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Cryptocoin Mining?

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Jionix said:
This is very interesting, but strikes me as "Too good to be true". It just doesn't have any logic behind --- there is value in calculating random, useless code? No, there isn't.

Who is pegging the value of bitcoins? Who gives them that authority? Who's to say that someone won't be able to forge bitcoins easily, since they are only computer based?

Those are just a few things that will stop bitcoins from ever becoming recognized. The likelihood that any legitimate entity will ever recognize or lend credibility to bitcoins is probably zero.
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the perceived value of the coins comes from the system that is in place. It is anonymous and decentralized and the coins are produced at a controlled rate. Not that I condone it necessarily, but its a dream for those looking to launder money or conduct black market deals.

it also has an anarchist appeal as far as being able to circumvent the governments control over monetary system/policy.
 
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Muyoso said:
So the difficulty increases every 10ish days right?
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it doesn't always increase, it depends on the network hash rate. If the overall network performance for this set of blocks is lower than the last set, the difficulty will actually decrease. it changes every 2000ish blocks. a couple of weeks ago, it didn't take more than a few days to change.

speaking of which, im a little confused as to where the huge surge of hash rate came from. It was at almost 8 t/hash at one point today, when it had been around 4ish up until the difficulty change.
 
How would they set up mining PCs in caves with no eletricity? Besides its easier for them to continue what they're doing now for money.
 
so how fast are nvidia cards at this? i have 2 460's with a decent OC on them and am willing to give this a shot if they are as effective as there ATI counterparts(6850's)

But im not buying new hardware for this.
 
Nvidia cards are not good at mining. With the current difficulty jump that just happened you'd just be wasting your time & electricity.
 
Yes, the multiple weaker shader processor system is surprisingly similar to the hardware designed with the sole purpose of generating hashes.
 
Rifterut said:
really? wow, so 2 460s is equal to 1 4850? looks like whoever wrote that code is taking payoffs from ATI that is a INSANE differance.
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Nah, firstly, it's all open source, so if there was a way to make Nvidia cards fast, someone would have done it.

Nvidia's shaders excel in FPU performance. ATI's shaders, while being nearly as good with FPU calculations, have far better integer performance, which is what bitcoin mining uses.
 
Also, computing hashes is a very simple process. Perfectly suited to ATI's architecture of lots and lots and LOTS of less potent SPs.

The same exact code runs on both cards. There are at least two OpenCL implementations (phatk and poclbm). Now, maybe there is some optimization to be done on the code to make it nvidia specific -- but so far nobody's been able to do it. The performance of both implementations is about the same with the same % delta nv to ati.

Also, as I remember, nv intentionally decreases GPU computing power of consumer gaming cards in driver. Market segmentation and all. I'm positive a real tesla card would turn in numbers closer to the ATI professional equivalent. That still doesn't make it a good choice for bitcoin mining, but may explain the gigantic performance gulf some more.
 
v8envy said:
. I'm positive a real tesla card would turn in numbers closer to the ATI professional equivalent. That still doesn't make it a good choice for bitcoin mining, but may explain the gigantic performance gulf some more.
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The Tesla cards on the miner comparison don't appear to do any better than their Geforce counterparts.
 
Muyoso said:
Gonna be some cheap 5830's on craigslist in 3-6 months when its no longer profitable to mine bitcoins with them.
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Especially if the 7xxx series Radeon proves to be a step up in mining ability or at the very least causes 6xxx price drops to fill the role 5xxx has had now.
 
So what exactly are you guys going to do with these bits? Looking at the sites that buy them, they aren't buying any right now, they will sell them to you though! Also the "markets" for trading have almost no liquidity. Just because a few people in the world will pay 17$ for one doesn't really mean the mass of them are worth that much, back to the liquidity thing. I almost dumped a little money into this a few months back but it seems like a pyramid scheme that really isn't going to find enough suckers with real money.
 
Vesku said:
Especially if the 7xxx series Radeon proves to be a step up in mining ability or at the very least causes 6xxx price drops to fill the role 5xxx has had now.
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Except the 6xxx are terrible at mining unless you go really high end and those prices would have to freefall to make them a better deal than the 5830 is.
 
Rifterut said:
really? wow, so 2 460s is equal to 1 4850? looks like whoever wrote that code is taking payoffs from ATI that is a INSANE differance.
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Some workloads work better with more cores thrown at it vs having a stronger single core. It is an arch difference between ATI and Nvidia. In this case having, what, 1500+ stream cores vs 512 cuda cores yields a higher throughput due to having 3x simple cores to throw at it. In other workloads those 512 cuda cores from Nvidia run circles around ATIs 1500 stream cores.
 
Muyoso said:
Gonna be some cheap 5830's on craigslist in 3-6 months when its no longer profitable to mine bitcoins with them.
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Gonna be a lot of cheap video cards on craigslist in a few months 😛 All the hardware is well paid off. Very little risk for me, I'll stop when I can't cover my power costs anymore.
 
OVerLoRDI said:
Gonna be a lot of cheap video cards on craigslist in a few months 😛 All the hardware is well paid off. Very little risk for me, I'll stop when I can't cover my power costs anymore.
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Well for you with your ridiculous setup that is probably going to be a while.
 
Desin said:
So what exactly are you guys going to do with these bits? Looking at the sites that buy them, they aren't buying any right now, they will sell them to you though! Also the "markets" for trading have almost no liquidity. Just because a few people in the world will pay 17$ for one doesn't really mean the mass of them are worth that much, back to the liquidity thing. I almost dumped a little money into this a few months back but it seems like a pyramid scheme that really isn't going to find enough suckers with real money.
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This. Been doing a bit of reading about BitCoin lately, very interesting concept, but I think a lot of people are jumping in without thinking of the economics, trying for a free lunch. A currency that is not convertible into other forms of currency (USD, Euro etc) in an extremely liquid market makes no sense.
 
gramboh said:
This. Been doing a bit of reading about BitCoin lately, very interesting concept, but I think a lot of people are jumping in without thinking of the economics, trying for a free lunch. A currency that is not convertible into other forms of currency (USD, Euro etc) in an extremely liquid market makes no sense.
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Tell that to the $450 in my pay pal account. I started bitmining may 25th 2011.
 
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