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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
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?
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Can anyone help me get bitcoin for my left over flooz?
1. The former is outside the context. Bitcoin in and of itself doesn't deal with fractional reserve banking.
Well that's my point. Major currencies have a central bank which implements the fractional reserve. Bitcoin by design has no central bank and thus no fractional reserve.
2. That kind of transaction shuffling doesn't add much in the way of work really. The transaction list in a block is only hashed once, then that hash is included in the repeating hash calculation, which cycles millions/billions/trillions of times before a valid block is found.
There are two problems with the highspeed wash transactions. First it generates large numbers of events that have to be propagated across the whole network. (bitcoin requires all nodes know about every transaction). Second, every transaction causes a work event that generates new bitcoins. Not only can the bots compete for those new coins (which is why the non-sense transaction are useful) but also since the rate of new bit coin production is limited it means that other pending transactions, legitimate ones, are held up in a queue. the queue gets flooded by pending non-sense-transactions.
3. Amount of value added is not fixed. It decreases over time, specifically every 210,000 blocks (about every 4 years. It'll happen for the first time sometime between mid 2012 and early 2013), the block subsidy (the 50 BTC) is cut in half (25, 12.5, 6.75, 3.3525, and so on) and eventually caps off at roughly 21 million. At an intermediate time, transaction fees will become the dominant means of paying the miners.
so at that point you cannot expand the amount of bitcoin. Thus to get bitcoin people will need to borrow it. that is banks will lend it. And without a fractional reserve system it will semi-limitlessly expand the money supply (which history has show always leads to a crash when eventually there is a run on the bank for deposits). As for transaction fees instead of bitcoin mining then the wash transactions I describes are not valuable. Instead the bots will now process the transactions to gain the transaction fee. Now one might say, well good, let the bots do that what harm is that? but the harm is that the cost of processing the transaction is borne by the owner of the computer not the botmaster. I would also predict it would be an unstable source of transaction processors when it became the dominant source since botnets collapse.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.