And in other news.

Doge And Dogecoin Are Actually, Really Headed To NASCAR

 

From the discussion threead:

 

Its so absurd, but seems to be working.

 

 

US Marshals Accidentally Replies All To Anonymous Bitcoin Auction Bidders In Email Fiasco | TechCrunch

 

 

Just noticed today that Dell Business now accepts Bitcoin.

 

Found this interesting:

 

Happened across this chart earlier:




Was thinking about all those folks who bought in during the hype of 2011-2013. Shame that there's no market in which a person can short Bitcoin.

 

Tulips were a big thing from1634 until 1637.

 

Not sure how the investors are doing. I am still mining BTC and getting more and more. I also still use them for purchases online.

I know RickP still has a large amount of them stashed away in case they go back up above some certain point.

 

Have you compared your mining rate vs your energy cost?

 

No, the server that has the usb asic miner is on and running 24/7 hosting a ton of other things. So additional power consumption would minimal at best. I am not making a ton from my asic miner any more, but I at least made back more then what it cost me. So I am relatively happy.

 

Just for kicks, I decided to run an experiment yesterday.

Here at the TV station, one of the small render farms has been sitting unused for about a week since the room it used to service is being relocated. Each of these ten machines contains a quad-core i7 running at 2.7 Ghz:



I downloaded some random mining software onto them, created a wallet, and let the machines run for 24 hours. At the end of that time, they had produced exactly 0.00000000 bitcoins.

 

Anyone in the mining business could have told you that is how much you would produce. Using x86 to mine with has not been profitable in years. I am willing to bet my $70 asic miner is faster then all of those combined and then some.

Edit: Based on your deleted post Joe, I use a cheap single usb asic miner that I picked up off eBay. I mine in a pool, would have to go home and check which pool. I have not honestly touched the setup in any way shape or form in over a year. I check it every couple of weeks to make sure it is still running then leave it be.

 

That's pretty much what I knew to be true based on a bit of reading, but I hate being the guy who says "no, that's not possible" without having actually tried it myself or otherwise having access to empirical data from a reputable source. This way, I can authoritatively say that it's not possible, having thrown quite a bit more CPU horsepower at the problem than the average household has access to.


You sort-of answered my question (in the response to shuiend) while I was still typing that, so I nuked it.

When I first read your post that you were still actively mining BTC, my reaction was incredulity, as I was, TBH, unaware of the existence of low cost ASIC-miners-on-a-USB-stick at the consumer level. All of the FPGA / ASIC - based mining hardware I'd seen previously was packaged in the form of large clusters:









While I haven't been passionately obsessing over the subject, I still make it a point to peruse the bitcoin-related headlines from time to time, and from what I can tell, reality seems to be aligning itself with the majority-consensus predictions and observations; that bitcoin (and its various imitators) continue mostly to exhibit characteristics consistent with a speculative commodity rather than a store of value or a medium of exchange. The differentiating characteristic being that unlike most commodities which are commonly speculated upon (wheat, oil, Dutch tulip bulbs, etc.), bitcoin has a utility value of approximately zero.

 

When the value of a new block drops to near zero its going to become really interesting.

 

From what I understand, the Bitcoin "back-end" economy is supposed to be structured such that as mining new coin becomes less and less profitable, those people who have invested the capital to build large mining farms will instead begin to draw operating revenue from the small transaction fees appended to point-of-sale operations, much as is done with credit-card processing today.

Of course, the profitability of mining has already begun to decline in real terms (decreased yield per block, artificially increased difficulty per hash, and the steadily declining value of BTC against both transactional currencies and store-of-value commodities), and yet large-scale POS transactions have not begun to occur, nor are they likely ever to.

 

Yeah every 4 years the reward for creating a new block is halved per the model. I think its going to kind of end up being like the economy of a mining bomb town. Everyone rushed in and got them selves some skills as a miner and then the gold ran out. Except now instead of a bunch of disgruntled minors we'll have a bunch of people, many of whom already lived on the fringe of the internet, who have extremely powerful encryption breaking computers.

 

Shows how little you truly know. The hardware currently used to mine bitcoin is so specialized that it's entirely useless for anything else. Lars is already mining a ghost town if he's using USB anything. Guys like him and I will keep the network going when it's no longer profitable since we already do so now.

Nobody is cracking anything, well, my wall of 25KW of GPU power might have, but it's long gone.