Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs
Vigile writes "For users that have known about the process of bitcoin mining the obvious tool for the job has been the GPU. Miners have been buying up graphics cards during sales across the web but which GPUs offer the most dollar efficient, power efficient and quickest payoff for the bitcoin currency? A series of tests over at PC Perspective goes through 16 different GPU configurations including older high-end cards through modern low-cost options and even a $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."
With all that computation power being used I can't help but think about projects like Folding@Home and think it's a bit wasted on the sort of margins you'd be getting back - even at the optimistic high end (which don't factor in power costs).
jaymz
Other than being a decent applied cryptography experiment, BitCoin has no real use in the real world. It isn't anonymous, it isn't backed by anyone that matters. The currency is too unstable to trust for anything. Its architecture gives a lot more power to people who come on early, and whom likely are going to cash out if people catch on.
I'd rather hear about an Amiga emulator, checkered ball spinning while formatting an 880K floppy disk running on the nVidia hardware than yet another BitCoin article, because BitCoin reminds me a lot of the old MAKE.MONEY.FAST posts of yore.
I keep wondering why do BitCoin articles keep showing up here. Any given article doesn't really seem quite nerdy enough to be real 'News For Nerds' (and yes, I agree that most of the articles here haven't been News For Nerds for a quite some time), and it's kind of a weird topic.
I kinda feel like "BitCoin articles is to Slashdot as gold advertisements is to the Fox News Network".
So I'm going to coin a term that we can add to the Slashdot Taxonomy (or the 'slashonomy', as I like to call it: :) ): Slashgold!
As in:
Random dude: "So, was the article good?"
You: "Naw, it was just another fluff piece promoting slashgold"
Bitcoin is the PERFECT Slashdot topic:
Open Source
Peer to peer
Cryptography
Computer Hardware
Libertarian
THAT'S why it shows up so much. What's not to like?
Nobody cares about bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about bitcoin. Please stop posting stories about bitcoin. I don't know how many other ways there are to say it, but we don't give a fsck about bitcoin.
All this hype is not coincidence, and it is not because bitcoins became useful suddenly. It is people hyping it to try and get others in to the market. They want to cash out, but can't in any large amount without tanking the value. Need to get new suckers lined up.
Oil can be burned for energy. Gold is always in demand as a means of exchange, is a de facto symbol of wealth and is used in jewelry and has great use in electronics. Housing has a purpose - shelter. Tell me again what the point of bitcoin is, apart from greed? Even something as silly as a US dollar has more point to it than bitcoin - because people do not acquire US dollars with the intention of dumping their US dollars as soon as some exchange rate reaches a pre-determined level. They see US dollars as a store of value and a means of exchange, not a means of wealth acquisition.
People who are mining bitcoins have the SOLE INTENTION of dumping their bitcoins at some time in the future. They far outnumber people who use bitcoin for everyday trade. Therefore the collapse of the bubble is built in to the inflation of the bubble. The minute sellers > buyers, the price will go down. And the minute the price goes down, everyone who was counting on an ever inflating price is going to panic and try to cash out right away. In fact this has already happened.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Several reasons:
- It is designed for rewarding early investors. It even has a built-in diminishing return per investment.
- The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
- You're encouraged to find new investors in order to drive up the value of your (meager) holdings (and the substantial holdings of early players).
- Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments.
I'm as nerdy and liberal as they come, which is exactly why I see this for what it is. Bitcon.
If it makes you happy to play this game, by all means go ahead, but do yourself a favour and don't invest more than you can comfortably afford to lose.
Pyramid scheme: A system of selling goods in which agency rights are sold to an increasing number of distributors at successively lower levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
No real investment, products or services? Check.
Promising participants payment? Check.
Priority in enrolling other people into the scheme? Check.
Non-sustainable business model?
Hmmm... Converting electricity into ones and zeroes of highly volatile value and no practical use beyond said value, which can't be readily converted to goods, services or even monetary units...? Oh, SO check.
There's no hierarchy of "agency rights", and, even metaphorically, bitcoins have never been sold as "a remedy for all diseases." It's like kids don't know what words mean.
Seriously?
You'll be the one to pull the "kids don't know what words mean" AND "metaphorically" card(s)?
When arguing about lite-FUCKING-ral meaning of a meta-FUCKING-phor for a FUCKING SCAM?
For fucks sake... Kids these days...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens