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Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner

Posted by timothy on from the b-b-but-the-feds-are-here! dept.

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.

18 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. Bitcoin - by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bitcoin Slashvertisements remind me too much of Glen Beck's gold hocking. Have fun with that.

    1. Re:Bitcoin - by naz404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow.

      You'll generate "0.00019867 bitcoins per hour" with this. It takes about 100-200 days nonstop to generate a single bitcoin with this if you're lucky.

      If a bitcoin is $8 now, even if let's say it rises to $20, that'd mean you burned hundreds of hours of CPU time/electricity to earn a mere $20 in 6 months.

      There are better things to burn your CPU time, electricity, bandwidth and attention on.

      --
      http://www.object404.com
    2. Re:Bitcoin - by Stellian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If a bitcoin is $8 now, even if let's say it rises to $20

      Hijacking the thread to point a major flaw of Bitcoin: It's an inherently deflationary currency. Because it aims to be 100% distributed, there's no central mint that controls the bitcoin supply. To prevent inflation, the system is designed with a hard limit on the total amount of coins in circulation. This means that "mining" for coins will be get progressively harder until it will become virtually impossible to find new coins.

      The engineers behind the project might not see deflation as a flaw, but an economist most likely does. The immediate consequence is that when bitcoins start to be traded in the real world for goods and services, the relative value of a coin will increase. If bitcoins gain popularity and their penetration increases by say 20% a year, the market will quickly attract speculators who will see hoarding of bitcoins as a high return investment, and they will hold on to those bitcoins for as long as the high returns will continue. As with any deflation, this will create artificial scarcity of money and halts economic trades: deflationary money "do not want" to be spent. Of course the high returns are nothing more than a bubble that will burst at some point, and the market becomes engulfed in coins from investors wanting to make an exit. The cycle could then resume - but of course other speculators will try to ride the bubble making the value of a bitcoin highly speculative and random.

      The penetration of bitcoins in the real economy will undoubtedly be hampered by it's widely fluctuating value, and it will create an opportunity for speculators to extract undue profits from honest economic agents. An online store will be unwilling to sell for bitcoins inventory that was purchased for dollars for fear that it might not recoup his costs at tomorrow's bitcoin parity.

      As much as I like the idea of a distributed and truly democratic currency, I don't think bitcoin is it, even assuming all other technical aspects are flawless. An effective currency must not be deflationary, and the money supply must expand with the size of the underlying economy - this is a key role that the central bank plays in almost any country. Any engineer looking into creating a new currency should understand this undertaking is essentially an economic feat, not a technical one, and should consider Keynes' General Theory as mandatory reading.

  2. Still wondering... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Still wondering... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think most of the merchants that accept Bitcoin do so for the express purpose of giving it value.

    2. Re:Still wondering... by myotheridislower · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What, exactly, have merchants been told that has convinced them that Bitcoin currency has actual value?

      Belief that it has value, the same illusion that makes our USD based economy run :p

      At least if we all had the same faith in bitcoin it would be impossible for the government or central bank to devalue our currency, effectively robbing everyone of their savings.

      --
      The Pirate Bay is my App Store.
    3. Re:Still wondering... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bitcoin is a stupid idea with excellent PR. Up to and including a weekly slashvertisement.

    4. Re:Still wondering... by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Insightful

      betting on the future value of the currency, in order to profit in the future. Which is exactly what an entrepreneur is.

      No, that's what a speculator is.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re:Still wondering... by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So another guy does the same to protect his investment (ie: by buying a more stable investment).

      I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?

      Tulips.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    6. Re:Still wondering... by Rakishi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      New Bitcoins can be created

      Only up to a finite limit then no more new ones, ever.

      old ones never become obsolete

      Old ones can be lost (ie: if the wallet they are in is deleted).

      I hear the stock market is supposed to work the same way.

      Ever wonder why people are told not to keep all their savings in stocks?

    7. Re:Still wondering... by Rakishi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Basically, it would have been nice if the people who invented BC had taken Econ 201 or any sort of engineering class dealing with control theory.

      Good luck with that. Their view on economics is based on a single to them unshakable view:

      Everything the government and federal reserve do is evil, counterproductive and without any redeeming value.

      As a result a fiat currency must have no advantages or reason for existence except to oppress the people. The gold standard must be superior in all ways. And if the gold standard is superior then something like bitcoin must be even better.

    8. Re:Still wondering... by qubezz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The illusion is that it's not a pyramid scheme for the creators and early adopters. The mailing list in-crowd creates a few million easy coin first (out of a total of 6.2 million coin currently created, total market cap $49 million), then opens up the service for speculators. The speculators drive up the exchange value against real currency and the original 'investors' cash out their imaginary bits.

      It's like how an IPO makes the original owners wealthy on the back end - they sell 49% of the company and keep a majority stock themselves that they can divest under the radar at a later higher market valuation. The only difference is there's no immediate cash infusion from the IPO and there's no company.

    9. Re:Still wondering... by oliverthered · · Score: 3, Insightful

      so is it a ponzi scheme?

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  3. /vertisement by blackraven14250 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The level of slashvertisement on these things is seriously getting retarded. Stop publishing this crap!

  4. Sounds like a sales pitch by S3D · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's this thing with regular promotion of bitcoins on /.? Shouldn't it be in advertising box or something?

  5. Re:"mining" for bitcoin by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?

    If you know of a more energy-efficient method to enforce scarcity, let's hear it. The traditional method (establish and maintain a judicial system and police force to catch and punish counterfeiters) isn't exactly low-overhead either.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  6. Taking it Seriously by Seumas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. perhaps trust is subject to network effects by epine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?