Ask Slashdot: Enterprise Bitcoin Mining For Go-Green Initiatives?

Supp0rtLinux writes "Bitcoins are currently trading around $75. I work for a very large organization. We have a fairly large HPC that is usually about 50% idle, as well as about 18K desktops on 4 campuses connected with dark fiber. All stay on 24x7 for after-hours AV scans (weekly) and backups (2-3x a week). All are leases that refresh every 2 years so all have fairly good CPU & RAM specs. As part of a go-green initiative a proposal has come up to use all the PCs for bitcoin in our own mining group; sort of like SETI-at-home style, but with a real dollar value return to us. Additionally, we would setup a queue in our HPC that dedicates 30% to BC mining when in use and up to 99.5% when no other jobs are running. The thought is that all the PCs are on 24x7 anyway and consuming resources so why not allow them to be useful 24x7 as well and generate bitcoins which can then be sold to offset the electrical costs of the running equipment and/or possibly even make a little profit. The guy with the idea says its a no-lose situation as if the price of bitcoins drops to below a certain level and is no longer a financially viable option, we simply stop the mining process. I'm curious what the Slashdot community thinks of this? " Read on for a few more details.

Supp0rtLinux continues, Is it viable? Would we generate enough revenue to cover our electrical costs even with CPUs running at 100% utilization all evening? Are there any security risks? Any thoughts on network impact? The consensus is that the proposal sounds good, but no one has enough info to make a knowledgeable decision either way. As a follow-up question and one that came up after the initial proposal, this entire idea has us wondering why the botnet/malware guys aren't doing this already? It would seem like a trivial task to take a botnet of hijacked PCs and have them do BC mining instead of spreading more malware and generate real revenue for the owner's of the botnets wouldn't it?

Comments

Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[Macfox]

Why not ask this guy? Seemed to work out well for him.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/secret-money-abc-virtual-currency-racket-probe-20110623-1ggp6.html

On a serious note. If it were viable, the practice would be wide spread. The serious miners have moved onto purpose built hardware.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/05/2242233/race-to-mine-bitcoins-drives-enthusiasts-into-the-chip-making-business

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[Joce640k]

"all the PCs are on 24x7 anyway and consuming resources..."

They may start consuming a lot more resources if you max out their CPUs.

Think: If bitcoins were worth more than the electricity they need to make them then there'd be big players in the game.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[mea_culpa]

This.

Connect a Kill A Watt and compare your energy usage under full and idle loads.
My PC consumes about 60W idle and 250W under full load.
10 years ago it would make sense to use spare clock cycles for side projects, today not so much.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[shaitand]

Bitcoins are definitely worth a LOT more than the electricity needed to make them. At least with GPU/FPGA/ASIC mining. I don't know if it is true of CPU's anymore.

There aren't more big players in the game because the Bitcoin economy was too small to worth bothering with for a big player. Now it is starting to get there. Plus, there is a severe shortage of the hardware needed to mine. Large companies can't just generate it out of air, if there are no ASICs or suitable GPU's to be had there are none to be had.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[theSatinKnight]

Initially the CPU was being used (which is what you suggest), but this practice has ended. Now GPU is being used (do your servers even have graphic cards? Powerful ones?) because CPU processors do not hash correctly. Most (all?) software for mining is now GPU based and not CPU based. So your concept of combining a bunch of CPUs not otherwise in use will not work if this is as true as I believe it is. Next: Even GPU is about to become obsolete, as there are several hardware-based platforms poised to launch momentarily. These will use a teeny portion of CPU for the "handling app" and as such will not need "bunches of cpus" to manage them. In fact, the advertising for one manufacturer implies it is more efficient to use a USB hub to chain them together for more group processing power.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[dshk]

I agree, the wattage must be measured. As another example, I measured 80W idle and 160 W on full load on a 12 core Opteron server.

This server does not have a 3D video card. I guess you also achieved full load on a 3D card too, and that explains the large difference between the wattage in idle and full load in your case.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[Pope]

This is the most laughable aspect of the damn article: he wants to run a ton of computers at full blast to "go green." Last I checked, the utility company doesn't take BitCoins as payment.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[ElizabethGreene]

Unless your HPC cluster includes large numbers of FPGAs or GPUs, you'll be quite disappointed at the performance. If you do have GPUs then it depends on the integer operation performance of the chips. As a real world example, my 1 year old mid-range CPU mines at around 1Kh/second. The two $100 video cards in the box mine at 180Kh/s each. The $1500 Asic miners I bought last month mine at 60Gh/s each.

CPU based mining is not worth the power required to mine it and manage the heat.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[shaitand]

"No they are not. A winning lottery ticket is worth more than the cost of the ticket, but you have to win. The benefits of Bitcoin mining accrue only to the first person to compute the hash. Everyone else uses electricity, and gets nothing back. You have to take into account competition for mining to calculate the cost. Nobody does this, so it looks like a no-brainer, but once you find you're competing against ASICs you're screwed even if you have an ASIC too."

I'm sorry but it seems like you almost but don't quite understand the way the system works. The system adjusts for additional competition by adjusting the difficulty factor. This gives you an easily calculated and predictable probability of "winning" that absolutely does account for the "competition." If there is a 1 in 10 chance of winning, over the course of time you will win roughly 10% of the time. You can plug a given mining rate into a mining calculator and it will tell you often you'll "win" and it will be right. Of course you can also just join a mining pool and instead of winning every 30 days (which might mean 1 every 30 or 3 in the third month, etc) you'll get a constant trickle of coin that adds up to a full block after 30 days.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the nature of the competition. There is a competition in the sense that there is only so much coin to be had but miners are all running on private tracks, not running on the same track with bigger miners being faster.

As for ASICS, they are cheaper and use less power. They'll cause a short disruption but everything will stabilize again. Ultimately everyone will have them. All they will do is is change the difficulty factor. In the end they are a great thing. Miners aren't just doing random crap, they are processing transactions for the network and securing it. The faster the rate the better.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[ElizabethGreene]

s/Kh/Mh/g in the above, I said it wrong.

CPU mining is measured in Khash/sec.
GPU mining is measured in Mhash/sec.
Asic mining is measured in Ghash/sec.
Pool mining is measured in Thash/sec.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[davester666]

Um, what? CPU's don't hash correctly? If there is ANY component in a computer capable of hashing correctly, it will be the CPU.

I'm pretty sure it's just straight-up speed and power consumption. GPU's effectively have many more 'cpus' within them to do processing, provided you can perform the computations based on the more limited instruction set and the problem can be done in parallel.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[Tynin]

Using a Kill-A-Watt my computer pulls ~220 watts at the wall with the GPU under a full load. I pay $0.0845 per KWh, which works out to ~$13.50 a month to leave my computer always on mining. I have a hash rate of 480 Mhash/s. With bitcoin trading at $30, I make ~$1.10 a day, which is enough for me to break even on my electric bill in 2 weeks, with the remainder of the month as profit. Of course with it trading at $75 currently, I'm able to make a bit more. Sure it isn't great money, but it'll let me replace my video card every year. At least for now... I continue to re-evaluate, and dream of getting an ASIC.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[AK Marc]

I optimized a "high performance" computer for power consumption. It managed to beat my laptop (a desktop replacement one which uses lots of power and doesn't advertise long battery life). 25W idle. But it was still a full computer with all the power available - 150W+ under full load. And I've worked with servers long before power consumption was considered, and idle and full power weren't far apart, most of the power probably went to spinning discs that never stopped.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[Tynin]

That isn't accurate. Most people mine in pools these days, with various payout models. If anyone in the pool gets the correct hash, everyone in the pool splits the reward from the block, generally split between the number of shares(accepted hashes) you were able to submit. Right now the main people making money on bitcoins are pool operators that run with fee's on the reward. I've read accounts that some of these pools, like DeepBit and Slush bring in a $1000+ a day on fees. Of course there are pools that have zero fee's, thankfully.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[GameboyRMH]

Came here to say this. There's nothing "green" about adding load to an "idle" PC these days, they use more or less power on demand and there's little to no room to take advantage of "wasted" power. In the older days PCs had more of a "static" power load and it would have made sense, just because the computers were so wasteful.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[dshk]

25 W idle is quite impressive, could you describe what parts and other measures have you used to achieve it? Now I have 3 computers online 24h in my home alone, mostly idle. Two are about 60W at idle. The third is a Raspberry Pi, which only consumes a few watts, but it has an attached LCD display too.

Regarding servers: I believe the new servers has much better energy management, so the idle - full difference may be larger than once it was. I also found that it is very hard to achieve a - seemingly - full load, the type of test program makes a big difference in power consumption, even if top displays 100% on all cores in every cases.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[TClevenger]

This is the most laughable aspect of the damn article: he wants to run a ton of computers at full blast to "go green." Last I checked, the utility company doesn't take BitCoins as payment.

Just mentioning "go green" is pretty embarrassing for this guy anyway. An HPC that averages 50% usage and 18,000 desktops that stay on 24/7 for AV scans? Seems like he'd save more money working on having his virus scans run at a very low level during the workday and using WOL to wake machines at night for the few minutes it takes to back them up.

Even at a low 50W idle draw with the screen off, 18,000 desktops are drawing 900kW of electricity. At a very low 5 cents/kWh, that's still $45 per hour.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[AK Marc]

high cost Asus motherboard with lots of power saving features. A low-powered CPU (25W). I then used the overclocking features of the motherboard to under-clock the RAM. One "green" HD (large size). And the most powerful passively cooled video card at the time (again, underclocked).

Underclocking/undervolting everything I could saved 20% or more, and had almost no impact on performance. Oh, and a high-efficiency power supply.

I also found that it is very hard to achieve a - seemingly - full load, the type of test program makes a big difference in power consumption, even if top displays 100% on all cores in every cases.

Yeah, if you just stress the CPU, but not video or RAM, you'll not actually peak it, and depending on the storage, do random reads and writes at the same time as well, though not that big, still has a load. I've found that RAM takes more power than people think, not just the RAM chips themselves, but driving power use in bridges and such.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[KingBenny]

with the cpu i have installed i get about nothing, maybe 500Khps, my ati card can get to about 400Mhps which, according to the estimate on the client should net an average .03 BTC a day, that's like somewhere up or under $2 at current prices if i let it blaze 24/7, not really worth it unless 1 BTC would grow to $500 or more i suppose. Litecoin seems a bit more viable but is hardly accepted yet so that might maybe die out still.
what made me curious however is your Asic machines, you actually have them? All the ads i see are talking about pre-order. If you do so, would you say they're worth the investment atm (not asking you to speak exact numbers or anything) while one block nets 25 btc still (no idea when it will go down again). I've been dying for some real info on this, i almost thought they're somewhat of a scam where the company will disappear before delivering.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[ElizabethGreene]

The ASIC miner companies are about as reliable as a rusty Yugo. Don't invest any money you aren't willing to lose. I placed an order for a Butterfly labs box in December. They still haven't shipped. I also ordered a batch 1 Avalon Asic that has shipped, arrived, and has paid for itself. The day that box broke even I canceled my Butterfly order. I subsequently ordered two more of the Avalon asics in Batch 2 and am expecting delivery within the next 3-5 weeks. The batch 1 Avalon will have paid for the batch 2 boxes by the time they arrive. The batch 3 avalons are significantly more expensive, and violate my risk/return time horizon. I am not purchasing any at this time.

My long term approach is to cash out as soon as possible to pay for the mining hardware. After that, I let BTC accumulate. 1/3 goes to my fund for whatever I want to play with, 1/3 to tangible physical precious metals (coinabul.com) and 1/3 to long term savings. Of my long term savings, a subset is conservatively invested at BtcJam.com. The rest is in a paper wallet.

The pay-for-the-hardware-first approach places me you in the gambler's paradise. That is the sweet spot where you are playing with the house's money and not your own. The disadvantage of this that I've sold 50+ Btc from GPU mining at exchange rates that were grossly lower than what they are today. It happens.

You might also consider investing in AsicMiner shares. Just a thought. That adds a whole other dynamic of risk, since you have people involved.

Cheers

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[KingBenny]

thanks a lot, that was clear, useful first hand info. I suppose you have let that box run 24/7 then before it collapsed. How's the noiselevels on those things ?

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[ElizabethGreene]

I suppose you have let that box run 24/7 then before it collapsed.

None of the boxes have collapsed, I have both my dual radeon GPU and batch 1 avalon-asic miner running currently.

The GPU box is my living room computer and it's noisier than I'd like. It helps if I keep it free of dust bunnies, but it can be annoying when watching a movie. I would like to move it elsewhere. The kids like it where it is because they can play PlanetSide 2 on the big TV with no lag.

For the Asic box I have the fans cranked way up. This makes it significantly louder than the GPU machine. It's in my non-climate controlled garage now, but that won't work for long as spring is coming. I need to come up with a better solution for this ASAP. They may end up in my bedroom as a white noise generator. I also have some as-yet-unknown worried about running all of them on the same electrical circuit, so that may force me into something else.

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[KingBenny]

uhuh, i was kinda hoping it came with some ultranifty silent cooling tek but i suppose they have to press the price. I can't stand the noise of the ati mining bitcoins so i only turn it on when i'm not near
If you're that much into it you might wanna check litecoin, i dont know if it's going anywhere but the price tripled from 40 cents to $1.20 in less than three weeks. It's not generally accepted but can be mined still (albeit slowly) off a cpu. If it hits, same as for btc those on it from the start will benefit most since the difficulty was lower.
I suppose installing an airco wouldd solve your problem with the asic maybe but that would probably defy its purpose due to the extra cost in electricity. Your explanations have been very helpful thanks a lot and good luck with the mining

Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp.

[KingBenny]

there's solar panels on the top of this house so i suppose that cancels the energy cost here since it's not my house and i didnt pay for them

Unlikely.

[jythie]

From what I have gathered, mining via CPUs is, at this point, not cost effective. It eats more power then it produces in bitcoins. The OP would probably get a better economic result by letting the computers go to sleep.

Re:Unlikely.

[Wonko the Sane]

From what I have gathered, mining via CPUs is, at this point, not cost effective.

They aren't even close to being cost effective any more. Two years ago this would have been a good plan, but now even the best general purpose CPUs are three technological generations behind the state of the art.

Re:Unlikely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the mining software will use the GPU to do it now, so if they all have a hardy video card it could still be cost effective.

GPU mining has been superseded by FPGA, and now ASIC technology. Most GPUs on the market aren't cost effective anymore.

Re:Unlikely.

[Supp0rtLinux]

And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...

Re:Unlikely.

[Technician]

Having seen a server demo with 3 10 core Xeon processors do raytrace rendering ( like Monsters Ink ) the idle power is just over 100 Watts. Full load 60 threads running is a little over a KW. If BC is ramping idle machines, you will have a power requirement to support it.

Server was similar to this one but three processor..
HP ProLiant DL980 G7 E7-4870 2.4GHz 10 Core 4p Server

Re:Unlikely.

[LordNightwalker]

And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...

Wake on lan? Wake by BIOS clock (scheduled)?

Re:Unlikely.

[n7ytd]

And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...

Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?

If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.

Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.

Re:Unlikely.

[gmack]

There are more power save states than just sleep. Most modern processors have the option to to reduce speed when idle, saving power. The same goes for the PCIe bus, and even some video cards if you run the machine full out mining bitcoins you will use extra electricity.

Personally, I would attach a power meter to one machine and compare the difference and have a look at whether it mines more value in bitcoins than the extra electricity it consumes during the process.

Re:Unlikely.

[Agent ME]

Good GPUs still compete with FPGAs in hashing rate. FPGAs win in power efficiency, but depending on electricity costs and the computers' efficiency, GPU mining can still be worthwhile.

ASICs appear to give at least a hundredfold improvement over GPUs (similar to GPUs vs CPUs) but there are only hundreds or less out right now. Only one company is currently selling and shipping them right now and they're in small batches.

Re:Unlikely.

[blue trane]

Why can't bitcoin mining do something with some knowledge value, like Seti@home tries to do? It seems that bitcoins base a currency on wasting energy. Which would seem to be contrary to the principles of a "Green" organization.

Re:Unlikely.

[N1AK]

This. It isn't rocket science to work out how much extra power would be required and what the BitCoin mining return is worth. I have my doubts that it'll be cost effective, and am nearly certain that finding a way to lower power use instead would be better, but there's no need to guess when testing would be easy.

Re:Unlikely.

[xtracto]

Yup, this is spot on, using a client like BitMinter you will see that a 'decent' CPU will mine at most 10 khps (kilo-hashes per second) at most, while a 'decent' GPU will mine at about 60 khps.

Re:Unlikely.

[tlhIngan]

Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?

If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.

Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.

Exactly. Leaving the PC on overnight for a weekly AV scan and twice-a-week backups? Far more efficient would be to have the AV scan the PC Friday evening after the user leaves for the weekend, then runs a backup, then shuts down for the weekend. Likewise, do the same Wednesday evening.

Same with your HPC - do you really use it fully all the time? Considering you can spend 30% of it while it's used for bitcoin implies you can shut down 30% of them immediately because even at full load you can spare 30% of its capacity. Or even reconsider the business case for having it - you might have a perfect reason to migrate it (partially or fully) to the cloud like EC2 if you only need it sporadically enough that its only half utilized and the rest are kept for overflow.

Best way to go green is to not use the resources you don't need to. Might also want to consider "full cycle" costs - running laptops to 20% might still cost more than keeping them plugged in constantly, especially if you can adjust the charger thresholds so they don't charge the battery until it hits some value like 60-70%. Running a laptop with the charger idling takes less power than running the laptop with the charger having to charge the battery (and there are losses with charging, as well).

Re:Unlikely.

[SydShamino]

As others have pointed out, this is what wake-on-lan is for. My company bought a package (Night Watchman) that shuts down all of our machines but manages scheduled backups and scans, and we saved a few hundred thousand dollars a year in electricity.

The idea to leave the machines on at all, much less use them to mine bitcoins, is horribly bad for a "green" initiative. It's bad enough that if anyone knows what school/company you work for, they should contact the local media so they can do a story on how your "green initiatives" are perverting the term and making things worse.

Re:Unlikely.

[Alphadecay27]

I have a tendency to do the same thing so I'm not judging here... You guys seem to be fixating on the cool, innovative solution when there are a dozen better solutions staring you in the face. Several people have mentioned WOL. You can also set a wake time in the BIOS and have the AV run once a day at startup before the normal start of the workday. You said your computers are all moderately powerful. AV can run in the background with very minimal to no user impact. You can adjust priorities, set it to run on idle time when they are on break. You could have a shutdown script that runs daily and does a backup/shutdown of the computer. The user can initiate this or it can be scripted. It's trivial to put in a 'snooze' button to reschedule the backup/shutdown if the user is active. You can also let them adjust the time according to their schedule. Most organizations run backups/AV and still shut down computers at the end of the day. It's standard operating procedure and there are lots of resources out there to help you do it.

Re:Unlikely.

[brokenin2]

Mining with GPU's has a very limited lifespan as well now.. ASIC's are here, and taking over, and GPU's can't compete with them even a little.. Right now there may be a window because ASIC supply is limited, but not for long.j In a short time, it won't be worth the electricity. No matter what the price is, it will balance out that way, because ASIC is simply the most efficient way to do it (by far).

Re:Unlikely.

[tompaulco]

My GPU is still cost effective. It makes me about $120 a month and doesn't cost anywhere near that to run.

Re:Unlikely.

[tompaulco]

For all we know, seti@home is wasting energy too. But of course, you can't prove a negative.

Re:Unlikely.

[Yebyen]

That sounds plausible.

I have a Radeon HD 5970 and that's not even a good card (200MHash/sec overclocked) running full-time all the time, it puts out 0.26BTC about once a week for some time now. At today's rate of $88/BTC, that's about $92/mo. I have not calculated my power usage and I am looking forward to ASIC, but if the calculations I've seen are anywhere near accurate, two Jalapenos at $314 are going to generate close to about as many bitcoins when the difficulty catches up to the amount of hash power BFL is going to allow to be added to the network.

(If I turn off the GPU, which is est. ~45 times less powerful than two Jalapenos by hashrate, I will probably see reduced power usage on the order of 100W, but not down to as low as the 9W consumed by the Jalapenos, to see my usage that substantially reduced I would need to invest in an Android with USB-OTG for my mining or perhaps a Raspberry Pi, otherwise I will still need to keep the computer on full-time.)

Re:Unlikely.

[Tynin]

I think your info is old, or we define 'decent' differently. A modern CPU, like an i5/i7, can do anywhere from ~5 to ~20 Mhash/s. A modern video card, like a Radeon 7870 can do ~390 Mhash/s (with the flagship models [5-7]970 all doing around 550 - 800 Mhash/s), and Nvidia the fastest they get is with GTX570 at ~140 Mhash/s. For both Radeon and Nvidia, the more shader/streamer/cores you have the faster your hash rate, but Nvidia doesn't scale up as well.

Re:Unlikely.

[Yebyen]

Here, more documentation for the curious: https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/christmas-bitcoins

The point in January where my balance drops to zero is when I cashed out to buy the Jalapenos, for 22.04 BTC.

I have not bought any BTC since then, as you can see from the regular pace of increase on the chart. Boy what a mistake that has been. Hope to see the return soon, still waiting for Butterfly Labs to ship their first batch. Any day now, maybe if I'm lucky I'll only be waiting til June for orders in the 16000 range like mine to ship.

Re:Unlikely.

[jhantin]

I have a Radeon HD 5970 and that's not even a good card

Wait, what? The 5970 is the GPU miner's proverbial holy grail. With a 5970 you should be getting 700 MHash/sec easily, 750 if you overclock. Are you sure you don't have a 5770?

Re:Unlikely.

[MachineShedFred]

Or, use the enterprise features baked in to your supposedly enterprise-grade desktops and enable a smarter power management scheme using Intel's AMT and vPro out-of-band management stuff. The wrong question is being asked here. The guy is asking "how can we be more productive with all this power we're wasting at night" rather than "how can we stop wasting all this power at night."

Re:Unlikely.

[MachineShedFred]

What's really funny is that if they bought actual enterprise grade desktops and such, they could leverage the out-of-band management baked into the chipsets for the last 5+ years to have the backup server wake the machine up when it is it's turn to back up, do the back up, and then put it to sleep. Or if you want deeper savings, skip the sleep and go directly to a power off state.

Intel's AMT leaves the NIC on and listening for a wake event, and will power up the machine. AMT has something like this too, but we have Intel machines here. Many management systems understand AMT as well (Altiris, SCCM) so you could start saving power right now by simply provisioning the AMT agent on your systems and then using group policy to tell them to turn the hell off. If they are needed, the servers that need to interact can wake them up with a HTTP packet.

Stop with the BitCoin get-rich-quick bullshit and actually do something that saves money and conserves power at the same time.

Re:Unlikely.

[gbjbaanb]

you don't even need that, I wake my desktop up at 7am to do backups, and it will go to sleep itself after an hour if I don't get up to use it. Its a pretty simple thing in Windows to set a scheduled task to just wake the PC up, followed by another one to run the backup.

Setting that on 18k desktops might be more interesting, but a script could push a new job to all those desktops even if group policy couldn't.

Re:Unlikely.

[MachineShedFred]

AMT has something like this too

Meant AMD in the above.

Re:Unlikely.

[MachineShedFred]

Or, use out-of-band management built into most business hardware of the last 5+ years to completely power off systems, and remotely power them up on an as-needed basis for management tasks such as backup and deployment.

Intel AMT: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-active-management-technology.html
AMD DASH: http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/systems-management/Pages/manageability-desktops-notebooks.aspx

Power off PCs at set time via group policy, wake them up with a direct HTTP packet, shut them down afterward with whatever task they are performing. Save money now without the get-rich-quick bullshit.

Re:Unlikely.

[bloodhawk]

Why would sending desktops asleep mean no AV scan's backups or updates? Go read up on Wake on Lan, it has been around a long LONG time and is supported in most if not all machines nowadays and if you truly actually have a Go Green initiative and you don't already do this then you are technologically a long way behind most orgs already and should be sending your staff to basic admin training and researching basic technology management and operations not looking at ways to burn more electricity.

Re:Unlikely.

[tompaulco]

... are you claiming to get $120/month in bitcoins from a single GPU?

Yes, I have a Radeon 6990. I bought it because I was building a system for Flight Simulator. By happy accident it turned out to be a great miner just when mining was starting out. I've paid for the whole system 2 times over and I wasn't even mining during most of that time. How I regret now not mining when the price dropped to 2. If I had kept mining, I would have made probably $25,000 right now.

Re:Unlikely.

[Yebyen]

Maybe I read on the internet what I wanted to have, and forgot what I actually got for $170 at BestBuy

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Juniper
XT [AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series]

It's not the holy grail card. Still hashrate scales to money pretty linearly, as long as the difficulty and exchange rate situations work out favorably.

Re:Unlikely.

[MachineShedFred]

The point is though, with AMT, it's completely dynamic, and controlled by a service that needs that asset for as long as it needs it.

Doing a software deployment? Send a power-on event from your management system, and then when the agent checks in (because the system booted up) you can proceed with the install. When the install is done, send a power-off task. If you're not doing a software deployment / backup tast / AV scan / etc, the system stays powered off.

The summary stated that this guy's company has 2-year business leases on desktop hardware, so it's very likely that they have AMT baked in, and just need to provision it.

Go Green

[Anonymous Coward]

For a Go-Green initiative, maybe you should consider turning 18,000 computers off over night.

Re:Go Green

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You misunderstood. "Go Green", as in mining bitcoins, each worth 75 greenbacks.

Re:Go Green

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lets go green by making all of our always on 18,000 desktops run at full load at all times."

Makes sense to me.

Re:Go Green

[Supp0rtLinux]

Trust me I would like to. In fact, in our ESX environment we do turn vmotion VMs and turn off servers each evening to save power in the datacenter. However, for desktops and to meet requirements, etc we are required to have them on for the AV scans and backups, as well as automated Windows Updates.

Re:Go Green

[Chatterton]

For the desktops. Why not use the wake-on-lan feature of most of the current bios? You can then wake up your computer when the AV or the Backup need them...

Re:Go Green

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

> we are required to have them on for the AV scans and backups, as well as automated Windows Updates.

I was under the impression this is what wake-on-lan functionality is for. Maybe your machines don't support this?

Re:Go Green

[dave420]

As others have stated, the only serious way to be green in this situation is to use Wake-on-LAN. Just schedule certain computers to wake up, scan and backup, and then turn off. Do it in batches to ease possible network congestion or power spikes, and you're good to go. Even better, you can schedule the computers to wake before work starts so people don't even know anything has changed. Problem solved. Running every computer 24/7 is simply going to chew up energy.

Re:Go Green

[mlts]

If one has the ability, what about going for a solar array on the roof? A lot of office buildings are flat and are in direct sunlight, so why not add a passive [1] solar array facing south at the right angle, with the right power and battery bank?

With this in place, it won't make a company completely off-grid, but it will offset the higher power used for Bitcoin generating, as well as give positive PR.

[1]: As opposed to an array that actively tracks the sun.

Re:Go Green

[rwise2112]

"Lets go green by making all of our always on 18,000 desktops run at full load at all times."

Makes sense to me.

I think by "going green", he means "making money".

Re:Go Green

[dkleinsc]

Go-Green initiative: An institutional process to convince the public that the institution isn't destroying the environment and doesn't have to significantly change their behavior.

Re:Go Green

[cdrudge]

Maybe your machines don't support this?

Are there really modern (ie within the last 2-3 years) computers that don't support WOL?

Re:Go Green

[bloodhawk]

For a Go-Green initiative, maybe you should consider turning 18,000 computers off over night.

^this, if you have a go green initiative and relatively modern computers then why the hell are they on 24x7? Wake them up when they need to be scanned or backed up, the rest of the time they should be asleep. The people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative there need to be slapped senseless.

Re:Go Green

[Darinbob]

Better rate of return by using those idle computers to send out Nigerian 414 emails.

Re:Go Green

[mlts]

Agreed.

If one is needing energy for the BitCoin mining computers, might as well get panels up and running, which helps things regardless of how many coins are available. Then, when the CPU cost of mining goes out of the realm of possibility, one still has a set of panels reducing the electric bill.

Re:Go Green

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Are there really modern (ie within the last 2-3 years) computers that don't support WOL?

In all honesty I'm not sure - but there is the network card firmware, network card drivers and possibly the BIOS and/or EFI all that have the possibility to get in the way of this working out of the box.

The OP mentioned they are rentals - not owned - which makes things a bit tricky. They may have to purchase this functionality if it is available.

Highly unlikely

[Wonko the Sane]

Unless you are getting your electricity at extraordinarily low costs, close to free, the increase in your electric bill will exceed the revenue you can bring in by an order of magnitude or two.

Even if all your computers had the best ATI graphics card that you could use to mine with it you'd be lucky to break even.

Re:Highly unlikely

[Wonko the Sane]

There's a small possibility it could be beneficial if they have an arrangement with the power company that would give them extremely low rates in exchange for using power during off-peak times, but even then it would make more sense to buy ASICs or FPGAs as throttleble loads to arbitrage electricity rates with.

Re:Highly unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to make a profit on Bitcoins you have to steal the power... That is basically what Bitcoin is for, its to make a new revenue stream from stealing elektrisity. It used to be that you had to grow weed to convert the stolen power to cash but that is illegal, this is a much better option.
1. Rent house in false name (or with a goalie).
2. Bypass meter.
3. Put in lots of mining hardware and cooling.
4. Automatically transfer mined Bitcoins to "secure" site.
5. Profit.
6. Leave sit until discovered and removed.
7 goto 1.

computers are terribly inefficient

[SeanBlader]

I bet your company ends up with a noticeably higher electricity bill, more so than you'd recover in bitcoins. I ran Seti@Home for a month on a single gaming grade system and my electricity bill jumped a staggering amount. But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[gandhi_2]

But if you are a publicly funded institution, you just make the taxpayers suck up the power bill while you 4: profit!!!1!

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[ggraham412]

I don't think many people realize that a computer consumes more electricity when the CPU is loaded than it does when the CPU is idle.

It's not like a hairdryer which draws the same power whether or not it is blowing at your head..

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[wisnoskij]

Form what I understand no one can mine bitcoins cost effectively anymore, except for custom built systems.

It is a guarantee that they would put orders of magnitude more money into the project then they would get out.

And in no scenario would this ever of been green.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[chrysrobyn]

I bet your company ends up with a noticeably higher electricity bill, more so than you'd recover in bitcoins. I ran Seti@Home for a month on a single gaming grade system and my electricity bill jumped a staggering amount. But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.

Let's say you're turning your screen off, and the delta between your tower sitting in sleep mode vs working balls-to-the-wall is about 400 watts. I think that's a gross overestimate since the GPU is mostly idle, but it's a strawman.

0.4 kW x 20 hours per day (24 hours minus the 4 hours you actually game) x 30 days (per arbitrary billing month) = 240 KWh. At 10 cents per KWh, it sets you back 24 dollars to run SETI for a month. Maybe I shot high for the power delta, maybe you game for 8 hours per night, maybe your heat is helping heat only the room you sleep in so you can turn the thermostat down in the rest of your house (net saving you money) or maybe your air conditioner has to work a little harder to throw that heat outside (half that $24 may be an additional adder to your power bill from the additional air conditioning for a total of $36).

Maybe you enjoy the project and the $20-$40 per month is worthwhile or maybe it's enough of an education that you now sleep your system as fully as possible in the cooling season.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[Dr. Evil]

But it is like a hairdryer in that the waste product is heat.

Heat your home with your bitcoin rig and you won't be wasting the energy.

For that matter, a wifi-enabled GPU-heating element hair dryer would be pretty cool.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't be wasting the energy but you will be heating your home using electricity, a vastly less cost-effective method than burning oil or gas.

Even if you only have electricity, a heat pump, which has a multiplier between Watts consumed and Watts of heat supplied is obviously more efficient.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[SydShamino]

That assumes resistive heating is the most efficient way to heat your home. A heat pump is more efficient, in that it puts more watts of heat into your house than you consumed from the power line. And of course natural gas heat is just plain cheaper than resistive heat in many parts of the country.

"waste" doesn't just mean no use at all, but also grossly inefficient use.

Re:computers are terribly inefficient

[ThePeices]

But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.

Sure, no problem, happy to oblige;

You were wrong.

Feel better now?

not green

[Anonymous Coward]

This might be financially feasible, but it is NOT green. Bitcoin mining *uses* more power, and does not produce anything "tangible", meaning something that offsets the use of energy elsewhere.

Wouldn't that waste more energy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Idle computers don't actually waste all that much power, especially newer hardware. Mining bitcoin instead would use more power and generate more heat which you would need to get rid of somehow - in short, this is in no way "green", and I'm not even sure you'll break even.

Re:Wouldn't that waste more energy?

[Supp0rtLinux]

Well, that's the general idea we're trying to figure out. Obviously if the PC is idle it uses fewer resources. But at what point does ratcheting it up to 100% utilization for 8-12 hours become worthwhile? Sure, it will consume more electricity, but say the extra electricity is $0.10 per PC times 18K PC's is an electrical bill increase of $1800. So we would need to generate 24 bitcoins in that 8-12 hours to break even and more to make money. Granted, this is loosely rounded math, but that's what we're trying to figure out. Is it feasible now? Or do I need to wait til a BC is $200 versus $75? Of course the real money *could* be to the botnet guys as they can use the swarm to generate revenue without caring about the electrical costs.

Re:Wouldn't that waste more energy?

[The_PS4_Will_Fail]

Sure, it will consume more electricity, but say the extra electricity is $0.10 per PC times 18K PC's is an electrical bill increase of $1800. So we would need to generate 24 bitcoins in that 8-12 hours to break even and more to make money.

Using more electricity to generate money is not a "go green"-initiative, as others have pointed out. This proposal should be rejected as it is going to use more electricity.

Re:Wouldn't that waste more energy?

[petermgreen]

If you want a REAL answers you need to use your own numbers. Test many megahash/s your hardware can do. Test how much extra power your hardware draws when mining verses when idle (expect it to well over doublt). Find out how much you pay for electricity. Look up the current difficulty and value of bitcoin and run the numbers.

As others have said unless you have specific ATI GPUs don't expect the results to be positive.

And remember as total network hashrate increases difficulty increases to bring the block creation rate back down.

Oh and I don't see how any of this is "green", is your "go green" initiative really a "save money" initiative?

You need a stockpile

[L4t3r4lu5]

Your issue is that you'll have to mine bitcoin when it's not economically sound to do so in order to have bitcoin available to trade when they are worth something. Good luck selling that idea to the beancounters.

No Bitcoins expert, but this doesn't seem "green"

[blind biker]

As far as I know, mining bitcoins is extremely CPU intensive. So unless the bitcoins will be spent on planting trees (or something...), the increase in the electric bill due to the increased CPU power dissipation (more electricity to feed the CPU and more electricity to cool it) makes things less green, not more.

But maybe a new definition of "green" is used here? Such as... "profit"?

Some Thoughts

[eldavojohn]

Okay, frankly, I don't see the "Go-Green" aspect of this. Maybe I'm missing something here -- was that joke to make it sound eco friendly but actually reflecting the color of money? I'm lost as to how this would be environmentally friendly as opposed to your current situation unless that extra money is going to subsidize your enterprise using renewable energy or something ...

One, it's a great idea and even if you don't move forward with this plan I think it's important to give the employee kudos for suggesting something new. If everyone came up with a half crazy/half ingenious idea you'd be able to try out a lot of innovative stuff. That said, I think there's some underlying costs you should evaluate up front: there needs to be an administrator for the Bitcoin mining software, (I assume you know this but) your electrical bill should rise up a bit to reflect the increased power draw when your cluster is crunching numbers and there needs to be a way to record any incidences where you think the BTC software ran into the day or inhibited a normal work related job on the server. That shouldn't be a deal breaker, just have a system in place to assess those monetary incursions on your business. It may also require you to do some interesting tax claims as you might "earn" so many bitcoins that your accounting department has to start including it on an asset sheet so that the books stay legal. I'm not an expert in this.

Something that is important is that the sooner you get this up and running, the better. Read up on the distribution of bitcoins to understand what I mean.

Is it viable? Would we generate enough revenue to cover our electrical costs even with CPUs running at 100% utilization all evening?

Probably? The real problem is the volatility of BTC on trades and, if you become a major reserve of BTC, you would likely have difficulties realizing your USD valuations of BTC in one swift action. One day it could make sense and the next day it could be a bust all based on whether MtGox was hacked or some major holder cashed out. How exactly did you plan on evaluating these holdings?

Personally, I wouldn't do this. I'd take a more entrepreneurial approach and attempt to lease CPU time to new customers. I know this practice has grown less profitable as people have been better equipped to set up their own clusters but what you might do is look into software that rents out your cluster by the hour and then seek out customers. As far as I know you can only expect a couple cents an hour per core on something like that but it slowly adds up. Plus, it's a little more legit and on the level.

Another idea is to lease this downtime as CPU usage to a local university or high school or something and, whether they use it or not, you might be able to write off some of that donated time and save a little money on taxes or at least build good will.

As a follow-up question and one that came up after the initial proposal, this entire idea has us wondering why the botnet/malware guys aren't doing this already? It would seem like a trivial task to take a botnet of hijacked PCs and have them do BC mining instead of spreading more malware and generate real revenue for the owner's of the botnets wouldn't it?

I'm not an expert in this but I'm pretty sure the answer is simple: when a botnet is up, it takes commands instead of issuing information back to the command and control. The idea behind a botnet is more frequently to control millions of random desktops from one central point. If botnets phone home with a new wallet or information, you run the risk of being traced more easily, being detected more easily and also DDOSing yourself if your botnet gets out of hand. That's my suspicion anyway. I'm sure some do do this, they probably just can't get very large.

Re:Some Thoughts

[Supp0rtLinux]

Thanks valuable insight here. I would mod you up if I could...

Re:Some Thoughts

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> If everyone came up with a half crazy/half ingenious idea

The company already owns the machines, let them also pocket the incremental electricity costs and pocket the bitcoins yourself. It's embezzlement for the modern age.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Green ?

[kuiken]

Using more CPU = using more power
So this is not really green

Might not be as green as you think

[Digital_Quartz]

The one thing that jumps out at me immediately is that, for almost any modern computer, a computer which is powered up but otherwise idle is going to draw less power than a computer which is mining bitcoins. If you want to use GPU mining (and, realistically, if you don't, this is probably a waste of time since you'll probably never mine any bitcoins) then I think you'll find the power draw from a mining machine is substantially higher than that of an idle machine.

So, what you need to do is work out your idle power consumption (with, say, a Kill-A-Watt meter), then work our your fully-loaded power consumption (preferably by trying to mine some bitcoins, but you could get a reasonable quick estimate by firing up a modern 3D game), work out the delta, which is your effective power consumption for mining, and then use one of the various calculators out there (e.g. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/) to decide if this is a profitable venture for you or not.

Re:Might not be as green as you think

[Digital_Quartz]

Actually, I will mention that here in Ontario, larger organizations get their electricity on HOEP pricing (https://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/marketdata/hoep.asp). HOEP basically stays at a fixed market rate, provided that electricity demand is close to projected electricity demand. When demand differs from projections, the price fluctuates. You can get the current price off their website, updated in realtime.

If demand is too high, the price goes up, and if demand is lower than expected, the price goes down (because they have extra capacity, possibly from nuclear sources that can't easily be spun down, that they need to bleed off somewhere.) Sometimes, the price actually goes substantially negative, but usually only for a few hours a few times a year.

So, if you're on your local supplier's equivalent of HOEP, you might review your historical pricing, and see if it's worth your time an effort to build a system that starts furiously mining when the price goes low/negative.

Wasting electricity to "go green"?

[PremiumCarrion]

How would wasting electricity by mining bitcoins on CPUs and then increasing cooling demand from your HVAC system be going green at all?

I'd genuinely be interested in hearing the logic behind that, have you considered burning all the worlds forests in order to make some road salt too? I'm sure that's green too, somehow.

Not the desktops

[gman003]

Bitcoin mining right now is barely profitable using GPUs, and has been a complete waste on the CPU for over a year.

Just because the machines are on 24/7, you cannot add load to them without increasing their electrical consumption. I have a desktop that idles around 80W, and under full load can reach 400W. And don't forget, every watt a computer uses means one more watt of heat that needs to be removed.

The desktops, unless you have gaming-level GPUs in them, aren't going to turn a profit just on the electrical costs. The HPC might, depending on what sort of hardware is in it. If you're set up to do a lot of GPGPU computing, it would work well. Or if you have FPGAs that you can configure for mining. But if it's just a bunch of CPUs, it's not going to work. Bitcoin mining was explicitly designed to be embarrassingly parallel - the only thing that matters is throwing a lot of wimpy cores at it.

Test and do the math

[RayHahn]

Get a "Kill-O-Watt" for about $20. Test a PC at idle. Then load up the bitcoin processes, and test again. You will indeed find that the PC is drawing considerably more power under load than at idle. Multiply the increase in wattage by the number of hours in a month, then by the number of PCs you're talking about, and then divide by 1000 to get the increase in kilowatt hours. Multiply that by your cost of power per KWh.

Then go read how increasingly impossible it's becoming to mine coins, and how you'll have a very difficult time getting one.

Then don't do it.

Re:Test and do the math

[sootman]

Labs at my school have HP workstations left on 24/7. (I've tried to convince them to let them sleep -- making some progress. As in, people agree it's good to do, but no one can be arsed to do it.) With a kill-o-watt I pegged them at about 160w idle. (Not counting the 24" LCD left on, showing a screensaver.)

25 computers x 160w = 4kwh per hour. If they're only needed 40 hrs/week, then 4 x (168-40) = 512 kwh wasted per week. At $0.10 per kwh, that's $50 per week, per lab. So $2500 per year, per lab, and we have at least 5, maybe 20, maybe more, labs like this. (Been a long time since I've gone on a whole campus tour after hours.) And that's not even touching on the waste to keep the AC running to keep the (empty) rooms that much cooler. Insane.

Better to lease the CPU time

[jago25_98]

I agree. Better to lease the CPU time to a local university or anyone else who wishes to pay - is there a market for this out there? I'm sure I remember hearing out this somewhere.

Definate kudos for the idea. This inspires the leasing out to a University or similar who might be able to bee more green as a result and then you are lining up on that green goal... assuming making such processing available isn't like roads and actually encourages growth.

you're already not green

[anyaristow]

You leave 18K systems on 24/7 so you can do a once-per-week virus scan and a twice per week backup? Really?

GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

if the computers have GOOD gpus, then it might be cost effective.
If you are mining on cpus, forget it.

Why not donate the resources?

[gQuigs]

You mention SETI in the post, but why not pick some distibuted projects that are useful to your company to help push the research forwards? Most big companies want to find ways to improve their public image, this is a great way to do it.

There are many options: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

If you don't already you should look into getting a special deal for power consumption at night. It should cost much less than powering on in the daytime. In fact, if you could have your system off in the daytime and only run it at night you could likely get really good deals in certain electric markets.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[dcollins]

The proposal is still not green. Increasing profit is not the same as reducing energy. So it sounds like your accounting method has self-induced delusion on this issue.

probably irresponsible at best

[erikscott]

If then entire value of this thing is predicated on finding SHA256 collisions, then we need ask "what is the practical value of an SHA256 collision?" Looks like some one or some group has found a way to fraudulently-sign-digital-certificates@home. Is that something you want to participate in, especially in a way that can be traced back to you? :-)

Competition

[onyxruby]

Your competition is botnets, they consume no power to their owners and the return is hard to beat. Your far better off from a financial stand point to put those computers to sleep. Your also running against bit coins becoming always harder to make with time. Bottom line is that the cost of making them is more than the return. That is why botnets will free to make them, they aren't paying the costs.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[Wonko the Sane]

All laptop users are required to run on battery power throughout the day until 20% and then they plug in.

Is that really the most efficient use of the laptop battery?

Power off

[vvaduva]

You are better off powering off all the unused machines at night and saving your company quite a bit of money.

Broken compass

[WaffleMonster]

I never understand the appeal of bitcoins. All transactions are basically public information subject to any number of statistical methods to develop profiles of user activity over time. Your local paper currency still wins out big in the areas of privacy and legitimacy nor is it clear that governments would actually continue to tolerate the usage of bitcoin if it ever popped its head out of the ashes of irrelevance without subjecting it to at least the same rules as normal currency. Perhaps this is unlikely due to the self limiting nature of coin circulation.

Like a chorous caroling under a troll bridge if you want to go green turn the goddamn things off when your not using them.

Re:Broken compass

[AdmV0rl0n]

I see the attraction.
The currency is global, which means that unlike some things (paypal) I might be able to do things with people in some countries that could not happen before.
Its breaking the ice and allowing anyone to barter goods or services in exchange for coin.
Its not really monitored by government yet/or heavily - and as such it has certain nice features.

The downside, is that it can and is being used for illegal things. An Iranian man can pay for a server outside Iran. This may be illegal to the zealots who run a theocracy there. A man in the US might pay for something outside of US gov finance circles and the gov may deem this non legal. And criminals may use it for finance. And certainly I know that people are buying drugs on the silk road via it.

Given in the US there is some talk of ending the drug way, the better way for them to face that off would be to legalise then tax it.

As its a small internet currency, my personal take on this is that if someone is doing something illegal - its not the coin that is the crime. It will largely be the end product, drugs, violence. These are often dealt with under existing law. I think it terms of small sized bartering, Its creating people opportunities for goods and services. I don't mind the governments saying large transactions or repeating transactions should have monitoring, but I hope they allow it room to operate.

I may change my view on this, but thats roughly what I think at the moment.

Re:Broken compass

[Saethan]

Over half of all bitcoins that will exist, already exist. The remaining half will take about 140 years to be produced. The Chinese do not concern me. :)

How would this be green?

[maccodemonkey]

When CPUs go idle, they consume less power. By keeping them pegged at full capacity, you're using more power, not the same amount. I'm not even sure how this is green at all, ignoring the whole Bitcoin angle.

Green schmene

[sarysa]

Anyone else notice that this question is being asked during a massive bubble period, and what is necessary to prop up a bubble is public awareness? Just like my post just now is shamefully unrelated to its parent, might the true purpose of this Ask Slashdot be to bring in a few more suckers before it crashes down to 15 or 20?

I will admit my biases against Bitcoin and my post history speaks to this, but this is a tactic also used to prop up stocks and precious metals. So yeah, I'm calling out TFS.

Re:Green schmene

[Anonymous Coward]

Which crash is missing? The one due to the gox hack was on here. The one due to the fork was on here. The one due to the pirate was on here. You are seeing things that aren't there.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

I wouldn't speculate on Bitcoin... or anything else for that matter. Speculation is gambling and 80% of speculators lose money while only 20% win. The problems you are talking about with bubbles and suckers apply to the stock market just as well as Bitcoin speculation. Which isn't to say that the current price is (entirely) a bubble. There have been a lot of recent developments in the bitcoin world to stoke the flames that indicate solid changes in supply and demand that explain a huge upward movement. Bitcoin is very young, companies the size of the Bitcoin economy often grow 400%-1000% year on year for awhile. At some point they mature and it simply isn't possible to maintain that growth but that doesn't mean they suddenly shrink.

None of that means Bitcoin as a currency is a bad idea though. And short of something terrible happening like a system wrecking hack Bitcoin will continue to appreciate over time... that is a mathematical certainty.

All that said. My guess was that we'd see something more like $30-35 with the mining reward halving. Now it looks like we are probably going to hit $100. That would be nice because we could essentially use bitcents (0.01 BTC) as dollars.

Re:Green schmene

[sarysa]

The purpose of my post wasn't a general rant about Bitcoin, but more of a reference to the now famous (and very true) Anatomy of a Bubble. It's a beautiful rendering of what many of us have known about bubble behavior for some time. I wrote my post hastily during my (public transit :P ) commute, but a quick google search shows that we are back in the media awareness phase, and there'll probably be a manic rise before a nasty crash. I'm only guessing 15-20 because it's the "mean", though I still maintain that Bitcoin is doomed to fail in the long, long term. I don't want to go there, I'm only posting to point out where we're at.

I suppose what triggered this bubble was the mess in Cyprus, as well as the currency gaining some recognition by financial institutions there. Not really sure how that's going to work with the inherent instability of Bitcoin. (and the patterns of behavior that inflationary currencies bring about)

That said, I suppose I was too accusative of the original poster. Starting out with pointing out its recently inflated value, effectively "Bitcoins are currently double what you last remember them being if you don't have any" reminds me of the mania surrounding other bubbles in my lifetime. Supp0rtLinux is probably not trying to incite mania given their long history on /., though I guarantee you fake posts with the sole purpose of raising public awareness of the bubble will omnipresent until it crashes in the next 1-2 months.

Re:Green schmene

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to add to this something I've seen others point out before.

Bitcoin's Blockchain grows exponentially larger with time.

In 2 years it went from about 200mb to 6gb.

I'll rough-graph this exponential growth to show you clearly what it means At around 10 years you're talking about a 100gb file sitting on the drives of every bitcoin user. At 20 years that 100gb file is now over 4tb. In 30 years that's 9tb. And so on, you can read a graph.

The blockchain is a fundamental aspect of the bitcoin, you can't just start truncating it. It will grow like this forever. Bitcoin will eventually grow so large that it is impractical for even the most diehard of virtual currency enthusiast. The only way to keep it functional is to assume massive advances in technology or that everyone is going to move to cloud based bitcoin banking, letting a third party company do all the processing and blockchain storage. At that point bitcoin would be as equally regulated as any other currency rendering the entire point of bitcoin useless.

The reality here is that bitcoin is an intentionally manufactured bubble. Anyone that understands math and has a reasonable grasp of how large a terabyte actually is can easily see this if they look past the near blinding glamour that the bitcoin proponents toss out to distract you from the truth.

Another point to consider is that bitcoin is not a stable currency. It swings up and down very wildly in value. This is fine if you treat it like an investment akin to trading the Forex markets, but it's pretty terrible not knowing from day to day how many bitcoins it takes to fill your gas tank. If you do get involved with bitcoin be prepared to exit at any time or you risk losing everything. Enron was also a fantastic investment for early adopters.

Re:Green schmene

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's going to crash entirely until Governments crack down. Right now, it's being used to launder money on illegal transactions. Selling drugs or other illegal items for BitCoins and then selling those coins on the exchange makes the income appear to be legitimate. And buyers of those illegal items are the ones buying at the exchanges. That the price fluctuates is an acceptable reality of the system that, even with those fluctuations, is more reliable than other payment methods.

But BitCoin can be shut down just as easily as online gambling was. Simply classify the exchanges the same way that the online gambling sites are and prohibit financial institutions from transferring money in or out. When there's no way to exchange real money for BitCoins (inherent in that statement is my feeling about BitCoin), we'll see how much intrinsic value they have and whether they can survive in an environment where their only value is trading for goods and services.

Re:Green schmene

[Synerg1y]

Yep, this is almost exactly like the .com boom and bust. At the end of the day when everything is said and done there is nothing physical to sustain bitcoin's value. While it's a great concept and I'm of the whole keep the government out of my business mindset, there is nothing to say it's worth $500 mil, or $5 outside of speculation.

As an underground currency though (non-mainstream)... it can work, but I still if anybody wants real money out of it, it defeats the purpose.

Re:Green schmene

[Dr. Spork]

I don't think that enforcement of a "no exchanges" law can be done by any single government. As long as there is somebody in the world willing to give you a tradable currency (Dollars, Euros, Pesos, Rubles, etc.) for Bitcoins, you'll be fine. Once you have the Rubles, you can exchange them for whatever currency suits you.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

You can buy goods and services with Bitcoin. It IS real money. Since it is built on more sound principles than fiat some of us take it in preference to fiat. The only thing hindering Bitcoin now is critical mass and adoption is growing.

It is no different than the open source vs commercial or firefox vs IE issue. Being an entrenched monopoly makes overtaking you a slower process but it doesn't make you invincible vs a superior solution in the end.

Re:Green schmene

[IamTheRealMike]

Hmm. I would note that the dotcom bubble did leave several very successful companies in its wake, and the internet itself whilst subject to a bubble was not, itself, some kind of scam or inevitably doomed project. Bitcoin can be subject to speculation and volatility yet still not be doomed.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

"Not really sure how that's going to work with the inherent instability of Bitcoin."

I don't see there as being any inherent instability in Bitcoin. Unless you consider the instability that comes from low volume as inherent instability. A stock with Bitcoins volume and media appeal has price instability as well. But we can agree to disagree here.

But I'll tell you a story. There is an entity billing one of my credit cards monthly for $20. They refuse to stop. I can dispute the charges but only back 90 days. I did this once and had a new card with a new number issued. I just discovered that the charges are still being applied. According to my bank because it is recurring billing it doesn't matter how many times I dispute or change the card number they will continue to pay it. My only remaining option is to put a total block on my account with them, pay off any remaining balance, and then close the account.

As it happens I never entered an agreement. But whether or not I did so doesn't matter. At least, it is none of my banks business. Their primary reason for existence is to make sure NOBODY gets a single penny of my balance without my explicit authorization. If there was an agreement the company in question would be free to try to establish that in a civil suit. So why does my bank refuse to stop giving away my money? They have a backend deal with the merchants and are deliberately breaking faith to maintain their interests over those of account holders (it is a secured card, I don't use unsecured credit so I am borrowing my own money not theirs).

Bitcoin prevents this scenario from even being possible. It is left to me to authorized every pay out. Nobody can pull funds, I have to push them. At the end of the day, my right to decide a vendor doesn't deserve my money is left to my discretion not the banks. If I want to rob peter to pay Paul, this is my choice.

Re:Green schmene

[jasonq]

I was thinking the same. When you see corporate drones showing interest you just know it's about to be butt-fucked.

Re:Green schmene

[letherial]

Couple of problems with your logic

1. bitcoins are finite, there will only be so many made
2. the block chain is not ran by any central authority, the worst the evil governments could do is put it in the blackmarket, but hey, its already the currency of the blackmarket. I could right now take cash, turn it to moneypack and then turn it into bitcoins, not one person would know what i did. I could also take bitcoins, turn it into cash and have it sent to my doorstep through the ever reliable mail system. Its a virtual concept, not one that can be just shut down.
3. if rich people are using it to hide there money, then it wont get be attacked all that much.

While i am not as cool as everyone else and able to fortune tale the fate of bitcoins, I do agree that it is a volatile market, i wouldnt invest to much in it, i watched it crash more then 10 dollars in 5 hours; However, i dont think its going anywhere, far to many people use it to do things they shouldnt, and well we could argue about those shouldnt do things and the morality of it, it doesn't matter, despite your feelings, it will be done anyways.

Re:Green schmene

[Synerg1y]

Can you buy basic necessities? Food, water, shelter?

Sure, you can probably get all the coke you want, and maybe some minor items... but I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Also, I've never said it wasn't money, I'm just saying its not worth anything in the end pretty much, but let me emphasis also, there's nothing wrong with riding the wave while it's up, it's just that some people aren't going to be able to get off when it crashes.

Re:Green schmene

[Mindcontrolled]

Creating artificial scarcity by wasting energy and processor cycles is a more sound principle than expanding and contracting money supply according to economic status and necessity? You really should monetize that gateway to a parallel universe you built in your basement, man.

Re:Green schmene

[spire3661]

NO it is not real money. Real money is backed by violence. All it would take is a stroke of a pen to wipe out bitcoin entirely. I really dont like the idea of Bitcoins. All that computation going to waste for LITERALLY NOTHING but a number. Its an IMMENSE waste of resource and it makes me sad people find this to be a noble endeavor.

Re:Green schmene

[spire3661]

They dont have to shut it down, all they have to do is make it illegal. The point will be to stop its growth, not to wipe it off the earth.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

Food and water yes. Bitpay is adding about 1000 merchants a month and climbing rapidly. Most of them are probably using the option to convert directly to fiat at the time of transaction but it hardly matters to the guy looking to spend Bitcoin or who is considering whether or not he can spend it if someone offers it. They just dropped their fee to 0.99% of the transaction with no other fees of any kind. Even the straight percentage is less than you will get with any credit card merchant account and there are no charge backs.

Re:Green schmene

[Methlin]

Can you buy basic necessities? Food, water, shelter?

Yes, as a matter of fact you can

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

"Creating artificial scarcity by wasting energy and processor cycles"

The scarcity is a numerical property. It isn't artificial, you can't get less artificial than a mathematical certainty. Someone could find some new cache of gold, or mine it from space junk, etc. Nobody can ever find unexpected Bitcoin. Also the processor cycles are being used to process transactions and to assure counterfeiting is impossible. That isn't a waste, it is an essential economic function for the currency.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

"All it would take is a stroke of a pen to wipe out bitcoin entirely."

I'd love to see that pen. Outlawing it wouldn't work. As long as anyone, anywhere, runs a client and mines Bitcoin is still around.

"All that computation going to waste for LITERALLY NOTHING but a number."

That is what comes from reading news article to find out about a topic. Miners are processing transactions which is a fairly essential function and not wasteful at all.

Re:Green schmene

[Mindcontrolled]

And what has that to do with any economic propertiy? I could as well propose a constantly exponentially increasing money supply based on a "mathematic certainty" on your argument.

Re:Green schmene

[Synerg1y]

When I go to any of these: http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/spend-bitcoins/online-stores-accepting-bitcoins/#post_food I can't help but notice a distinct lack of bitcoin currency signage all the way through checkout.

Your link is symbolic of bitcoin: it looks great on the surface, then you try to do something with it and realize its DOA.

Re:Green schmene

[Wonko the Sane]

A bitcoin is a number that has a SHA-1 hash of a particular form.

By design, you do not need to know what the number is to recognize someone's claim to have it; similarly, you do not need to know what someone's private key is to know that they know it. Bitcoins are not the only numbers like this.

Incorrect.

There are no discrete bitcoins. There are only transaction outputs which have spent by having been included as an input to a new transaction and transactions which have not yet been spent.

Every valid unspent output is verifiably traceable back to a valid coinbase via a hash chain.

Nobody can create valid UTxOs out of thin air.

Re:Green schmene

[Wonko the Sane]

1. The blockchain size is increasing exponentially at the moment because the number of Bitcoin users is also increasing exponentially.

Because the number of Bitcoin users is increasing exponentially, and also because known optimizations which will greatly reduce the amount of data needed to be preserved have not yet been implemented, because the need to do so does not yet exist.

Re:Green schmene

[fatphil]

How do you compare it to SETI?

Not trolling; personally I'm anti-both to the same extent, and I am genuinely disappointed when I hear that people are burning through our finite fossil fuel resources looking for ET.

Re:Green schmene

[Darinbob]

The whole thing just feels wrong. The question being asked is "how can I use idle computer to print money for me". This is why bitcoin is a faulty and broken currency, because people just print more. Forget the platitudes that there's a limited number that can ever be made, because people are STILL mining it. The value is not tied to any actual product or unit of work, but is pure 100% speculation. It is designed to get the early adopters the most money. A true digital currency trying to take the place of physical currency would not stoop to such dishonesty.

Re:Green schmene

[spire3661]

Given the scope of the universe, SETI is orders of magnitude more useful and viable then bitcoin. SETI is hope, Bitcoin is greed. Personally, when i donate CPU cycles, its for protein folding, but i have done SETI in the past.

Re:Green schmene

[Darinbob]

There aren't enough bitcoins to make a safe haven. It is inherently limited, as the fans keep claiming, so there will never be enough to replace currency.

Re:Green schmene

[Darinbob]

Because there are some slashdot editors who let this lunacy through. Probably some early adopter of bitcoin is an editor and is astroturfing it hoping to make more money.

Re:Green schmene

[amorsen]

Miners are processing transactions which is a fairly essential function and not wasteful at all.

This would perhaps be slightly relevant if say 0.1% of the processing was handling transactions. Bitcoin mining is about useless hashing, not about transaction processing.

The only actual value provided when a new bitcoin is found is a bit of joy for those who like numbers that hash to certain types of values.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

Finding ET isn't even something meaningful if we succeed. It isn't as if we are searching for any reason beyond curiosity. Bitcoin = Financial freedom from the tyranny of banks and governments. A level playing field for global trade and a potential global currency with all the benefits that provides and none of the drawbacks of a government controlled global currency.

Sure some of the miners might just be in for the greed and the speculators certainly are but that doesn't mean it's all Bitcoin is about.

Re:Green schmene

[complete loony]

The entire block chain contains all of the history of every piece of every coin. But to mine coins, and validate new blocks you don't really need to keep the entire history locally to validate new transactions, you only need to keep the details of transactions that haven't been consumed in another transaction. That's the sole purpose of the log anyway.

Sure the whole log should remain available online somewhere, but even that could be stored in a distributed way. The log itself is essentially tamper proof, since you can verify every single hash and signature if you want to.

While the total number of coins has a finite limit, each coin can be split into a huge number of transactions. Even when the active set of transactions grows too large, there will be solutions to improve the scalability of the system.

These are all solvable problems. There just hasn't been a pressing need to solve them yet.

Re:Green schmene

[Wonko the Sane]

Bitcoin mining is about useless hashing, not about transaction processing.

It's about making it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to rewrite history.

Re:Green schmene

[soundguy]

All that computation going to waste for LITERALLY NOTHING but a number.

EVERY computation in the history of mankind, both before and after the invention of mechanical and electrical computing devices, has been done for the sole purpose of arriving at a number. The computation NEVER has value. The value comes from what you are able to do with the resulting number.

Re:Green schmene

[hairyfish]

Since it is built on more sound principles than fiat some of us take it in preference to fiat.

Bunk. I know it's fashionable to slag on modern economics because we're right in the middle of a recession, but the fact is that fiat currencies gave our economies the fluidity it need to expand and give most people in the western world unprecedented levels of prosperity. The answer to poor regulations, isn't no regulation. It is no accident that the countries that survived the GFC the best we're the ones that had the strongest finance and banking regulations.

Re:Green schmene

[shaitand]

I'm afraid I have to disagree. First modern economic theory has existed for a very short time and there have been wealthier peoples in the past who did not subscribe to it. It is also highly suspect how much of an impact modern economic theory has had compared to the advance of technology and science. You might have a case of soda in the fridge where you would have had a six pack before. But the total amount of resources, in terms of materials and labor, that you can buy is actually far far less. It isn't economic progress to own two cars that represent a 10% the amount of raw resources where you used to own one that represented 10 times the value... it is technological progress. A very solid argument that modern economic theory has only managed to stumble along because of the extreme strides in technology that have coincidentally progressed in parallel could be made.

Let's not forget this is hardly the first depression/recession in the short window of time that modern economic theory has been at play. Personally, I blame speculation more than inflationary currency. Large scale speculative markets are what brought us the great depression. As for what countries will survive the GFC, lets wait and see if and when it passes.

Bitcoin doesn't prevent all regulation it simply prevents regulation by the majority in a place where the interests of the group conflict with the interests of every individual who makes up that group. If someone somehow steals your Bitcoin you can still call the police. If someone fails to pay a contract you can still file a civil suit and a judge can order a payment, even in BTC, the same way it could order the return of any property. Government can still regulate the production of goods and apply controls on them.

The mass adoption of Bitcoin won't suddenly unravel law and order in the world. It doesn't prevent you from facing the consequences of breaking the law. It just restores personal privacy, thwarts the unlawful search of your financial actions without warrant, and restores to the right to decide if you'd rather face those consequences of law than give up your property. At least to the extent you manage to protect that property.

Taxation is another issue. Bitcoin doesn't have much chance of helping you avoid taxes locally. But the US oversteps it's right and taxes money it's citizens makes abroad even though they must pay the local taxes. Now the US can do this because ultimately might makes right. But using a system like Bitcoin empowers those citizens with the might needed to make a ridiculous and abusive policy like this unenforceable.

Re:Green schmene

[sarysa]

I find privacy to be important, I also feel that governments need to be countermanded from time to time. Many have terrible practices -- it was the EU pressuring Cyprus to rob its citizens.

I actually do like the idea of Bitcoins and what goals they are trying to accomplished, but they fucked up, plainly stated. The designers did not adequately account for human nature when designing the currency. There will never be a utopia with free flowing bitcoins and privacy with transactions online because it is always going to fluctuate. If all fiat currencies were done away with, it would be like using a snowblower filled with grain, pointed at the gears of the economy. Anyone who has the means to hoard would, for as long as the world's population rises, the demands will always increase.

Human greed and speculation are not small problems that you can stick "if only" in front of and diminish -- they are massive, inborn, and and unsolvable flaws that will forever deny acceptance or independence. (i.e. not using middlemen for tying transactions to fiat currency) It was a nice try, but we need to start over. More focus on privacy and less on gradual value decline, which is a necessary evil to keep economies from stagnating. (Fun fact: precious metal standards were routinely abandoned during times of war)

Re:Green schmene

[hobarrera]

I'm pretty sure 100GiB won't be much in 10 years.
Hell, 10GiB sounded like A LOT 10 years ago, and isn't much today (I belive windows uses even more than that, and look at all the people that still use it).

CPUs are bad at Bitcoin mining

[coldsalmon]

Bitcoin miners use GPUs, which are orders or magnitude better than CPUs at Bitcoin mining. Unless your server has a high-end GPU in it, you will probably get nowhere (even assuming that the underlying idea is sound, which it is not for reasons pointed out by other posters).

Re:CPUs are bad at Bitcoin mining

[Wonko the Sane]

Bitcoin miners use GPUs, which are orders or magnitude better than CPUs at Bitcoin mining.

Miners are moving to ASICs, which are an order of magnitude more efficient than the FPGAs they replace which were already an order of magnitude more efficient than GPU mining.

GPU mining was how things were done a year ago, but in terms of the speed at which Bitcoin is evolving "last year" means "back in ancient times".

Re:CPUs are bad at Bitcoin mining

[Wonko the Sane]

as I understand it, the Bitcoin mining chain is designed to release about the same amount of coins per unit time to the mining network

This is true, but that is not the only source of income for miners and is intended to decline over time. Once the network grows to about the size of PayPal's transaction rate miners will get half their revenue from optional transaction fees that users pay to speed up processing time. As the network grows beyond that the introduction of new bitcoins will become increasingly insignificant and miners will be more properly thought of as being in the transaction processing business.

You're doing it wrong.

[hawks5999]

If this is your "Go Green" initiative, you either don't understand Bitcoin mining or "Go Green" means something different than most would assume.

Re:poster is dumb fuck

[Supp0rtLinux]

Apparently /. has started to allow 12 year olds to post again. Please go back to pretending you have a life on Facebook and leave /. to people that don't have to pretend their existence is greater than their phone tells them it is. :P

Re:Not Enough Information

[Supp0rtLinux]

True. This started as a technical solution with only one finance person present. We know we have evaluations to do, etc to figure it out. I figured why waste the time going into budget and P&L meetings and crap if there's some huge reason it won't pay off. From the majority of replies it sounds like we'll burn more electricity and make some money but likely earn less BC value than we'll spend in power. That will be the focus of our next meeting and investigation and determining if we move forward with this.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[femtobyte]

Another issue with a fungible commodity like Bitcoin is that, by adding to the market rage for it (increasing the price), you're encouraging others to burn more (horribly non-green) resources to create their own. Even if you have completely free, clean, green energy for making Bitcoin, by giving publicity and support to this fundamentally ecologically disastrous project, you're helping to push the price up --- thus making it worthwhile for someone else to fire up their coal-powered mining rig. You can see similar patterns with other fungible extractable commodities --- as the price goes up, new and more ecologically damaging mines go into operation (because it's worthwhile to tear up even more mountains and dump more arsenic to get a smaller amount of material). If you really want to "go green" (in a meaningful rather than empty-nerd-PR-only manner), then you shouldn't be encouraging growing the market for super-energy-expensive resources.

Don't think so..

[AdmV0rl0n]

I've done some testing. I tried to create conditions for success.

1. I had handy an M18 R2 - with dual 7970s.
2. I work a lot of hours and my kit is used by my employer. In trade off I use some juice for testing.
3. CPU bitcoining is worthless - just forget about it totally. Anyone telling you that only high power GPUs, FPGAs or ASICs offer a return are correct, and thats before ever discussing power.
4. I am vaguly able to generate 0.05 BTCs a day in test conditions. This currenty equates to 1/20th of a bitcoin per day, so 20 days would get me around $75.

Notes: At current rates, it will take 400 days to recover the cost of the laptop - assuming power was free, which it is not. Power draw is not far off a nasty P4 desktop box - but daya by day 24/7 I don't like the look of the power costs.

ASICs and FGPAs seem to be full of start ups, and small companies offering various now and future hardware and G/hs rates. These offer performance that will - as far as I can see eliminate GPUs in the near future, and make BTC mining the home of specialist miners only. Which is perhaps where it needs to go given the silly power required now on commodity hardware for minimalist return.

I can't really equate this being green, in any way, no matter how I cut it. I think the idea is to cut your power use, not get creative in trying to generate money of silly power usage.

I think previously, some crazy folks might have been able to make large btc mining operations on commodity hardware - I think its moved away from that now. At least where I live, and with energy costs what they are.

And the figures now are not what they were, when BTCs fell to 2$ - its fairly scary to see the loss basis if you make assumtions of hardware costs/ profit. For me, it has to be hobbyist mining, and with no direct aim 'to make' money.

If someone else buys your hardware for you; and if someone pays your power costs and colling / air con costs - then on the surface money could be made... but its a mirage really. Someone has to pay

World Community Grid

[Dishwasha]

I'd recommend looking at the World Community Grid and BOINC. You can pick any number of projects to contribute resources to from solving clean water problems to finding a cure for AIDS to processing massive antennae data sets to detect asteroids that may be on a collision path with earth.

*POP*

[Ambiguous Coward]

Bitcoins are currently trading around $75.

Until the imminent pop, at which point all those bitcoins you were hanging on to because they were going up uP UP! are now worth squat, and there's still a giant power bill to pay.

Re:*POP*

[nu1x]

Really ? I doubt they can lose much value at all, being a deflationary currency, save for total protocol/algorithm compromise.

Value of currency is in the eye of the users, and people are using it more and more (really ! the drug scare is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of all BTC transactions).

FWIW

Re:*POP*

[Ambiguous Coward]

Of course I meant "worth" as in "current cash-out value." The OP was suggesting mining only when the cash-out value is high enough, but that could only even possibly work if they cash out IMMEDIATELY upon getting any amount of coin. Otherwise, they risk holding on to their funbux based on the assumption that they can cash them out at X amount, and then X suddenly drops well below their "we shouldn't have been mining" threshold, which is incidentally calculated in USD because that's what the power company et al. takes, having no interest whatsoever in a highly volatile, deflationary currency.

Bitcoin is, quite literally, a ponzi scheme. The only way to win is not to play.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[anagama]

We are positioned near a local river & lake for cooling needs

You do realize that aquatic organisms are affected by heat? Warming rivers and lakes with your waste heat is not ecofriendly. It may be cheap because you can shift the cost to the commons, but do not confuse cheap with green.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_kill

The most common cause is reduced oxygen in the water, which in turn may be due to factors such as drought, algae bloom, overpopulation, or a sustained increase in water temperature.

The warmer the water, the less oxygen it can hold.

Re:I can't believe apk would stoop so low

[neminem]

You make me sad with your complete lack of either bel-airing *or* "that dog's not so shaggy" at the end of that. Don't you know long, rambling, pointless, off-topic posts are required to end with one of those memes?

I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Beorytis]

Assuming this is about money and not the environment... Bitcoin has been mostly off my radar, so I went back to the original paper describing the system. A very important aspect is this:

As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers.

If you can get enough CPUs together to break that requirement, then you'll be able to make some real money.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Wonko the Sane]

If you can get enough CPUs together to break that requirement, then you'll be able to make some real money.

And just how many CPUs would you need to calculate 30 trillion SHA256 hashes per second?

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Ambiguous Coward]

Or you could instead use your powers for good and destroy the entire thing.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Beorytis]

Shhh... don't tip him off.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[betterunixthanunix]

This is kind of like the German cryptographers knowing that Enigma had weaknesses saying, "Who would invest in the effort needed to take advantage of those problems?"

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Wonko the Sane]

Except in this case Bitcoin miners built a network that would take about a billion quad core i7 processors to match. Right now the only credible attackers would be those who have an entire chip foundry at their disposal, and the window for that kind of attack to be viable is gradually closing.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[betterunixthanunix]

Is "a billion" supposed to impress anyone with any amount of experience in cryptography? Would you use a cipher that could be defeated by a billion modern CPUs?

There is a reason researchers working on secure multiparty computation require that the attacker's work scale exponentially with the work done by honest parties. In Bitcoin, the attacker's work scales at most linearly with the work done by honest parties -- which is cryptographically worthless.

Again, your argument is what the German cryptographers thought about Enigma. It was a mistake then, and it is still a mistake today.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Wonko the Sane]

Is "a billion" supposed to impress anyone with any amount of experience in cryptography? Would you use a cipher that could be defeated by a billion modern CPUs?

If you think the security we are talking about has anything whatsoever to do with cryptography you don't understand how Bitcoin works.

The issue here is not the cryptographic security of transaction signing, but rather the process by which nodes arrive at a consensus regarding the ordering of transactions. An attacker would need the ability to calculate 55 trillion SHA256 hashes per second in order to have a 50% chance of successfully asserting a different ordering than the rest of the network agreed to in the most recent block. The odds of altering history decrease exponentially with each prior block.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[betterunixthanunix]

The issue here is not the cryptographic security of transaction signing

No, it is the cryptographic security of digital cash transactions in general, which is what Bitcoin fails to provide. Bitcoin is not a signature system, it is a digital cash system, and the security property of a digital cash system that matters here is the protection against double spending.

The fact of the matter is, double spending attacks on Bitcoin require linear time. Twenty years before Bitcoin was released, David Chaum showed the world how to make a digital cash system where double spending required exponential time in a security parameter that had nothing to do with the number of users of the system. That is probably the most annoying part about Bitcoin: not only is it insecure, but we've known how to solve the same problem in a secure way for decades.

Re:I went back to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper.

[Wonko the Sane]

the security property of a digital cash system that matters here is the protection against double spending.

That's exactly what I was talking about.

Again you demonstrate that you don't actually understand how Bitcoin works.

That is probably the most annoying part about Bitcoin: not only is it insecure, but we've known how to solve the same problem in a secure way for decades.

What's stopping you from releasing your own, superior, cryptocurrency? It's what all cool kids are doing right now and plenty of people who think they can do better than Bitcoin are actively trying to prove it.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[j-beda]

All laptop users are required to run on battery power throughout the day until 20% and then they plug in.

Is that really the most efficient use of the laptop battery?

Probably not as it can "wear out" the expensive battery sooner.

However it might make some sense in terms of shifting electricity use away from the peak hours of solar generation and high electricity prices. In a grid-tied system with time-of-use pricing, you want to minimize the use of electricity during the highest priced times (working hours typically), so shifting them to later in the day might be economically and environmentally a positive move.

None of this is an argument for increasing your power use by running extra processes on your systems.

How is using up more electricity "Go Green"

[Tomji]

Save the energy, let unused system sleep.

rough calculation

[nu1x]

Let's say a single, ATIx7xx (or better) graphics carded desktop (anything else is not price-effective) consumes ~250 Watt on idle (reasonable estimate).

Let's say you mine with it - you now consume ~350-550 Watt per desktop, let's say, average of 150 Watt per desktop increase.

With 18000 desktops, that would be, if we are careful with time allocation, (8 hours x 150 Watt x 18000 desktops) / 1000 KW/h increase in power consumption, per night.

That is ~21600 KH/h increase in power consumption per night, or 648000 KW/h increase in power consumption per month.

Now, as it is (and it is a floating, quicksand value), 1 GH/s gives you ~2-2.5 BTC per month.

150 Watts of low-medium ranged ATI card gives you ~100 MH/s, (which you want to run @ 50%, for your offices will catch fire, and no, I am not kidding). So that is ~50 MH/s optimistic value per desktop (remember, provided they are optimally equipped, that is, ATI x7xx cards or better).

50 MH/s x 18000 desktops per month is 900 GH/s per month. That would amount to ~1800 BTC, which go by $70-80 right now, say $75. So a profit of 135000 $ if you somehow can convert them to useable (spendable) form.

Now take 135000 bucks per month and substract from that 648000
KW/h per month (where I live 1 KW/h is about 20 american cents).

So you substract from 135000, 129600 Dollars for electricity, and you are left with 5400 Dollars profit (provided you have god like ability to convert that amount of bitcoins to real, useable currency at such rates).

So, in perfect world conditions, yes it breaks even, barely.

Sorry if there were any crude errors, but you get the point.

Re:rough calculation

[nu1x]

s/~21600 KH/h/~21600 KW/h

Re:rough calculation

[YrWrstNtmr]

and you are left with 5400 Dollars profit (provided you have god like ability to convert that amount of bitcoins to real, useable currency at such rates).
So, in perfect world conditions, yes it breaks even, barely.

Assuming those numbers are even a little bit close, that theoretical $5,400 'profit' is eaten up after the second workstation dies an early death due to running at 100% 24/7.

Almost sounded reasonable, until..

[Cajun Hell]

Additionally, we would setup a queue in our HPC that dedicates 30% to BC mining when in use

You need to get it straight, in your head, about what you're trying to do.

When you're talking about a "nice -n 20 ionice -c 3" job (or its equiv in whatever OS you're using) the idea is that there are some resources being used over time, which happen even when the processor is idle and are independent of power. As an extreme example, if you have to have a thousand computers, then you need to have a building for them to exist in, and they're costing you money even when they're turned off. The other extreme is using the CPU to turn the local power utility electricity into money, which is probably a loser unless your hardware is very special, and it's likely that your hardware isn't special. In between the two extremes, are various gray areas where the tradeoff is different, and the question is whether or not your specific pieces add up to a positive or negative sum.

That is a wise question to ask, and I wish you the best of luck in getting the answer. It's very complicated and requires someone much much smarter than me.

But as soon as you start talking about letting this project take resources away from other work (dedicate 30% even when in use), you're headed into a whole other area. You're concentrating on one of the extremes that I mentioned above, the worst case scenario where you're just looking at CPUs converting energy into money. On one hand, that's going to be easier to answer. On the other hand, the answer is very likely No, unless you have exotic hardware.

If it doesn't look profitable, present it to the boss as "competing" with your existing business. If it does look profitable, then call it "diversifying." ;-)

Correction

[nu1x]

OK, upon further thought, I made an error wherein I allowed for 50 % reduction in hashing rate but not 50 % reduction in power draw. Also, your power cost would be lower or higher, I have no idea.

In the end, it is viable, but the headache and amount of work, especially at such scale, would not be worth it (and I am really serious about fires, in the offices, and the potential of such - where would you put extra ~1500 KiloWatts or heat ?).

This is anything but green, if we could mine bitcoins withn idle CPU looks we'd all already be (bitcoin)millinaires.

As part of a go-green initiative...

[nospam007]

"Go-green."

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

100% correct: 0% green

[drinkypoo]

The biggest problem I have with bitcoin is that it is based on wasted effort. Unless we find out one day that bitcoin was all a scam to get the internets to break some magical encryption scheme for some interested party, all the effort spent "mining" bitcoins has literally been thrown away. The same energy spent mining bitcoins could have been spent folding proteins. But instead of bitcoins being tied to some useful processing in that fashion, they are based on waste. Bitcoins are inherently wasteful, and thus inherently evil. That doesn't really separate them from the typical western lifestyle, but it is more than a bit pathetic that everyone jumped on a currency based on conspicuous consumption.

Ignore Bitcoin

[Khyber]

Go Litecoin, or Namecoin, or something else that will become a competitor to Bitcoin.

In the end, it's all virtual currency anyways, even the US Dollar (which is a fiat currency, and thus essentially virtual.)

Re:Ignore Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Namecoin is frequently merge-mined with Bitcoin so it's similarly difficult to win Namecoins.

If anything, Litecoin is the way to go - they can barely mine on GPUs, but still not on FPGAs or ASICs at all. This CPU cluster would actually have a shot of getting some. Even that's iffy because a lot of old Bitcoin GPUs are moving to Litecoin.

Re:Ignore Bitcoin

[KnightMB]

Go Litecoin, or Namecoin, or something else that will become a competitor to Bitcoin.

In the end, it's all virtual currency anyways, even the US Dollar (which is a fiat currency, and thus essentially virtual.)

Add Timekoin in there as well. It takes a total opposite approach to digital currency that minimizes CPU usage while providing a lot better protection than Bitcoin in terms of double spending and wild spikes in prices.

Re:Ignore Bitcoin

[Khyber]

Don't know why I'm being modded offtopic. If you want to mine, you're too late for the Bitcoin wagon. Best jump on Litecoin.

It's just that simple of a fact.

Unrelated Project

[MyLongNickName]

In a former career, I had loaded idle-time cancer research software on our office machines. I had permission from the manager to do so. One of our employees was offended because she had a family friend die of cancer and she didn't want to be reminded of cancer. The app was only a tray icon to her. It made no sense that she wanted this removed from her computer but I complied. It also made no sense to me how the cigarette breaks she took every other hour didn't remind the bitch of cancer either. No, she wasn't a nice person and she did end up dying of cancer within 5 years herself.

words

[nu1x]

"Once" is not "when". "When" is definitive, "once" can be speculative.

Re:Doing it wrong

[wonkey_monkey]

Funny, I don't remember ticking "post anonymously." Oh well. That was me.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[Americano]

No, you see, the COMPANY saves money because they're not paying for some of that electricity. So they can claim that they're "green" and use "less electricity." When all that's really happening is that their employees are plugging the devices in and charging them at home (and paying for the electricity to do so). Then when they come to the office, the company gets a few hours of free electricity out of them!

It's really just a diabolical way to shift the costs of your energy consumption onto your employees, and claim you're "doing good" while doing it.

Tax break

[mattr]

I was wondering about whether computing resources could be donated and you get a tax break. Found this related thread.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7201
Key is as others have mentioned that your resources are most likely using minimum power when idle and increasing use will increase electrical fees, air conditioning fees, and might I suppose also wear them out sooner if it uses disk space.
Also imagined you might have enough scale to sell elastic computing services but there is a competitive market for that too.

green, energy use, and money

[Sloppy]

The proposal is still not green. Increasing profit is not the same as reducing energy.

(Reducing energy? I reduce energy every time I add oxygen to carbon. Look, now it has less energy!) Just kidding, I know what you meant. But it was still wrong.

You're under-rating money. Money is power in the very most basic sense (and coincidentally, the whole topic of bitcoins is about restoring that equivalence, as some people see fiat currency as decoupling money from its power). Making money (if only you could do it totally without any negative consequences or side-effects, which I'll admit you can't) really would be green, because with money you can, say, plant forests to soak up CO2, do the expensive shit needed to clean up industrial waste sites or restore mountain tops, or simply use the money to abstain from destructive necessities (e.g. "I don't have to drive to work today, because I don't need to work."). If infinite money representing real resources fell out of the sky into our hands, the whole planet would turn into a hippie paradise overnight (but hopefully without all the patchouli and chlamydia). Don't discount money. Ultimately, the long-term promise/fantasy of cheap solar and fusion energy, is just that.

Similarly, pretty much every single damn non-green activity that happens today, happens because of avoiding monetary consequences -- it happens precisely because we under-rate money as a means of measuring things. When you say you can't put a price on a beautiful meadow, you're saying "fuck this meadow, let's build a parking lot here." If you really had to directly pay to clean up your pollution, repair your environmental destruction, etc, as you did those things, then you'd stop doing them. So would that megacorp that you don't like, if they had to pay.

I swear to you, the very essense of a green "victory" will be a strategy of removing externalities; to make everything be "about money" -- accurating measuring, assessing, collecting that money and using it to restore or protect environmental value.

Within that framework, making money will be good. Making money will mean that you're not polluting (or you're polluting little enough that you're doing more than enough good to offset it), because polluters will be the ones who are losing money, since they wouldn't be generating as much wealth as they use up as pollution.

If this guy can collect solar rays -- or (I'm very serious) even burn coal -- and turn it into usable resources for a net gain, as long as it's a true net gain where his pollution isn't subsidized, then that's green. Infinitely sustainable.

Loss is what can't be sustained. Next time you see something unsustainable, maybe the question is: where's the loss? How come I don't see it? In what way are we using government's power to hide it from the market?

Re:green, energy use, and money

[dcollins]

"If infinite money representing real resources fell out of the sky into our hands..."

But it can't. Physics trumps economics.

"But if energy use has limits, so may economic growth. So far, at least, nobody has found a way to decouple the two."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-11/could-economic-growth-kill-us-.html
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

Re:green, energy use, and money

[Sloppy]

By your way of thinking, nothing can ever be green.

You're not exactly wrong; it's just that it makes the discussion meaningless, and that means .. oh, excuse me, that means you are wrong. ;-)

Combined with crap like "physics trumps economics," (*facepalm*) I have to assume you're having a really shitty day. Sorry to hear that. I hope your weekend refreshes you.

Useful?

[Yunzil]

The thought is that all the PCs are on 24x7 anyway and consuming resources so why not allow them to be useful 24x7 as well and generate bitcoins

Or, you know, you could do something actually useful and run folding at home.

Unless all your machines are AMD GPU's

[Formorian]

it's not worth it. And as more ASIC"s hit the market, GPU's will become unviable to make back what you spend in electricity. As it is, it's getting close to that point with FPGA's already out last year using much less watt per mh/s.

You PC idle is prolly 200-300. And again only the AMD gpu's are good at BTC mining. Nvidia stink and most intels don't have openCL and stink even worse then nvidia.

You also have to think about heat. Running full load over night if the machines are near each other is going to create lots and lots of heat. Your AC system may kick on when it never did before over night. Causing even more electricity to be used.

You'll spend more in electricity then you make back.

Just put them to sleep for like 6 hrs each night and you'll save a ton.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[darkith]

All laptop users are required to run on battery power throughout the day until 20% and then they plug in.

How is that green? As already pointed out, wear and tear will go up, consuming energy to manufacture and transport more batteries. Plus recharging the batteries will take *more* power to recharge them was discharged from them (due to efficiency lost in both the charging circuitry and the chemical processes involved. A quick google suggests at least a 10-15% hit).
Plus, most machines' default power profiles reduce performance when running on battery, so I wouldn't be surprised if things take longer to accomplish. i.e. Less work out of people, for the same overhead costs and environmental power usage (heat, lights, etc). [side note to pedants: any power savings from cpu throttling/spindown could be gained independent of battery usage by managing power settings, so it could still be accomplished where actually desired]

Unless running on battery is able to shift the consumption from daytime to seriously off-peak (past 7pm?), it's probably consuming more power....especially if everyone runs low and plugs in at the same time, or plugs in just before heading home and adds to the residential peak typical at quitting time.

Sounds like another bright PHB idea, like reducing heating in winter will save the company money......until they start to wonder why everyone types slower in gloves and makes more typos... :P

Which Enterprise

[rossdee]

I am sure the computers in the NCC1701-E would be able to calculate Bitcoins very efficiently and the power souce does not emit CO2

Mr. President, I Know Something You Don't Know

[eldavojohn]

... to processing massive antennae data sets to detect asteroids that may be on a collision path with earth.

Engineer: Sir, sir, sir! Our HPC has detected an asteroid of catastrophic proportions hurtling directly toward Earth with a 99.993% chance of a direct center of mass strike!
CEO: Excellent, did you prevent it from phoning home to their main servers with this information?
Engineer: Yes sir! Just as you instructed, the world awaits you to heroically deliver this vital information of a massive threat that is currently a needle in the a haystack ...
CEO: Good work, now go out front and remove the sign under our logo that says "Do No Evil."
Engineer: Um, sir? Time is of the essence ...
CEO: I SAID DO IT! Then get me a big chair and a cat -- preferably black and lethargic. Then get me every world leader on a video conference. *evil laugh* Would you like your Christmas bonus in Renminbi or Euro?
Engineer: This is ... this is madness!
CEO: Hmmm, you know what, you're right. It'd be stupid to do that without first buying up bunkers and portable generators ... I have an inkling they're going to become a hot commodity ...

Oversubscription

[Bengie]

I wonder if the power infrastructure is ready to handle every computer increasing power draw by 5x.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[Saethan]

Unless you're paying something like $0.01 kW/h, CPU mining will never be efficient. Heck, even at that, it still probably wouldn't be(CPU's mine in the 1-10MHash range, GPUs in the 250-700 MHash range). At $0.07 kW/h my Radeon HD 6870's are -barely- profitable, one or two more difficulty increases and I'll shut 'em off. At least it's still cold out so they contribute to warming my house. ;) To give an idea of how quickly even small GPU farms are becoming obsolete: the last mining difficulty increase for bitcoins was over a 30% increase. The two or three before that were 10% a piece. The ASICs(the real ones, not the non-existent ones from BFL I see advertised on /.) are coming online and pushing everybody else out of the business.

idiots

[pele_smk]

You're an idiot. CPU power is the least green thing I can think of in the world. Your machine sitting idle uses far less power and cooling than your machine sitting idle. Before your nitwit idea comes to fruition, perform a real ROI, not a slashdot ROI prediction. The beauty with bitcoin mining is you can actually compute the stats of how much power and cooling you'll need to produce a single bitcoin in the present time. Within the next 30 days, be ready to have wasted a crap ton of money on power, because ASICs are about to make fools out of all of you.

Re:idiots

[pele_smk]

I meant to say uses far less power and cooling than your machine running at 95% full time..still the jist is the same, the world is full of idiots

Yeah, They're using ASIC boxes for this now.

[Molochi]

I was reading a forum discussion yesterday regarding mining bitcoins with a 17w Haswel (the new i7 CPU) and wound up on a bitcoin calculator here...

https://bitclockers.com/calc

There's a chart further down that page that compares different capacities to produce bitcoins.

The $150 Jalopeno box (ASIC) is rated at 4500 MH/s.
The $600 BitForce Single (FPGA) does 832 MH/s.
An ATI Radeon 5870 does 420 MH/s.
No mention of a vanilla CPU. But, HardOCP rated an i7 2600K (4.8GHz) at 4.4 MH/s in 2011. They rated the 5870 at only 380 MH/s.

So, using the calculator and assuming a 2 year old i7 2600K system (no GPU) using 200 Watts at 9 cents per Kilowatt meter rate...

I would lose $12 per month. (Assuming a system value of $0)

And with the new Haswell it looks like I'd be losing $9 per month (plus the cost of the system)

Re:Yeah, They're using ASIC boxes for this now.

[Molochi]

Oh and it looks like using the GPU side of an AMD A10 processor is ~80MH/s, but that still loses money on a 200W system. You could maybe still make a profit with an AMD Laptop though

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

And The Poverty Divide Grows

[ambidextroustech]

Bitcoins can only be created and/or used by people with computer hardware. That's an initial cost that the poor are unable to afford.

Let's hope food, clothing and other life essentials don't become traded by Bitcoin.

Re:And The Poverty Divide Grows

[ambidextroustech]

When will we move away from currencies? It seemed a good idea when there were fewer people, and society was small but clearly, the system is not designed for these numbers -- and upper class people tend to change the rules often.

I'd also like to participate in economics without having to evaluate how much a currency is being traded.

William Harrison in a 1840 speech (making the rich richer and the poor poorer) Shelley in 1840 said That the rich have become richer and the poor poorer. In modern times, Stanley Lebergott states that under a free market, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Source

The digital divide will soon encompass the poverty divide

Yeah but... SSD?

[garyoa1]

With the SSD seemingly "coming into it's own"... sure. With a "comparatively" shorter life span why not run it 42/7? After all, the manufacturers have to make a buck too.

Re:Yeah but... SSD?

[maxwell demon]

With a "comparatively" shorter life span why not run it 42/7?

Unfortunately the day is 18h too short for that. ;-)

Here's an idea

[rjr162]

"as well as about 18K desktops on 4 campuses connected with dark fiber. "

How about using something like a Group Policy or BigFix to set power profiles that get pushed out so each machine will auto-power down if not in use for X amount of time (even if it means stand-by). For employee machines, make the time longer than public machines... that's what we do here at our university to help save on electricity use (which IIRC from a recent article we use about $2 million a week but I think that includes all the branch campuses as well)

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[PRMan]

Actually, modern batteries run much better these days with fewer charges and complete drains. So this strategy not only saves power but increases battery life.

Re:Follow-up from the OP

[PRMan]

I have an Asus netbook that I kept plugged in all the time. After about 2 years, the battery won't even do half of what it used to.

2 years later, I bought an Asus tablet. I was determined not to repeat the situation, so I charge as little as possible and then use battery power until it dies. After 2 years, I still have about 90% of the battery function.

Go ahead

[koan]

But be aware FINCEN has taken an interest and the "regulation" has begun so before you involve the Uni might want to hit up a lawyer.

You have to sign up for this. "US Begins Regulating BitCoin, Will Apply "Money Laundering" Rules To Virtual Transactions"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-21/us-begins-regulating-bitcoin-will-consider-virtual-transactions-money-laundering

" In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started

        trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain's download charts , coinciding with news that cash-strapped ... you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.""

hmmmm

[fireylord]

When there's no way to exchange real money for BitCoins (inherent in that statement is my feeling about BitCoin

Just as a mental game, what makes you so sure other 'real' currencies are any more real outside of people's perception of their value?

Re:hmmmm

[fatphil]

The fact that governments legislate the fact that their currency has value.

Re:hmmmm

[fireylord]

This is not the point, currency having 'this is legit' stamped on it by a government doesn't mean much. Cite sources? Sure!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation

A currency having a fiat guaranteeing it's value does not help when nobody wants that scrip.

Spot what's wrong with this statement

[viperidaenz]

as part of our go-green initiative we're going to burn as much power as possible to generate virtual currency.

Re:I want to help spread the TRUTH

[tepples]

Why are you hosting Zionist propaganda on your server?

Because I'm assuming good faith, waiting for whoever posted it to explain why it's on topic.

When the shoe-shine boy...

[dadioflex]

...starts talking about Bitcoin, it's time to get out of Bitcoin.

Something unsettling

[roman_mir]

There was something unsettling about Bitcoins as I read through the protocol, I finally figured it out. It's in the plain site, right in front of me, Bitcoins rely on the fact that it is not feasible to reverse the block chain (the proof), however if you have enough time, you don't need to reverse it. But who has enough time with Bitcoins?

The people who invented the algorithm, they had plenty of time to run the generators before they became used by the public. The code is deterministic, no part of it is random, somebody with prior access to the generator code could run the entire sequence (or a large part of it).