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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#101

Post by wellboy »

corford wrote: post #97
wellboy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

108 days and afterwards you make $1,500 income per month and you could travel the world and never have to work again if you don't want to? Sounds like a pretty good deal. What you didn't take into you account as well was the fact that this is $3,000 if Ethereum doubles in price, $4,500 if it tripes like you specified.

That income is not coming from mining Ethereum and, as time goes on, the amount of any coin you can mine diminishes (sometimes rapidly). The only way to avoid diminishing mining returns as difficulty increases is to swap to a new, lesser known coin. Eventually you run out of coins to swap to or the ones you are mining don't go up in value (because if they did, bigger miners would come in and knock you out of the game…

It isn't really hard to mine profitably, you can look up which ones are profitable and choose out of over 1,000 coins, of which 100 are already above market cap of $500M, so that's not the bootleneck.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#102

Post by pbhjpbhj »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #48
bdr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You register the hash of domain+seed. Second transaction reveals both.

Couldn't someone else then simultaneously register the hash of the same domain with a different seed? Neither of you would know of the duplicate until you revealed your seeds.

What's the chances of simultaneous transactions? (That's a question, not a snarky statement).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#103

Post by deadw0mb »

corford wrote: post #19
doctoboggan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have modern cards you can still mine with one of the services that find the most profitable algorithm for you. I use NiceHash and have historically made about $2/day per GTX1070. This past month though I've been making more that double that. EDIT: Use this site to find out if your cards will be profitable considering your energy costs: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator I do want to leave one im…

I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…

> A GTX1070 costs about $800.

Where on earth are you getting that statistic? Newegg sells GTX 1070 ti's for ~500 when they are in stock. Same with bhphotovideo.

Depending on what coin you mine you can net $8-10 dollars a day - then exchange it to ETH/LTC/XMR/etc.

Also factoring in the growth rate of the exchanged currency the ROI on that is less than 3 months.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#104

Post by Tepix »

pmontra wrote: post #98

Aren't all of those scenarios covered by fraud laws? Obviously one should be able to provide evidence that an actual miner willingly reordered transactions to get paid twice. I don't know if this is possible (gathering the evidence.)

Miners are not required to put anything into a block in any particular order. If you don't like what they are doing, stop paying them.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#105

Post by corford »

wellboy wrote: post #101
corford wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That income is not coming from mining Ethereum and, as time goes on, the amount of any coin you can mine diminishes (sometimes rapidly). The only way to avoid diminishing mining returns as difficulty increases is to swap to a new, lesser known coin. Eventually you run out of coins to swap to or the ones you are mining don't go up in value (because if they did, bigger miners would come in and knock you out of the game…

It isn't really hard to mine profitably, you can look up which ones are profitable and choose out of over 1,000 coins, of which 100 are already above market cap of $500M, so that's not the bootleneck.

Yeah but you're forever capped at meager returns.

As soon as a coin's value increases, more mining hash power enters the scene and difficulty shoots up (ruining your profit margin). You then swap to another coin, eventually the same thing happens. Rinse, repeat.

During all of this, you still have to make back your initial investment on the GPUs and power, then you have usually another 6-9 months max before your entire rig is too outdated and you have to start again buying newer, faster cards (which will then take you another 3-5 months just to earn back your cost).

Just seems a very painful and slow way to cash in on the crypto bonanza (which isn't going to last forever).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#106

Post by Tepix »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #102
SimonPStevens wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't someone else then simultaneously register the hash of the same domain with a different seed? Neither of you would know of the duplicate until you revealed your seeds.

What's the chances of simultaneous transactions? (That's a question, not a snarky statement).

There aren't any. That's what the article was about: The order of the transactions in a block.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#107

Post by pbhjpbhj »

>"In this way, Proof of Work forces miners to constantly re-invest revenue." (the OP) //

Classic capitalist view. It's not that miners are forced to reinvest, if all miners were satisfied with the status quo then it could continue and each miner would get the same returns - depending on the structure of the system, greater demand could even drive hash value up.

But miners aren't satisfied, they want more, and new miners want a go at picking from the money tree. So the available pickings get higher up (require more resource expenditure). In theory, and often practically, it drives optimisation. Ultimately the return should be so low as to match safe investment returns.

It seems it should be possibly to design a system such the the coin holders can effectively own the means of hash production, which would keep value in the system.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#108

Post by DINKDINK »

>Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

Except that ethereum is lying when they say this. The DAO contract was nullified and censored. The Ethereum Foundation and the DAO team were bailed out and had preferential treatment.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#109

Post by andybak »

infogulch wrote: post #16
runeks wrote: post #11

> Again, let’s design a simple smart contract. This time Alice wants to play a guessing game. Alice puts 5 Ether in her contract. That ETH goes to the person that guesses closest to the number she’s thinking of. Alice calls commit with the hash of the number, so she can’t change her mind. Anyone else can call guess to submit a guess. After 2 blocks Alice calls reveal to tell everyone what the number is. This scheme i…

In other words, blockchain programming isn't trivial, and you have to translate your intentions into the contract with blockchain concepts in mind.

> blockchain programming isn't trivial

This surely is a very bad thing. I'm not saying programming smart contracts should be trivial. Or maybe I am.

I guess the thing is - for Ethereum to have any chance of surviving it needs to be simple to write simple contracts. Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible. And footguns should be removed from the language...

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#110

Post by mhluongo »

mannykannot wrote: post #95
mhluongo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, anyone interested in taking a crack can write a language that compiles down to the Low-level Lisp-like Language (LLL) intermediate lang. There are a couple projects working on it (eg Viper), though many seems to prefer starting a new blockchain. Edit: s/Serpent/Viper/

Isn't Serpent an earlier effort that was abandoned in favor of Solidity? There was also the short-lived Mutan, V[iy]per (apparently a work-in-progress) and something called Slang.

Duh, Viper is what I meant- thanks :)
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