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Best Way To Mine Bitcoins - Allow Errors!
An anonymous reader writes: A recent paper from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that bitcoin mining profits can be increased considerably if mining hardware is allowed to produce occasional errors. The research shows that mining hardware that allows occasional errors ("approximate mining") can run much faster and take up less area than a conventional miner. Furthermore, the errors that are produced by the miner do no corrupt the blockchain since such errors are easily detected and discarded by the bitcoin network. Mining profits can increase by over 30%.
What are your working hours? You have to post an article once and hour while you work?
So, they basically shift part of the workload necessary for mining onto the nework, and thus pay less?
As long as it benefits me, I am going keep wasting resources. I hope you dont mind.
So you flood the blockchain verifiers with bad solutions, increasing everyone else's workload, in order to make more money yourself. Are you from China by any chance?
> worthless
All value is subjective. Back to ECON101 with you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Approximations can solve problems faster than exact algorithms but with occasional errors? Who would have thought? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The best way to "mine" bitcoin is to not mine any in the first place. Bitcoin is DEAD for mining. You not only need ridiculously expensive specialized hardware to even mine it, it will also waste a TON of electricity, which if you live in the US, is more than likely being made with Coal, thus polluting the world... and for what? A virtual currency that really shouldn't even have any value at all, if it weren't for the idiots who decided it was worth something when it really isn't.
Quit trolling, you can't exchange your monopoly money to an actual real new car or a house, can you?
At least gold has real economic value in industy (your computer, dental fillings, etc.) and quasi-real/probably-less-dependable economic value is use in things that look pretty that people with excess cash are willing to pay for (jewelry, etc.).
I see a lot more gold jewelry than I do BC jewelry.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In the 90s I used to work at Convex Computer (the first mini-super manufacturer) and there was a joke that the founder (Steven Wallach) could create silicon designs that were an order of magnitude faster than anyone else in the business, just as long as you were OK with getting a wrong answer every once in a while.
Indeed. The value of your comment is objectively less than 0.
Just scam them from Martin Shkreli's dumb ass.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That depends... exactly how much Monopoly Money are we talking about? A handful? A truck load? If Monopoly Money is absolutely worthless, why is it produced, and then sold in a game called Monopoly?
Monopoly Money does have a non-zero value... granted, not a lot of value, but some value none the less.
I can't exchange BitCoin for a real house either.
Oh, really?
[Rent This Space]
All you are showing is that bitcoin, money, cars, and houses have value.
Econ101 assumes agents with perfect knowledge, and yet people are still arguing about the externalities of modern industry, especially electricity, with quite a bit of uncertainty of future impact and resource limitations.
not all value is subjective, that's libertard nonsense
True, but if you're talking about money, be it bitcoin, USD, or rupees - that's all subjective value.
The vast majority of Monopoly money value comes from it being included in a game that uses it, and separated from that is near worthless. This is especially so since any copy shop or home printer can produce more with some colored paper for the few people who might lose the money from their game. Otherwise it is just subpar play money without the game. You could say it has value as it will burn, but so will the paper it was made from which can also be used for many other things. Beyond the game, the money has less value than the paper and labor used in its production. Value is not a zero sum game, and it is possible to lose value in a process even if the outputs still have some nonzero value.
That is what is done with writing research papers these days: pay sufficient lip service to the notion of science to get published, and if errors turn up, just ignore them. Increases rate of publications significantly, and that's what people get paid for these days.
John_Chalisque
The research shows that mining hardware that allows occasional errors
All you are doing is making other people do the checking work for you.
This is wasting other people's CPU and bandwidth.
Your mining pool should ban you if you're caught doing this.
Completing 'fake' shares, which ultimately enrich yourself at the cost of the total profits of your pool and other miners.
Well if I find myself in a lift with you I'm going to do a smelly fart, I hope you don't mind that
If the hardware misidentifies a solution as valid, the network will quickly identify that the solution is invalid when the miner broadcasts it. “These are essentially immediately rejected.”
Why broadcast the block straight away? Surely checking if a given solution is valid is quick enough that it could be checked by a different system before being broadcast?
Nope. Value is an opinion that differs per person, and is therefore subjective.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I hope that no one believes that Bitcoin has no value. It has whatever value is assigned to it by the people willing to use it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
However, much could be said about fiat currencies especially if they are poorly managed. It is usually just that a fiat currency is managed, and closely watched and protected. That has both positive and negative effects.
So in the end, the problem with Bitcoin may well be that it is completely off the rails. I don't think I'd hesitate to use it to make small purchases, if I had to, but I don't think I'd want my retirement in Bitcoin.
That said, I'd like to see it continue. A currency that cannot be governed by some country's monetary policy may well reveal interesting things about a free market currency. I'm just not sure I want to be part of the experiment.
Mine something out of thin air? Shit. Are you a Democrat or something?
Than farming with a botnet using other people's electricity and CPUs.....
There, moderated that anon to -1 for ya ;)
Doesn't this sort of defeat the whole purpose of mining bitcoins? After all it is the difficult, time intensive computing that supposedly gives bitcoins their value by validating bitcoin exchanges. If some sleazeball mining consortium deliberately starts allowing errors so they can increase their profits by 30% then that by definition will lower each bitcoins value by 30% as phony transactions must get filtered out by other miners taking up the slack by actually doing the validation.
This would be like the US mint taking a contract to produce a number of $20 bills, and then deliberately printing a certain percentage of counterfeit currency using substandard "non-official" materials to increase their profits and justifying it by saying that banks and merchants will filter out the obvious phonies.
Once other miners figure out what is happening and start deliberately introducing their own "errors" to get some of these extra fraudulent profits the whole system will break down and collapse via out of control inflation.
If I were selling a new car or a house and you came up to me wanting to purchase either of these with Bitcoins, I'd promptly tell you to go fuck yourself. As would most people.
And as we all know - it's absolutely worthless if you can convert it into money!
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
You missed one of the largest problems with Bitcoin: It was designed to be deflationary. Most fiat currencies are designed to be slightly inflationary, which encourages people to spend or invest it (the economy, in a nutshell), rather than hoard it or invest in it on speculation that it might be worth more in the future. Unlike investing in a business, precious metal, or commodity, when you buy Bitcoin you're not putting your faith in peoples' ability to turn a profit, the labor and costs involved in mining and extracting a rare element, or something with intrinsic value. You're simply buying into a cryptocurrency modeled after a pyramid scheme.
To truly picture what's wrong with Bitcoin, think of a new iPhone release. Yeah, some of the people buying them are speculating that they'll be able to sell them for a profit on eBay. Perhaps some of the buyers on eBay are speculating they can re-sell the phones in their bodega cell phone shops. But ultimately, at the end of the line are people who just want to actually buy an iPhone to use it.
Bitcoin's utility is limited by the hassle of exchanging it to and from fiat, its unstable value, and extremely limited merchant acceptance. It's kinda like paying a fee to have someone hold your wallet and randomly add or remove some of your money, and most of the time tell you "no" when you ask if you can spend your money at a merchant. Doesn't look like such a great investment, does it?
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I'm so sick of Slashdotters's stupid economics nonsense. Value is not what you think or want it to be. There are theories about it, none of them state that value is an "opinion" (you're thinking of "utility"), nor that "all value is subjective" (at least not without substantial qualifications).
Go read some Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall, Valras, and a few others, and then come back.
I wonder if physicists and engineers also bang their heads on the table while reading Slashdot comments as much as we economists do.
Microeconomics assumes agents with perfect knowledge, and not every school of macroeconomics have the same microeconomic foundations. Uncertainty is built into the models, not simply ignored as you imply.
Of course there is no perfect knowledge, nor is there perfect competition, and not everything fits into a normal distribution, nor is a coin-toss exactly 50/50, nor is a dice perfect, nor is there 0 drag and a perfect vaccuum in the real life equivalents of the examples you use to teach classical mechanics, and so on... these are simplifications, generalisations, models that we use to make sense of stuff.
If you think you're smarter than Smith, Ricardo, Marshall, Bentham, Hume and their peers, and have another, better idea of what to base economic theory on, let's hear it.
We've seen the results of an occasional error in that work!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
..... with Bitcoins, I'd promptly tell you to go fuck yourself.
Really? Just for asking a question? Don'y you think that is a bit extreme or do you answer all questions in the negative with "go fuck yourself". E.g., if I asked if you had the time and you didn't would you say "go fuck yourself"?
.As would most people.
I very much doubt it.
What we should do is encourage the economy and people to become more efficient and competitive. Right now the law creates a lot of monopolies/duopolies/etc (from internet access and cable television service to government schooling). Some of that does involve letting industries and companies go out of business (banks) when more competitive solutions come along (or f**** ups happen). What we should do is eliminate the programs altogether or severely curtail them and then open the markets up to competition. Unfortunately some of the laws which created and/or ensure the monopolies/duopolies need to go in the other direction now as otherwise no newcomers can afford to enter the market. For instance cable providers often have a monopoly position because towns gave them these monopolies in exchange for rolling out service. What we need to do now is create programs to incentives competitors enter these markets. That might be a good thing to have across the board actually- incentivizing startups and companies to enter new markets. Maybe a reduced tax rate or elimination of taxes for a certain amount of time for new entrances to the market.
We need to eliminate not just corporate welfare or social programs even- but all the programs. We should all but eliminate funding of the public education system through taxes for example. We should open up the boarder. That's OK if we're actually creating a competitive situation for Americans. We should eliminate copyright except for where it is actually in the public's interest (ie to ensure competition in the case of free software, that is where the sources are publicly released under copyleft licenses).
We don't need taxpayers to fund the majority of public school students educations to ensure all students receive a good education (ie I'm against voucher programs- we shouldn't be funding private anything with tax dollars). What we need to do is eliminate welfare programs for the middle and upper classes to send there children to school and only lend sufficient amounts of money to cover students educational costs whom can't afford it otherwise. This would both guarantee students get a good education, reduce the cost of education (as it creates competitiveness in the market for schools, etc) and eliminate excess taxation of the masses such that they can't afford to cover there children's education.
Rather than funding health care with public tax dollars or requiring everybody to obtain insurance is we could create a multitude of non-profit health insurance entities. We should eliminate drivers licenses, registration, and auto-insurance, as unnecessary tax generating programs that have no real public value (NH does just find without requiring auto-insurance, and registration is merely a tax generating program, drivers licenses aren't needed for an arrest either if someone is driving dangerously). and reduce or eliminate state and federal police forces. We should have a constitutional protection that guarantees no crime has been committed unless it cane be demonstrated that real and actual harm occurred. Speeding does not harm anyone- but reckless driving that results in an accident has.
I'm tired of stupid opinions suggesting that value is something other what people think something is worth. Gold, USD, Bitcoin or even monopoly money is only worth what we as a society value it at. For Christ sakes, Economics is a RELIGION!!! a belief system, that's all... Therefore, any equations or theories in economics is at best opinion.
Oh cool, another economist on Slashdot. Well then you're probably familiar with how Smith's theory of value has been superseded by Menger's subjective theory of value and marginal utility; and how Marx is total garbage for doing anything useful.
Physicists know about heliocentrism, Kepler's laws, and Newton's laws. Some are pretty good theories that work well for day-to-day kinematics, some are total garbage that don't even give us good enough estimates to do anything useful with, and if you want to launch a GPS system you're going to have to look for a theory that supersedes all three (say, general relativity).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
This is super obvious...how did this paper get published?
Of course I'm familiar with the subjective theory of value, that's why I mentioned (and misspelled) Walras. But Smith's theory hasn't been "superseeded" by it, they're concurrent theories (and aren't even mutually exclusive). Much like how biologists have more than one theory about how life came about and haven't decided on a single most likely one yet. Every field has its concurrent, diverging theories, even physics and mathematics.
The usefulness of a theory has little to do with its validity. Either way, you're wrong, Marx's works are very useful to study labour and history. Marginalism, on the other hand, is completely useless for that, and is more useful to study microeconomics.
As for your sarcastic and unwelcoming remark about economists, I think what makes Slashdot worth reading is the diversity of its community. The stupidity brought about when you leave engineers and physicists discussing varied subjects among themselves is astonishing. You're probably one of those close-minded STEM people who think social sciences are useless bunk, and so is poetry, and literature, and anything that can't be summed up with mathematical equations.
If you don't mind, I have a question... What doesn't have subjective value?
I really can't think of anything that doesn't have a subjective value - at least at an individual level. I am not trolling, I am not being snide, I am not fishing for an answer to then pounce and say, "Ah ha!" I really don't understand and you're far more adept at it than I. I can assure you that you know more about the subject than I do and I will happily defer to your expertise.
Yes, it's sad that I pretty much have to include that. The quality of the comments are such that I'd doubt my motives too. Rest assured, I am not trolling.,
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Indeed, that came across crass. I should have said Oh cool, there's a fellow economist on Slashdot. It is my passion, and I think it is the hardest science we have. (Indeed, economists invented game theory.) It is not (merely/necessarially) a social science, people who think of it that way or criticize economists are being rather narrow-minded.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Dunno man, that LSD and mescaline I bought with bitcoin didn't seem worthless.
Economists forget that most people aren't economists don't don't behave how economists think they will or should. This is why neo-liberalism has run aground. People just sent that selfish. But some are. It depends on what one values.... and people value things quite differently. For example, some people will pay extra for a shurt with certain logo on it. Others would not have the shirt even for free because they consider it to have been defaced by the same logo. Value is subjective.... Though non economists seem to understand this much better than some economists.
Only boring people are ever bored.
1849.
Mmmmmm.. . . . smelly farts.
For what it's worth, my initial post came across too angry, and I fell victim to Poe's Law while reading your response. My assumptions about you were unwarranted, you are a better person than me for putting up with it.
What I really wanted to convey was that statements like "the value of something is whatever value I think it has to me, or other people think it has to them, and it's all subjective" is empty, circular reasoning, and it's not even what the marginalists were talking about. Utility != value. After all, I may very well exchange something of value that I own for something useless to me, as long as I know I can exchange that useless thing for something else that does have utility to me. Then you may say: "well, but if you can exchange that, then it's not useless to you", to which I'll reply that, by that standard, everything has significant value to me as long as someone is willing to exchange it for something else I want. But that would make it clear that the value of that "thing" is neither intrinsic to the thing itself, nor decided by my own judgement, but is instead decided by the judgement of other people who may be interested in it. Now change places with one of those people, and you'll reach the same conclusion, thereby realizing that this subjective interpretation doesn't really explain value at all; it only describes the market (accurately).
Simply put, you can find Nobel laureates and other internationally known and well regarded economists who think Marx's labour theory of value is complete and utter garbage, and it's alright to have that opinion. I just wish people would put some thought into things, and read a little about it, before oversimplifying it and pretending we don't have some nearly 300 years of theory about it by some of the greatest minds of the last three centuries.
People's judgement don't change the value of the shirt, all that changes is what they are willing to pay for it, which is not the same as value. They could very well accept the shirt for free and exchange it for something else. This way it would have non-zero value even though they are not willing to pay anything.
What makes you think economic theory hasn't dealt with that problem? Not only has the problem of value been dealt with by many economists, but the problem of choice has been dealt with extensively by microeconomics.