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Bitcoin Mining Reward About To Halve
First time accepted submitter ASDFnz writes "The reward for successfully completing a block (also called mining) is about to halve from 50 bitcoins to 25. From the article: 'Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the transaction fees become the main part of the reward and the introduction of new bitcoins slows down to a trickle. This also means that there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins in circulation.' You can watch the countdown here."
My parents won't let me mooch off their electricty forever.
Yea it's too bad nobody ever though of that or else they might have made sure each one is divisible to eight decimal places or something.
A BitCoin can be divided up into 8 decimal digits. So one BitCoin contains 1 billion discrete units that can be used for transactions.
They're being used quite a bit for online gambling because they allow for instant deposits, instant withdrawals, zero risk of charge-back, and for some online casinos, provably fair wagering.
Bitcoin will let us see if money is something that can truly exist without government, or if the anarchists were full of it. Bitcoin's success or failure will almost certainly tell us more about this than about deflationary spirals.
Palm trees and 8
Get rid of them now. I suggest you send any bitcoins you have to this wallet address: 1AeCTNhF3Sovi8fkjq7Buy8sYoc2C4xoo4
Yep. That's a feature of any currency without inflation, and why inflation is actually a good thing. It discourages hoarding. Neutral or deflationary currencies are only good for the people who already have a lot of them.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Since now they girls doing video clips for bitcoins! http://www.videos4btc.info/
Gold has actual mechanical uses (electrical contacts.) It also has bauble value.
BitCoins have zero intrinsic value, and they require electric and Internet connectivity to be used. Gold requires a civilization level just a step above pure anarchy to be useful.
IMHO, it is sort of suspicious that there is this ramp where early adopters get these bonuses, and people hopping on late end up having to put a lot more resources in for the same coins... that combined with the value of the currency going up/down in insane swings, makes it useless as anything other than a novelty.
I used to be big on the BTC mining thing. These days, however, it just doesn't matter anymore.
I got into BTC fairly early, back when it was profitable to run the mining software on a single workstation to suck up unused cycles. At that time, it was actually profitable to invest in dedicated hardware to mine coins- so I (and a lot of other people) eventually did. My first dedicated rig was a HP ML350 G5, which set me back about $4000. It ran two 8 core processors and basically sat around all day mining bitcoins.
Later on when the GPU accelerated mining took off, I bought and built four systems from off the shelf components, and the ML350 was rededicated to running ESXi with a bunch of VMs for mining and managing the four slaves. Each slave had 3x ATI GPUs, later those were swapped out for NVidia GPUs for other various software reasons.
Then the FPGA (and later ASIC) players came into the game. It started with development boards (FPGA boards purchased direct from the chip manufacture), but later spiralled into custom FPGA boards in nice cases that you could stack or keep around on a metal shelving system easily enough. Now, the custom FPGA boxes for BTC mining basically put the GPU miners out of business- the introduction of FPGA hardware increased the BTC mining difficulty to the point that it was pointless wasting the power mining with anything other then.
The problem was that by the time the FPGA market exploded, it was *barely* worth investing in the hardware to get in that late in the game. Previously, buying a few PCs and loading them with GPUs was a cheap way to make some extra cash. FPGAs however cost a hell of a lot more and the difficulty of mining BTCs had increased so much that you would barely break even, and you'd be bloody lucky if you actually made any money in the end.
But FPGAs weren't good enough. People started thinking that they could build silicon to do things even faster, and thus the ASIC market started to emerge and take off. The problem here is that while an ASIC kicks the shit out of an FPGA (and anything that came before the FPGAs)- they're so expensive and the BTC difficulty has been bumped up so much by the initial ASIC wave and the FPGAs before it... That... Wait for it...
Investing in ANY form of ASICs to make **any** kind of reasonable money... Means that you'll never actually break even.
That's right, the ASICs they've got out there are so powerful and the BTC chain is becoming so difficult to mine, that if you invested $10K+ (which is what you'd have to spend) for a reasonable ASIC setup- you would never actually make any money. If your ASIC box is profitable, it won't be for long since the more ASIC miners join in on the party- the more difficult it becomes to mine BTCs.
So the whole system has kind of spiralled into nothing. Mining isn't profitable anymore. Even if you invest in serious hardware. It just doesn't matter anymore, and now that the "reward" for mining BTCs is about to halve- it's even more of a waste of time then it was before. You could have made money in the beginning if you were there, but if you weren't- it's not worth investing even a dollar into hardware to mine BTCs anymore. That train has long since departed.
BTC is basically just a currency now. Mining is vastly irrelevant and always will be, now that we've got FPGAs and ASICs flying around.
-AC
What problem does it solve for normal people?
It provides a censorship free way to transfer small amounts of money pseudonymously over the Internet, something regular payment providers still fail at (Paypal censors, proper bank transfers are far to expensive).
The main advantages of Bitcoin over other types of "real" money:
* it's censorship resistant (can't be shut down, just like bittorrent)
* it has low transaction costs and low barrier to entry (freedom of economic transaction)
* it can be transmitted via the internet globally in short time (max 1 hour)
* it's cheap and easy to secure against theft and loss
The additional advantages of Bitcoin over FIAT currencies:
* the supply is limited
* it's open source and not controlled by banking cartel or government, open to anyone
The disadvantages of Bitcoin:
* its acceptance is very low, to say the least
* it's hard to understand and therefore hard to trust
* it offers an ideal playground for criminals and scammers
* you can add your own criticism here