91–100 of 113 posts
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Are you sure about that? There have definitely been times in the past when the NSA rented fab capacity from Intel.
Wikipedia says they have their own fab at Ft Meade. Or is this just a super secure division of an Intel fab?
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First question, yes, I think you'd be talking about a timespan of months before seeing a reward as a lone miner. Joining a pool is pretty painless though. You just create an account, and probably give them an email address, and then start running GUIMiner or something. You also give them a Bitcoin address to send the rewards. That's it, no other personal information needed.
I just read about that and joined one yesterday, though. I ran it for an hour or so and made a ten-thousandth of a bitcoin or so, at which point I calculated that it's probably not worth the electricity and shut it down.
If you go with today's exchange rate, the Bitcoins I've collected mining since January are worth between 3 and 5 dollars (US) a day. I only recently shut down my BTC mining to try Litecoin, which is reported to be about 4x more profitable to mine.
The profitability of mining has gone down sharply in this time, if you ignore the fact that the exchange rate over time has made up for this fact. The coins I mined in January were worth more because there were more of them (and I didn't cash them in.) Last clean 11 day sprint of mining before the LTC experiment resulted in 0.2652BTC, same as the 8 day sprints in January.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I have a video card that I bought from Best Buy about a year ago for $160. Not exactly top of the line.
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NSA use FPGAs. Even they can't afford ASICs unless its a supercomputer CPU I.e IBM power and they aren't all that quick compared to an FPGA.
If Motorola and Cisco and other big tech firms have no trouble producing ASICs, why would the NSA? You don't need to fab them yourself, you just need designers and a fab partner.
When I worked for one of these orgs, we had a PowerPC rad hardened device which was based on a 603 and that was nearly $100k a unit in quantities of 50 and that was an off the shelf design. The one ASIC we had which was mixed mode (analogue front end and digital back end) was $25k a pop in quantities of 1000 on top of tooling and design costs of $7m.
Just doesn't add up. If its on the ground or can be bought in milspec form, it'll get used. Altera/Xilinx do this for a reasonable spend. Expect to be killed by an FPGA I programmed one day :(
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฿0.10 is currently USD$13.47, that's almost double minimum-wage. I'm having a _really_ hard time believing your computer uses USD$13.47 of electricity an hour.
It doesn't, which is why I didn't claim it. I said 0.0001 BTC. Maybe it was 0.00001, though. Actual math: 0.00000336030223163 BTC per share, I generated 21 shares, so my balance is 0.00007057 BTC. Roughly the amount I quoted, yeah.
Which made me think of a problem; BTC's are really a speculative market at the moment, rather than a currency (i.e. most people are buying them to trade, not to purchase items). I feel like that defeats the object.
But, hey, it was a tidy profit.
Bitcoins are just a right to participate in a digital crypto economy. They don't have any value in themselves. Its like holding passes to a show in the big theater. If the show doesn't start you passes are worthless. If there is any meaningful possibility of a show in the theater, you might get lucky for holding those passes. The main problem is that people who will participate in the show also need to get the passes…
This effect of deflation is why Japanese economy is so broken. And why Governments and central banks will do almost anything to keep inflation going.
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>people are hoping that its USD rate climb to $1000 or even $1 million, which is pretty ridiculous. Is it really? Not too long ago, a Bitcoin was worth about $.0007. 130/.0007 = 185714 It's only four more orders of magnitude to get to the $1M range. I don't think it's going to happen, but it's not all that far-fetched.
Well right now the entire bitcoin economy is valued at $1.6B so if a bitcoin rises to $1M the bitcoin economy would reach $12.3T . I'm no economist but that seems like it might be an unrealistically huge percentage of the world economy. I really don't think there's enough investable money in the world to get there.
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"Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme in that everyone is counting on someone else to want them" Exactly like gold. Yet you don't see people claiming gold is a "pyramid scheme", now do you? Most of gold's value is dictated purely by speculation and jewelry use (people want it because it is... rare - there is no other underlying reason). (People say that gold has value because it has industrial uses, but these uses only justif…
I don't know, Gold has a well known historical value, but the recent spike in value caused be distaste of Dollars is very similar to what is happening the Bitcoins. The problem with Bitcoins is that market has already proven it is capable of spiking to zero. Gold could drop, but it is very unlikely to drop too far below its historical levels (since there is demand for it by itself) in contrast, Bitcoins don't have an…
(If you have in mind the events of June 2011, it dropped to 0 because of bogus trades by the hacker; they were later reverted by MtGox).
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"Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme in that everyone is counting on someone else to want them" Exactly like gold. Yet you don't see people claiming gold is a "pyramid scheme", now do you? Most of gold's value is dictated purely by speculation and jewelry use (people want it because it is... rare - there is no other underlying reason). (People say that gold has value because it has industrial uses, but these uses only justif…
I don't know, Gold has a well known historical value, but the recent spike in value caused be distaste of Dollars is very similar to what is happening the Bitcoins. The problem with Bitcoins is that market has already proven it is capable of spiking to zero. Gold could drop, but it is very unlikely to drop too far below its historical levels (since there is demand for it by itself) in contrast, Bitcoins don't have an…