Slashdot Mirror
Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner
An anonymous reader writes "There's a popular discussion happening at the Bitcoin forums about a new browser-based bitcoin miner released today. This lets people mine for bitcoin straight from the browser. There's talk of making an embeddable version. How long until websites start using CPU power from their users to create Bitcoin for their owners?" As Bitcoin gets more attention, I foresee malware with payloads promising to do the same thing.
Bitcoin Slashvertisements remind me too much of Glen Beck's gold hocking. Have fun with that.
What exactly gives a Bitcoin its value? At least with a dollar, I can pay my taxes and not be imprisoned.
Palm trees and 8
+5 Funny.
I don't even.
The level of slashvertisement on these things is seriously getting retarded. Stop publishing this crap!
At some point or another, you have to interface with the Real World (TM), do you not?
Or will you pay your rent/mortgage/food in Bitcoin, too?
That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The podcast called Security Now featuring Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (famouse for that the "Shields Up!" web page) dedicated episode 287 entirely to bit coin.
I thought steve gave an incredibly well thought out, clear, concise explanation of what bit coin is why it is apparently impossible to "game" the system in anyway. The following episode (288) was the "listener feedback" episode with many listeners expressing doubt and even more excellent explanations from Steve.
Here are the convenient transcripts of these episodes, linked here in the hopes perhaps it will be useful to the slashdot community.
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-287.htm - main episode
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-288.htm - Q-and-A episode
In my mind if Steve says it's trustworthy and not a scam, that's good enough for me. But then I've listened to all 300+ episodes and am a big fan so I may be biased.
In fact there was a spike in use after the SN bitcoin episode. It may be wholly or partially due to Steve's apparent endorsement (he says he's going to make his software purchasable via bitcoin).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
What's this thing with regular promotion of bitcoins on /.? Shouldn't it be in advertising box or something?
Only just today? Are you SURE?
This has been happening for days at least, already. (Look at the first post date, and there's another older thread at the same site.)
Site uses only CPU mining, and I can guarantee you that you will be spending more on electricity than gaining in bitcoins with the current valuation. You need a powerful GPU or some other specialized hardware to do it profitably. It's cheaper and easier to just buy bitcoins.
That said, if it works as a steppingstone for you to get interested in Bitcoin, and actually familiarize yourself with the system, before coming to the wrong conclusion about its validity, then go for it.
Here are some places you can start with:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf for the original whitepaper that everything is based on (internalize this)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths for some of the more common myths flying around about bitcoins
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses for some ACTUAL weaknesses in the system, so you don't have to come up with the same old false ones that come up with these thread all the time.
A major function of the federal reserve is to prevent the infinite expansion of the M1/M2 money supply. I don't understand how Bitcoin prevents this. Is there a mechanism?
worked example: I form a bank and I offer interest on deposits.
1) person A1 deposits M bitcoins in my bank.
2) I loan M bitcoins to A2 who promptl pays a debt for a purchase to A3.
3) A3 has to do something with his money so he deposits in my bank
4) I loan the new M dollars to A4 who promptly pays A5 for a purchase
5) A5 has to do something with his money so he deposits in my bank.
and so forth. in short order M bitcoins becomes K*M bitcoins in circulation.
The ferderal reserve prevents this by requiring all banks to trnsfer 10% of all deposited for holding by the ferderal reserve. That way I can only loan out 90 cents on every deposit. The net effect is that the money supply only can expand 10 fold at most. (indeed by modulating the holding factor the fed can modulate the amount of money in circulation). This effect does not depend upon if there is one or many banks because no matter where money gets deposited it gets loaned out again.
How does bitcoin deal with this?
Second I don't see how bitcoin gets rid of the zombie bot miners. three bots start trading 1 bit coin in a circle as fast as they can. Each transaction must be validated, therefore other bots can do work to validate it and thus they can mine bit coins. Nearly 100% of all transactions thus become fake (circular) transactions. This has to be propagated across the entire bitcoin network which means lots and lots of work for all the legit nodes.
Third the way bitcoin is set up, with a fixed amount of value to be added per year, the value of the coins must decline due to all this bot induced trnasaction minting. In addition to inflation the value of mining decreases. soo the only miners who can do are the ones that don't pay for their own electricity. that is to say the bot miners. Even the website miniers will be driven out since they have costs associated with sending out many copies of the mining software for little return.
thus the whole thing implodes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was under the impression that bitcoin IS malware.
At this point, the mining operation is being dominated by people using the latest Radeon GPUs, and a guy who sunk 20+ thousand dollars into some custom ASICs. Try it with a CPU or weak GPU at this point and you will be lucky to cover your electricity costs.
So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?
Sounds like a fine use of resources to me!
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
For some reason, the only way I can analogize bitcoin to people is "it's what you'd get if you explained Star Trek's energy credit system to a stoner, who then ran for US congress and implemented it." I write science fiction constantly and would be hard pressed to come up with a zanier scheme.
Great Intellect...
If the puzzles it solves meant cpu cycles farmed out, that had a demand, in an open market place, then yes, I could see this having some value. But the abstract is to abstract. What are these puzzles? A better idea would be.. if I could become a bitcoin affiliate and make money by getting others to sell bitcoin! Now you are talking!
Funny that the actual "browser" based miner is a Java Applet. Yeah, one of those things that always fails to load and is slow as hell.
Wake me up when there is a JavaScript or at *least* a Flash-based miner.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Generating 0.00019867 BTU per payout
Getting 1 payout an hour
1 BTU = 7 USD
Therefore your computer is generating 0.14 cents per hour
Seems like you could be doing some more useful for your CPU.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Bitcoin designed to be botnet proof? Sure - the more recourses you have, the more bitcoins you will mine, but also the overall difficulty of mining bitcoins increases for the entire network as a whole! (Here is a wiki entry https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty graphs of current difficulty here http://bitcoin.sipa.be/)
Another overlooked factor is that the network capacity is important too - it's whoever has the longest proof of work wins.
The gold rush days of bitcoin will soon be over. What we will see next is the value of bitcoins rise, and get divided into smaller portions, eg. bitcents, bitmils, etc.
Both as a technical concept and as a social phenomena. Quite a lot of people using Bitcoin are not doing so for practical benefits.. they're installing the software and promoting the concept as a sort of protest against the fiat banking system. Oh, and because they hate paypal.. but that's mutual.
http://susansayler.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ever-seen/
That's a pretty interesting article.. and it demonstrates the power of portraying yourself as persecuted to attract new members.
However, I think they're pretty delusional about the robustness of the system. From the paper that started it all:
This obviously assumes the attacker is interested in profits that can be extracted from the system. An attacker who is already wealthy, and has a greater interest in undermining the system than extracting profit from it, can trivially overwhelm the network by assembling processing power - especially if the attacker already has a stockpile of processing power.
National governments obviously fall into this category, so if they ever decide to destroy Bitcoin they won't need to issue any bans or even tell anyone.
I'm sure you can think of some other potential attackers who have the capability.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What can I buy with bitcoins? Food, housing, software anything? For the articles it looks like you can trade US dollars for bitcoins and bitcoins for us dollars. And that the $7.70 you put in two days ago is worth $7.10 today.
Trading visitors' CPU power for access to web applications/content might be worth something. Perhaps not so much with BitCoins but instead with some other calculations. The more CPU power you give the better service/experience in return.
The calculations does not have to be for the service provider's own needs. There can very well be a third party involved in this transaction, perhaps one that aggregate CPU power from visitors on many sites (similar to ad companies today). It might be sold as cloud computing power or something to other companies.
If you don't pay with verifiable computations then you don't get any content. No Adblock can save you there. On the other hand it's no effort on the user and no extra pay wall steps to take manually.
Would it not be possible to link these calculation speed to anything useful, let's see folding@home or the likes, or anything like good old seti@home? I would gladly make my server run a little hotter while doing something useful WHILE minting some bitcoin...
my 2€ct..
Trading visitors' CPU power for access to web applications/content might be worth something. Perhaps not so much with BitCoins but instead with some other calculations. The more CPU power you give the better service/experience in return.
The calculations does not have to be for the service provider's own needs. There can very well be a third party involved in this transaction, perhaps one that aggregate CPU power from visitors on many sites (similar to ad companies today). It might be sold as cloud computing power or something to other companies.
If you don't pay with verifiable computations then you don't get any content. No Adblock can save you there. On the other hand it's no effort on the user and no extra pay wall steps to take manually.
what a waste
So Bitcoin is basically a mechanism for converting electricity into an asset which is worth less than the cost of the electricity used to produce it, and which can only be used in trade with other people who are stupid enough to have not thought this through? I think I'll pass.
I don't see enough people ever taking it seriously enough to matter. I ignored BitCoin entirely for a year, simply because they did such a poor job of explaining (in user-facing content, at least) just exactly what the fuck the clients were doing and the fundamentals of the process. You can watch their promotional video, which amounts to "install a client that does magic and makes money appear".
The reason I ignored it for over a year is that it just instantly hit me as a garbage. As a scam. As those companies that used to ask you to install a client that would do distributed work and would pay you for your CPU usage, but never really actually accomplish enough work per user to ever bet any money back (especially when counting the energy your system used to do the work). With this, the starting user is left wondering "okay, what am I doing? is my client doing computational work that is being sold by bitcoin to companies and institutions and they're giving my bitcoins in return for that?" but you never really know, until you start digging around in white papers - which most users aren't going to do.
And if you check out the forums, there's even more scammy sounding things. Like advertising sites that sell pre-built computers made just for running your own bitcoin farming machine. Or guys offering to contract to you for a certain amount of work, etc, etc. It all just rubs even the experienced person as shady and scammy. You really have to overcome a lot of mental hurdles to stop and give it a real look.
I've been seeing bitcoin mentioned here and there for a few weeks now.
With this FA, I've been introduced to the concept of "mining" Bitcoin. (It seems I'm a few months late, perhaps -- and yes, you can get off my lawn.)
Which, I must say, is interesting -- if people are willing to pay for it.
But in my own preliminary experience, I will generate two 10,000ths of a bitcoin per hour on my Intel Core2 Quad Q6600. (I found it interesting that all 4 cores were appropriately maxed out with in-browser Java, and that the system still seemed as responsive as always.)
But that's for my years-old CPU, which everyone seems to agree is the wrong way to mine Bitcoin. And while I can harness my GPU(s) to do the work considerably faster, given appropriate kit, here's something I've been so far completely unable to figure out:
What in the fuck are these cycles being used for? Is there some problem being solved? Is it just a measure of masochistic tolerance? What's going on here?
Kid-proof tablet..
Usually, the cost of destroying something is much cheaper than creating it. That's why terrorism can work. The cost of attacking is not that large compared to fear, destruction and cost of guarding. 9/11 proved it very well. In case of Bitcoins, obtaining 50% of the network compute speed required for completely disrupting the Bitcoin network grows with Bitcoin size. When Bitcoin network compute speed crossed the fastest supercomputer Tianhe-1A, it is no longer that easy. Destroying Bitcoin economy is roughly as costly as the Bitcoin economy size and if it grows, it will become even more costly.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Thanks for your insightful post. As someone who's researched bitcoin (and who should have put that $500 in at the $.20 mark...) I find your post to be the only one so far that actually gives some context about this development and what it means to bitcoin, both to those new to the concept and for those who have been out of the loop for over a year. I'm certainly no expert, but I know enough that I was hoping an explanation like yours would show up earlier in the discussion for those who might not know about the futility in mining with a single CPU beyond just learning about the system, so the conversation could take a more productive direction rather than correcting myths and wild guesses about the system again and again.
It took me some time to understand what BitCoin actually is.
Basically, BitCoin network is a big transaction database.
One transaction is: "transfer X amount of BitCoins from account Y to account Z." This 'database', or transaction log is replicated and stored on all participating users' computers.
You can be sure a (your) transaction has been recorded, because you can check with many other peers who will verify that it is.
Of course, the inner parts are more complex, and there's a way to generate new BitCoins (but over time you can generate less and less, so it's a finite amount in total).
Usually, the cost of destroying something is much cheaper than creating it. That's why terrorism can work. The cost of attacking is not that large compared to fear, destruction and cost of guarding. 9/11 proved it very well.
In case of Bitcoins, obtaining 50% of the network compute speed required for completely disrupting the Bitcoin network grows with Bitcoin size. When Bitcoin network compute speed crossed the fastest supercomputer Tianhe-1A, it is no longer that easy. Destroying Bitcoin network is roughly as costly as the Bitcoin economy size and if it grows, it will become even more costly. This is not asymmetric as in case of terrorism. It is still possible for national governments but it's no longer a matter switching on a small cluster.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
I think the actual "problem" being solved, is the code/encryption for each "coin" that is made.
It took me some time to understand what BitCoin actually is.
Basically, BitCoin network is a big transaction database.
One transaction is: "transfer X amount of BitCoins from account Y to account Z." This 'database', or transaction log is replicated and stored on all participating users' computers.
You can be sure a (your) transaction has been recorded, because you can check with many other peers who will verify that it is.
Of course, the inner parts are more complex, and there's a way to generate new BitCoins (but over time you can generate less and less, so it's a finite amount in total).
(I forgot to login before my comment, so i'm posting it again.)
"CryptNet is just a simple, innocuous tuple-processing collective, man."
What in the fuck are these cycles being used for? Is there some problem being solved? Is it just a measure of masochistic tolerance? What's going on here?
It's basically trying to generate a block of data such that the hash is not less than the current (network-wide) difficulty value. So it is a "problem solved", but it does not carry any inherent utility outside of BitCoin. The only point of making you do this work is so that it can be later be verified that the coin was indeed generated by doing the work, and not conjured out of thin air (thus keeping the total supply at check).
What in the fuck are these cycles being used for? Is there some problem being solved?
Yes, you are basically verifying transactions. This ensures the cryptographic integrity of Bitcoins.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Mining
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The few people who found out about bitcoin back in 2009 were able to mine a very significant percentage of all the bitcoins that will ever be created, just because there was no competition yet (back then you could create a block with on average 4 billion sha-256 hashes; now it's about a quadrillion). If they hold on to their bitcoins, and bitcoin trading becomes big, they'll be filthy rich just because they found the website before slashdot did.
I'll be staying away from doing any bitcoin transactions. Humanity does not need any more undeserving elites.
That would get people's attention and get a bit of runtime.
There's nothing productive happening. You're effectively flipping a coin over and over and over again (as fast as your rig can), until you happen to be the first to hit.
Unfortunately the workload isn't doing protein folding or anything. Though that woulda been cool.
They can't write code that is portable and compiles on FreeBSD.
Yet...a browser? Really? What, to use the CPU cycles from the school's computer?
I think I'll go and invent a new currency, for which anyone is allowed to mint a billion new coins the first day, half a billion the second day, and then watch as my personal stash gains value when a hoard of ignorants start flocking to the service at day 300 because they can "get free money just by minting it".
I foresee a problem in the future where the gold rush'ers start trying to cash in, de-evaluating the currency significantly and screwing anyone who supported it enough to try to give it value.
What in the fuck are these cycles being used for? Is there some problem being solved?
Yes: put simply, the problem being solved is generating authentication codes for transactions that require enough CPU time to generate that it's infeasible for an attacker to generate them themselves. On a technical level, you're searching for random numbers that can be added to a transaction list and the hash of the last transaction list block which makes the SHA256 hash match a certain pattern.
Does that help?
This reward is for those who supported the system in its darkest hour of need. For that, Queen Rand gladly rises them up to just beneath her own majesty.
Gold coins, paper bills, even barter items, these things cost energy to make. Do you really think actual money just springs out from the head of Zeus at no cost?
As bitcoins are based on cryptographic technology, I wonder if quantum computing can render my bitcoins invalid?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Really? This is some type of a Goverment experiment using our computers Processors to solve some kind of Astronomical problem thats gonna take years and years to solve. So it makes perfect sense to gather as many processors together to help with the equation. We will become Slaves.
I'm seeing a lot of conversation regarding the economics and tech of bitcoin itself, but what about Bitcoin Plus? That is to say, is it a better or worse proposition to join up with Bitcoin Plus, than it is to run any of the other Bitcoin miners? It appears that Bitcoin Plus actually is some sort of distributed computing project, in that you actually aren't signing up to mine bitcoins directly to your account as with other miners, but rather that you are agreeing to give your CPU power to the fellow that runs Bitcoin Plus for some sort of distributed operation, in return for (hopefully, if he's honest) Bitcoin rewards? Now, the FAQ page has something about 50 Bitcoins, and I'm not sure if that is an arbitrary number for example, or something having to do with payout etc... are you given BCs YOU find, or is it that every 50 Bitcoins found on the network lead to a payout of..X BC's to everyone involved?
Next, I'd also be interested to know in the type of miner this is. From what I've read, GPU mining is MUCH faster than CPU mining, but the basic miners are only CPU etc.. can this web-based miner really use GPU as well as the standalone options, if it uses it at all? I can't imagine so, unless it somehow interacts with CUDA or (Better) AMD Stream. If I remember correctly, the AMD 5000 and 6000 series high ends are the fastest bitcoin miners around, so I'd like to put my 6970 to use!
Remember it's not a dupe any more, it's a ReSlash.
Mining is used to sign and validate a chunk of bitcoin transactions. The problem is artificially hard to keep the network safe from attacks; people shouldnt be able to pump these validations out at will. That could open for e.g. double-spending of coins.
To me, smells a lot like the fear of fiat money.
But to me, the key difference is that unlike Bitcoin, fiat money has the power of a sovereign state, including its monopoly on violence, behind it. I can pay my tax obligation to the sovereign state on whose land I reside with fiat money but not with Bitcoin. But I'd love to be proven wrong with examples of people who use one currency just for paying tax and another currency in daily life, especially without a well-defined means of exchange between the two.
There's an intrinsic value to a currency which is hard to trace and hard to tax and liquid across international borders. Satoshi engineered a nice exit strategy for himself. I don't know why you call it "gamed". It's a damn sight more clever than anything Bezos ever patented.
Most of Satoshi's personal profits will ultimately come from the robber barons of the black economy, such as Nigerian 419 scammers. Is that a bad thing? For pillaging the Philippine nation, there's the Swiss banking system; for everything else, there's Bitcoin.
I know this is a bit too abstract for many, but an accurate and reliable and relatively private score-keeping system is an intrinsic good in human affairs. It doesn't need to be backed by any other form of value.
What the ultimate market cap in Libertarian cachet?
Wampum, dollars, giant stone wheels, pieces of eight, bitcoins, -- if enough people believe they have value, they have value.
But as of 2011, not enough people with weapons believe Bitcoin has value. I'll believe Bitcoin has value as soon as A. governments start accepting it for tax payment or B. I can exchange it for a currency that governments accept for tax payment. And for me right now, that's dollars.
That's a really good idea - distributed computing, paid for with bitcoin...
It seems I can't get away from the pump-and-dump of bitcoin. It's all over the place on certain websites as a new form of spam. This is part of the pump.
The dump is when we get the first people selling into the bubble and then it's a race to the bottom as sellers can to try to beat everyone else. Those that didn't sell are known as bag holders.
I see all sorts of justification for the trading on the "exchange" which is entirely unregulated and full of wash trades and other manipulation nonsense. Why people even trust the market is beyond me. It's trades in a vacuum - based entirely on the greater fool theory of value. Just like tulips. But with tulips, if you are starving, at least you can eat them. You can't eat bitcoins.
The above doesn't even take into the account the fucked up economics of bitcoin. With built in deflation, if this was ever adopted as a real currency, the dumbest thing you could ever do is take out a mortgage in bitcoins for a house, even at a rate of 0 percent interest. Proof of built in deflation is that there are roughly 21 million bitcoins maximum, that if they become a valid currency, become fewer and fewer (they can be destroyed and gone forever) while chasing more actual goods and services as economies grow. This benefits hoarders and nobody else. Deflation is bad. It gums up the works of functioning economies, like sand in the gears of a transmission.
But that's if it ever becomes viable. There are no advantages to it at all beyond what we have right now for electronic transactions. Even the most credit-unworthy can waltz into a bank and get a secured credit card and be protected from online fraud in purchases or if the card is stolen. Bitcoins give you no such protection. If your bitcoins are stolen or you are defrauded, they are gone for good. It's as if you've used a debit card over the net.
I see no advantages. Only pitfalls.
This is so unworkable that it must be for another purpose entirely - money laundering. Make successive wash trades (illegal in real exchanges like NYSE, Chicago, NASDAQ, etc) in the market and voila, your formerly dirty money is now untraceable and "clean."
I can't wait until bank accounts are frozen and people go to jail over this. It will be delicious to watch.
I'm getting popcorn.
--
BMO
No /. discussion is complete without the bad car analogy:
I see this as being a similar false economy to the plug-in hybrid that people drive to work and charge for "free."
At this very moment, my work computer has all 4 cores pegged, generating one bitcoin every 45 minutes (except when the java periodically hangs up...) So, I'm using my employer's landlord's electricity (which my employer gets for a fixed price in the lease) to generate bitcoin. I win, but ultimately, somebody else is paying the price.
Really, it's the landlord's own fault, the air-conditioner is from the 1960s and only has one setting which results in about 64F at my desk, if I weren't generating bitcoin, I'd be doing un-necessary FPGA compiles to keep warm.
I don't think they'll be getting rich too quick with these exchanges
http://www.bitcoinpay.com/
most of the stuff on the trade wiki is also pitiful exchange rates
MOD PARENT UP.
Can anyone help me get bitcoin for my left over flooz?
As Bitcoin gets more attention
That seems unlikely.. outside of the bitcoin forums and slashdot.
I've read that PayPal and Visa have shut down a bunch of BTC exchanges. Google points me to Mt. Gox as the most popular one, but I couldn't find terms of service listed anywhere on the site before signing up. How are USD accounts on BTC exchanges typically funded?
Does anyone know the current Bitcoin to Flooz exchange rate? I imagine it will soon reach parity.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
A while back I tried some flash-based game on facebook and noticed it was causing my browser to eat up nearly 100% of my 3-core cpu. I couldn't tell if the game / flash was just that poorly written or if it was using my comp to do some sort of background processing like some sort @Home software. The game mechanics were designed, too, so that you really needed to leave the browser open w/ the game running to succeed (even when you weren't actively playing).
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
So, what's the difference between bitcoin and, say, shells on the beach?
Really, look here: I've got a pocketful of pretty shells. I say they're worth something, you agree, we have adopted this as a currency, I give you shells, you give me bread. You give me shells, I give you milk.
Fine.
It's the same with paper dollars. I work at my desk doing "useful things," my boss signs my paper paycheck, and some electrons are transferred to a harddrive at my bank, I take my plastic card to the grocery store to buy bread and milk, I transfer some of the electrons sitting at my bank into the grocers harddrive sitting in his bank. I eat, he eats, we're happy.
So, what's wrong with the currency we already have? I have 200,000-300,000 CPUs at my disposal (I work for the government so really, I do). What's to stop me (or any government agency or OMG, GOOGLE!!) from "mining" BC, flooding the system by giving them away, and devaluating the currency?
My work here is done.
I'm going to go collect some shells on the beach.
This is Slashdot; where is the fork at? Maybe something with a nice bell-curved payout shape.
Unless of course someone advocates that Satoshi and his pals actually did something in these first two and a half years. Something that we fresh, young virgins should appreciate.
There's one thing that don't make sense to me about bitcoins. The whole system relies on the fact that a huge distributed database stores all transactions ever made. So basically, I can get a smallish botnet of 10000 nodes or so, buy/mine a ~1000 BTC, then proceed to make as many transactions between the nodes in my botnet as I can. If I keep at it long enough the size of the database will become so large that noone could possibly store all that data conveniently - and you need to store all transactions ever made to verify transactions - rendering the whole system useless.
And then I haven't even mentioned the insanity that the whole system relies on the fact that there are more honest nodes than dishonest - so just get more dishonest nodes than honest and you can get all bitcoins in existence.
The degree it is accepted in exchange for goods and services.
i generated .00001954 bitcoin!
My system is drawing about 100 watts right now in a mostly idle state. The CPU is in its low (1.6GHz) state and it is just running its 3 HDDs and its very high end display adapter. When I fire up linpack, draw goes up to 170 watts. So pretty major increase, even for a system with a lot going on. Now if you take a system that only has 1 HDD, a more moderate display adapter or integrated display, well then it might be more like 50-60 watts up to 120-130.
No it isn't going to make you go bankrupt, but you have to pay for that power and if you live in a warm area you have to pay for the cooling to dissipate the heat it makes.
I don't really care to work out the math (since bitcoins are retarded) but that 70 watts of power (plus cooling) has to be accounted for. My electricity costs me money.
Searching you're disk drive for personal information?
Sorry, you must have Javascript enabled to use Mt. Gox
The first time I loaded that page, I got "Sorry, you must have Javascript enabled to use Mt. Gox" and I clicked away before the script managed to load. That's why I assumed at first that one needed to register and log in to view what funding options are available.
http://www.dwolla.org/help/the-famous-faq-section/
In other words, Dwolla appears to be a cheaper alternative to PayPal that goes through ACH instead of the credit card network. So now I think I understand the flow: dollars, paid through Dwolla, exchanged for BTC through Mt. Gox.
And boy how making up a user name and password sure does put that user name and password at risk.
I don't like to sign up for a service without knowing what I'm agreeing to by clicking Register, which is why I just read through Dwolla's TOS. Should I trust Dwolla with my "Social Security number (personal) or EIN / Tax ID (business)"? And how likely is it that Dwolla will shut down Mt. Gox's account for allegedly "transmit[ting] funds in association or for payment of illegal goods or services" such as "pyramid schemes, or any type of money laundering", as Dwolla's TOS puts it?
It is a highly distributed system based on the same totally screwed up understanding of monetary theory. Wasting resources to produce something worthless for its own sake. Bleh!
How about instead of doing something terrible more efficiently, actually come up with something good, like "coins" that are redeemable for cpu cycles.
Bit coins are like trading sterile semen for pornography, but actually worth less than that because at least sterile semen could be used as stunt bukake.
I ran across this one last night. The owners of http://bitp.it have already written javascript that will generate bitcoins for any wallet you specify. Just cut and paste the code into your site, and your visitors generate bitcoins for you.
Either the java is more inefficient than I figured, you were unlucky during your preliminary testing, or your math is off by about an order of magnitude. A Q6600 should mine about 0.0019 BTC/hour.
As for what the cycles are being used for, basically, it's recording transactions (the block chain is basically a massive accounting ledger, and each block is a section of it) in a manner that makes it near impossible to tamper with. The mining takes a list of transactions, the hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and a nonce (and a couple other things), and hashes those repeatedly, incrementing the nonce each time (which completely changes the hash due to how it works), until it gets a resulting hash value that is less than a certain number (the target) at which point it becomes the next block in the chain, and everyone starts the whole process over again.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Do people know what these puzzles are? Is there a chance this could be used as a botnet, or to break catchas and do spamming, or something like that?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Use platinum.
It's naturally rare, and easily assayed: all elements more dense than platinum are also more valuable, so it can't be faked.
Doesn't work online, of course, but I'm okay with paper-and-database money as long as it's based on a decentralized, naturally-scarce element.
Rather than a virtual currency backed by computational complexity, I suggest one backed by labor. The standard unit is 1 hour of unskilled labor. Other labor is negotiated at some multiple of that unit. So programmer time might be valued at 10 or 20 units per hour. Whoever you do work for pays you with a promise to supply the negotiated units in return. The promise goes into an electronic system with cryptographic security, etc. Now you can trade your positive promise balance to other people for whatever it is they supply. The person who made the original promise extinguishes it when they do something for someone else. They can use the units they get to extinguish the units they owe.
If your Bitcoins are stolen, why should the police help you?
I have a new currency system: you earn a credit every time you hit yourself in the head with a mallet.
Seriously, this BitCoin business is for idiots, as every other commenter has pointed out. The people who dreamed this up know nothing about currency or economics.
Paper money has "value" because people with guns force you to use it. You can't turn garbage into gold by any other means. Even gold is only valuable because stupid monkeys are entranced by it. Dumb dumb dumb.
Thanks for the link to the Harris book. Wish you could have done without the trolling at the bottom to get you shitbinned, but what can you say.
Hah! now i know the *Real* reason sony disabled all those connectable PS3's.. how does it go.. the average PC would take *years* to produce an appreciable amount of bitcoins? But what about a couple hundred original playstations?
Harness the power of all these computers in a network and sell the cpu cycles to solve real problems for realsies, and return the real money in proportion to the cpu cycles contributed to the users? Kinda like Seti@home with bling attached. Is that really so strange? I bet its been done too.
Sure, it requires a lot of CPU and electricity... but who says it has to be yours? With us now in the studio is Shady Russian Botnet Guy...
EOM.
dumb book looks dumb