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%.

Comments

Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they basically shift part of the workload necessary for mining onto the nework, and thus pay less?

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Zeroko]

They say the network would detect the errors, but more likely, an adjacent, more reliable processor would—there is no reason not to double-check the relatively few attempts that would make it through the first stage (as happens already e.g. with pooled mining, where you get credit for things that are not as hard as the official difficulty).

Re: Shifting the workload onto other people?

[guruevi]

Because that would defeat the whole purpose of this method. This method only works faster by simply offloading the actual checking (recalculating the hash) onto the network (which has to do it anyway but now you've increased the workload on the network with a ton of false positives).

Re: Shifting the workload onto other people?

[slashping]

No, the false positives are easy to detect locally. A regular CPU in your PC could detect a false positive in much less than a microsecond, and the number of false positives would be small to start with.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Solandri]

Both parties are the same. Republicans shift workload onto society via corporate welfare. Democrats shift workload onto society via government welfare programs.

There's nothing "wrong" per se with either type of program as long as you can keep inefficiencies down. In that respect it's good to have both R and D at each others' throats - helps keep their pet programs honest. Corporate welfare helps to guide the direction of economic development and technological progress (renewable energy being the latest example). Social welfare helps to act as a safety net allowing people who fall on hard times to pick themselves up and become productive members of society again more quickly.

But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit. Corporations take the subsidies without producing a meaningful product. People mooch off welfare with no intent to re-enter the workforce. If you can see the possibility of that happening with only the half of these programs your political party opposes, you're part of the reason our government wastes so much money.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Dahamma]

Both parties are the same. Republicans shift workload onto society via corporate welfare. Democrats shift workload onto society via government welfare programs. ...
But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit.

True, and an insightful point. Though I would argue that the result of corporate welfare abuse is that the already rich 0.1% benefits the most. The result of social welfare abuse is that the poorest 25%+ benefits the most.

Neither form of waste and corruption is ideal, of course, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils I'd prefer to direct the inefficiencies to the 25% of the poorest people in society living day to day with underfed kids and horrible health care than I would to millionaires wanting to add an extra comma to their net worth.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[tricorn]

From reading the linked page (which is woefully short on details), this isn't approximation, it's more akin to overclocking hardware so it goes faster even though it occassionally will make a mistake. If it can run twice as fast, but only create 10% false positives and negatives, it's worth it (as long as the overclocking doesn't use twice as much power).

Sending it on to the network without double-checking that it's valid would be stupid, though, considering it takes less than a microsecond to check a result, and even the false positives would be very rare.

The real problem isn't the false positives but the false negatives, as those are missed wins. The nature of the hash probably makes the false positive and negative rates the same, absent some specific failure mode of the hardware.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Dahamma]

Yeah, the irony is much of the tea party thinks they are in the middle class but most of them haven't been for a while now.

The 1% has already taken 14 of the 15 cookies and left them to fight over the last one with everyone else.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[sexconker]

No, verification is trivial. I have no idea why he wouldn't verify the result.

Mining pools use a similar scheme to distribute work, sending each miner what amounts to a partial problem only, while checking answers to see if they're valid before submitting to the network and awarding any bounty to the miner. This was done so that miners with varying hardware could all effectively help the pool without their tasks expiring and so that miners couldn't submit work to the pool and then submit any blocks found to the network directly, thus getting the pool rewards from every other pool member's found blocks and not sharing any blocks they find.

This jackhole is suggesting to just skip verifying the result and instead spam the network with trash.
No idea if he has gotten any significant improvement over what already has been done, but I seriously doubt it.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Dahamma]

If you want to screed against something of that ilk, I'd suggest railing against the corporatism that is rampant in this country. The current administration dumped a trillion bucks to their buddies on wall street, and another trillion in "shovel ready" stimulus pork, right out of the gate!

Exaggerated, but partly true. But what you fail to understand is Mark Zuckerberg did not inherently create $300B in value by creating a large website. It's worth $300B because Wall Street made it worth $300B. He and the other Facebook investors made money because Wall Street investors decided it was valuable. So, yes, most of these companies gained much of their value from Wall Street speculation, partly enabled by the government in bailouts (it wasn't just GM: it was the investment banks now inflating .com values) low taxes, low interest rates, protectionism, and just completely lax regulations.

HENCE: a lot of their value is due to these bailouts, low taxes, low interest rates, protectionism, and lax regulations, ie. SOCIETY created a lot of the value and deserves to share the profit. You seem to think that one guy has an idea and that somehow "inherently" makes him worth $50B and all of the employees who help build it worth nothing. Well, sorry, that's not a law of nature, it's a result of some work, some luck, and a very stacked system.

I don't know why you think that Oprah Winfrey building a billion dollar media empire is a huge problem that should be addressed by confiscating the majority of her wealth

Is this the Oprah who bought a large share of Weight Watchers, announced she lost weight on the latest WW fad diet (for like the 20th time) and raked in $20M in stock gains the next day? Yeah, she worked hard for that money. Worked hard to figure out SEC insider trading loopholes. As they say, it takes money to make money - which is the whole point.

Re:Shifting the workload onto other people?

[Dahamma]

There is no such thing as a zero sum game.

Of course there is, that's a stupid statement. There are many zero sum games. It's a huge branch of game theory.

And while long term investing may not be one of those, much of the short term investing of Wall Street (options, futures, many of the strategies of hedge funds) are for all practical purposes zero sum games. And of course usually the professionals (i.e. the already rich people) win, and the average middle class investors convinced to try their "luck" or forced to invest in retirement accounts, lose.

Re:BeauHD

[BeauHD]

Nope but thereabouts is a good spacing wouldn't you say?

Re: Great news!

[bill_mcgonigle]

> worthless

All value is subjective. Back to ECON101 with you.

Really?

[Drethon]

Approximations can solve problems faster than exact algorithms but with occasional errors? Who would have thought? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Oh great.

[r.freeman]

No, the article is bullshit about that. No such thing happens, the miner verifies the checksum himself, it takes around 1 / 1,000,000 of the time/energy required to find a solution (or even few orders of magnitude less).

Re:Gold vs BC

[slashping]

Industry use of gold is very small, and does not explain its value. And the monetary value is a big reason for people to buy gold jewelry (otherwise they'd all get gold plated stuff).

Re:No.

[slashping]

Not true. Right now, finding a block requires doing an average 7E20 hashes before you find a good one. Verifying only takes one hash.

Re:Gold vs BC

[slashping]

You misunderstood. There are plenty of uses, but the combined total of industrial use is only 10% of the new gold mined every year.

Re:Great news!

[Aaron B Lingwood]

I can't exchange BitCoin for a real house either.

Oh, really?

Re:No.

[Bert64]

I don't live in the US, so i can't pay any of those things with USD either, nor can i pay those things with gold or stocks. However what all of these and bitcoin have in common is that they can be exchanged for local currency which i can use for all of the things you've listed.

Re:No.

[slashping]

Where I live, there's a food home delivery service that accepts bitcoin as payment.

Standard academic practice

[John Allsup]

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.

Re:Standard academic practice

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's why the peer review process exists - it significantly cuts down the amount of BS that makes it to "print".

Tell that to the "soft science" journals. I did my postgrad degrees in stem, but studied psychology as an undergrad. The math in every single psych paper I've read from 1970 onward is not only wrong as fuck, but so wrong that everyone with even a modicum of sense for basic statistics will be able to instantaneously figure out that it's garbage. My favorite was when one paper that experimented on a whopping 6 subjects deduced a -10% margin of error (or, at least, that's what it would have had to have been to be consistent with their conclusion).

This was in Science, by the way.

This is cheating

[mysidia]

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.

Re:No.

[slashping]

Current above-ground gold reserves are big enough for more than 650 years of industrial consumption. The scarcity is purely artificial.

Re:No.

[gl4ss]

if you exchange sticks for rocks, you still need to pay the taxes on that transaction in dollars. that means you must have dollars. there is the value, since you can't run a business legally without them in USA. of course you could try to argue that what if everyone in the USA just ignored tax laws, then it wouldn't have value. then you wouldn't have USA either though.