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Thoughts on Bitcoin

Jensen567
Level 7
I live in upstate NY and it is starting to get colder up here, I had heard about Bitcoins, and have a Tri-Fire 7970 setup in my computer, so I thought I would look into doing some bitcoin mining to heat my house (no joke). Well after about 15 minutes of googling I realized I was way late to the game and GPU mining is a think of the past thanks to ASICs. This chart is a good example of why it is worthless to GPU mine, before it goes crazy is before ASICs were a thing.

30508

I then found these few articles from the past couple of days.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-fast...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-million...

http://kotaku.com/bitcoin-mining-is-getting-out-of-control-1471769898

This got me thinking, there is now an entire industry devoted to making these ASICs which can do nothing but mine bitcoins. There is also a boatload of computing power going into solving these algorithms to mine bitcoins which is using a ton of power. The problem I see with this is that the problems that are solved from mining bitcoins are useless. You are solving an algorithm that does nothing but say "OK, you solved me, here is a bitcoin" in essence.

It made me wonder if it would be possible to make a form of digital currency similar to bitcoins, only instead of doing arbitrary calculations there are actual scientific and mathematical problems being solved. Almost like Folding@home, only for every x number of folds you get a science-coin or something. So that all of this electricity, and all of that computing power could go towards something that at least benefits the world in some way.

I don't know how the supply would be regulated (like bitcoin does with increasing difficulty) but I imagine something could be put into place. This sort of method would likely keep GPU mining relevant also as the calculations would likely vary some based upon the subject it was needed for (ex, climate modeling calculations vs folding) which would make it hard to make an ASIC to do the work.

Mostly I just wanted to start a discussion to see what everyone thinks about Bitcoin, and to see if my idea is totally whack (I know it would be very very very hard to implement, but in theory) or if people agree that it seems a bit nuts to be devoting so many resources to a calculation that has zero benefit to society.

Mods: If this is the wrong place for this I apologize, I am somewhat new here but I did not see anywhere else it should go.
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Arne_Saknussemm
Level 40
Hey jensen. This is absolutely the place for this...the general discussion section has a venerable tradition of hosting debates on on all sorts... and much weirder than bitcoin has been discussed :).

Bitcoin itself is just another currency and people have traded using one thing or another as currency throughout history. So in principle there is nothing wrong with your idea. If enough people agree on a currency and establish it's worth (or rather it's worth becomes established in the market place) then it will be used for trade. Of course the hegemony of the petro-dollar would then be threatened and you might might meet a sticky end.

Bitcoin was started by an economics professor so the experiment is ongoing and many who are mining don't know they are part of the experiment and most don't know what it is designed to show.

It is virtually impossible to do now and turn a profit....you end up spending more on electricity than you make. There are companies selling specialist mining processors and rigs...you have to ask why they sell them and don't use them to mine bitcoins shows how much faith they have in bitcoin staying as a currency or as a currency that is really worth anything....

http://www.techspot.com/news/54886-kncminer-sells-8-million-worth-of-new-20nm-bitcoin-mining-hardwar...

Jensen567
Level 7
I don't think there is anything wrong with a digital currency, it just seems silly to spend all of that energy calculating nothing. I mostly just think it would be cool if there would be some way to make the reward based upon solving a block of useful calculations (such as folding) instead of decrypting something arbitrary.

Arne_Saknussemm
Level 40
We already have a digital currency...virtually none of it is actual money ;)...and when the electricity goes off....we'll have to go back to shiny...

HiVizMan
Level 40
Debate and discussion are the joy the joy.

Bitcoin are no more real money than the pound notes in my wallet, each have value only because we ascribe value to them. There are cultures who have sea shells as coin. The construction of those coins, or diving for them in the sea shell instance is not what creates the value or worth of those currencies it is us that determines that. Now bitcoin mining may seem pointless and most proberbly is pointless beyound the creation of another coin but it is no more pointless than the BOE instructing the treasury to 'print' another few trillion pounds and to inject that new money into the markets. Quantitative Easing. Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the economy when standard monetary policy has become ineffective.

Both are illusions.
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HiVizMan wrote:
Debate and discussion are the joy the joy.

Bitcoin are no more real money than the pound notes in my wallet, each have value only because we ascribe value to them. There are cultures who have sea shells as coin. The construction of those coins, or diving for them in the sea shell instance is not what creates the value or worth of those currencies it is us that determines that. Now bitcoin mining may seem pointless and most proberbly is pointless beyound the creation of another coin but it is no more pointless than the BOE instructing the treasury to 'print' another few trillion pounds and to inject that new money into the markets. Quantitative Easing. Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the economy when standard monetary policy has become ineffective.

Both are illusions.


Totally agree with you,HiVizman

Take a look at Obamacare in the United States

the website did not work for the Gov't.So the Treasuary injected $678 million for the fix

This equates to $2,000,000.00 for each and every citizen(320 million population census).

Give me the money. I can take care of myself and pick my Drs.

Now who needs healthcare???

01 Wolverine wrote:
Totally agree with you,HiVizman


Take a look at Obamacare in the United States


the website did not work for the Gov't.So the Treasuary injected $678 million for the fix


This equates to $2,000,000.00 for each and every citizen(320 million population census).


Give me the money. I can take care of myself and pick my Drs.


Now who needs healthcare???



Isn't there a mistake in your calculation? if 678 million for the fix were injected, that would lead to roughly 2$ per head (with 320 million population census)..no?

LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs

12/9/2013 by: Anshel Sag -

As everyone knows by now, cryptocurrencies are the latest craze in the computing community. You've got people mining BitCoins on industrial scales using ASIC miners and you've got countless people mining LiteCoins (and all the other crytocoins) using their gaming GPUs. Currently, the BitCoin sits at a price of $905 at the time of publication, but in the past week has fluctuated as much as $300 in either direction. While it appears that BitCoin [BTC] has leveled off for now, the new more affordable and heavily mined currency is the LiteCoin [LTC].

LiteCoin [LTC] is currently at $32 per coin, which is vastly more affordable for most people to buy and at the same time is also vastly easier to obtain through mining than a BitCoin. Because all of these cryptocurrencies use hashing to do the 'mining' AMD's GPUs are just faster and more efficient at accomplishing this task than Nvidia's GPUs. If you've already got an Nvidia GPU, nobody is going to criticize you for mining using one, but you're better off with an AMD Radeon. Now that we've given you a little background on cryptocurrencies and their popularity, this should explain why there is a shortage of AMD GPUs. People are buying these GPUs in anticipation of mining LiteCoins at much more efficient rates and most people are buying R9 280X and R9 290s for their mining rigs. At $30 a coin, LiteCoin mining more than pays for itself in terms of electricity consumed and in the long term will also pay for the hardware used as well. Additionally, if the price of LiteCoins maintains steady, AMD GPUs will remain a consistent method of generating LiteCoins. This is because LiteCoins use a different algorithm than BitCoins and are easier to generate and there are more of them (still a finite amount). If you look at LTC and BTC, you can see that both currencies' fates have been almost tied to each other almost perfectly with the last few weeks looking identical in terms of price.

Because of this fact, If you go online and try to buy an R9 280X or an R9 290 your options are severely limited. Heck, even the $550 R9 290X is difficult to come by for the very same reasons. We've spoken to some people involved with the retailers and some retailers themselves and we've been finding that most retailers simply have very little to no stock of cards. And this is not for having enough cards coming in, but rather that in some cases back orders are outstripping the incoming stock. If you head on over to Newegg, you can see that only 4 out of 17 models of the R9 280X are available for sale, the rest are completely sold out. In addition to that, only 2 of the 16 models of the R9 290X are available for sale as well. The story is the same with the R9 290 as well, with only two of the 7 models of the card available for sale.

Do keep in mind that some of these vendors (ASUS, XFX, Sapphire, etc.) will be coming out with their own non-reference designs with custom coolers and such to reduce the heat generated by the R9 290 series GPUs. However, this usually does not affect the overall stock of reference cards as most vendors tend to keep selling their reference cards alongside their non-reference cards in order to command a price premium with the non-reference design cards.

We wanted to make sure that it wasn't that these cards were getting EOL'd or cut down in quantities, so we did a stock check with another retailer and verified our hypothesis. For the R9 290, they had 225 cards incoming with 121 back orders already being filled. The R9 290X was a much more drastic story with 290 cards shipping and 259 backorders being filled, effectively only leaving 30 cards in inventory, which will likely be snapped up immediately after they are shown as in stock. Even the R9 280X, which is effectively an HD 7970 refreshed into a new card has an insane amount of backorders with a quantity of 642 cards being shipped and 525 backorders being filled immediately.

Upon talking with one retailer, we heard them say that this is the best month they have ever had for GPU sales and it is only the 9th of December. Considering that many more cards will be shipped before the end of the month, I suspect that this could be the best month of GPU sales for AMD and most vendors and their retailers, ever.

Edit 12/10/2013 7:30: We also spoke with a European retailer that stated that they had sold over 1,000 high-end AMD GPUs over the course of last week (starting with Cyber Monday) and that 65% of those sales were multi-GPU sales. They said that they suspect most of those sales were for LiteCoin.

As a result, this retailer and many retailers will likely be sold out of AMD high-end GPUs for the time coming and if you want one and see it is in stock, buy it. Because there is a strong likelihood that you won't see very many cards coming in stock until late December or early January. Sure, there will be some of the new non-reference cooler models coming out, but those are usually produced in lower quantities, especially in their first few runs. I suspect that between these developments and the PS4 and Xbox One selling very well, AMD is going to have an incredibly strong fourth quarter of 2013. One I don't think anyone would have suspected.

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Myk_SilentShado
Level 15
I wouldn't say Bitcoins are frivolous, their current value is about US $1000 for a single coin alone. And i've been doing some reading here and there and it seems the best way to mine bitcoins/litecoins and whatever others there are, is through GPU's because they can do the calculations a lot faster than CPU's.