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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 $1700+ collection with multiple dual-GPU cards installed. The article gives details on how the mining programs work, why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently and why AMD seems to be so much faster than NVIDIA."
Did you know that it's been nearly a week since the last Bitcoin story on Slashdot? I was worried that the standards were changing and blatant slashvertisements for bitcoin were no longer getting through! Never been happier to be proved wrong.
With all that computation power being used I can't help but think about projects like Folding@Home and think it's a bit wasted on the sort of margins you'd be getting back - even at the optimistic high end (which don't factor in power costs).
jaymz
Given that the difficulty increases exponentially you're not going to be making their calculated B$/day for the whole year, so while the quickest to pay of is 70 days if the difficulty increases at the usual rate, you'd probably want to add on another month or two.
For the ones taking nearly half a year to pay off at the current rate, you'll probably spend closer to a year before you'll even break even.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
So now it induces nerds to stock op on GPU hardware? I get it! BitCoin is not currency at all, is just a new game genre: MMOM (pronounced like "mom"), Massively Multiplayer Online Money. The hottest MMOM in town. Spread the word.
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"
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.
I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Please don't start mining Bitcoin. You will not turn a profit. It's hard work. It's no fun. Don't do it.
(the difficulty is high enough, we don't need another influx of miners)
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.
I see no evidence of this at all. No major stores take it, so you can't use it for any kind of serious commerce. It isn't exchanged on any reputable currency exchange. I've seen nothing done to address some serious flaws brought up (like the possibility of spending a coin multiple times before it is noticed or the built in deflation). I've seen no analysis of the cryptography by leading authorities.
All I see is speculators playing around and people who think Cryptonomicron is an instruction manual not an entertainment novel.
You compare it to Apple stock, I compare it to Flooz.com stock. Sure, there was a time when it was "worth" something and if you had gotten in and out in the right time you could make money. However as it was a stupid idea with nothing really behind it, it collapsed to nothing.
I built a bitcoin mining machine two weeks ago. There's more you should know that TFA only hints at. First, check out these graphs. The total CPU power competing for the 50 BTC generated every 10 minutes has increased 10X every quarter for 6 quarters, and soon, it will drop to 30 BTC every 10 minutes. If you think you can make money given that bitcoin value is flat or falling, while you have to split pay outs with more miners every day, well... ha ha! That's a good one.
That said, I'm a happy miner. I was looking for an excuse to build a gaming machine anyway, and I was able to do a decent machine for about $430, with an HD5770 doing just over 200 MH/s. Even if I earn nothing for mining, I'm still glad I built the machine. I needed another Ubuntu server anyway, and the mining only loads the CPU 1%. Next year, I plan to put Windoz on it and give the machine to my son. I can hardly wait to see what he thinks of the graphics.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Sorry, I find those arguments highly uncompelling.
First off, no I can't send them to almost anyone. I can send them to almost noone. Ok well let's be a bit more precise: I can PAY them to almost no one. Money is only money if you can spend it, and nobody I wish to spend money with accepts bitcoins.
In terms of currency, that is not an issue. Credit cards are global and my bank will convert currency on my behalf, in realtime. I've used my cards in other countries with ease.
The no chargeback/third party is a disadvantage, not an advantage. I have no one to help protect me and my money. If my credit card is compromised somehow, I bear no financial responsibility. If someone across the world rips me off, I have a recourse. I have none of that with bitcions. They get stolen, I'm SOL. If someone outside of the laws of my country screws me, I can do nothing.
Credit card transactions happen in seconds these days.
It is NOT easy to spend bitcoins. You can only spend a currency people take. I know of NOWHERE that I shop that takes them.
Your portability argument is extremely silly. why the hell would I want to keep millions on an easily lost, stolen, or damaged SD card? Part of the usefulness of digital banking is money is secure in databases, you don't actually carry it with you. I carry the means to access all my wealth (passwords, SecureID tokens, ID cards, etc) with me. However the money itself is tracked in banks, so that it cannot be easily taken.
As for the disadvantages, I've seen no response. Where is the cryptographic analysis? Let's see some analysis from people like Schneier and Rijmen. Let's see the reports from institutions like the NSA and IBM? Crypto takes a long time and a lot of analysis to prove. AES went through 5 years of evaluation by the top minds before becoming a standard.
Also, please tell me how it at all prevents a multiple-spending attack: Someone sends bitcions to multiple different entities, in rapid succession. How do you verify this doesn't happen? I understand that yes, eventually this can be traced, I mean as the person accepting them, how do you make sure this didn't happen and you aren't stuck holding the bag?
You've said a lot about what you'd like bitcoins to be. That changes nothing of what they are.
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