Slashdot Mirror
Operation Wants To Mine 10% of All New Bitcoins
An anonymous reader writes: "Mining new Bitcoins is computationally expensive — you can't expect to do much on your standard home computer. Many miners have built custom rigs to mine more efficiently, but it was only a matter of time until somebody went industrial. Dave Carlson's goal is to mine 10% of all new Bitcoins from now on. He's built literally thousands of units. They collectively use 1.4 million BitFury mining chips, which are managed by a bunch of Raspberry Pis. 'The current rigs each contain 16 boards, with each board containing 16 BitFury chips, for a total of 256 mining chips on each rig. Carlson said about 90,000 processor boards have been deployed, which would put the number of rigs at about 5,600. A new board [being designed] will have 756 chips on each rig instead of 256.' Carlson says his company spent $3-5 million to get everything set up. They current generate 7,000 — 8,000 Bitcoins per month, which, at current rates, would be worth over $4 million."
very wow many btc
My friends and I have already switched to Dogecoin. Sorry. And when you start mining that, we'll move again, etc.
I'm not serious, I haven't invested in any virtual currency. But isn't this a sort of problem? When it looks like a Major Player moves in and starts dominating the generation of your pet virtual currency, why wouldn't you just jump ship to the next one, where you can stand a chance to make money in the early days of generation?
It's not like mining gold. Gold is gold and there's only so much of it, and it's there or it's not. These virtual currencies only have value due to consensus, and can be abandoned on a whim, especially when some guy comes in with his 1.4 million mining chips and upsets everything. I know there's a limited number of bitcoins available before computation is done, so in that sense it's 'limited' like gold and thus perceived to be a scarce valuable item, but unlike gold, the users can just up and quit Bitcoin forever, especially when they sense 'unfairness' in the operation.
Other than bitcoins, are other virtual coins worthless ?
How do they know the current value of BitCoin? Who is considered the primary exchange now? Are there any that are considered even remotely trustworthy?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why mine them? It's much easier to set up an exchange and just steal them.
Also, FP.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What we need now is not more "exchanges" for virtual coins but a "central bank" in charge of the virtual coins.
If they are successful in accumulating 10% of all Bitcoins they may want to use them as the base of the first ever Virtual Central Bank
As the central bank for virtual coins, they can function much more than the "exchanges" that we've heard so much about.
They can manipulate the value of any virtual coins via "buying" and "selling".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'd strongly recommend that they start selling enough now to pay off their hardware and debts in the first couple of months. Maybe gamble on keeping half the take for future appreciation, but if they're mining it this fast they ought to nail down their initial stake quickly in case the Bitcoin ecosystem colllapses.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've got the spare desktop in my lab keeping one CPU busy mining Dogecoins. It's *research*! It's for *Science*!
It wouldn't be appropriate to use my employer's electricity and resources to mine Bitcoin or even Litecoin at work, and the older Intel mobo GPU doesn't support any of the serious GPU clients, but I figure the US$0.25 or so I've made mining Dogecoin doesn't really count as conflict of interest here. I've tipped a few people on Reddit, and triggered the local botnet detection system (which thinks port 22556, the Dogecoin blockchain pool, is probably a botnet, and in some sense I suppose they're correct.)
They've said it before, I'm saying it again: It's all right to take money from suckers
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Investing $3-5 million to garner $4 million a month is a fantastic return on investment. Roughly 1200% per annum.
That's ignoring power and maintenance costs but still, it is pretty good.
Of course, once other people figure this out the entire scheme will flop.
you're effectively asking to get butt hurt by the NWO.
Mining nothing and wasting energy, and devaluing society in one swoop.
Next thing you know, they'll screw up dogecoin, too.
Dorks.
All serious Bitcoin mining is now industrial-scale using custom ASICs. CPU-based and GPU-based mining are dead. They can't even cover their own power bill. This guy's setup is primitive compared to this large high-density liquid-cooled mining facility in Hong Kong. The two biggest mining pools control over half of the mining power, and the biggest, "ghash.io", would have over half if they hadn't deliberately split up to avoid that happening.
The thing to remember about Bitcoin mining is that all miners are in competition for a fixed number of Bitcoins produced each week. More mining does not mean more Bitcoins are generated.
...right now.
The question is, as it is with bitcoin, whether they will be worthless (or, worth less) in the future.
"Being good for making jewelry is just a bonus, but it's good for making jewelry precisely for the same reason why it's an excellent conductor"
No, it's good for making jewelry because it's seen as precious. By your logic, silver jewelry should not exist (it's a pain to keep shiny) and aluminium jewelry would be all the rage.
Can the raytracing equations be used as a proof of work? The BTC chips are useful only for mining BTC and when they are not any longer powerful enough because of the raising difficulty they can be only thrown away. I think that if the effort put to generating SHA256 in silicon would be put to harware solving ray-polygon intersections, the computer games and lots of ther stuff would be at a completely different level now. And the obsolete harware could be used for other purposes.
> I'm not serious
Says it all.
It'll be funny to see this bubble burst...
what a wonderful way to utilise $3-5M to the advancement of society, produce a valuable commodity and generally bolster the economy in these times of decreasing worth.
Some random tool wants to do something. Is he doing it? No? Get back to us when it's not a non-event.
Bitcoin has become yet another juicy prize for the already-wealthy, since it is nearly impossible to generate any bitcoin unless you have the capital to be the first to obtain the latest ASIC, and in large quantities.
How many hopeful miners pour $1000 to "pre-order" (and pre-pay for) the next miner only to wait a year for it, while the people they paid $1000 to for it use it to build their industrial mining racks?
The whole thing is rife with fraud and deception, and as usual the 1% get all the spoils.
You forgot to mention gold's inertness. Yes, copper and silver conduct better than gold but both of them corrode like fiends. To combat this you have to alloy, or coat. You don't need this with gold, and combined with its "softness" (better described as extreme ductility), you can lay down a very thin layer indeed. "Atoms" thick, vs "fractions of an inch" thick. Ask someone designing a satellite which is more valuable. Or a jeweler. Or a circuit board maker.
I come here for the love
What if 10 other people also decide to mine 10% of all bitcoins?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Actually, aluminum corrodes (i.e. oxidizes) very readily. It just so happens that the coating -- a mix of Al & O atoms -- takes up the same space as pure Al atoms. So the surface Al oxidizes to Al2O3, and once the surface is covered with the oxide, O can not get through to react with the Al. End of "corrosion" but very much an oxide surface. Oxide surface = not attractive in jewelry (just like what happens to silver). Also, absorbing Al through the skin contact is not a good idea.
I come here for the love
They current generate 7,000 — 8,000 Bitcoins per month, which, at current rates, would be worth over $4 million
And at tomorrows rates $125, and the day after's rates $1.7 billion, and the day after that...
Interesting that the main investor in this operation (and apparently the chip design) seems to be an academic bioinformatics institute in Poland: http://bioinfo.pl/
I guess it beats applying for research grants...
If I had $3 to $5 million to blow on bitcoin mining crap, I wouldn't need to blow money on bitcoin mining crap. I'd be sitting on a beach, enjoying life.
Damn son!
"They current generate 7,000 â" 8,000 Bitcoins per month, which, at current rates, would be worth over $4 million." ...and at tomorrow's rates will be worth $0. Oops. Virtual evaporation leaving no trace behind, not even a ring around the bathtub.
If you send me $30,000 (a pittance compared with $3 million) I'll supply you with pork for life. Real food in the real world which you can really eat. You can also trade your real pork for other real goods with other real people or just serve it up as a delicious meal with real friends in the real world.
Hundreds of real people have send me real money like the above and smaller amounts to get their real pork CSA Pre-Buys. It's real. This money helps us finish building our on-farm USDA/State inspected butcher shop. That's creating real infrastructure in the real world funded by real people at a real farm producing real food.
Be a part of something real and get real benefits.
-Walter Jeffries
a Real Pig Farmer
on a Real Mountain
in the Real State of Vermont
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/
This sort of reminds me of the Y2K scares 15+ years ago. Back then, there was a lot of FUD about Y2K and consequentially a lot of money being spent to deal with it. A lot of new equipment was being purchased. A lot of software was being modified along with a lot of older programmers being hired to perform those modifications since nobody else knew how to deal with it. Once Y2K came and went without any catastrophe, all that capital spending evaporated overnight. One could argue that this may have been a catalyst for the dotcom crash but that's a separate issue. My point is that a lot of very expensive equipment is being built to mine bitcoins. A lot of real money and resources, particularly energy, is being spent in an effort to mine something that has no other use besides virtual currency unlike metals. So when the last bitcoin is found, all that capital spending will vanish. Is this hardware good for anything else? If not, there will be residual effects.
Reading many of the comments it would seem people think Bitcoin is nothing other than something to mine for money and then argue it is pointless. Well, yeah, that would be pretty pointless. A few mentioned it's being 'untraceable' and so good for buying drugs. I don't really think so. The record of every transaction is out there for everyone to see. Sure, individual transactions are anonymous but if law enforcement agencies can manage to find out who was involved in one transaction they can start leaning on people until they have the one they are after. I wouldn't recommend using Bitcoin as a way to commit a crime!
Where I see value in bitcoin is the ability to perform transactions with little or no fees. Why do I have to pay on average $3.00 every time I use another bank's ATM? What did the transaction actually cost the 3rd party bank and any other middlemen to complete? That has to be 99.99...% profit. How about credit card merchant fees, Paypal fees when one person sends money to another outiside of Ebay? Don't get me wrong, I'm not against companies getting a profit for providing a service but when the transaction is 100% digital the real cost must be vanishingly close to zero. That means the profit margin these banks are charging must be rediculous! Besides, even if the fees the banks are charging aren't rediculously high (unlikely) If others are willing to provide that service to the community for free or lower cost then why is it worth paying the banks to do so?
That's what I hope to be someday using Bitcoin or some other virtual currency for... real honest day to day transactions. At the moment though I haven't seen the things I normally pay for on a day to day basis available for Bitcoin. Maybe someday...
The fastest, cheapest, most efficient systems right now have a payoff period of about 9 months. They're claiming they're doing it in 1 months. They're lying. They're probably not counting electricity or are lying about their efficiency or simply got lucky solo mining.
Also, 25 BTC are created every 10 minutes. There are 4392 sets of 10 minutes in the average month. He wants 10% of the 25BTC so 2.5 BTC per cycle is 10,980. So they're close but just short of it...except it doesn't work that way. You aren't stealing processing ability away from the rest of the network, you're supplementing it. So if the total network speed is like 700,000MH/s, you can't add 70,000 yourself and have 10%. Then you have 70,000 of 770,000 which is 9.09%. Then there's the fact that new miners are adding every day and lowering your profitability. I think it's like 1% growth per day or something so goodbye profits. They basically have a very bad business plan and aren't so great at math.
Just like PayPal stock.
Made me think of the open hardware Bitcoin miner - https://github.com/GeorgeHahn/.... Anyone had a chance to check that out?
The difficulty goes up exponentially with pool size. How long does this guy plan to keep buying up the world's computing resources? Cause he'll have to pretty quick to keep his 10% goal.
When one spends $X on a system and electricity to mine $X worth of bitcoins, the difference is exactly wasted.
This operation will not lead to generating more bitcoins. The market will not overflow, no gazillions will be 'dumped'. The supply of mined bitcoins is steady. The only point of this article is that 10% of this steady supply will be in the hands of this particular miner. That gives them the power to do large deals involving great sums of bitcoins in a single transaction, but it does not influence the market price in any way because the total supply of bitcoins does not change.
If only 10% of the people on slashdot could grasp this concept, perhaps we could finally get rid of these endless articles of BTC non-news filled with clueless comments.
Hey! Let's make a vaporous new "currency" that has no regulatory body to stabilize the price! It's a FEATURE, not a bug!
Oh look! A bunch of big-dick players are getting involved. Looks like their best bet for turning a profit is to buy low, and sell high!
Oh dear, the price is see-sawing all around, why is that happening?
Hey, where did my money go?
... to cover up for the fact that bitcoin is a "solution" in search of a problem.
Wire fraud sucks, but the fact that bitcoin transactions are totally irreversible isn't exactly an improvement.