I guess I under estimated exactly how specific the specific in asic was.

I'd be curious to know whether this is, in fact, true.

Granted, when the bitcoin protocol was created, it was most likely envisaged to operate on general-purpose (software-programmable) CPUs, rather than ASICs.

That being said, I'm not aware that the core computing requirements will change at all when the reward shifts from coin to transaction fees, as to the best of my admittedly very limited knowledge, the workload (solving hashes and adding to the blockchain) remains the same.

Or were you inferring, from Leafy's post, that said computational horsepower would be re-leveraged to launch cryptologic attacks against sensitive targets as revenge for some perceived (and entirely foreseeable) injustice?

Joe the computing is the same. Mining bitcoin means you're creating transaction blocks, which are what allow transactions to take place, and you get bitcoins from the system as a reward for your work. The idea is when the bitcoin rewards dry up, or stop paying for electricity, that the people mining will start making money off the transaction fees rather than the reward built into the system.

But yeah I way implying that the purpose built miners could be used to crack other forums of encryption since basically their job is to create decryption codes and check if the code produces the correct checksum. I dont know enough about ASICs or the specific programming of bitcoin mining to know if they're close enough or flexible enough for that to be a real thing.

The level of work in the bitcoin network is set by the total computational power, which right now is all special very parallel chips that aren't much good at anything more than lots of SHA256 hash calculations. They all work in tandem, but they all just continually shift a single value then recalculate. Besides the initial value, you can't change how they calculate.

sha256(sha256(x)) - literally all they can do.

Stalking this discussion...

I'm curious to how much money has been made on asic usb sales alone.

Here is the server that I use to host mkturbo.com, plex media server, mine BTC, run iRacing, and a few other things. The little red square out the back is my ASIC btc miner.
Attachment 238230

The asic miners are specifically made to only crunch numbers for BTC and nothing else. As far as I know no way to re-purpose them to crunch anything else.

I don't understand what transaction fees you guys are talking about. Unless you mean what an exchange would charge you to convert BTC into some other form of currency. When I do buy coins I generally meet up with a guy at McDonalds and hand him cash, he then sends the coins to a wallet at whatever the current exchange rate is. I have never tried to get cash from my BTC. When I spend my BTC on my vpn access there are no fees, I just sent the coins to their wallet.

There are fees, you just don't see them. There is also a thing called transaction priority, if your coins inputs are old enough the priority can be high enough to send the transaction with no fee attached.

Last I checked the fee was .0001btc/10kb. If you had someone send you 100 .01 bitcoin transactions and you tried to send them all 1 place, you'd have a huge transaction requiring lots of data.

edit: The wise say the person making the shovels makes the most off a mining endeavor. The first to market with a shovel, that dude's freakin' rich.

You're quite correct, it is the nature of most ASIC circuits to do one thing, and one thing only. They do not run software in the sense that we are familiar with it (in fact, many ASICs are purely analog), nor are they even reconfigurable as are FPGAs.

I find it interesting that the evolution of BTC-mining hardware has essentially mirrored that of electronic computers in general, but in reverse.

The first mining operations used CPUs and GPUs, much like any other modern computer.

With the move to FPGA designs, dynamic reprogrammability was sacrificed for a more streamlined design. These second-generation systems were, in essence, a step back to the mid 1940s. Much like an FPGA, computers such as ENIAC derived their programming not from software instructions stored in memory, but by means of manipulating patch cords and switches. Both can be reconfigured to perform any general computational task, but this cannot be done dynamically; the machine must be powered down and reconfigured at a physical level in order to change from one task to another.

Before this, reaching back into the 1930s and early 1940s, were single-purpose computers such as the American Atanasoff–Berry computer and the British Colossus. Designed to solve linear equations and crack the German Lorenz Cipher, respectively, each of these machines could perform only that specific task for which they were created, and lacked any ability to be reconfigured for any other task. These earliest of computers are, for all intents and purposes, the same as the ASICs which present-day mining is based upon.




An analogous concept here might be for a person to sacrifice their cutting-edge smartphone, with its vast capabilities and computing power, for a device which is capable only of making and receiving telephone calls, but which does so with extreme clarity and reliability, consuming little power and occupying a very small space.

A ridiculous notion, I admit...

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424316666




Sidebar: How microprocessors used to be designed:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1424316652

http://archive.archaeology.org/1107/...u2_flipped.jpg

Name this analog, single-function computer:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424317149

I shall name it Carl Scanimate.

And for making me laugh, you receive props. :D

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424364626

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424364626

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424364626

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424364626

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1424364626

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3...Awrsa34XEczRDQ

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3...vsIXzrHRHWVOfQ




http://www.quickmeme.com/img/b4/b47b...82cd56b3a6.jpg

http://bitcoinmemes.com/wp-content/u...14/04/118.jpeg

New conspiracy theory:

Bitcoin is thought to have been invented by an individual (or group) using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Virtually nothing at all is known about the true identity of Nakamoto-san, who disappeared completely from the Bitcoin community around mid 2010.

The fundamental nature of the bitcoin concept creates an ongoing arms race in mining technology, and rewards those who invest large sums of money on a recurring basis in the very newest, high-margin mining hardware.

Nakamoto is a person or group of people who own a large interest in a company which specializes in the design and manufacture, at low-volume and high-margin, of specialty ASIC devices.

Also, CatCoin is a thing that exists.

http://i58.tinypic.com/118emvl.jpg

Catcoin

It is in fact an ASIC manufacturer and developer looking for another market outlet

Coinye is the funniest IMO

I mined coinye the very night it released. The pool I was mining with crashed after about 12 hours, so it quit giving me coinyes after that time. I had over 7 mining rigs, with 6 7950s or better per machine.

I sold all I mined the next two days for around .1 BTC per 100K coinye. I made over ten bitcoins in one night, and they were worth a lot more back then.

Douchebaggery like that can't sustain itself, quite obviously. I still have some coinyes, but I don't think I can even give them away.

Ya'll are crazy conspiracy theorists. No ASIC manufacturer "made" bitcoin. All it takes is a look at the history of the network to tell. CPU's ruled shit for a long time, followed by GPUs, followed by non-specific FPGA. You can see who had lots of mining power by the blocks they solved, all saved for eternity in the chain. When ASICS did come online, one of the first I remember was ASICMiner (with the "blades" you see hanging out in oil, the USB "block eruptors") had a "IPO" that was actually pretty legitimate on the bitcoin forum.

If they did it for profit and they had asics from the get go, they were meticulous about hiding it. Bitcoin nerds are on a whole nother' level when it comes to doxxing or tracing routes.

An interesting article appeared today from the Washington Post:

Bitcoin isn't the future of money - it's either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme - The Washington Post

The article doesn't contain much in the way of new information, it merely offers a couple of perspectives on the social / psychological aspects of bitcoin.

It also makes the rather bold assertion that bitcoin is fundamentally equivalent to fraud, which is not an insignificant claim to make, nor the sort of thing which The Post is want to do lightly. I find this to be an interesting barometer of popular sentiment.

Bitcoin (and reddit.com/r/bitcoin in particular) is great entertainment. You get to see step-by-step how libertarians discover the reasons we have financial regulations.

It's all in the last sentence in the article posted.

"The future might not belong to Bitcoin, but it should to its technology."


The advantage a network like bitcoin creates cannot be denied, yet there is no conceivable way to create such a widely distributed, yet still trusted network with no incentive. Who would join up, banks? Would you go buy a $400 toaster that required special expensive bandwidth monthly yet did nothing more than stored your neighbors' mortgage for BOA so they can sell it along easier?



People have been calling bitcoin a pyramid scheme or ponzi from the beginning, only lately have they started to recognize the value of cryptographic stores of value. They still sit at the sidelines like so many useless people pointing out all the issues yet never offering any solutions.


Besides the people like me, the ones who really only hold bitcoins without spending them, there are plenty of people actually making transactions with bitcoins. It's becoming so congested that the big issue lately is shoving more transactions inside each ten minute "block" so that transactions are moved in a timely manner.


In other words, nobody is spending bitcoins so hard that there's a worldwide push to increase the numbers of transactions possible in a day so that it can all continue as it has since the beginning.



It costs money to send bitcoins, so unless someone is literally burning money to appear as though the network is overloaded it's a legitimate concern.

Edit: The main reason bitcoin needs financial regulation is because of the government fucking with it. Were it not nigh impossible to open a legal, legitimate money transfer business bitcoin would be a lot more popular. Instead money laundering laws and local and national governments intentionally being vague with classifications, licenses, laws, everything, causing the market to be overrun by shady bullshit artists while also making normal law abiding citizens criminals. Things are slowly changing for the better though, and more legitimate open companies are becoming the norm. None of that changes the core values that libertarians love bitcoins for though, not at all.

I've made 0.16 theoretical USD cents playing around with mining.

In recent news, BTC is at an all time high and some are skeptical of a correction soon.

Are any of you still into mining? I thought of picking it up as a past time to learn market trading through cloud based mining services.

https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedi...d-9c8e992d421e

Really no point to mining now unless you're on specialized hardware and your electricity is cheap.

There's no way bitcoin won't have a major correction soon. It's not being used as currency right now. More like a really weird stock. It's really just going to take 1 or two big owners to decide they've made enough "profit" from it and cash out for the panic cash out to start and have it crash down to the point where you'll actually be able to use it as currency again.

^I was under the impression some of the smaller coins are still worth mining with just a powerful GPU. But I haven't built a new rig yet to see.

Definitely worth going after smaller coins as far as I can tell. And that's why I want to do cloud based services. I'd just pay maintenance & transaction fees. Hopefully get to a point to where I can just re-use coined profit to keep it going and trade around.

Considered using nicehash for fun, but learned they were the ones who were recently hacked. Even more surprised people don't store their coins locally.

I've got some play money in litecoin and ethereum. Both of which have better block chain tech than Bitcoin which reduces transaction costs and time. Of course this could all go to shit and I could lose it all but that's why it's just play money. I like the potential tax efficiency of block chain as currency if it stabilizes and actually becomes more mainstream.

Tax efficiency .. I like how you put that. :)

I am just looking to get into ether myself.

Mining ethereum is profitable right now, I started mining it last night. It's getting less profitable, so it'd take a long time to pay for a setup, I figure I just built a gaming rig, why not pay some back. Plus with the ethereum trend lately, could be worth more later on.

I also bought into litecoin at $98, so I'm doing pretty well there.

I'm not really sure where it's going to end up, but a lot of stores are starting to accept bit/altcoins now, so it seems like it could be a real thing in the future. I figure starting out now with a few coins of each could be largely beneficial at some point. Just gotta hodl for years.

What program are you using for ethereum mining?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0
https://ethermine.org/

Not to say this is the best or anything, I'm new to this so still learning!

Nice!

You're having better luck than linus tech tips. They built a crazy 8 card 10x0 nvidia (mix and match 1080, 1080ti, and 1070s from their leftovers bin), and used some program that determines which coin you could mine most progitabily and mines that for you, cloud based. And they figured the setup would break even in like 2 years iirc if electricity was free, and like 6 years while paying for the electricity.

With my current hash rate, I should have just around $73 per month with current ETH prices, and assuming my power usage is on par with other single GTX1070 computers I should use $14 on electricity per month. $708 profit per year isn't enough to pay for the machine quick, but it's better than nothing. If I were to mine constantly until my GPU warranty expires, I'd pay for the whole machine back and then some, so I figure why not mine. Plus having a whole ETH after a year could be profitable in the future. For all we know, Ethereum will go to Proof of Share soon and none of this will even matter.

At the moment, my system has mined this amount at home. IMO, the difficulty with BTC seems still feasible.


[coingecko.com snapshot]
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...7a215ea398.png

Attachment 236966

I currently have 9 GTX1070s mining Ethereum. its usually making $20-25 a day, depending on difficulty and the ETH price.
You can use whattomine.com to see what is the most profitable. Ive recently been looking into vertcoin and zcash as a way to diversify a bit, they are frequently more profitable than ETH.

Ill posts some more info when Im back home. Its honestly not difficult to set up.

Photos? :likecat:

So there is the main mining rig, which uses a weird "Pro BTC" mining mobo that has lots of 1x PCI-E slots. This is 4 EVGA cards and 2 founders edition cards, they all overclock about the same (same memory chips I'd imagine).
Attachment 236965

Then I also have an old case, with an old AMD phenom II setup in it that has 2 MSI cards. The MSI cards overclock just like the cards mentioned above, but just run a little hotter.
Finally, my main PC has an EVGA 1070 FTW card which doesnt overclock or mine as well as the other cards, but does benchmark better for gaming. Im guessing it has some different brand memory in it.

Im using the claymore miner and the ethermine pool. This is 8 cards (The one in my main PC has been running vertcoin for a few days):
https://ethermine.org/miners/400fc3d...c3de144d8dc850

Very cool !

Did you pick these cards up used or new?

Also,

Where it says 'Your Ethereum Address', would this be my wallet address from coinbase?

I bought them all used for mostly between 350 and 400 bucks. SSD, PSU, CPU, and RAM were all used as well. The only things I bought new was the mobo and the PCI-E risers.
The good thing about doing it this way is the stuff hasnt depreciated much. The cards probably havent depreciated at all.

Exactly. Also, be sure to change the payout amount in the pool so it does it more frequently if possible.

Good prices, I doubt they've dropped in value at all if any.

Pay amount? Is this the farm recheck? I'm only using Ethminer.exe with a batch file and haven't found a cmd list that explains everything.

I really thought there would be more of you guys into this...

I have a few rigs and am sitting right around 400mhs on ETH. A friend is sitting right around 700mhs and uses his rigs to heat his house.

I bought tulip bulbs. Hoping they really take off.

LOL! It does seem eerily similar.

Its funny that Im suddenly hearing about the Tulip "bubble" all over the place. The last time I heard about it was in college where I learned that it didnt actually happen.

There are arguments on either side of the debate as to whether or not Bitcoin is in a bubble state. Its not healthy for people to view it as a "get rich quick" scheme, but at the same time the market cap and adoption rate is not really that high, yet. The media has never been able to report on economics well and Bitcoin has really started to expose how many of these journalists dont know shit. Then on top of all that you have some of the most wealthy people in the country intimidated by the implications of highly liquid, international, decentralized, cryptocurrencies. Put all this together and you have quite the information shitstorm.

My advice has never changed. Build a diverse portfolio. Crypto has its place in everybody's portfolio, how much depends on what beta you are targeting. If you have all your money in just BTC, you should stop. That is dumb.

Anyone buying Ripple in here? I'm about to dive into that one here shortly and make a quick buck. Maybe use the profit to buy another Miata lol

I bought a shitload of Ripple at .22 cents. My portfolio has exploded in the last month, I have about 18 different alt coins, taking profits back into BTC now while it's low. Also returned 2x as much $$$ as I borrowed from our account to shut my wife up so I can continue to trade in peace :bigtu:

Tulips am I right lol. I also could buy a Miata with my Ripple profits :)

Bitcoin will last until the very first run on the bank. Since there is nothing to back it up aside from perception of worth, once that is gone it will fall as the house of cards that it is.

Bitcoin will be gone because its technology is extremely limiting. Transaction times are way too high.

Ingenius analysis, sir! Where'd you pick that up from? CNN? There are actually billions of $$$ in computer hardware backing it up. Over xmas break $100 billion was taken out in 24 hours...held strong around $15k.

New upgrades coming this spring which will reduce both fees and transfer times. Lightning network will allow immediate transactions between users putting a placeholding in the main blockchain to be fully confirmed when the network is less busy. People think that Bitcoin is set in stone, it is not. It has a whole path for future upgrades and they are being undertaken.

I have some ripple, I also have some Tron lol... if you are looking for quick money I would go to Tron.

I'd love to buy some ethereum or ripple or what have you to short so I could use the lump sum student loans that just showed up in my account. Given my luck though, I'd end up seeing everything tank and make 10x the loss that I'd stand to gain lol.

EOS and REQ the ones I would invest in for their long-term potential.

I understand that you have consumed the fancy colored Flavor Aid (the actual beverage at Jonestown). Would you care to enlighten me as to what anyone would be able to trade their Bitcoins for once the populous has decided they don't wish to trade anything for them? Once upon a few hundred years of time, a mule was a useful device, easily traded and highly valued. A good pair of mules was worth much all across America in an economy that saw them as a means of developing wealth. When was the last time you saw a motherfucking mule, smartass? People decided they weren't valuable. Just decided it. Moved on. NEXT!

So what happened to the people with a shitload of mules in the pasture? Did mules become unable to work? Nope. Same old mules. Just people stopped considering them as valuable, wanted other things instead. Shiny tractors and such. How do you sell 400 mules you paid $15,000 apiece for when nobody wants to buy a mule, even at $400 a head? I know I'm pitching faster than you can swing here, but try to keep up, would you son?

There's only perceived value behind any currency. No smoke and mirrors, just perceived value. Either there's confidence in it or not. This is why the USD is more prized than the Bolivian Boliviano, or did you think all currency is equally valuable? How cute! People believe it will be worth a roughly equivalent amount next month so it works. This is based upon history and the perception of the establishment guaranteeing the value. People generally believe the US government won't collapse by next Tuesday or even by the 23rd of August so they accept it's currency as reasonably stable to own.

Has Bitcoin demonstrated stability? Do tell? Has it functioned predictably?

You know that the iPhone 6 had people waiting in line for days? What is it worth now?
https://kt-media-knowtechie.netdna-s...14/09/Line.jpg

Worth less than a mule now?
Worth whatever someone will give, and no more.

Will they give the last 400,000 people trying to cash it in those billions of dollars of computer hardware? Split it between them?

Anything is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it at any given moment. When that value changes quickly in one direction it could easily change quickly in the other. Or are you incapable of envisioning such complexity?

Bet only what you are ready to lose with a chuckle and no more. If you win, great! If you lose, tell the grandkids about the magic computer money scheme someone invented in their basement and got a bunch of people to buy.

More Flavor Aid, sir?

sixshooter, I think you are confused about how modern money works.

Back in the day money had commodity value. It was literally made out of precious metals (gold, silver, mules, salt, silk, etc) which defined its value. It was not that far off from a barter system.

Then we had the gold standard. Instead of trading actual pieces of gold, people started trading certificates that you could exchange for pieces of gold in a bank. It had 1:1 value to gold, meaning that you would get 1 predefined weight of gold for 1 certificate unit.

Now we use Fiat. The value is backed by the government that has issued it. It does not hold a physical commodity value of any sort. Its value is defined by demand and supply, much the same as with Bitcoin and altcoins.

What I don't like so far is storage with the coins. Is it really worth buying a ~$120 hardware wallet when I only have $500 or so invested? Will this $500 that I have spread around a few different altcoins disappear in a few years because they are left on a software wallet or some on an exchange? With this little invested, is it really worth moving around to wallets if the transfer fees stack up quick? At least on binance they are pretty high, luckily gdax makes fees low/non-existent for the major coins. I don't see how this could take off to more than those who either are technically inclined with this type of stuff or just have high belief in the cryptocurrencies, because the average person isn't going to deal with storage like this. I'm thinking about moving some of mine to Tron, cashing a chunk of my investment out if it rises, and just hold on to a bit of each. Not sure if I'll regret not holding on to my whole investment.

Yes. We all know this. Learned it in elementary school. Pretty basic stuff there!

You obviously don't know enough about crypto to have an opinion if you don't understand where the value comes from. Mules are still worth something. An old iPhone is still worth something. After the '08 housing loan crash, did houses become obsolete and worthless? No. The price of something goes up and down until an equilibrium is reached between buyer and seller.

Your analogy to a "run on the bank" is completely telling because you fail to understand that the blockchain is a public ledger. It is reconciled by individuals all around the world every 10 minutes. It is impossible to cheat or lie about it. Therefore the "bank" is not capable of lending and it is not capable of owing more than it's own value. Just like gold, except you can't send a lump of gold to the other side of the world for next to nothing in 10 minutes.

You're drinking the fruity drink. I'll put $1000 into crypto and you put $1000 in the bank and we'll see who's is worth more in a year.

When a WW3 erupts with all of you with money in bank, facebook or crypto you will wish you bought mules :)

I fully understand Fiat money and how it works. Something is only worth what someone is willing to give you for it. If there is a scare and people dump Bitcoin for cash then no matter what you paid for it you won't be able to get much for it. It doesn't matter what you think it's worth or what someone on the internet says it's worth if no one is willing to give you anything for what you got. It's about supply and demand as you have stated. I'm simply saying that if confidence in it falls then there will be little demand. The dollar is well valued because people have confidence it won't suddenly fall. If Bitcoin drops to $8,000 next week the casual investors may flee end dump their shares possibly driving it down to 4000. That might piss off the more serious investors and they may dump some of theirs as they watch the value in free fall.

Saying it can't happen made me feel like you needed an elementary explanation of economics, hence the mule example. Carry on as you were.