AMD destroys Nvidia at Bitcoin mining, can the gap ever be bridged?

[Chiropteran]

The big difference is that the majority of USD is used for legitimate transactions. Can you say the same for BTC?

Keep denying it, but BTC is popular because of its shadowy nature. Are you just afraid of admitting that BTC exists through dirty money and that your payout is coming from illicit transactions? Or do you just believe that BTC is the savior for world finance?

You have no idea.

The "majority" of USD isn't used for illegitimate transactions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis

Possibly not the majority, but enough to put our economy in ruins for a few years.

Bitcoin is accepted at:

reddit
okcupid
wordpress
https://www.bitcoinstore.com/
At least one JEEP dealership http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/04/17/jeep-dealer-in-kansas-now-accepts-bitcoin/
At least one FORD dealership http://www.spford.com/

Hundreds of others:
https://www.spendbitcoins.com/places/

Educate yourself and you will discover that bitcoin is used for plenty more than drugs.

 

[railven]

Well DAYUUUMNNNN, I better start mining again...for science. Of course.

 

[wand3r3r]

Some of the uptight AMDefenders and NVolunteers forum members could get together and sacrifice a few bitcoins for a few tabs or pills at a ATF get together.

Maybe everyone would just get along with each other for a change.

 

[railven]

Some of the uptight AMDefenders and NVolunteers forum members could get together and sacrifice a few bitcoins for a few tabs or pills at a ATF get together.

Maybe everyone would just get along with each other for a change.

Or the already loose shackles of sanity break and there be blood. Lots of it.

 

[Zanovar]

Some of the uptight AMDefenders and NVolunteers forum members could get together and sacrifice a few bitcoins for a few tabs or pills at a ATF get together.

Maybe everyone would just get along with each other for a change.

This forum drop e and trips?CHAOS!

 

[Chiropteran]

Hmm, maybe this could be part of AMD's new marketing. "AMD video cards let you earn ponzi money that you can trade for drugs, to make 3d games even more immersive!"

 

[wand3r3r]

Now I get the hostility by the non-miners. They are noticing they wouldn't have to work for money if they could mine for um.. life essentials.

 

[Eureka]

I don't even use bitcoins. When I first got a 7950 I used it for a while until I had one coin and just said forget because at the time they were worth $20 and I couldn't be bothered. I sold that coin for $180 when the price skyrocketed and haven't bothered with it since.

My point is just that I don't care if some people are using bitcoins to buy some marijuana from one another. Just like I don't care about someone using some government issued paper currency to buy some drugs either. It's just smokescreen to me, no one can say one way or another what the majority of transactions are being done for or with and it's irrelevant. Illegal use of currency is nothing new...

Fun fact, near every single bill in circulation will test positive for traces of cocaine. People will use currencies for illegal means, nothing new here.

I've heard about the cocaine part on USD, it's actually quite interesting. I also agree with you, I don't really care what people use their BTC for. But you should be at least conscious where all this money is coming from.

Say you don't have a BTC (and are not mining it). You pay the miner, who has 1 BTC, $120 USD, for that BTC.

Now, what can you do with it (beyond investing it)? You can buy things with it. But you have to get a seller who's willing to take it. Why should a seller take your BTC, which is a word of mouth currency, with an unpredictable value, versus USD in paypal, which at least doesn't come with the same risks? It's because that seller wants to move something without a USD trace. Can this be quasi-legitimate, as in the case with failing markets such as Cyprus? Yes, but that's a rare case, it's one country out of 200+ in this world. More than likely, it's for an illegitimate purpose.

Now, you offer this seller a BTC, but he also has to get something for that BTC (or else he gave you something with nothing in return). He can trade/sell that BTC to another person for USD, who wants to use it for a purchase elsewhere, or else he's trading it to a person for USD who wants to invest it in the hopes that someone else down the line wants to use that BTC for a purchase. So ultimately, it comes back to the buyer and seller, who needs to use the BTC. Which chances are, aren't going to be for legal sales because BTC has no binding laws behind it.

You have no idea.

The "majority" of USD isn't used for illegitimate transactions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis

Possibly not the majority, but enough to put our economy in ruins for a few years.

Bitcoin is accepted at:

reddit
okcupid
wordpress
https://www.bitcoinstore.com/
At least one JEEP dealership http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/04/17/jeep-dealer-in-kansas-now-accepts-bitcoin/
At least one FORD dealership http://www.spford.com/

Hundreds of others:
https://www.spendbitcoins.com/places/

Educate yourself and you will discover that bitcoin is used for plenty more than drugs.

Firstly, while the mortgage crisis was terrifying, it wasn't illicit. It's irresponsible spending, not illegal spending.

Secondly, a few legitimate websites, while nice, pales in comparison to the amount that's being moved underground the deep net. You've shown quite a few of legitimate takers. The Silk Road is just a single of illegitimate takers, and it moves millions (USD). How much does okcupid or wordpress actually move in terms of BTC-based transactions? This and that most of the deep-net is undocumented.

 

[crashtech]

Just because something is frowned upon by the issuer of a fiat currency, doesn't make it wrong.

That sort of argument against BTC just serves to strengthen its position, since I would wager most people don't want anyone telling them what they can do with their money. Illicitness is in the eye of the bureaucrat.

 

[Chiropteran]

How much does okcupid or wordpress actually move in terms of BTC-based transactions? This and that most of the deep-net is undocumented.

I was thinking you would tell me. A few hours ago you were positive that nearly all bitcoin transactions are for drugs. Now you don't know? You aren't really putting forth a very strong argument for your position.

 

[Grooveriding]

Is BTC truly anonymous though once it comes to converting it to your national currency ? I had to transfer the money into my bank account to get it into $ form. Is there some means of actually converting BTC into $, €, £ without a trail related to a bank account or paypal ?

 

[Eureka]

I was thinking you would tell me. A few hours ago you were positive that nearly all bitcoin transactions are for drugs. Now you don't know? You aren't really putting forth a very strong argument for your position.

Well, it seems like you don't know either, and we're at a standstill.

My point has been, and has been for hours, that the majority of BTC's capitalization comes from illicit transactions, and from investment/speculation. We do know that the Silk Road is moving millions a month. OKCupid, on the other hand, is not (they make a few million in revenue each year and most of that is advertising payment). Since we don't have exact numbers, we can only extrapolate from what we do know. I don't believe that at this time, that this money is being used through the goodness of people's heart as a way of fighting the evil tyranny of fiat money.

Is BTC truly anonymous though once it comes to converting it to your national currency ? I had to transfer the money into my bank account to get it into $ form. Is there some means of actually converting BTC into $, €, £ without a trail related to a bank account or paypal ?

IIRC, BTC isn't completely anonymous, and it is still possible to trace it back to a transaction, it's just very difficult to do so. It's a smokescreen not an invisibility cloak.

 

[crashtech]

Women showing their faces in public in Saudi Arabia is an illicit activity.

 

[Zanovar]

Women showing their faces in public in Saudi Arabia is an illicit activity.

erm

 

[crashtech]

Yeah, we have a poster here that natters on about "illicit activity" as if it actually has some meaning to a global audience interested in computer hardware.

 

[3DVagabond]

Is BTC truly anonymous though once it comes to converting it to your national currency ? I had to transfer the money into my bank account to get it into $ form. Is there some means of actually converting BTC into $, €, £ without a trail related to a bank account or paypal ?

Well, reading about Silk Road, they were trying to track it's owner. They found a bitcoin wallet that had 1/2 million bitcoins in it. This was assumed to be a good possibility of being Silk Road's owner. One day the wallet simply disappeared without a trace.

 

[Chiropteran]

Well, reading about Silk Road, they were trying to track it's owner. They found a bitcoin wallet that had 1/2 million bitcoins in it. This was assumed to be a good possibility of being Silk Road's owner. One day the wallet simply disappeared without a trace.

Huh? You can't "track down a wallet" unless you actually obtained the wallet.dat file, which would let you spend the coins contained. You can track down an address and see how many bitcoins it has been sent. The owner of that address my choose to send the bitcoin in it to another address, but you can track that as well. An address can never "disappear without a trace" though.

 

[3DVagabond]

I'll let you read this. I did misspeak, it was the coins in the wallet. Not the wallet itself. Anyway, read the article. Of course there's no way to know the validity of the story, but it's interesting none the less.

Keep in mind that what's going on here has little to do with bitcoins directly. Silk Road would still exist even without bitcoins. The activity, both legit and illegal, would not be stopped without bitcoins. It surely isn't supported through mining bitcoins in any conceivable way.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Dosn't BitCoing mining use OpenCL?
NVIDIA dosn't care for OpenCL (Just look at their drivers)...and their CUDA implementation is 58% faster than thier OpenCL path:
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9646&start=30

Looks like people are forgetting this fact.

 

[24601]

Dosn't BitCoing mining use OpenCL?
NVIDIA dosn't care for OpenCL (Just look at their drivers)...and their CUDA implementation is 58% faster than thier OpenCL path:
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9646&start=30

Looks like people are forgetting this fact.

The only problem with mining on Nvidia is the lower integer performance.

There are CUDA bitcoin and litecoin miners.
Bitcoin:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2444.0;all
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3486.0
Litecoin:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.0;all

We are still seeing how far Kepler and specifically Titan can be optimized for.

 

[Chiropteran]

I'll let you read this. I did misspeak, it was the coins in the wallet. Not the wallet itself. Anyway, read the article. Of course there's no way to know the validity of the story, but it's interesting none the less.

It's a fascinating story, and sounds legit, but that one part-

"Then, in August, without fanfare, the 500,000 Bitcoins disappeared."

That just doesn't happen. I'm sure it's just some creative license, I'm guessing what really happened is that the owner of that wallet sent those coins through some sort of anonymizer service- but even then it's wrong to say they "disappeared", as you can still track them through any such service, you just don't know if the new owners are related in any way to the old owner.

 

[blastingcap]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Avalon 1200 x ~75 GH/s incoming (a mix of higher and lower units, plus some ASIC miners overclock)

BFL shipping Jalapenos soon from what I hear, plus the article implies that full scale rigs may be on the way soon = ???? GH/s

One other company (Asicminer (sp?)) apparently shipping or mining with ASICs and the number will undoubtedly grow

GPUs being bought or turned on for mining = ??? GH/s

+ possibility of other ASIC makers we don't know about, and of the ones we DO know about making and keeping ASICs for themselves (apparently ASICMiner is doing some of this already) = ???? GH/s

The Batch 2 + 3 Avalons alone will double the current difficulty. BFL has sold thousands of rigs and their hashrate will likely be much higher than Avalon's batch 1, 2, and 3 combined. Then ASICMiner and GPUs pile on. Brace yourselves for a quadrupling of difficulty very soon. I'm pretty sure price will not quadruple to follow; price is determined almost entirely by demand, not by mining difficulty. This is because mining produces 3600 coins/day but there are already 11 million coins mined so 3600 is not enough to move supply much.

There is no "very low limit on supply." This topic has been discussed to death on bitcointalk.org already and if you still don't understand it, go there and ask. The already-mined supply is almost 11 MILLION. It absolutely dwarfs the daily rate of production such that the short-term supply is basically fixed. This implies demand is the one setting the price. Look at Halving Day last November--if mining difficulty sets price why didn't the Halving impact prices sooner? It took a confluence of events on the DEMAND side in Feb-April (Cyprus, and the ever-growing snowball of press coverage as BTC shot higher) for prices to move significantly. In the very long run supply will play more of a role perhaps. Put simply, mining difficulty follows price, not the other way around. If price went up another 10x, you would expect more mining response. If mining difficulty goes up 10x, price may not go up very much at all. Chiro has a point that if the discrepancy grows too big you can do mining arbitrage but that only sets in for the long run if you have consistently bad price/mining ratios. Supply is very boring. Everyone knows exactly how much supply is coming in for BTC because it's an algo. The fact that there are huge gyrations in price is because of demand, not supply.

 

[Silverforce11]

Brace yourselves for a quadrupling of difficulty very soon. I'm pretty sure price will not quadruple to follow; price is determined almost entirely by demand, not by mining difficulty. This is because mining produces 3600 coins/day but there are already 11 million coins mined so 3600 is not enough to move supply much.

I cannot compute this paragraph...

Mining is limited to 3600 coins/day would suggest there is a very low limit on supply. In situations where supply is the hugely limiting factor, price would spike obscenely high unless demand drops significantly.

Why would demand drop? Bitcoins is growing in awareness, acceptance and global exchanges show a hugely growing market of transactions.

 

[pandemonium]

The thing that people need to understand is there's a very small, but very important difference between FIAT currency and bitcoins. Bitcoins are finite, where-as FIAT isn't. Wallets will be lost and popularity will fluctuate, but as more people adopt the idea, the value is basically guaranteed to rise; regardless of demand (think long term).

 

[Rikard]

The thing that people need to understand is there's a very small, but very important difference between FIAT currency and bitcoins. Bitcoins are finite, where-as FIAT isn't. Wallets will be lost and popularity will fluctuate, but as more people adopt the idea, the value is basically guaranteed to rise; regardless of demand (think long term).

There is another small but important difference. If you really want to you could create a competing digital currency today. You cannot do that with FIAT currencies. Bitcoins are finite, but the sum of altcoins is infinite in the same sense that FIAT is infinite. I agree that bitcoin value will probably increase, but it is far from guaranteed.