ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[lophie]

Last 30 hour hashrate reading is at 58.23 and the 20 hour is at 73.90. Perhaps some new hardware is being deployed?

Why do we keep repeating this... Its called variance

it is because the swings are too sharp against variance. That is why most of us here are speculating about events happening in the farm.

[ThickAsThieves]

Last 30 hour hashrate reading is at 58.23 and the 20 hour is at 73.90. Perhaps some new hardware is being deployed?

Why do we keep repeating this... Its called variance

it is because the swings are too sharp against variance. That is why most of us here are speculating about events happening in the farm.

Candoo is right, variance really can be this "sharp".

[candoo]

Yes this is variance. You can verifiy it after 3 days...

The whole network suffers from bad luck  sometimes. We could have 1400.093 Thash/s right now or 886.093 Thash/s... Its just variance

[philipma1957]

Last 30 hour hashrate reading is at 58.23 and the 20 hour is at 73.90. Perhaps some new hardware is being deployed?

Why do we keep repeating this... Its called variance

it is because the swings are too sharp against variance. That is why most of us here are speculating about events happening in the farm.

Candoo is right, variance really can be this "sharp".

 huge swings are possible once you are less then 10% of the total pool 1 block in 1 day  is not that uncalled for.

6 blocks in 1 hour is the 'norm'  for the entire pool or about 144 blocks a day.  If you are 10 percent of the pool 14 blocks is common place or your norm.

 But here is a simple way of doing your odds. if you are at 10% of the network.  vs 5% of the network
  
1 miss is .90                                                                                       .95
2 miss is .81                                                                                         .902
3 = .729                                                                                             .857
4 = .656                                                                                                        .814
5= .5905                                                                                                       .773
6 = .5314   so at 10% you are about 47/100 to do 1  block in the first hour                .735 at 5% your are about 25 -75 to do 1 block in the first hour
7 = .4783                                                                                                      .698
8 = .4304                                                                                                      .663
9 = .3874                                                                                                      .630
10 = .3486                                                                                                     .598
11 = .3138                                                                                                     .568
12 = .284 at 10%  your are about 72/100  to do 1 block by 2 hours                        .540  at 5% your are about 46 /100 to  do 1 block by 2 hours
13 = .254                                                                                                       .513
14 = .2287                                                                                                     .487
15 = .2058                                                                                                     .463
16 = .185                                                                                                       .439
17 = .1667                                                                                                      .417
18 = .1501  at 10 % you are about 85 /100 to do 1 block by 3 hours                        .396  at 5% you are about 60/100 to do 1 block by 3 hours


the point is at 3 hours 10 % of the network vs 5 % of the network  allows a big difference for more then 2x as some would think.

[empoweoqwj]

Yes this is variance. You can verifiy it after 3 days...

The whole network suffers from bad luck  sometimes. We could have 1400.093 Thash/s right now or 886.093 Thash/s... Its just variance

You mean you can verify its not variance only after 3 days?

That's just a figure plucked from the ether. All you can say is the longer the higher hashing rate appears to continue, the less likely it is due to variance. You can't put a specific time limit on it. This is luck we are talking about, as we keep saying.

[kano]

Yes this is variance. You can verifiy it after 3 days...

The whole network suffers from bad luck  sometimes. We could have 1400.093 Thash/s right now or 886.093 Thash/s... Its just variance

You mean you can verify its not variance only after 3 days?

That's just a figure plucked from the ether. All you can say is the longer the higher hashing rate appears to continue, the less likely it is due to variance. You can't put a specific time limit on it. This is luck we are talking about, as we keep saying.

No.

There is a reason why the difficulty adjustment is (14 days) ... 2016 blocks ...

[empoweoqwj]

Yes this is variance. You can verifiy it after 3 days...

The whole network suffers from bad luck  sometimes. We could have 1400.093 Thash/s right now or 886.093 Thash/s... Its just variance

You mean you can verify its not variance only after 3 days?

That's just a figure plucked from the ether. All you can say is the longer the higher hashing rate appears to continue, the less likely it is due to variance. You can't put a specific time limit on it. This is luck we are talking about, as we keep saying.

No.

There is a reason why the difficulty adjustment is (14 days) ... 2016 blocks ...

Sorry, lost me, the guy said "you can verify after 3 days" and you say "There is a reason why the difficulty adjustment is (14 days) ... 2016 blocks ..." - how are the two connected?

[Rannasha]

Yes this is variance. You can verifiy it after 3 days...

The whole network suffers from bad luck  sometimes. We could have 1400.093 Thash/s right now or 886.093 Thash/s... Its just variance

You mean you can verify its not variance only after 3 days?

That's just a figure plucked from the ether. All you can say is the longer the higher hashing rate appears to continue, the less likely it is due to variance. You can't put a specific time limit on it. This is luck we are talking about, as we keep saying.

No.

There is a reason why the difficulty adjustment is (14 days) ... 2016 blocks ...

Sorry, lost me, the guy said "you can verify after 3 days" and you say "There is a reason why the difficulty adjustment is (14 days) ... 2016 blocks ..." - how are the two connected?

The reason the difficulty adjustment is every 14 days (approximately) is that you need a period of that length (or longer) to reduce potential variance to reasonable levels. Adjusting the difficulty every day would cause large swings in both directions.

So if you already need 14 days to get a reasonable average of the network hashrate, you'll need more than that to properly reduce variance for a part of the network (in this case, ASICMiner), which brings us back to the main point that any hashrate estimate over a period of 3 days or less is completely meaningless due to the random nature of block-solving. Even longer periods, like 1 week or 2 weeks are susceptible enough to variance that it can be hard to draw any conclusions from those data.

[Lohoris]

I shudder to think of the electricity wasted otherwise.

I'm quite concerned about scaling too, but apparently most people aren't.

Can you copy paste what you wrote there here? It seems to be a private forum.

Sure!

I can copy what I wrote, but I can't copy other people's answers, though.

The most compelling argument in defence of the resources spent for the proof-of-work is that the current legacy systems (banks + credit cards + paypals + etc.) are already eating up tons of resources, and likely mining bitcoins is going to eat much less than that.

While this appears to be fine, I've just noticed it doesn't really work: the legacy systems scale in a more or less proportional way to the transaction volume, i.e. if transaction volume doesn't increase, they do not need to scale up.

Bitcoin's proof-of-work, instead, will apparently go up indefinitely, because either miners will move to countries where electricity and sysadmins are cheaper, or they will find ways to produce more powerful chips. Problem here isn't only the consumed electricity, but the wasted hardware: old chips will be useless and will become just pollution.

Honestly I can't see how can this not go horribly wrong. We'd better think very hard about this now that we are still in early stage, rather than waiting for it to become a huge problem later.

[kano]

Now where did I see a comparison that said that one major bank central office used probably more electricity than all the bitcoin mining in the world ...

[neilol]

Now where did I see a comparison that said that one major bank central office used probably more electricity than all the bitcoin mining in the world ...

That can't be true, I would be surprised

[lophie]

Banks love to print papers and send letters, that's a lot of energy consumption.

We are so arrogant to make our own currency that is created at a limited amount within a range of time and in the process use electricity.

We should let them print infinite money with infinity paper and electricity cost. That is better for the economy and the environment  .

We can't be thinking better it is not like we have brains to think with, right Satoshi?

[kano]

Now where did I see a comparison that said that one major bank central office used probably more electricity than all the bitcoin mining in the world ...

That can't be true, I would be surprised

OK lets try a wild estimate

I use less than 1KW to do well over 100GH/s
So lets go with 1KW for 100GH/s
That's a way over-estimate for some of the high hashing devices and a way under-estimate for any of the old devices anyone is silly enough to keep mining with

The bitcoin network is ~1PH/s
So that's like 10,000KW

That seem too high for a big bank's main data centre head office?
If it is then say how about 10 of them? Certainly not too high for 10 of them.

All guesses, but certainly makes that argument above seem far from certain.

[supert]

The power used to sustain either currency will be negligible compared to the effect on power consumption due to the economic effects on investment.

The question is really which currency system promotes investment with a meaningful real rate of return.

All of which is off-topic.

[Puppet]

OK lets try a wild estimate

I use less than 1KW to do well over 100GH/s
So lets go with 1KW for 100GH/s
That's a way over-estimate for some of the high hashing devices and a way under-estimate for any of the old devices anyone is silly enough to keep mining with

The bitcoin network is ~1PH/s
So that's like 10,000KW

That seem too high for a big bank's main data centre head office?
If it is then say how about 10 of them? Certainly not too high for 10 of them.

All guesses, but certainly makes that argument above seem far from certain.

Well lets compare, not to a bank, but to paypal/ebay.

The first phase of the Topaz project is a 240,000 square foot building housing three 20,000 square foot data center halls – one for eBay Marketplace, one for PayPal.com, and a third hall for expansion space. The master plan for the site calls for four phases, which will allow eBay to consolidate leased data center space currently spread across three states. The facility has 7.2 megawatts of capacity in phase 1, with a 30 megawatt substation on site.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/23/ebay-unveils-new-flagship-data-center/

So bitcoin is currently using a roughly comparable amount of electricity as ebay+paypal datacenter.
If you are going to spread that over  transaction volumes, honestly bitcoin isnt going to look very green.

[JimiQ84]

I went through old friedcat posts and realized that last three updates in this thread were posted month apart. And now it's around one month since last one. I guess we should expect update any day now. (last posts were june 21st, july 23rd and august 22nd)

[BitAddict]

I went through old friedcat posts and realized that last three updates in this thread were posted month apart. And now it's around one month since last one. I guess we should expect update any day now. (last posts were june 21st, july 23rd and august 22nd)

I hope he also come with some news about future plan and gen2 chips.

[lophie]

Now where did I see a comparison that said that one major bank central office used probably more electricity than all the bitcoin mining in the world ...

That can't be true, I would be surprised

OK lets try a wild estimate

I use less than 1KW to do well over 100GH/s
So lets go with 1KW for 100GH/s
That's a way over-estimate for some of the high hashing devices and a way under-estimate for any of the old devices anyone is silly enough to keep mining with

The bitcoin network is ~1PH/s
So that's like 10,000KW

That seem too high for a big bank's main data centre head office?
If it is then say how about 10 of them? Certainly not too high for 10 of them.

All guesses, but certainly makes that argument above seem far from certain.

That's 10MW, iirc any one of the top 50 supercomputers uses at least 15MW. Just the ATM machines worldwide consumed several times the power of the Bitcoin network too.

The argument that Bitcoin uses alot of energy is just a cheap shot that is easily refuted with comparison to the current systems. You don't even to go deep and comprehensive like the above just the ATM machines woeldwide and you are done.

Believe it or not some people bring that up when we are talking bitcoin and they feel like undermining the system, pun intended 

[Puppet]

The argument that Bitcoin uses alot of energy is just a cheap shot that is easily refuted with comparison to the current systems. You don't even to go deep and comprehensive like the above just the ATM machines woeldwide and you are done.

Believe it or not some people bring that up when we are talking bitcoin and they feel like undermining the system, pun intended 

Are you saying bitcoin ATMs are more energy efficient, or that bitcoin somehow eliminates the need for POS transactions?

[tinus42]

The argument that Bitcoin uses alot of energy is just a cheap shot that is easily refuted with comparison to the current systems. You don't even to go deep and comprehensive like the above just the ATM machines woeldwide and you are done.

Believe it or not some people bring that up when we are talking bitcoin and they feel like undermining the system, pun intended 

Are you saying bitcoin ATMs are more energy efficient, or that bitcoin somehow eliminates the need for POS transactions?

Banks have datacenters that use up more energy than the Bitcoin network. There was an article on Bloomberg that called Bitcoin a realworld threat to the environment, I read a rebuttal on one of the Bitcoin news sites (can't remember which) in which the author had calculated that the Bloomberg HQ building in New York used more energy than the entire Bitcoin network. It is really a red herring.