Quake3World

Without some SERIOUS hardware you aren't going to get rich mining bitcoins right now. After nearly 24 hours I only have 0.02 btc and even with my new card I'll only pull like 0.06 per 24 hours. It didn't always take this long, it gets harder as time goes on. So really, I have to hope that the value stays high and in about 2 months I'm still able to sell one for $266 or more. If I do sell one for that price, it will pay for the electricity usage of my entire home for those two months (not just my PC). I'm currently paying $0.062 for each kwh of electric so they could drop as low as $8 per coin and I would still technically make a profit for a computer a leave on 24/7 anyways.

The only catch is finding someone with the balls to buy bitcoins. It's like selling any other virtual item to another person.

Deathshroud wrote:Interesting. 1 thing, lets say you wait 2 months and horde a bunch of bitCoin hashes. What if someone else cracks the same hashes as you and sells them? Does that invalidate your hashes?

If you're trying to solo process blocks it takes 1-4 years with a current single GPU system, so that isn't really something you do. The way the vast majority of people mine is by joining a pool that tracks the amount of "work" you contribute and when each block is done they pay you a tiny fraction that corresponds to how much you did.

Coincidentally, an article appeared in a local newspaper here about the first Dutch restaurant that accepts bitcoins. The article said each single coin is worth 108 euros. Not sure how much it was before, but bitwise made it sound like it was a lot less.

Eraser wrote:Coincidentally, an article appeared in a local newspaper here about the first Dutch restaurant that accepts bitcoins. The article said each single coin is worth 108 euros. Not sure how much it was before, but bitwise made it sound like it was a lot less.

The value is extremely volatile. That is the problem with using bitcoins for purchases.

Here is a graph in euros

lol jesus

And morons still think it's a good idea?

Building your house on sand in an earthquake zone is a better idea.

lol, I read someone (in the netherlands) who has his house up for sale accepts 6000 bitcoins for it as well.

Price dropping...

bitWISE wrote:If you're trying to solo process blocks it takes 1-4 years with a current single GPU system, so that isn't really something you do. The way the vast majority of people mine is by joining a pool that tracks the amount of "work" you contribute and when each block is done they pay you a tiny fraction that corresponds to how much you did.

Ok, this makes more sense. The "layman" doing this from home essentially has to rely on whatever 3rd party is running the pool, in hopes that they'll make good use of the blocks that have been mined. Seems a bit dubious to me.

lolol
http://kotaku.com/e-sports-league-mined ... -486205191

Users discovered the Bitcoin mining when they noticed their GPUs carrying unusually high loads over the past two weeks.

[...]

The league is offering free memberships as some members complain the code damaged their video cards.

Hehe, if you blindly skip through the EULA, you (and your GPU) are going to have a bad time
(Wonder if it actually *was* in the EULA. That would be even more deliciously devious.)

<tatclass> the keys are like right next to each other.

Price has slumped back under $100 this week. Holding my new coin a while before I sell.

Was reading the other day about some new machines coming (or may already be) out that generate silly amounts of hashes which is going to make generating lots of coin much more difficult for the more casual miners.

So that Bitcoin mining that was done by the ESEA League over a 2 week period only netted $3600? For 2 whole weeks with several customer's computers churning away simultaneously?

Why do I get the feeling that "earning" from Bitcoin is probably less than minimum wage? Oh that's because it is.

The things people do to earn a pittance.

I would say the $3600 was free but someone had to code in the secret miners and setup a pool account to pay out the coins. If it had lasted more than a couple weeks though, you can see how the profits would really start to roll in. I'm surprised they thought they could get away with it though, when my card is mining its loud as all fuck.

phantasmagoria wrote:Was reading the other day about some new machines coming (or may already be) out that generate silly amounts of hashes which is going to make generating lots of coin much more difficult for the more casual miners.

Yea there are two major vendors. Butterfly Labs are the main force and have machines from 5, 10, 25, 50, or even 1,500 gigahashes per second. Another company released enough competing products to prevent Butterfly Labs from effectually taking control of the entire bitcoin network (network is controlled by the distributed processing power, if one person controls 51% or more they could roll out fake bitcoins) and presumably recoup the costs. The cool thing about the butterfly labs devices is that you can change the firmware to do other computation tasks with it, if you have something that could benefit from the instruction set.

They achieved such insane performance by designing custom 32nm processors (wafer printed and all that jazz) that do nothing but process SHA256 hashes. To compare the performance, some of the most powerful single GPU systems top out around 700 (1200 if you count the mutli-cards like a 7990) megahashes per second. So where it would take me over 1 year to process a block of 25 bitcoins, it would take these machines a matter of days or even hours.

Another option available to the more average Joe's and companies are custom FPGA setups. Field programmable gate array. Alone these don't push out many hashes but with lower power cost and size you can cluster them up like crazy. But these new ASIC machines basically kill the FPGA market.

Well. Fuck.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... ge-mt-gox/

Not surprising in the least...

Even better. Since I couldn't take the cash off my account it was just sitting there. Someone this morning was able to login and transfer the funds out. I got a confirmation email but when I replied they couldn't do anything...

Very interesting thread. if I'm understanding it, we are (/were) following somewhat of an evolution of an actual trade-based electronic currency
It would be cool to see this model become more of a standard, only with a more tangible "source" of revenue, and a much more stable and secure, identity-based resource tagging. I'm picturing a virtual bank account accessible anywhere via thumbprint / retinal identity management. Wouldn't that curb ATM theft somewhat?

bitWISE wrote:Even better. Since I couldn't take the cash off my account it was just sitting there. Someone this morning was able to login and transfer the funds out. I got a confirmation email but when I replied they couldn't do anything...

That's shit. Is that someone that's hacked your personal account independently or is it a more widespread hack?

The accounts of people using bitcoin sites are getting hacked left and right lately. It's not safe out there, man!

Underpants? wrote:It would be cool to see this model become more of a standard, only with a more tangible "source" of revenue, and a much more stable and secure, identity-based resource tagging.

you might want to have a look at

http://www.coindesk.com/uk-firm-promise ... -exchange/

also people in berlin are starting to accept bitcoin:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/vi ... rlin-video

Underpants? wrote:Very interesting thread. if I'm understanding it, we are (/were) following somewhat of an evolution of an actual trade-based electronic currency
It would be cool to see this model become more of a standard, only with a more tangible "source" of revenue, and a much more stable and secure, identity-based resource tagging. I'm picturing a virtual bank account accessible anywhere via thumbprint / retinal identity management. Wouldn't that curb ATM theft somewhat?

what you want is an rfid up your rectum , which is the exact opposite of what the idea behind bitcoins is.