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Javascript Bitcoin Miner

forum.bitcoin.org

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I should add that the prospects of finding any meaningful amount of shares, while much better than finding a block, are still quite low. My GPU can find a couple of shares per minute in a good minute, but it operates at 55.5Mhash, over 10x faster than my CPU (i7-2600K). Consider that most are going to have really slow CPUs and share the processor power with other heavy applications (Flash games), and you might ge…

That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to le…

An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id...

Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#62
post #50

So why does the bitcoin economy reward spending processing power? I guess our economy does too (quant finance)

At heart, it's because honest nodes spending CPU power to notarise transactions in a distributed manner is what maintains the system's integrity. I suggest reading the original bitcoin whitepaper - even if you find the economics a bit dubious, as I do, the tech is certainly interesting.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#63

Just used google's closure compiler http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home on http://bitp.it/jsMiner.js and it saved some 4.11%. While compiling on advanced mode i get lot of warnings.

If you take the output of the Closure compiler and run it through the compiler again, it will almost always be smaller the second time. However, the second will also likely produce javascript that doesn't work because it renames things that shouldn't have been renamed (and only the original source contains the information necessary to determine what shouldn't be renamed).

The 4.11% reduction you experienced is likely gained at the expense of invalidating the code.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to le…

An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id... Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam

Even if he is right and bitcoin shouldn't be considered a "currency", but rather an asset or a scam to enrich the early adopters, I think there is still a question I wrote above, namely, if it is worth to buy bitcoins for money now.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#65
post #50

So why does the bitcoin economy reward spending processing power? I guess our economy does too (quant finance)

Because you need some way to inject new coins into the system initially. Bitcoin chose to do this by allowing early users to "mine" the currency.

The traditional approach is to have a central bank which does the minting and printing, and then the regular banks can borrow that money. Those banks then lend that money to their customers, possibly creating more virtual currency by fractional reserve banking.

Bitcoin obviously can't do that because it is a decentralized system. The traditional approach also has the disadvantage that all currency in circulation is ultimately borrowed, so there is always more debt than money unless you allow banks to default. That can only work as long as the economy is growing fast enough.

I think there are even better alternatives, by modeling currency after trust and social capital: http://ripple-project.org/decentralizedcurrency.pdf

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#66
Going meta:

I've seen in the last few weeks apparently relevant and polite posts that had been flagged dead[1]. One of these was a post by jashkenas in a CoffeeScrit thread. This one could hardly have been more on topic.

Is there a new moderation policy, or is it a bot with a happy trigger?

[1] In this thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566826 , a post by jhuckestein, and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566797 by csomar.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#67
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to le…

An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id... Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam

He might be an economist, but he doesn't know anything about monetary history:

The economic assumptions underpinning the Bitcoin ecosystem are laughable, and ignore hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how currencies work with each other.

Paper money is about 100 years old. That's it.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#68
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to le…

An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id... Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam

There's quite a bit of misunderstanding in that post, especially with respect to systemic weaknesses. And a lot of unsubstantiated claims and terrifying graphs (like that tweet graph as something desirable for currency inflation - what it also implies is your savings going up in smoke).

I'd love to find an in-depth debate on Bitcoin from an economic standpoint, but this is not it. It's just more of the same half-understood FUD. And it is a horrible idea when half-understood - IMO, it remains to be seen if it's a horrible idea when fully-understood.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#69
Regarding angry visitors, I think it is completely fair if you just inform them of what is going on.

In a way, this is the perfect internet model: I offer my content for free but visitors pay me with cpu cycles. It's superior to the ad-model because it pays according to time spent on the page regardless of who the audience is.

It's too bad that it's infeasible because of the very low rate.

Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

#70
post #35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

way, way less than 10mhash s/mhash/Mhash/

that's a bit pedantic, ya know... the number only means something to people who know the system even a little bit, and they'll immediately translate to the proper unit because 10 milli- hashes per second makes no sense. Unless you're mining by hand. It's like ranting that people talk about "10mb" files. Or "100gb" or "100GB" drives. When they're technically "93.1GiB" drives ("gibibyte" [1],[2], or [3]). [1]: http://e…

Ironically - your example speaks against itself. 100GB Drive is a very precise and agreed upon way of referring to a drive - it means 1x10^11 bytes. 93.1 GiB drive is unusual - we don't typically use powers of 2 when referring to drive length - so if you really mean 93.1 GiB, then it's important you call it out as such, or people (storage admins, driver manufacturers, and operating system developers) will understand you to mean 1X10^11 bytes when you say 100 Gigabytes. Precision has it's place.
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