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Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

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Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#91
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about it, I wonder how much QDR SRAM bandwidth compare with GDDR5. This would be useful for Monero for example. Nobody is going to care about spending a few hundred for FPGAs with large amount of memory if a 5x-10x boost over GPUs is possible, but...

There's a price trap here. The good FPGAs still cost $10K or more each and if you're intending to ship that hardware, which is how the Bitcoin and Litecoin ASIC platforms bootstrapped themselves, you're going to be in trouble if your FPGA solution can't beat the equivalent spend on GPUs. Bitcoin lends itself to FPGA acceleration extremely well, SHA256 is trivial to implement in an absurdly parallel way. Scrypt is a b…

I am thinking of Monero and CryptoNight not Ethereum for FPGAs for that reason. I am thinking of ideally something like Virtex-7 or Vertex-8 with 32Mbit or more of memory.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#92
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11MWh average, 0.12 cents/kWh?! Power costs more than twice as much in Europe, and the average household uses half as much. No wonder you guys (in a twisted democratic sense of the word) aren't too fond of climate treaties.

I know you're sort of joking, but that doesn't really explain it: the places where power is cheapest in the U.S. are the places where the most renewables are used. Here in Pacific Northwest power is closer to 8 cents/kWh because it's mostly hydro; Texas is cheaper than in the surrounding South because it has more wind power, etc.

In this case, the server room location is Allen, Texas, likely paying commercial rates.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#93
post #84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL! Congrats to HN for going 24 days without bringing this up. I have written it up last time in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14563751 so let me copy > Every time I ask, people come and say but... but... international transfers! and I point it out that for that transfer the sender needs to buy bitcoins, transfer and the receiver needs to sell them because there is no legal, useful application of it :) And th…

Please don't do this here.

Don't do what? Someone needs to advocate against this bullshit.

People are cheering this crap because they hold coins and when ordinary people get burned they shrug and say "you shouldn't have done that". Ordinary banking systems have a number of brakes built in so that people do not lose their money in an instant -- at least not that easily.

As an example, more than one person made the mistake of typing in an Ethereum address instead of copy-pasting and losing their money in the process. Or when someone's account on an exchange get hacked and thieves walk away with the money the usual answers are "why you didnt have 2fa" or "why did you leave money in the exchange". If someone hacks my online account they can't do an outgoing transfer to a new address without verifying a code first -- that's 2FA -- and more likely than not, there'll be a daily/per transfer limit I can report to the police, contest the wire and so forth. There are remedies. If it's crypto"currency"? Sorry for your loss!

When I say, legit uses, and people say, VPN, I am like sure you want to do a public service of seeding Linux images and your evil ISP stops torrenting so you need to use a VPN. I get it. The fact that you are using an anonymous way to pay has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the traffic you run through this VPN is breaking the law. Surely No True Scotsman or in this case No True Hacker News Reader would do such a thing!

When I say, legit uses, and people say, various businesses accept Bitcoin, no, they absolutely don't, they integrate the separate sell your bitcoin step into the checkout, the moment Bitpay dropped Canadian dollars, Newegg Canada dropped Bitcoin without a second's hesitation. No business wants Bitcoin on their books, that's a horror bookkeeping / accounting wise.

I maintain: all there is illegal money transfer out of China and more than a little hype with the occassional Ponzi and other scams thrown in. Just because sometimes VCs are on top of a pyramid scheme it doesn't cease to be a pyramid.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#94
post #93
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do this here.

Don't do what? Someone needs to advocate against this bullshit. People are cheering this crap because they hold coins and when ordinary people get burned they shrug and say "you shouldn't have done that". Ordinary banking systems have a number of brakes built in so that people do not lose their money in an instant -- at least not that easily. As an example, more than one person made the mistake of typing in an Ethere…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#95
post #93
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do this here.

Don't do what? Someone needs to advocate against this bullshit. People are cheering this crap because they hold coins and when ordinary people get burned they shrug and say "you shouldn't have done that". Ordinary banking systems have a number of brakes built in so that people do not lose their money in an instant -- at least not that easily. As an example, more than one person made the mistake of typing in an Ethere…

Please don't:

(1) snark on HN about HN talking about something—that's incongruent and supercilious;

(2) paste earlier comments into new threads;

(3) rant in a flamewar fashion. It never persuades anyone and it damages the commons.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#96
post #12

The premise of mining bitcoin is not really about being cost effective today, but taking a long position on its value, and what you perceive the value will be, for totally anonymous money at some point in the future. Because the profit earned from mining is pretty close to the definition of untrackable in a crypto.

You need to buy the equipment from some third party and hide your IP address. It's possible to do both while maintaining anonymity, but if you can hide cash transactions then bitcoin get's you zero net benefit while exposing you to new risks.

> You need to buy the equipment from some third party and hide your IP address.

No. You don't.

The other stuff is just confusing.

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