...

[ultimatebob]

I'd imagine that the Chinese guys built their Bitcoin farm "quick and dirty" on purpose to maximize their profits. It only gets harder to mine every day, and I'll bet that even they knew that it wasn't going to be worth more than $500 a coin for long.

By the time they spent a week installing a half decent filtration system, for example, the mining difficulty could have gone up 20% or the price of Bitcoin would have dropped 20%.

This is why I never bothered to buy a lot of equipment for mining Litecoin back when it was the best way to make money in crypto. The odds of the price crashing during the week it would take for the video cards to ship and set up was too high, let alone in the three months I would have let it run to recoup my equipment costs.

Besides, the miners they're using are probably going to be obsolete in a year anyway. The fans probably wouldn't fail due to dust blockages before then.

 

[DrPizza]

Another thought into why the US government is unlikely to ever accept bitcoins - wherever electricity is cheapest, you can print money. In the US, since we care about the environment more, we won't be able to compete with China who apparently have no qualms about screwing the environment for the sake of profits.

 

[Red Squirrel]

We had thought of getting into it at work, we had it all planned out. They make some rackmount ASIC units and we were going to order them as soon as they come out, but then they got delayed, and delayed and delayed and now the difficulty went up too much. That's the biggest issue with most of the ASICs, getting them is a challenge on it's own. A lot of them you have to pre order too, screw that. Not preordering something that is time sensitive.

Not too worried about power usage/environment as our power comes from hydro dams anyway. Depending on how much money it would have made I would have bought solar panels or a wind turbine anyway.

But yeah, that didn't happen. If only I got in like... 2-3 years ago. 😛 GPU mining was really where it was at it's prime. At least you can reuse a GPU after. The ASIC boxes are a huge waste of resources as they have no other uses once they're not outputting enough anymore.

 

[destrekor]

Another thought into why the US government is unlikely to ever accept bitcoins - wherever electricity is cheapest, you can print money. In the US, since we care about the environment more, we won't be able to compete with China who apparently have no qualms about screwing the environment for the sake of profits.

I don't think electricity would be an issue once any crypto currency was stable enough to become a standard currency. For now, much mining still has to happen, but once the mining difficulty becomes so extreme that most farming becomes unprofitable, then a currency will reach a point where there is no longer injection of additional currency, rather, the price now becomes subject to the whims of trading alone. There would still be a very very meager growth over time, but it would never become equivalent to inflation if the difficulty can indeed reach such a point, as "printing money" would not happen at anywhere near the rate that it can with standard currencies.

IF something like bitcoin ever reaches that point, it won't be nearly as volatile, and could become stable enough for global economies. If it ever deserves to be adopted as an official currency, that remains to be seen. I don't know enough of the backend details to work out how that might occur, but I do believe that it is feasible to reach an unthinkable difficulty level that mining surely becomes unprofitable.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[destrekor]

But if no one mines, who validates the blockchain so you can make transactions?

As I said, I am somewhat ignorant as to the inner-workings of crypto currencies. I have entertained the idea of getting into them, but now that even Litecoin (which I had toyed with briefly) is basically dominated by asic miners, iirc, I really don't care to bother. I'll have 2x290X soon, which could be put to use for mining, but I don't see it being profitable or worthwhile by sticking to GPU mining these days... Litecoin seems to be the champion up and comer, and I don't think there can be multiple strong currencies.

Can blockchains be validated with less intensive resource use than a full mining algorithm, and/or can it be done on a smaller scale so that a ton of transactions can be verified with far less effort than mining?

 

[ultimatebob]

I'll have 2x290X soon, which could be put to use for mining, but I don't see it being profitable or worthwhile by sticking to GPU mining these days... Litecoin seems to be the champion up and comer, and I don't think there can be multiple strong currencies.

GPU mining Litecoin isn't worth the effort anymore, either. Even your dual 290X's are nothing compared to an ASIC miner that the pros are using now.

Besides, the price of Litecoin is down to less than $2 now, compared to $20 a bit over a year ago. It seems to be even worse off than Bitcoin.

 

[destrekor]

GPU mining Litecoin isn't worth the effort anymore, either. Even your dual 290X's are nothing compared to an ASIC miner that the pros are using now.

Besides, the price of Litecoin is down to less than $2 now, compared to $20 a bit over a year ago. It seems to be even worse off than Bitcoin.

I wasn't very clear, my bad. That's exactly what I was complaining about: I had some interest and screwed around with a semi-put-together Cuda miner for my 560 Ti SLI setup, but quickly grew bored with that route. Nowadays, I am definitely not interested in pursuing Litecoin with GPU miners, as it is as you said, ASIC miners now rule Litecoin just as they do Bitcoin. Litecoin had the surge it did strictly because it was at first ASIC-free and then ASIC miners could get into it, but as ASIC miners have now ruled Litecoin, it has begun to drop as at this point. Litecoin was always simply an alternative to Bitcoin, trying to get in the same early profit that early Bitcoin miners enjoyed, and once they got back to being on the same ground, Bitcoin once again grabbed the spotlight. That will probably go on for awhile, with other coins like Dogecoin grabbing some attention and profit, remaining ASIC-free for some time, and jumping in profit for the early ASIC era, and then likely crashing once it's entirely ruled by ASIC miners. It's the crypto equivalent of the pump and dump, I'm afraid.

 

[halik]

I've been looking at bitcoin cloud mining. I'm really confused by CEX.io

So you can buy 1GH/s of mining power from them and they charge a $0.10 per month maintenance fee. But most calculators show I will only make $0.07 per month in bitcoins with that 1GH/s.

Even if I up the amount to 2TH/s I'm still paying $200 a month for maintenance and only making $147.

Why would anyone buy this service? Are the online calculators incorrect?

In a gold rush, the money is in selling shovels.

Anyone aside from Ron Paul/Libertopian loonies/Neckbeards knew that places like Butterfly Labs wouldn't be selling equipment that mines $10K in 3-6 months for $10K.

 

[OverVolt]

Its a modern day gold rush. Just like the California gold rush, the only people who made any money were the people selling the equipment.

I'm not sure bitcoin has lasting potential. The limited quantity bit is interesting as is the increasing complexity of the hash. No idea how it works in the grand scheme of things.

 

[pete6032]

Its a modern day gold rush. Just like the California gold rush, the only people who made any money were the people selling the equipment.

I'm not sure bitcoin has lasting potential. The limited quantity bit is interesting as is the increasing complexity of the hash. No idea how it works in the grand scheme of things.

Doesn't computing power increase at the same rate of the complexity of mining? Or does computing power increase slower than the complexity of mining?

 

[Jeff7]

I would think that the cloud company would instead choose to use their equipment to do the bitcoin mining themselves, rather than rent out the computing power to someone else - unless they perceived it to be a really risky venture. 😉