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Open Source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL Stack Adds Bitcoin Mining
hypnosec writes "The open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has been modified to support Bitcoin mining through the use of mining application 'bfgminer.' To mine Bitcoins using the open source GPU driver, one must use Tom Stellard's non-stock branches of Mesa, LLVM and libclc OpenCL library. Further, bfgminer must be patched as well. Once the patches are applied and modified code of the stack is used, users will be able to mine Bitcoins using the Radeon HD 5000 and Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards; however the cards have to be pre-HD6900 Cayman in case of the HD 6000 series."
Bitcoins in a rational market would cost only as much as they cost to make with perhaps a small premium.
Competition for commodities drives the market price down to near cost in a rational market. I wonder if increased competition will do that to this market as more and more way to mine get distributed. I doubt it though, but time will pop the bubble anyway.
That's Cayman as in Cayman Islands, right?
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
I didn't look, don't know if they addressed it. I setup a miner a while back (should have kept it going...damn). What really took the most time setting it up, was that I didn't know it couldn't be done without a desktop running!
If I build a compute node, the last thing I want on it is a desktop. I don't want to have to login and start up the program....I want it to run on a headless box, and start from init.d or whatever the kids are using after I chase them off my lawn.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
#!/bin/bash
for submission in ${submissions[@]}; do
if [ ! -z `echo $submission | grep -i "Bitcoin"` ]; then
post $submission;
fi
done
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
That's where the power consumption trade-off is best.
Well, at least this useless craze is adding more economic drivers for power-efficient compute
power, but I think we already had plenty of those drivers.
Otherwise it's kind of dispiriting to see the continued drain of computing and intellectual resources
by the financial sector, be it bitcoin using CPU cycles better used for medicine/science
or very smart people and advanced equipment chasing dollars in HF trading shops.
Sigh.
When you spend more time keeping core than you do playing, the game is broken.
Someone had to do it.
What bubble? Plenty of people performed transactions for houses in 2006 and went away happy. How was that a bubble?
What bubble? Plenty of people performed transactions of dot-com stocks up through early 2010 and went away happy. How was that a bubble?
What bubble? Plenty of people perform transactions using bitcoin to pay for goods and services every day and go away happy. How is that a bubble?
People bought and sold houses during the housing bubble, and used dot-com companies every day in the dot-com bubble. Use has little to do whith being a bubble or not. The notion of a "bubble" is where the price of a commodity far exceeds its actual value. Yes, this can even apply to foreign currency like bitcoins. People are buying bitcoins more as an investment than for actual trade, so the price climbs higher, making everybody happy.
Then something happens. A few more big thefts, or a flaw in the protocol is discovered, or an economic externality makes people sell off just a few coins at less-than-market price, so they're sure to sell quickly. Other investors see the price fall, and they worry about the bubble starting to burst, so they sell quick, too... and that makes the price drop more, and the cycle repeats, sending the price crashing back to a price on par with its actual value.
The problem is that Bitcoins have very little intrinsic value. The value of national currencies is based on the stability ogf the government backing it, ultimately reflecting the currency's use for paying taxes and other government charges. Bitcoin isn't backed by a government, though, and even the prices for day-to-day trade are effectively just national currencies with an exchange rate and transaction fees applied. When the bubble finally bursts, Bitcoins' value will hover around the cost of the electricity & equipment to mine them, so investors can write off the purchase as a slight loss or slight profit.
Like all bubbles, there are some get-rich-quick millionaires who made a fortune getting in early, but their money will effectively come at the expense of those who come in later, buying the bitcoins they're selling off. Someone's always left holding the bag.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Then you use the fglrx driver that is packaged in ubuntu and ppa:bitcoin/ppa
The news is news because Gallium3D is open source. I do not know if this means that GPU mining with ATI cards on FreeBSD is possible now, but I would speculate that yes, it is.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
How much is the cost? It's gone up a lot. You have to buy either a stack of cards (expensive) and a lot of electricity, an FPGA (hugely expensive) and a moderate amount of electricity or an ASIC (if you can even find one) and a small amount of electricity.
You can also build a particle collider and turn lead into gold, but that doesn't raise the price of gold to a few billion dollars per ounce. The cost that matters is the cost of people's effort to get a Bitcoin. If people are actively hoarding Bitcoins, the price rises until a cheaper long-run investment is to buy the mining equipment. If people are selling off Bitcoins, then the cost that matters is what they're selling them for.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I wonder how many megatons of CO2 will be put into the atmostphere due to people mining bitcoins by the time it's no longer profitable.
Bitcoin? Really? I thought news is information that someone cares about. 10 years from now people will chuckle or roll their eyes at the thought of Bitcoin. In 20 years, people will go "huh?" --JSt
"Energy is the currency of the future." --CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
A currency based on something solid, pretty much impossible to fake, and hard to get confused about. Compare that to national currencies base on different people's varying fuzzy perceptions of the stability of the issuing government. Sounds pretty good, actually.
I think you're right (it'll stabilize at that price) but others think it'll deflate. This'll be interesting to watch. And damn useful to have a pocket change, for those usenet server subscriptions which don't take paypal anymore.
But this is somewhat by design. More hashing power means a healthier Bitcoin network. The point of the mining reward is not to be egalitarian in distributing new bitcoins but rather to encourage the networking effects that are needed.
Simply because Bitcoin was the first to get major market mind share. It is like the million dollar home page -- this was someones home page which had a 1000 x 1000 grid of pixels, and he was selling them for $1 each (effectively selling advertising space on his home page). But since it had gained a lot of exposure it was worth the $1 per pixel, whereas no one else could pull the same trick a second time (since they would have the mind share).