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A Trip Through The Bitcoin Mines
Once upon a time, money - in the form of precious metals - used to be literally dug out of the earth. Limitations on the amount that could be mined, and on how much growth could be borrowed from the future (all debt is, is future consumption denied), is why eventually the world's central bankers moved from money backed by precious metals, to "money" backed by "faith and credit", in the process diluting both. It was the unprecedented explosion in credit money creation that resulted once money could be "printed" out of thin air that nearly destroyed the western financial system. Which brings us to Bitcoin, where currency "mining" takes place not in the earth's crust, or in the basement of the Federal Reserve, but inside supercomputers.
It is these supercomputers, that are the laborers of the virtual mines where Bitcoins are unearthed, that the NYT focuses on in a recent expose:
Bitcoins are invisible money, backed by no government, useful only as a speculative investment or online currency, but creating them commands a surprisingly hefty real-world infrastructure.
Instead of swinging pickaxes, these custom-built machines, which are running an open-source Bitcoin program, perform complex algorithms 24 hours a day. If they come up with the right answers before competitors around the world do, they win a block of 25 new Bitcoins from the virtual currency’s decentralized network. The network is programmed to release 21 million coins eventually. A little more than half are already out in the world, but because the system will release Bitcoins at a progressively slower rate, the work of mining could take more than 100 years.
As the following chart shows, in addition to the surge in the price of Bitcoin, another explosion witnessed recently is in the processing power of the Bitcoin network: from non-existent a couple of years ago, the "mining" power dedicated to hashing, or the calculations used to extract new Bitcoins, has risen to nearly 10 quadrillion per second!
So what do these supercomputer-populated mines look like? Below we look at two examples of just that.
* * *
First, we look at Hong Kong, where one of the largest Bitcoin mines in the world is located.
In an industrial backwater near Hong Kong's massive port, one of Asia's largest Bitcoin mines is quietly turning raw computing power into digital currency.
Located about eight miles from the city's finance hub, the entire facility is no larger than a two-bedroom apartment. Aside from a small bathroom, the mine offers no creature comforts.
It is dominated by vertical racks that house hundreds of ASIC chips. Shorthand for application-specific integrated circuits, these chips are custom-built to mine bitcoins.

These racks house hundreds of ASIC chips used to mine bitcoins.
Chinese investors have been enthusiastic early adopters, a trend amplified by a lack of more traditional investment vehicles in the country

The Kwai Chung mining facility is extremely quiet -- except for the whirr of computers
Industrial bitcoin mines devote their massive amounts of computing power to working on the algorithm, and are rewarded with an equivalent share of bitcoins. Currently, a winner is rewarded with 25 bitcoins roughly every 10 minutes.

A closer look at the towers. Most of the facility is devoted to mining for an investor group in China.
Miners are lured to Hong Kong because of its proximity to chipmakers in China and the city's permissive regulatory environment.

A bubbling liquid produced by 3M cools the ASIC chips.
This mine was purpose-built by Allied Control for clients based in China.
Kar-Wing Lau, Allied Control's vice president of operations, said the mine is cheaper to run and more efficient than many others because it uses a technology called immersion cooling.
Heat sinks and fans are typically used to disperse the heat generated by massed ranks of computer chips, but this Hong Kong mine is liquid-cooled using a product developed by 3M.
The processors used in the mine were build specifically for mining. They have no other function. "These ASIC chips, they can mine bitcoins and do nothing else," Lau said. "Given the pace of advancement, we need them to be constantly upgraded."
These radiators, housed on a balcony outside the mine, help disperse heat produced by the chips.
Immersion cooling allows Allied Control to leave less space between the chips, which saves money that would otherwise be spent on rent.
The technology also cuts down on electricity use -- one of the other major costs associated with Bitcoin mining. Lau wouldn't reveal how much it cost to build the mine, but he said that electricity bills for a fully-operational mine of this size would typically exceed $50,000 per month.
"The real question from a business perspective is how efficiently you can run your mining operation," Lau said.
The inside of the racks used to house the mining chips.
Cooling, however, is only one of the key factors when determining Bitcoin "mine" placement. Another key one: access to cheap electricity, because those massive servers sure soak up a lot of electricity: electricity, whose costs can quickly add up once a parallel processing cluster gets big enough.
* * *
Which brings us to Bitcoin mega-mine #2 in Iceland.
It is here that the NYT goes searching for digital excavators used to procure the digital currency.
On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin.
To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.
“What we have here are money-printing machines,” said Emmanuel Abiodun, 31, founder of the company that built the Iceland installation, shouting above the din of the computers. “We cannot risk that anyone will get to them.”
Mr. Abiodun is one of a number of entrepreneurs who have rushed, gold-fever style, into large-scale Bitcoin mining operations in just the last few months. All of these people are making enormous bets that Bitcoin will not collapse, as it has threatened to do several times.
Iceland's low electric bill and its effective infrastructure, may be a reason why the one country that rebelled against the banker syndicate and jailed some of its bankers, may become the place where the bulk of Bitcoin mining takes place:
The computers that do the work eat up so much energy that electricity costs can be the deciding factor in profitability. There are Bitcoin mining installations in Hong Kong and Washington State, among other places, but Mr. Abiodun chose Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric energy are plentiful and cheap. And the arctic air is free and piped in to cool the machines, which often overheat when they are pushed to the outer limits of their computing capacity.
The operation can baffle even those entrusted with its care. Helgi Helgason, a burly, bald Icelandic man who oversees the data center that houses the machines, said that when he first heard that a Bitcoin mining operation was moving in he expected something very different. “I thought we’d bring in machines and put bags behind them and the coins would fall into them,” said Mr. Helgason, with a laugh.
No coins, but the cash miners get in exchange for BTC, especially if each Bitcoin continues to trade close to $1000, the mining can be quite lucrative. The flipside, however, is that the business is just as if not more capital intensive than running a gold mine for the same profit.
Until just a few months ago, most Bitcoin mining was done on the home computers of digital-money fanatics. But as the value of a single Bitcoin skyrocketed over the last few months, the competition for new coins set off a race that quickly turned mining into an industrial enterprise.
“Even if you had hardware earlier this year, that is becoming obsolete,” said Greg Schvey, a co-founder of Genesis Block, a virtual-currency research firm. “You are talking about order-of-magnitude jumps.”
The work the computers do is akin to guessing at a lottery number. The faster the computers run, the better chance of guessing that right number and winning valuable coins. So mining entrepreneurs are buying chips and computers designed specifically — and only — for this work. The machines in Iceland are worth about $20,000 each on the open market.
...
In February, Mr. Abiodun used the investors’ money to buy machines from a start-up dedicated solely to manufacturing specialized mining computers. The competition for those computers is so intense that he had to pay for them and wait for delivery.
When the delays became lengthy, however, he went on eBay and paid $130,000 for two high-powered machines, which he set up in June in a data center in Kansas City, Kan.
This was the beginning of Mr. Abiodun’s company, Cloud Hashing, which rents out computing power to people who want to mine without buying computers themselves. The term hashing refers to the repetitive code guessing that miners do.
Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The computing capacity of the Bitcoin network has grown by around 30,000 percent since the beginning of the year.
What is the upside of mining?
At the end of each day, the spoils are divided up and sent to Cloud Hashing’s customers. Last Wednesday, for example, the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices. Cloud Hashing keeps about 20 percent of the capacity for its own mining.
To be sure, like any industry in its infancy, there are numerous glitches, and mining for Bitcoins is no different:
Some Cloud Hashing customers have also complained on Internet forums that it can be hard to get a response from the company when something goes wrong. But this has not stopped new contracts from pouring in. Cloud Hashing now has 4,500 customers, up from 1,000 in September.
Mr. Abiodun acknowledges that the company has not been prepared to deal with its rapid growth. He said he had used $4 million raised from two angel investors to add customer service representatives to offices in Austin, Tex., and London. Cloud Hashing is now preparing to open a mining facility in a data center near Dallas, which will hold more than $3 million worth of new machines being produced by CoinTerra, a Texas start-up run by a former Samsung chip designer.
The higher energy costs — and required air-conditioning — in Texas are worth it for Mr. Abiodun. He wants his operation to be widely distributed in case of power shortages or regulatory issues in one location. But he is also expanding his Icelandic operation, shipping in about 66 machines that have been running for the last few months near their manufacturer in Ukraine.
Mr. Abiodun said that by February, he hopes to have about 15 percent of the entire computing power of the Bitcoin network, significantly more than any other operation.
Hopefully Bitcoin will still be around by then.
* * *
The future of Bitcoin mining is uncertain. There are a fixed number of bitcoins available -- and more than half have already been extracted. Kar-Wing Lau of the Hong Kong-based Allied Control, compared the explosion of professional mining operations to an arms race. For now, it appears to be a profitable endeavor. Lau said that Allied Control is currently exploring other mining platforms, including a mine built in a shipping container -- something that could prove useful if regulators crack down on the currency.
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Much like the gold rush, the ones making all the profit are the shovel sellers.
Free the Silver Bears, bitchez!
The Silver Bears (various?) series are produced independently, no? I sure enjoyed them...
But, this BTC mining article was extremely intersting, thanks Tylers for posting it. It will be a wonderful journey watching and participating in BTC.
Whichever god that made me or didn't, hear my humble cry and rid this planet of the plague that is virtual currency.
FUCK BITCOIN.
Why do you care if you don't use it?
All that pictured hardware is oboslete paper weights within 6 to 9 months and uneconomical to operate in 4 months. The problem is not the cost of the hardware, but the rate at which the hardware becomes obsolete due to difficulty increases in the code. If you can go as big as the operations pictured and rotate into (and have first access to) the latest and fastest processors every 6 months then it can be profitable
True enough.
Some entrepreneurs will succeed, some will fail.
Not all gold miners struck gold. But I'm sure glad they tried. Because I like gold as money.
You don't have to mine bitcoin. But you can benefit from their use as money. Same with gold.
MOAR BITCOIN!!!
MOAR TULIPS!!!
bitcoins have been generated for thousands of years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfMFhrgOFc
the romans called it coinus bittus
the greeks awarded olympic medals with koinous wallets engraved on them
crazy stuff
these things really *have* stood the test of time
Exhorcism also stood the test of time, until we discovered antibiotics.
Ludite.
I got bored with this subject long ago. I made one articulate post. Here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-07/rethinking-money-bitcoin-quadrupling-cyprus#comment-3419196
Log in or you might not see it because it is on page X.
Regards,
Cooter
Great link with a great analogy re quantum vs regular computers. Link workz, fishez!
Um, but how much was a Bitcoin worth last April...? ;)
Hey, it's Christmas! Can't decorate your tree with BitCoin! I'm with Yukon Cornelius & Sam the Snowman ~> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EXCDCXaIkQ
Bubble, Ponzi, etc, etc. Yawn.
Here we are again at the doorstep of yet another broken downtrend. This time from a much higher low and in a much shorter timeframe.
Just can't fix stupid.
Jessie Livermore is rolling over in his grave.
You handed your money over....and didn't even get a tulip for it?
They got a virtual tulip.
If it was virtual.....I hope they received a plethora of them.
Only idiots could compare a flower with a globally distributed, decentralized computer network. And Bitcoin is nowhere near a mania stage. Even my tech savvy friends are just watching this from the sidelines somewhat puzzled. Few people have heard of Bitcoin in 2013 and very very few people both understand it and see the value in it.
I am predicting 2014 will be yet another stellar year for Bitcoin. Rarely in history have we seen something this far ahead of its competitors released into the wild.
BITCOIN IS THE DEFLATIONARY TIGER!!
You GUYS Can Keep Fucking With BitCoinz And See
Where This Virtual WIFI Fluff Takes You...
AND I'll Happily Stick With The HARD AU And AG ...
And what, you'll wait for them to be money again? I hope you're very young and patient.
MUH SHINEE METLES!!!!
...have gone vertical, my shiney friend. Can we have a hallelujah in the house!!!! The shorts are getting squeezed. What kind of chump bets against a winner?
From $1200-$1215???
If you're on team depends then I guess 10 steps is an achievement worth exclaiming about.
I can't wait for the day gold goes vertical. AAAAAnnnnnyyyy day now.
Til then another scarce money we have it bitcoin. Stop bashing and diversify your scarce resources.
No one here is telling you to sell all your gold to buy farmland. But it's not a bad idea to have some right?
I looked at today's gold.
Then I looked at last month's gold.
Then I just shook my head..
So, in EFFECT (if not by design/intention), this amounts to the free market subsidizing (paying for) the HW and Infrastructure Development of super-computer networks with a very specialized ability...
Since most of the mining is GPU-intensive, and given that graphics cards are IMAGE PROCESSING devices, how long will it be before the OTHER shoe drops... AI that can 'recognize' the way a human can.
Put another way... "SKYNET thanks you", as do its owners. For doing (a) voluntarily and (b) at your expense, that which they could otherwise not achieve without tremendous cost, complexity and resistance. If this is indeed the "big picture", they must be ROTF LTheirAO!
WTF are you talking about?
Why am I even bothering to ask? Its obvious you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Protip: GPU != ASIC. "Skynet" doesn't fucking exist.
Stop using Hollowwood bullshit to paint pictures of the future. At least in the Terminator movies, they got some details sort of right. You can't even do that.
So many crazies on ZH anymore.....ridiculous.
Skynet doesn't exist .... yet.
I wish I had revisited my post sooner, so I could have responded to YOUR nonsense in time.
No need to get abusive & hostile (unless that's your tool of last resort), but you sir clearly know nothing about Image Processing, or you'd know that graphics cards do NOTHING BUT Image Processing. Unlike you, I have actually done IP the hard way: using Matrices. What have you done? Played with Photoshop?
And clearly you lack a sense of humor, irony or sarcasm to grasp my elementary reference to Skynet. Any child knows that it does not exist. You'd think that you could figure out that I used it as a metaphor? I.e., as a metaphor for Full Spectrum Dominance by TPTB.
p.s. Are you the 'Malikai' who posted this YT video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Rrb_qR0ik
How far this ponzi can go, depends upon NSA,
The hash function that bitcoin relies on—called SHA-256, and developed by the US National Security Agency—always produces a string that is 64 characters long. For example:
+7f83b1657ff1fc53b92dc18148a1d65dfc2d4b1fa3d677284addd200126d9069
+You could run your name through that hash function, or the entire King James Bible. In either case, you’ll get 64 characters out the other end. And, for a given input, you’ll always get the same output.
Wow. Did you come up with that one all on your own?
I mean, you figured it out didn't you? It's an NSA ponzi because each hash string is 256bits.
Time for me to get out now while I still can!!
I care because I don't want kids to grow up thinking that imaginary shit like bitcoin is real, and I certainly don't want kids pursuing the mining of bitcoins because I cannot think of a greater waste of the boon that is cheap electricity. See HonestAnn's post about space aliens down below.
If it's all for the children, why are we raising them to embrace/pursue/compete for all kinds of fucked up ideals, when we know better?
I met one of my friends' new boyfriend yetserday and in the course of conversation told him never to be a middleman in his life, to always do something real and useful. He completely agreed and thanked me for reminding him.
FUCK BITCOIN.
Bitcoin cheerleaders still believe in Santy Claus!
And infallible math apparently too.
Maybe the math fairy will come visit me tonight if i put a bitcoin under my pillow. /sarc
OK, someone can correct me on this if my math is wrong.
21mil total bitcoins. 25 vended every 10 min, so that'd be 3600 coins/day (1440 mins/day divided by vending every 10 min times 25 bitcoins). At that rate it'd take 15.98 yrs to shell out all 21mil bitcoins (not sure when they officially started). Now we have a big ramp up in the computing power crunching the math problems required to solve for your bitcoin prize, so your chances of being one of the 144 "winners" per day grows ever smaller. I can't see how investing in this much hardware will actually pay off unless the "price" of bitcoins keeps hitting new, exponential nosebleed heights.
Some other questions from the NYT article which I think are valid:
"Open source notwithstanding, who gets to set the rules? Why the arbitrary number of 21 million bitcoins and no more? Who is there to verify there really is 21 million, and no more? What would happen to all these mining operations, with all the awesome computing powers, and there is no more mining to do, once the ceiling is reached? Who is to say if the upper reach of 21 million is to be raised...or not? Who designs or controls these supposedly complex mathematical problems for these miners to solve? Why wouldn't the designers simply submit the solution and claim the bitcoins, if only just for greed?"
I'm stuck on the undisclosed significance of the math problems that all this machinery is supposed to solve. It seems a really weird and arbitrary thing to do to put these coins into "circulation". This is either some diversion for a ponzi scheme, or we're being secretly used to crunch numbers (a la the old SETI signal processing in the late 90's) for some secret space project...
Aye, the miners' investments seem to indicate they believe the price will go much higher. *wink wink*
Aye, the miners' investments seem to indicate they believe the price will go much higher.
Miners: A Story Of What Can, And Will, Go Wrong With "Miners" In Ten Pictures
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-18/fools-gold-miners-story-what-can-and-will-go-wrong-miners-ten-pictures
Mining was supposed to be the less exciting way to gradually make money over time. The hardware is going to hit limits soon, since the foundries don't go below 14nm even experimentally yet, so within a couple generations there will probably be a plateau.
While I do not know the reasons behind the specific values selected, I have looked at it and compared all of the knock-off alternate coins that are just bitcoin but with more or less coins and faster processing times, and I can see that a lot of thought went into selecting the specific values chosen.
Anyone who wants to spend the time can read the source code and verify whatever they want.
The reward halves every ~4 years, so it will take longer than any of us will live before the reward disappears completely. The mining pool that finds the block also gets any transaction fees in it; the goal is that eventually the transaction fees will surpass the block reward and eventually be the only source of income.
The designers would not tamper with the system, because a loss of faith would render all the coins worthless, unless they were vindictive or insane.
The purpose of the math problems is to prevent counterfeiting and verify valid transactions.
As Above, So Below
FUCK BICOIN
Stack On
Honestann will understand.
Truly an enlightened one. Do you share the same couch with Skateboarder?
I can't wait to see the 'best performing assets of 2013' post.
I look forward to yalls drivel on the 31st.
While most of these questions and concerns are valid, they have all been answered and refuted YEARS AGO! Just think, if you would have bothered to do the research at that time, you could have spent a thousand dollars of risk capital on Bitcoin, which at today's prices is worth roughly 7 million dollars. Being lazy and stupid can be quite expensive no?
The Original Bitcoin White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths
That's why so many ZH'ers are mad. Not only did they miss the boat but the boat is far along in its voyage.
An entire industry EXISTS and yet people are waiting for the boat to sink when the passengers have already reached other shores. Meanwhile they are waiting for their gold to "go to the moon" as it (doesn't) becomes money again. And then they call other people stupid, crazy, whatever.
Arguing for something that doesn't exist and arguing against something that does....
Sad.
Here's something that doesn't add up with your math: So far - with around 13 million 'coins' having been minted since Jan 2009 - the coins have been minted at an average rate of 7,000/day = a new block having been mined every 5 minutes since inception.
That reduces the total mining period to just 8 years - ie. only 3 more years remaining! (assuming that increasing mining 'degree of difficulty' is offset by hardware advances ... with a 4x speed increase expected over that period under Moore's Law).
I also wonder just how many 'amateurs' have been scoring coins with their laptop GPUs when they're competing against those 'big rigs' in each 10-minute, errr, 5-minute window.
I think you forgot to apply exponential decay to the block reward.
It halves every 4 years.
Please try to do the actual research yourself.
In answer to your open-ended thought: Between 2009-2010, many, many blocks were found by amateurs on their laptops just playing around. Today, you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery - unless you accept your small hashing power and join a pool, where you'll get your share (minus fees) of the reward.
Thanks for the correction. Much clearer now (though I still have no interest in having my 'wallet' included in any digital block chain that is monitored by the globalist politburo).
If the 21 million limit ever increased, bitcoin value would crash, it would be the end of bitcoin.
Limited supply is bitcoin's most important "value" characteristic, as it is with any currency.
Of course there is no real limit. Any number of "crypto-currencies" can be created "out of thin air".
Miners are creating networks built with other peoples' hardware and other peoples' electricity bill.
What I want to know is why Bitcoin hates the environment to waste so much electricity?
Given the complexity and machinery required for mining after reading this article, I doubt you have to worry about many kids OD'ing on virtual currencies.
New generation of kids will simply stay away from virtual currencies because math has something to do with it and they cannot sniff it.
So that's <5% of the world's population..... Most young people I know today love the idea of virtual currency. They know gold is very expensive and they know that gold and silver are manipulated by governments and bullion banks and that the gov can take it anytime they want.
But you were joking right?
right.
I like trading bitcoins and have been making $ on the swings. But it's not Gold and never will be. Bitcoin only has the virtual characteristics of Physical gold. Bitcoin is a representation of why a physically limited element like Gold maintains it's worth. Like Gold, it's an affront to fractional reserve banking and currency dilution by debt creation. Bitcoin lacks one key characteristic of Gold, which is it's ability to survive untarnished and untainted through time without the need or support of an external system. Whether political, economic, technical or otherwise catastrophic.
The bitcoin transaction network can be maintained with pen and paper.
The digital signatures and hasing can be done on an abicus.
Modern computers just speed up the process.
If the grid went down and we had to rely once again on inked toilet paper or perform the laborsome task of maintaining bitcoin, what would be the price your willing to pay for liberty??
The next major selection event will greatly reduce the human population. The survivers will be those who can perform these functions in their head.
Natural Selection FTW!
I'm not sure what you're saying,
"If the grid went down and we had to rely once again on inked toilet paper or perform the laborsome task of maintaining bitcoin, what would be the price your willing to pay for liberty??"
The price to pay for not having possession is losing your "possession", No? Like virtual food or virtual protection, it won't help you when you need it. As far as Liberty, I'm seeing with time that it's not meant for everyone, just the brave.
"As far as Liberty, I'm seeing with time that it's not meant for everyone, just the brave."
I agree brother.
Bitcoins are in my possession. Its just very difficult to express that possession because it involves long strings of letters and numbers that are complexly calculated.
So when SHTF, do you want federal reserve notes or bitcoin. You suggest bitcoin is totally reliant on electricity and internet. This is not true. They just make the system as efficient as it is. Computers are way more efficient at calculations than an abicus is.
Bitcoin would be difficult to transact with if we didn't have electricity and computers. But not impossible.
I'm asking if you would deal with that difficulty to have liberty or if you would stick with federal reserve notes for convenience.
A stable currency is only one part of the liberty equation within a free land. I'm not concerned about when TSHTF, I'm ready, it took me over 4 years to feel comnfortable. Fuck the Fed and all the other progressive socialists and their machinations. Our problem is political, not finalcial, we can create anything we want. The solution will take courage and sacrifice, there's no easy button, never has been.
Any thing can be used as a stable currency like space rock or dust from moon or sea shell. You just need to keep it away from bankers.
You are missing a big part. Without the Internet, or even with the Internet but just with fragmented networks or bad latency, the blockchain would fork all the time. If a person in Brazil solved a block with an abacus, and that same month someone in China solved the same block with an abacus, and they did not directly talk to each other but the information only moved through sailors on wooden sailing ships, the ledger (blockchain) would fork into two seperate ones.
What I'm saying is, without fast computers and a single, open, global Internet, bitcoin cannot work. A derivative, paper-based alt coin could exist, but would be far less practical or secure.
Aye, pretty much need fully funcitoning electricity and internet grid for Bitcoin to be "usuable". There are plans to broadcast over Shortwave radio to parts of the world that is still networked. Anyways, this all goes into the price discovery process for BTC. This is not limited to Bitcoin by any stretch, For instance, IBM, MS, Apple, Cysco, etc etc also require a functioning grid and should be factored into their corporate value.
SW is interesting. Should I have a set?
Stack On
If I understand this shit correctly, essentially the complexity level is adjusted constantly to produce a more or less even release rate of new coins. If, for some reason, we are all reduced to slide rules, the complexity level should adjust to allow production with that technology. Much of this seems rather well thought out, so I will take it at face value that there is that much tolerance built into the system. Since my interest currently is more at an academic level, don't adjust any behaviors based on this conclusion (not that I think any of you will).
Yep, difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks (or about every 2 weeks).
The last adjustment was a 30% increase.
[Wiki] [Charts]
Hold on.....my pencil just broke.
OK....from the beginning again...
How about some realism in that scenario? Suppose BTC is outlawed and .gov uses NSA to track down users or it is outlawed and there is no network. You would have to do the calculations manually.
How do you you keep track of who has which BTCs? A BTC written on a scrap of TP would be somewhat trivial to counterfeit or just reuse over and over with different vendors. You don't have to track the transactions with a metal. The metal just is. Granted you can make fake metal but it would be extremely trivial to test for that compared to BTC.
Who would have the time to sit down and do the calculations? "I want to trade BTC for a dozen eggs...." It just wouldn't be worth the hassle. With a metal you just give a weight and go. Convenience will win every time.
BTC is only realistic and viable longterm in utopia. There is no utopia.
"The bitcoin transaction network can be maintained with pen and paper."
Try not to refute the wookies at Zerohead. They tend to growl and spit things at you.
The Bitcoin Channel
I agree completely.
I mined a few coins a year or two ago, but after the novelty of it wore off, I went back to crunching WCG. I won't let the aliens go by if I can help it!
We should all buy moar gold and then whatch the bankers knock the price down again on monday morning, then when they have done that we should buy moar at a discount because that makes total fucking sence FUCK BITCOIN. GOLDCOIN the money of retards.
Pardon me, I was just sitting here thinking "What fucking good/usefulness is this guy doing by shouting FUCK BITCOIN for all of zerohedge to see on every post?"
Not sure if stupid or troll.
"I care because I don't want kids to grow up thinking that imaginary shit like bitcoin is real, and I certainly don't want kids pursuing the mining of bitcoins because I cannot think of a greater waste of the boon that is cheap electricity. See HonestAnn's post about space aliens down below."
Computer networks are not "imaginary". They are real. As real as a brick and as real as a silver coin. To argue that the Bitcoin network is "imaginary" is beyond counter-factual, it is stupid.
Speaking for myself, number one, real money is not encumbered by anything, it doesn't need anything to be recognized as money. BitCoin is obviously encumbered by its very nature, it relies on the internet & devices requiring power to access the internet.
I've said before (and its still my opinion) its fine for moving money around outside of a governments prying eyes, in a metropolis (at one time) BUT it still would do you no good in the middle of the Sahara when you're really needing a camel (or pick any other scenario).
Then we get to, number two, a subject that purists (such as yourself) don't want to face.
How is it (from a purists standpoint, I assume you are) that wealth can be allowed to be created by "factory farms" such as the article describes? Because they have the wealth to get even wealthier? Where are the noble hackers to stop this inequity?
I don't really care that the Winklevoss twins, "Satoshi", Jed McCaleb and a host of others got in on the front end of nothingingness but calling it money and marketing as money has always been a problem for me, not to mention steering everyone towards a truly "cashless society" reliant on the very things BitCoin uses itself, that is, reliant on something outside itself.
Isn't gold also encumberd?
First it requires secure storage. How is the guy looking for a camel going to secure it?
Second how is the guy with the camel going to carry the gold if it's a sizable amount? Wouldn't a brain wallet be lighter? Would he need a second camel to carry the money?
Third are there issues associated with using gold as a global currency? The cost to transact globally with bitcoin is infintesimally smaller than gold, even with network and energy costs included isn't it?
Fourth, this one has yet to play out fully but I believe bitcoins can be secured against a 1933 style confiscation event more easily than gold can be. Again I dont know this but I believe this.
I agree with you that bitcoin is encumbered. I just think gold is as well in its own unique ways.
There's a reason why the world went gold-backed currency for a while. Because transacting with actual bullion is so damn awkward. Sophisticated weights and measures are needed and, nowadays, ultrasound oscillators to detect tungsten. Transportation costs, delays and security are also a factor.
Future "reserve"currencies may have to prove their worth by using a Bitcoin model to "prove" that they will not dilute the currency, while maintaining a physical reserve of something valuable like Gold to back the virtual $.
Sure, I'd be interested to check out such a system. How to trust the reserve accounting? How to protect the backing asset from theft and Gov't confiscation? How to keep the costs down to be competitive in the marketplace? I'm not holding my breath and in the meantime there is the Bitcoin option.
You can't prevent theft by Govt. Tyrants of anything you can't hide from them. A stable system will be created however because everyone expects some stability in their currency. People with some $$ are scurring to put their wealth into anything stable. It is about trust, in something real.
Bitcoin throws down the gauntlet at governments with a challenge: We are protecting ourselves from theft through cryptography. As individuals we have to protect our private keys and we are individually possible single-points of failure, similar to gold confiscation. Be the overall system is distributed far and wide and and protected through cryptography.
I'm not against Bitcoin at all, it's the future model for a stable currency. But there is no way I would trade any of my real assets for more bitcoins. Extra Fiat I don't want to keep in a bank account, yes all day long, but I'm already prepped, so for me it's speculation.
Just a thought - what is 'currency'? Would you take 2000 shares of MMM for a house valued around $ 275,000? I'm starting to wonder how long it will be until any security, bond, virtual currency, etc will, due to algorithmic mutations, be useable in transactions. All you need is a Carfax report on the security you're accepting.
BTW, did Al Gore invent algorithms?
Har har, al gore.
Some of the untapped potential of bitcoin is its use as a distributed property rights management system. Basically chopping up a coin in tiny parts, each piece of which would represent a stock in a company or some real estate, perhaps. Currently folks are betting at 2:1 odds that gold, oil and USD will be stored in the Bitcoin blockchain by 2015.
So the thousands of years of pulling gold out of the ground have been in vain, huh. What a pity.
I dunno. According to honestann the reason we pull gold out of the ground is to buy a ticket on an intergalactic space shuttle to some far off world.
So no, not in vain.
At least no more so than human endeavor to elucidate mathematics. Which is a virtual item. Can you show me where math resides please.
Mathematics resides in the temple of truth. The notion of truth is extraneous to and a required prerequisite for the existence of Mathematics. If math is the language which describes existence, truth is what lets the notion of existence to exist at all, etc.
awesome explanation. I upvoted ya.
Now just follow that logic as it applies to bitcoin.
I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts here.
Skateboarder, P-d,
Righteous dialog, greens! (It's still Xmas!)
"The truth shall set you free" was inscribed on the steps of my elementary school. It didn't make sense to me as a kid, I thought,- No way!, the truth will get you busted. :)
Best post ever. (and it's still Christmas! (well... for PST))
"The truth shall set you free"
It actaully goes something like this....
Arbeit macht frei.
@Prisoners_dilemna (the continuation of thoughts you requested):
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that emulates the notion of the gradual extraction of a precious resource that has been designated as a common fungible proxy. It is backed by electricity and cannot exist without it.
Human beings are computational machines. The act of computation requires an answer to arrive to, and that answer is a state of truth. (full idea in another post below) Since the efforts of a human being's labor for computing must be expressed in a fungible proxy of some sort for the notion of commerce to exist at all, it is required for the proxy to be indestructible if the efforts are valiant enough to deserve such a proxy. Real men make valiant efforts and demand that their proxies be indestructible. Rare metals (and other metals too) are indestructible. The notion of storing the effort of worthwhile computation (arriving at truth) is stored without fail when you use one or more metals as the proxy. Of course, you can abstract the real metal with a paper representation and even a digital one. But let the damn thing be real and one-on-one (physical redeemable for paper redeemable for digital without any compromise whatsoever) for fuck's sake.
Thank you.
Was it aristotle or plato that suggested money be durable? GOld is hardly indestuctible though.
Coins get worn down and lose their edges. Isnt that why coins have ridges on them?
And how exactly is your idea inconsistent with a "vector gold" or economic justice model for the distribution of "in-situ precious metal resources" exactly? Jus' sayin'. Don't you wonder at all why they are forcing the gold miners to stop mining? The new belief is that the safest/most indestructable place for "them" to store the gold is in the earth's crust. What's not real about that? Then redistribution is easy... you don't even need a Fedex for that. Planetary resources... but what does Google know anyway?
I call BS-----and redundant. --- I downed you
You can judge the late eugenicist however you want, but he did churn out some useful stuff (full read of Principles in the link). It should be quite obvious to even the casual observer that truth is not an inherent part of mathematics or anything at all. It is merely a notion, but it is King Notion - the source of all. What makes truth so special is that it it behaves as an element and cannot be recursed or broken down further, i.e. it is the base case in the realm of notions. In fact, it is King Element, because the act of computation is not possible if you do not have an answer to arrive to. The answer you arrive to is one of the states of truth. Obviously it is not binary, implying a continous domain, rather than the discrete. Some might argue it is discrete, i.e. true or false. I say bollocks.
What are your thoughts about truth?
Sorry bout that Prisoners_dilemna, fruit salad, cutting up vegis and whatnot.
1) "Isn't gold also encumberd?" No, it never is, monetarily, which is the context of what we're talking about.
2) "First it requires secure storage." Yes. "How is the guy looking for a camel going to secure it?" Just like anything else he values and always has the option of using physical force, unlike BitCoin.
3) "Second how is the guy with the camel going to carry the gold if it's a sizable amount?" The one with the extra camel to sell or the one needing a camel because he's on foot? "Wouldn't a brain wallet be lighter?" Lol...yes and completely useless. "Would he need a second camel to carry the money?" Did the guy with the gold to exchange for a camel carry that much with him?
4) "Third are there issues associated with using gold as a global currency?" Its recognized the world over as money, including by the guy with an extra camel. to exchange for it. "The cost to transact globally with bitcoin is infintesimally smaller than gold, even with network and energy costs included isn't it?" So is a common wire transfer, ex-pats & illegals do it all the time but for that...BitCoin is fine, as I've already said.
5) "Fourth, this one has yet to play out fully but I believe bitcoins can be secured against a 1933 style confiscation event more easily than gold can be. Again I dont know this but I believe this." To confiscate mine, I would have to be dead, so I really wouldn't be concerned about being buried in poverty or monuments to my passing.
6) "I agree with you that bitcoin is encumbered." Well that took awhile...lol. "I just think gold is as well in its own unique ways." In a sense yes, but you can also use BitCoin as a decoy away from where you are not on a virtual level, so if you're looking to hide your movements & whereabouts it works. But in the end, real assets/money is as anonymous as it gets ;-)
As to point #1, that is only true if you store it yourself. If you trust a bank to store it then there is counter party risk and it is encumbered. But if store at home then you are correct.
#2 I dont see what you mean. Why can't I protect my bitcoin wallet with force?
#3I was trying to ask how the guy buying the camel will carry all his gold. And then I as trying to ask if he would need a second camel to carry it all. I was inferring that gold is less portable than bitcoin. Or at least it requires more work to carry it the same distance as bitcoin. Agree?
#4 Wire transfer costs much more than BTC. This is one of the reasons why bitcoin has utility. So we agree here. Gold is mooney world wide except there's lots of people who wont accept it. I remember seeing a video of a guy trying to sell an ounce of gold on the street for $50... no takers. So he asked for $20... no takers. SO he wanted to pay for a slice of bubble gum with it...no one sold him the gum. Gold ought to be recognized as money but I dont believe the whole world will accept it. It ought to be universally acceptable.. I wish it was. But in fact it is not. I can't pay for gasoline with bitcoin or gold yet.
#5 That is some big talk and I applaud that. However you are unique in this stance. I believe most people will roll over the minute some guns arepointed at them. Very few people actually stand on their principles. So when it comes to security from government confiscation I still believe bitcoin are better. I only believe this because there is no evidence that my brain wallet exists, where as my gold, sunk to the bottom ofthe lake or hidden in my walls, can be detected, and then I will be called a felon and charged $10,000. What would most people do if gold were money and govt decided to confiscate it? Well history shows us they roll over or die. Bitcoin we will have to wait and see.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me on this forum! Cya at the next BTC article :)
I like the idea of gold. I don't wear it though, and I see no need for it other than as the ultimate insurance policy against a complete global meltdown. But it annoys me how die hard gold bugs, while claiming that gold is valuable because it has been accepted as money for thousands of years, refuse to accept the simple fact that gold is basically useless. It only has value because people believe it does, "belief" is not "tangible" or "instrinsic", and if you are starving in the desert you are better off with one camel than a truck load of gold. So just get off the "gold is the only form of money" idea. Bitcoin is far more useful for today's economy than gold. You can hold your gold to your grave praying for nuclear war or you can buy Bitcoin and join the rest of us in creating a decentralized modern economy where laborers finally have a chance and the banksters get what they deserve.
Ah! Not a FOFOA reader! Actually, the relative uselessness of Au* is one of its main attractions a numeraire (an accounting of a Store of Value). It is wanted. And people hoarding it do not affect any industry..., imagine if SILVER wre all in the hands of hoarders, silver is used more applications than any other material (save oil & steel). If all the silver were off the market, many electronic components would be far more expensive, there are NO good substitutes for silver in many cases.
IMO, gold and BTC complement each other nicely. But, I would (and of course do) hold much more in Au than BTC...
*Earlier today, an alert ZH-er posted some new research that has found interesting new uses for gold (nano-gold) as catalysts and similar.
Not a FOFOA reader!
Naw, but I was an ANOTHER reader......I was gone by the time he FOFOA came around.
Well not gone.....obviously I'm still around. Has anyone heard from FOA lately?
It only has value because people believe it does,
Au (and Ag) are excellent reflectors, malleable, ductile, etc.
"belief" is not "tangible" or "instrinsic", and if you are starving in the desert
But I don't plan on going to the desert.
you are better off with one camel than a truck load of gold.
No thanks. YMMV.
So just get off the "gold is the only form of money" idea.
Silver is fine by me, as are Pt and Pd, etc.
Bitcoin is far more useful for today's economy than gold.
Gold is a store of value, bitcoin is a means of exchange.
Forget about the camel. I'll use bitcoin to buy a coconut cut in two pieces, and continue through the desert 'riding' them as many noble kniggets did.
Question is...who was on the shiiter end of that transaction? I think it's a wash..outside of comic value. Even that can be debated further.
Aw shit, there got the crazy ass ZH'ers applying gumption to the topic at hand.
Quote me:
Coon Shit > Bit Coin
Regards,
Cooter
EPA and the ASPCA would shut down a coon shit mining operation pretty quick.
Nothing will be allowed to compete with the current coon shit mining op going on in the beltway...and boy fucking howdy....does that coon shit pile up.
The Bitcoin protocol itself does not rely on electricity. Accessing the Bitcoin network relies on electricity. So what you are trying to argue is that if you believe the power is going out indefinitely and the internet is going away indefinitely, don't buy Bitcoin?
Why do you care if you don't use it?
It's competition for gold and silver, which he problably invested in. Not that it will be competing forever, but right now it is.
Krugman said that they beat the ASICs and make them work 24 hours a day under un-ASIC conditions. And they don't pay them minimum wage.
I'd say the ASICs just need to organize a better union and hire some ASIC lobbyists.
Them ASICs better watch out for those FPGAs!
makes me wonder if all this processing power was devoted to, i dunno, cracking the cure for cancer or the common cold
Why not write your senator and request a law be passed? That's exactly what the healthcare lobby did to ensure sick people stay sick for profits. There's little profit in preventative healthcare.
All we have here is a free market and the ability of individuals to make decisions for themselves.
PS cancer can be cured. People just need to stop putting shit into their bodies.
Which raises a very good question. Just what are all those solved algorithms leading to? And following on from that, who is going to benefit from the solution of all of those algorithms?
Is someone going to get a patent on anti-gravity courtesy of all that bit coin mining? If they did I would have to give a hat tip to the cunning means of harnessing all of that computing power for free. Now, that is thinking.
The solved algorithms lead to nothing. They are themselves proof that some work has been accomplished. The higher the computing power, the more secure the bitcoin network is. All participants in the network benefit from this security and miners are rewarded with bitcoins (created out of nothing) for their efforts. If an attacker tries to disrupt the free flow of money over the Bitcoin network they will need 50% of the network's computing power.
Thanks TH73. However, it is disappointing. The potential for that "work" to actually lead to something is there but it seems that it is being wasted. Maybe the next version of BTC will utilise all that algorithm solving and do something both useful and wonderful with it. Such is life.
Maybe you would like Primecoin.
There are some miners pointing there computers at the Primecoin blockchain.
Hemp oil for cancer, garlic for cold!
Leeches for everything else....brilliant.
How 'bout using that power to crack PGP? What would that be worth... essentially control the internet? The NSA wouldn't want to crack PGP now would they? Probably wouldn't be in the budget. Maybe they could outsource it to Snowden and the Bitcoin network while drawing attention to themselves. That strategery certainly worked for Bart Chilton.
"But, this BTC mining article was extremely intersting, thanks Tylers for posting it. It will be a wonderful journey watching and participating in BTC."
Indeed. You are truly a rare person and are making history if you bought BTC in 2013.
"You are truly a rare person and are making history if you bought BTC in 2013."
You sure left that statement open for interpretation.
The Tylers should look at hosting in Iceland versus Switzerland. I checked it out and Iceland has a number of hosting companies and passed laws to protect whistleblowers and others. I wonder how big the pipes are to Europe and North America. I thought I saw a 200 GB fiber connection.
"It will be a wonderful journey watching and participating in BTC."
You must be out of your fucking mind, "wonderful journey"?
Mining for Bitcoins is like guessing at lottery numbers.
Whoever designed the Bitcoin software can create as many Bitcoins as he wants and at any time that he wants.
Bitcoin is as much of a scam as the US Dollar.
Congratulations if you speculate and win buying and selling Bitcoins. But there is no new fundamental money in Bitcoins. It's just a computerized Ponzi scheme.
Finally, a voice of reason on this thread! You seem to have it all figured out, just keep to your winning strategy, mate.
@ orez65
It is an interesting and wonderful journey... Look at the math under the hood. At least three impressive encryption techniques, and it, to a degree, works! I bought 0.25 oz of Au with BTC... Also, there is very possibly going to be a set of scholarly articles written about BTC, the hardware, how strong the various encryption mechanisms are, how & why there are failures, etc., etc.
Bitcoin and related are a "leap into the void". I am surprised that so many here are not captured by this... But then, not many are by FOFOA either.
***
I have no real idea whether BTC is going to work out or not. I would guess that some kind of crypto-currency will though.
Whoever designed the Bitcoin software can create as many Bitcoins as he wants and at any time that he wants.
Since the code is open source you and millions of others can change the parameters as you like anytime. Good luck.
+1
I have been scratching my head about this mining operation idea. I came to the same exact conclusion before reading your response. It is like having really fast servers trying to guess lotto numbers.
I think Bitcoins backed by gold might be cool. The problem is how do we verify that I have $2,000 in gold bars. The second you say that you put it in a depository - it is no good. Once you lose possession - game over. The govt can always raid or quietly loot a depository.
If someone could come up with a way then gold prices would skyrocket.
Here is Dr. Jim Willie and Turd Ferguson on Christmas Eve talking about gold, the dollar, global fianancial system.
http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/podcast/5349/jackass-roasting-open-fire
Talking about backing Bitcoin means you clearly don't get it.
The Bitcoin Channel
No Gold backing. Bitcoin is "backed" by Math and an open source network protocol. A distributed, not easily controlable, unhackable, unspammable, network of TRUST that verifiably validates distributed consensus. That is the true value of Bitcoin. This property of bitcoin, which is VALUED, is unprecedented in world history. We are discovering right now how much the bitcoin consensus is worth.
Gold shares some of the properties of bitcoin. Gold is a wonderful store of value. In other ways it is very different. Owning Gold is not without risk though. Nor is owning Bitcoin free of risk. Anything that has value has risk attached, primarily theft.
I clicked on this link to see what fonestar said. I'm sad not to see his (Canadian?) bitcoin enthusiasm here on point.
I'm currently in Mexico. I have offered the street vendors here payment in USD, CAD, Pesos, pure silver coin, junk silver and Bitcoin. All of them wanted paper US dollars still. So you could take that as a glass half-full or half-empty. Alternative currencies are still very much unloved after all the central planner's shenaningans of the past five years, but that means we just have that much further to run.
Merry Christmas to all!
I suspect that it is a rare 3rd world official who will not accept "C" notes for his trouble.
True dat ---^
@ fonestar
Peru in the 1980s suffered from a hyperinflation. The ONLY things accepted (retail level, this was before we had our bearing company there) were Peruvian Soles and US$. Peruvian Soles, yes, they were up to 5,000,000 Soles notes...
No silver. Many survivalists (and I am kind-of a half-assed survivalist) think that silver (esp. "junk silver") would be accepted in a SHTF. I never saw that (payment by silver) in Peru, even though they were the No. 2 producer in the world of silver. One of FOFOA's top fans went through a hyperinflation, he saw NO ONE in his country accept silver as payment. Only local currency and US$.
So your comments about what Mexican street vendors rings true.
***
BTC's future is uncertain AFAIK. But, it's been a fun and strange trip!
Great Xmas back at you!
DCRB, I normally don't haggle with you, but ...
But, it's been a fun and strange trip!
This can only be true before, as citizens of various countries, we have gotten to the "tax mule dick goes where?!?!" phase yet.
This is widely concerning given the broad use of "central banks" which tend to frat-rape muppets. I hardly feel confidence knowing that Russia/China may take over after the petro-dollar tanks ...
Tijuana Donkey Show may very well prove to be the prophetic ZH moniker ...
Regards,
Cooter
Ya CrazyOne! As I work to decipher exactly what you mean, I do concede, of course, that I know nothing...
Tijuana Donkey Show... I wonder if that is like the Reynosa Donkey Show I heard so much about when I lived in Texas... I went with a crew of three others to see (ah, MANY MOONS ago, that would be in the 1980s for the young 'uns here), nope...
***
I feel little confidence in our financial future as well. So much criminality, and so entrenched.
"Off the grid" is a good answer for those who can do it. Else:
Gold, fishez!
Yea the usd has always been there to turn to during hyperinflations, but what's left when it's the usd's turn?
Are the miners digging more than their own graves?
A major new trend for scientific problem solving is distributed computing. In distributed computing, computers connected by a network are used collectively to solve a single large problem. Many scientists are discovering that their computational requirements are best served not by a single, monolithic computer but by a variety of distributed computing resources linked by high-speed networks. This worldwide popularity of distributed computing can be traced back mostly to software developed in ORNL’s distributed computing research project.
What's Bit Coin really computing?
Is it a number of things?
And they pay to do it.
Big Data mining analysis for 100 Alex.
It could only ever come down to this...
"The technology also cuts down on electricity use -- one of the other major costs associated with Bitcoin mining. Lau wouldn't reveal how much it cost to build the mine, but he said that electricity bills for a fully-operational mine of this size would typically exceed $50,000 per month."
Bull shit!
Jevons Paradox.
While the process may be more efficient that in no way equates to LESS energy being used. We are continuing to increase total energy usage: though I think we're topping.
I will say this, though, at least there's an associated cost to "wealth" creation, rather than shit like QE, FB and TWTR. And with all things, opportunity costs should be seen clearly: this is energy that isn't going into food production or for use in cooking or heating.
Keep this up and one day we'll all, except for the "wealthy," be strapped into our seats stroking away to generate power for the "mining" operation... Always figured this, but it was more along the line of use in extracting real shit (such as energy)...
as complexity rises and mining rewards shrink the income of the miners will shift to transaction fees.
at that point the profitability will be limited by a non-trivial function of the total bitcoin economy, the percentage people are willing to pay for transaction fees, and the relative cost of electricity and chip manufacturing compared to other goods.
and that in turn will limit how much human action and resources will be put into mining as opposed to everything else that people desire. but it's not all wasted, because sound money is as much needed for a complex society as food. and if it can help defund politicians and their wars, then that gives a huge leeway to waste on mining...
but as promising as it is, i'm still staring baffled at this whole thing...
I think your take is as good as any :-)
At any rate, it's not looking good for the majority of the planet's inhabitants. (but all the prophets pretty much warned us of this)
Are there any power companies accepting BC for payment? No? There is the major problem with BC, it needs to be converted.
Patience, grasshoper.
How to solve the national debt: Use the NSA's supercomputers to mine Bitcoins.
You have restored my belief in people's ability meet challenges through creative thinking!
Let's just hope the NSA does it the legal way rather than just stealing (crap! hope I didn't give them any ideas!).
Your not sick or twisted enough to give them ideas.
#41
This settles it; I'm dragging the Coleco 64 out of the garage and starting my own bItcoin mine!
You can mine bitcoins from a webpage. You might solve a block once every 300 years or so, but you'll mining.
http://qz.com/154877/by-reading-this-page-you-are-mining-bitcoins/
Huh? The article indicated there are only 11M left to be mined? Assume $1000/ BC, and you may be able to pay the interest for one day.
Believe it or not, the bitcoin network likely has many thousands of time the performance (for mining bitcoins) than all of the NSA's computers combined. The scale of computing resources devoted to bitcoin is truly astonishing given how new it is.
My own personal mining rigs exceed the performance of the world's top 10 supercomputers at mining bitcoins combined. And I'm just one guy with a tiny, tiny fraction of the mining capability shown in this article.
That's the best way to inflate national debt much faster Mr 666!
As I rack up a few more rosetta@home task points.
Krugman likes bottles in coal mines but doesnt like bitcoinz? Very confused. :(
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/time-for-bottles-in-coal-mines/?_r=0