting to cash small amounts of BTC out of their system?

First of all, Valve would never do this, but IF they build in a BTC miner into their steam client that ran on low priority while you weren't gaming, and stopped when you fired up a 3D intensive program, then they let you buy games/hats/etc with your balance, that would catapult BitCoin into the stratosphere.

Actually, if I were Valve and I controlled the Steam client, I wouldn't mention BTC at all (bad for bitcoin), I'd rename the miner something like "The Piston". It would run as described, when the user isn't in a 3D application, and it would mine BTC for me, while the user would earn "PSI" points, equivalent to 10 PSI per $ or something, they could then spend those on select digital goods that cost me next to nothing to make (hats n stuff).

The electricity bill would piss some people off, but imagine having the whole Steam community mining for you like a huge farm...