pouët.net

@g. We have upgraded our GPU some weeks ago at work, we have taken some good card to test mining but nothing more :) It's really hot in the room now.

But this is really a pain in the ass to generate some btc. Now you have to own some kind of special hardware to earn money.

It's interresting to see that NVIDIA is less far away from ATI in term of MHash/s.

But why? I imagine it's how the GPU internal is working.. Cause the difference is VERY HUGE even with hight end cards.

If someone can answer why this gap between NVIDIA and ATI?

Think of bitcoin mining as being much like regular mining. You spend of ton of time and energy and money digging some stuff out of the ground and processing it, and at the end you produce some useful product that earns you money.

It's exactly like that, but without any useful product, just a bunch of machines pumping out pollution for money :)

@thanks all for explanation. I thought it would solve all today modern society problems but it the end its mostly geekery.

one thing which is still a mystery : once you have generated that "magic numbers" and exchange one of them with someone else (in return of something else, a real thing), that person get that number right ? but what if you exchange it again (same number) with someone else ?

Replace "magic number" by "coin"... You just exchange hard-to-find numbers instead of metal cylinders or printed paper rectangles. Typically, bank notes are hard to make ie. Dad's ink-jet printer won't cut it. Some says, the cool thing is that hard-to-compute numbers are not tied to some central bank, "power to the people" and all that folklore.

Bank notes are complicated to make, but cheap. You need a specialised machine, but if you have it you can mass produce bank notes without needing lots of time and energy. It's reasonably secure, and very efficient.

Bitcoin is the opposite: generic hardware can make it, but it needs tons of time and energy, making it highly inefficient. Security is a tough question: i've not seen any issues with the concept itself yet, but i've seen bitcoin wallets stolen (personally I'd call my wallet in my pocket more secure than my computer ;) and DDoS attacks used to manipulate the value of the currency itself.

i oncegot my real wallet stolen with euros in it.
surely cash is a failed concept and needs to be abolished

You can find here why ATI is a better than nvidia for minning:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU

"generative music" (not really) using mtgox exchange api:
http://pera.github.io/

Most of my money isn't in my wallet but a magic number in a computer anyways. And please don't try to tell me that the value of "real" currencies isn't manipulated.

Now I honestly don't want to endorse bitcoin, but I get a weird itch everytime I see inane arguments.

ted: oh I know real money is heavily manipulated (and in many ways I really hope bitcoin is successful, I don't want to bash it particularly - the only thing I really don't like is all that wasted power used in mining).

But look at the impact of some recent hack attacks on bitcoin, you won't see anything *that* extreme with 'real' currencies. There's a definite smell of bubble about it too. It's very much in the wild-west stage of development, your money might be worth half or double what it was last week. In time, assuming it survives and isn't replaced by something better, it'll settle :)

IANAEconomist, but the way I understand it, there are very good reasons for basing your currency on useless tokens: if you tie it to a commodity that has actual value, it creates a conflict between people who need that commodity and people who are using it as an indicator of wealth. Examples: 1) food speculation artificially driving up the price of crops in the 3rd world; 2) house prices (oh noes, they're building more houses for poor people to live in, now the value of my house is going to fall)

(which raises an interesting question that I'm totally unqualified to answer: what would happen if you built a Bitcoin-like currency out of *useful* calculations, like Folding@Home? Would it provide an economic incentive to build computers that do a better job of curing cancer? Or would those results somehow be 'locked' to the wealth owners, and inaccessible to the people who want to make cancer cures out of them?)

gasman: that's along the lines of what I thought too. There's a simpler solution perhaps.

Instead of rewarding the creation of some unique number, you reward the work itself. Computers capable of doing lots of work are in demand. Let the 'bank' simply accept some computational workloads (of which folding could be one) on an auction basis or similar. The bank divides the workload between clients, pays them for each bit completed.

Whoever does the work fastest gets the most jobs done and earns the most money - much like the current setup, except the work done is hopefully something of use.

Or in other words: a big distributed supercomputer where the nodes are individually owned.

Of course actually figuring out how to give out the computation work and ensure the results aren't faked is a lot harder than suggesting it on some forum ;)

The bitcoin miners get reward because they are providing a service. In fact the miners are who are maintaining the public transaction log database, which is the fundamental structure of the bitcoin system. From this viewpoint, it is really misleading to call it "mining".

Whether it is a good idea to base the system on "vote by CPU power" is another question.

(btw I can easily imagine that there will be indeed some cheap high-end cards on the market in the next few months, though it is also quite possible that GPU miners will simply switch to litecoin or whatever)

Thanks, that's a great infography.

The transaction/blocchain stuff is quite fascinating.

So basically bitcoins are money generated out of heating the atmosphere up? What a brilliant and sustainable concept.

(also, how long before a bitcoin isn't worth the amount of energy it takes to mine?)

I've read somewhere that it is already quite close to borderline.

That brings me to a though that bitcoin mining would be ideal for Russia, as energy is relatively cheap here, and we're heating the hell out of this place with dumb heaters anyway (and I use to leave my machines running BOINC 24/7 through winter).
You see where this is going, right? In Soviet Russia you get paid for running heaters.

in soviet russia bitcoin calculates you!

time to get miners to buy co2 certificates...

nice idea. let russia mine bits for heat. atleast more efficient then now.

It's June and I couldn't mind some more heat on the atmosphere. The weather is all fucked up!

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