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Race To Mine Bitcoins Drives Enthusiasts Into the Chip Making Business
holy_calamity writes "MIT Technology Review looks at the small companies attempting to build dedicated chips for mining Bitcoins. Several are claiming they will start selling hardware based on their chips early in 2013, with the technology expected to force many small time miners to give up. However, as happened in the CPU industry, miners may soon be caught in an expensive arms race that pushes development of faster and faster chips."
An unregulated currency plagued by theft and controlled by an elite cabal of basement-dwelling enthusiasts who can afford the thousands of dollars worth of hardware to drive smaller players out of the market. I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
If mining Bitcoins was so profitable why would they want to sell the chips? Wouldn't they be better off keeping these chips and mining the Bitcoins for themselves?
These are ASICs. The Bitcoin mining scene has already gone through its FPGA phase.
During the Gold Rush, it was the tool and equipment suppliers that made out filthy rich, not the miners (except for a lucky few).
Life is not for the lazy.
if you can buy the hardware on credit,
1. use the hardware to mine new BitCoins
2. pay back the hardware vendor with your BitCoins
3. ???
I was mining bitcoins with two AMD Radeon 9790 cards and was barely turning a profit. The problem is that the electricity cost to run the computer and the video cards is very expensive. It tripled my electricity bill. Then the difficulty was doubled, now I'm making negative profit. There is very little chance that if I continued to mine, the bitcoins I have in my wallet would ever become worth enough to make the money back. The same is true for everyone else: The more GPU's you add the more electricity costs and so you need so much hardware to break even that you'll never go into profit. The only hope is that you're one of the lucky few first people to receive one of the ASIC units from the two companies that claim to be close to shipping. Of course neither of those companies has actually shown a working unit even though they've taken thousands of orders (including two orders from me, one to each company).
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs. Unless there's another fiat currency to exchange your lump of gold for, it won't do you any more good than paper money. No one will want it and you won't be able to easily exchange it for anything that's actually useful. Any currency is just a proxy for the idea of wealth. If shit hits the fan hard enough that the several local currencies become heavily devalued, it will probably happen on a global scale as everything is so intertwined at this point.
Precious medals will eventually become valuable again over a long enough period of time, but they won't guarantee that you'll see that time. Depending on the severity of the collapse, means of protecting yourself, food, and other basics to ensure survival are far more valuable, but knowledge is probably the most valuable currency available. What good is a mound of money if you're dying and don't know how to stop it?
Precious metals suffer from the same problem as any other form of currency: it's only as valuable as everything considers it to be or as someone will pay to use it to produce something else.
Actually nearly all money in circulation is created as debt, which must be repaid with interest (that was created as debt that must be repaid with interest). Governments printing a little money (say enough to pay for their entire non-capital, non-military budget AND eliminate poverty) would probably help the economy so long as it was done quietly. In countries with a high currency due to a single resource being exported the effect could be even bigger. Of course this only works in countries that have their own currency (so not most of the eurozone) and the central bank is not a privately held cartel (so not the USA)
I'd advocate choosing some other useless and less expensive random "commodity" to stockpile along with your guns and food.
Suddenly, the bottle cap currency in the Fallout series makes perfect sense.
The Federal Reserve bank is.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The US treasure is not a privately held cartel. It also doesn't print money.
The US Federal reserve IS, and DOES. To quote Wikipedia ". The Federal Reserve System has both private and public components, and was designed to serve the interests of both the general public and private bankers. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
So, while what you said is true, its irrelevant. The people who make the money, are bankers. Banks are insolvent. The Feds job is to keep banks afloat. The banks benefit. Banks are privately owned. Etc. Etc Etc.
Google is useful, and GP is correct. The US Department of Treasury is not a bank at all, let alone the central bank. Per Wikipedia:
Guns and government don't uphold the value of a currency. Trust does.
If you can pay your taxes with it, then it has real value.
If you can manufacture things with it, then it has real value.
If you can eat it, then it has real value.
If you can't do any of those things with it, then it has only speculative imaginary value.
"His name was James Damore."
Associating monetary value with computing cycles would eventually incentivize the development of faster and better technology.
I just hope that whatever these guys come up with will also have applications in the real world.
the rothman lizard people
What? The Rothschilds and the Mothman had viable offspring? We're all DOOMED!
Comments like this are why I added "(sorry to sound crackpot)"
It is a great shame that any discussion of novel monetary policy which mentions the ownership of the Fed as a limiting factor gets accused of being associated with schitzophrenic delusions and/or anti-semitism.
The US Federal Reserve Bank is literally a privately held cartel. This is a statement of fact, and it has monetary policy implications. My original comment was about a specific method of quantitative easing which would be more difficult without a national currency or with a privately held central bank. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is monetary policy.
Most money now does enter circulation as bank account balances countered by interest bearing loans. This is a very usefull system. Without it I and probably the vast majority of people in the western world would not own any real estate. Sadly though it has nasty side effects in a contracting economy. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is economics.