Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#101

Post by vl » Mon, Apr 22, 2013, 7:34 AM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #59

fiatpandas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$40 per day?

I estimate it'd produce around 0.25 BTC/day, mining in a pool. That's about $30/day USD at today's price. As ASICs come online, the difficulty is going to go up, which will reduce the daily generation rate for any given miner. I've been trying to decide whether or not to order a device now based on my profitability prediction for months from now when I might actually get it. I'm guessing by the time I get one I might…

>getting back to hoarding coins as an investment rather than using them as currency

But then, may be it's better just to hoard BTC directly right now by reallocating thousands of dollars required for device? Can't decide for myself.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#102

Post by Too » Mon, Apr 22, 2013, 5:02 PM UTC

MaysonL wrote: post #90

drawkbox wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is energy expended during the process though. I imagine if this continues 'banks' of the future will be data centers. Also might be a way to make money on idle servers at data centers. If anything this is an extremely interesting time in currency experimentation. Side effect of this is massive energy cost, another awesome side effect is hardware/supercomputer miniaturization and evolution. Great for really hard…

I'm amazed that there hasn't been a scandal with some Googler or Microsofty or Appler or academic finding a way to use some fraction of their unused cycles for mining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Botnet_mining

http://thenextweb.com/au/2011/06/23/abc-employee-caught-mini...

Doesn't mention anything about the computing capability of those servers though.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#103

Post by nbanks » Thu, Apr 25, 2013, 4:42 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #22

The heat is of course a byproduct of the higher wattage, but I wonder what on earth happened to make them miss the wattage target by 6-7x?

They probably missed the clock-rate by a factor of 2x, or decided to use half the number of chips and overclock them to save money. It may also have been their backup plan because people are willing to pay 8x as much for power, but they're less willing to get 1/2 the hashrate.

If you run a CPU at the same voltage, but at half the speed, it uses 1/2 the power because CMOS circuits only really use power as the transistors change state. However you're also able to run at about 1/2 the voltage without getting errors. Because V=IR, 1/2 the voltage at the same resistance is 1/2 the amperage, and since P=IV, that's 1/4 the power for normal circuits. Of course CMOS circuits already run at 1/2 the power. In the real world there's also leakage and such, but in a perfect world doubling the clockrate takes 8 times the power.

Transmeta's Crusoe was the first processor to really take advantage of this, by varying the voltage and running slower to save battery life. Before this time (2000), laptops would use a duty cycle to save power. Soon all the major chip manufacturers started copying them.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#104

Post by daniel-cussen » Sat, May 04, 2013, 12:00 AM UTC

illuminate wrote: post #96

daniel-cussen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the value of Bitcoin (if any) is that it's decentralized. It should be more profitable to sell the miners out than to hoard them because if they're distributed the cryptographic safety of Bitcoin is greater.

"It should be more profitable to sell the miners out than to hoard them because if they're distributed the cryptographic safety of Bitcoin is greater" Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand what decentralization has to do with miners' profit.

Decentralization boosts miners' profits by making bitcoin sounder, and therefore making its price higher.

Miner's profits have to do with the stability of the network and the demand for bitcoins. At high bitcoin prices, their return is better than when the prices are low, other things (thing, mining difficulty) being equal. It's much like gold mining: it has become much more profitable of late because the difference between extraction price ($250 to $400 per ounce in most places) and sale price (roughly $1,500 per ounce) is how much the miner takes home.

Decentralization increases this price because it makes bitcoin sound. If there's no one door to knock down, or one person to subpoena, the cyberpunk currency can robustly survive losses in its network and still have enough computing power trained on it to prevent attacks.