"Folding" for profit, not fun - Bitcoin

[directhex]

Interesting TIME article on the whole thing: http://techland.time.com/2011/04/16/...e-governments/

[MadduckUK]

Some forum guy started offering $25 of pizza for 10,000 BTC about a year ago.

The exchange rate's changed since then.

wonder if he still has them

[badass]

Interesting. It seems that all of this mining that people are doing is providing aggregate CPU power that is essential to maintaining the integrity of the currency.
I haven't worked out how the 50 bitcoins are handed out by a decentralised network, or what happens when someone "loses" their wallet - are the coins essentially lost forever causing a small amount of deflation or do they become available again somehow?
Fascinating stuff.

[kalniel]

Yes, they're lost for ever, increasing the value of the remaining coins.

Of course, you could just hire a GPU cluster on Amazon EC2. First few people to do so would make all the money until other people joined in and compute inflation struck...

[Raz316]

I actually got some money through this morning from selling 5 bit coins. A bit gob smacked that it's actually real!

[directhex]

Yes, they're lost for ever, increasing the value of the remaining coins.

Of course, you could just hire a GPU cluster on Amazon EC2. First few people to do so would make all the money until other people joined in and compute inflation struck...

The difficulty of mining a block (therefore the required compute power) goes up with time. So worst-case scenario is the hard limit of 21 million happens earlier than the planned 2040

[kalniel]

The difficulty of mining a block (therefore the required compute power) goes up with time. So worst-case scenario is the hard limit of 21 million happens earlier than the planned 2040

Yes, but you'll have fewer of them than the person who cheaply hired EC2

[MadduckUK]

oops, i seem to have ordered a pair of 6870s

[Rob_B]

I hate it when that happens...

[1stRaven]

oops, i seem to have ordered a pair of 6870s

You'll like them. I keep looking at cpu's as my e8400 is the bottle neck when doing this....

[Queelis]

oops, i seem to have ordered a pair of 6870s

Yeah, those will pay themselves off..


..in about a lifetime.
But that's just jealousy talking.

[directhex]

Yeah, those will pay themselves off..


..in about a lifetime.
But that's just jealousy talking.

Assuming 10p per unit of electricity, a $7.65 exchange rate, 500W under load, £160 per GPU, and no change to the current bitcoin mining difficulty (which will go up in a couple of days, so is a false premise), profitability will be reached in... 25 days, give or take. 37 days on the estimated next difficulty threshhold.

[ehhhhhhh]

I'll be on holiday for a month so I'm gonna leave the pc mining

So far I've collected 7 coins so I'm curious what this system can do 24/7. I'll report back with my stats.

cheers everyone

Edit: i'm not sure on the power consumption of the 6870s but my system never goes above 490W (the whole PC, with 4 HDDs, 2 SSDs, 2 pumps, GPUs @ 6950 spec, and 4 fans)

[Queelis]

So you're saying it's getting harder and harder to mine? I.e. the returns are increasingly smaller?

How often does that happen?

[kalniel]

So you're saying it's getting harder and harder to mine? I.e. the returns are increasingly smaller?

How often does that happen?

Yes. Fewer bitcoins are generated over time, with the aim that they will increase in value.

The adjustment is every two weeks, per generating node. It also gets harder the more people are mining or the more compute power is globally contributed (in that your proportion of it is then relatively lower).

[directhex]

So you're saying it's getting harder and harder to mine? I.e. the returns are increasingly smaller?

How often does that happen?

Every 2016 blocks, the difficulty increases.

At certain intervals of blocks, the reward halves (e.g. from 50 per block to 25). It's meant to balance the increases in CPU power with time.