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Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

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Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#61

Post by fleitz »

anigbrowl wrote: post #54
fleitz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the method of mining mean that a currency should not be accepted? Gold serves as a currency yet the methods of mining have changed drastically in the last 1,000 years.

Gold fell out of widespread use as a currency after the mining became industrialized. Nobody wants to play in a rigged game.

Tell me more about how gold fell out of use as currency because mining became industrialized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

I'm not a gold bug and I see many problems with using gold as a currency, namely that the amount of currency in circulation should depend on how much stuff we can dig out of the ground. (In the case of BTC something about how many times a SHA-256 hash can be calculated.)

The idea that gold fell out of use as currency because of industrialization is either a completely new discovery in economics, or completely wrong. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#62

Post by [deleted] »

zwily wrote: post #49
jpdoctor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more people get excited about faster ways to hoard bitcoins People seem to be oblivious to the fact that a currency must be available in order to be useful. There is a reason that Gresham's Law has achieved "Law" status. Oddly, the right thing to do for currency acceptance would be to shutdown all of the ASICs.

The same number of coins will be mined, no matter how many ASICs are online.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#63

Post by [deleted] »

fleitz wrote: post #61
anigbrowl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold fell out of widespread use as a currency after the mining became industrialized. Nobody wants to play in a rigged game.

Tell me more about how gold fell out of use as currency because mining became industrialized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 I'm not a gold bug and I see many problems with using gold as a currency, namely that the amount of currency in circulation should depend on how much stuff we can dig out of the ground. (In the case of BTC something about how…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#64

Post by drawkbox »

Too wrote: post #55
dualogy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves? Only if they're "long BTC". What makes you think they are? They're just providing shovels & tools to "miners in a gold rush". Historically, such providers have always done phenominally well. At least they get the rigs at production cost to run the…

The difference with shovels is you need to be there and shovel yourself. Here if you have tool, you just plug it in and it does all the work for you.

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 problems like verification (as in mining here) and maybe brain research/processing or other really hard data crunching problems.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#65

Post by caf »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #38

The more people get excited about faster ways to hoard bitcoins and eventually make a nice profit (presumably in USD in the end) the dramatically more cynical I become about its future. When the bitcoin discussion was mainly around its use as a currency for things like silkroad, VPNs etc I actually thought it seemed to have a promising future. I really hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling in 2023 the bitcoin discussi…

This is working out exactly as planned - the security of the system against double-spending is predicated on honest nodes controlling the majority of the hashing power in the bitcoin network, so the fact that people are working very hard to add hashing power to honest nodes is desirable for the system as a whole.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#66

Post by MasterScrat »

sjtgraham wrote: post #3

I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves?

From what I understand these devices started shipping right after the BitCoin peaked... Maybe the vendors kept "testing" them for just a bit longer than they expected?

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#67

Post by uid »

sjtgraham wrote: post #3

I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves?

what makes you think they aren't doing just that? they could start shipping them out and make a profit on the machines just as the difficulty rate picks up and there is more profit to be made in selling miners rather than mining.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#68

Post by zurn »

pseudonym wrote: post #46
jpdoctor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more people get excited about faster ways to hoard bitcoins People seem to be oblivious to the fact that a currency must be available in order to be useful. There is a reason that Gresham's Law has achieved "Law" status. Oddly, the right thing to do for currency acceptance would be to shutdown all of the ASICs.

I think people are more oblivious to the fact that a "deflationary currency" is inherently flawed because it by definition results in hoarding, which is not what you want people to do with your currency. Why would you bother loaning or investing it if you can make more money just sitting on it?

Deflation is not desireable in itself, but it is not a crippling disadvantage. Eg Japan has had a very long deflation spiral and it didn't affect the usability of their currency. And the west has been living in a world of negative real interest rates since the 2008 crisis.

As long as we don't have a big bitcoin credit market and we don't want to regulate the bitcoin "printing press" to adjust for market cycles, it won't even be a disadvantage. = As long as it's only a secondary currency to most users.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#69

Post by XorNot »

fleitz wrote: post #60
wintersFright wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will people want to borrow in defalationary biased currency though? Better to borrow in Bernanke Bucks where there is an unstoppable torrent being emitted monthly. IMHO the Real estate bubble was from the Fed bailing the prior tech bubble by suppressing interest rates - which encourages borrowing. When loans are paid back, the currency created by taking the loan is extinguished but they have been juicing the system b…

If the USD pops then BTC may be less deflationary. The bubble did not pop because mortgages were paid back. Loans are generally repaid in currency, paying back a loan creates even more currency as the additional currency created by the interest becomes an asset against which loans can be issued.

The idea the USD is going to collapse is farcical. It would be a global catastrophe of a scale not yet seen, but also not threatened.

Meanwhile, BTC gains and loses 50 - 80% of its value in a single day. I wonder which is more stable.

Re: Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

#70

Post by makomk »

nly wrote: post #25

I work this out to be about 180 Mhash/J, which is 80-100x more energy efficient than any GPU mining. Also, for anyone wondering: At current difficulty and rate of exchange this will cost you <$0.10 a day to run and generate $40 of Bitcoin.

Also 1/5th the energy efficiency that BFL originally promised when taking orders, and their most vocal spokesperson claimed that there was no way that they'd be significantly more power-hungry than predicted, that anyone who suggested otherwise was trolling, and that the only reason to draw attention to the fiasco when their FPGA mining hardware which was announced with impressive efficiency and blew out the power budget so badly they had to redesign the boards was to shill or troll. Right up until they blew their power budget and had to redesign the ASIC boards.

Additionally, he tried to convince people to buy BFL rather than one of the competing boards by arguing it was so much more power efficient miners using them would be forced to shut down. It's barely more power efficient than ASICs which shipped months ago, and those companies are already looking at newer models.

Oh, for what it's worth that's also less than 10x the power efficiency of the best FPGA boards...

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