Leafy

iTrader: (1)

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

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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?

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

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.

deezums

iTrader: (3)

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.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Stalking this discussion...

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

shuiend

iTrader: (24)

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.


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.

deezums

iTrader: (3)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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...






Sidebar: How microprocessors used to be designed:

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Name this analog, single-function computer:

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

I shall name it Carl Scanimate.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

And for making me laugh, you receive props.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Also, CatCoin is a thing that exists.



Catcoin

MstrBlk

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

Coinye is the funniest IMO

deezums

iTrader: (3)

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 **** 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.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

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.

thenuge26

iTrader: (2)

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.

deezums

iTrader: (3)

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 ******* 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.