5 ms·

In 2010 I built an 8-GPU machine[1] (4 dual-GPU AMD HD5970) and wrote an MD5 bruteforcer (then faster than hashcat), doing 28.6 then 33.1 billion passwd hashes/

• vit05 9y ago
  "At a current market value of about USD$0.22 per coin" wow
  • Roritharr 9y ago
    The regret I feel having given away all of my 100 bitcoins at that price point will forever haunt me.
    • pmontra 9y ago
      Seconded. The bitcoin to USD ratio is like 1 to 2700 right now http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=USD http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=USD
      • ASlave2Gravity 9y ago
        What's caused the price to rise so much the past few months?
        • bastijn 9y ago
          Accepting by major parties and even speculated governments (Japan I believe) was one. In generic, being able to spend it in more places as well as people seeing the potential of trading in it.
        • konceptz 9y ago
          It's also being used to hide cash in China. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/jeff-gundlach-has-a-theory-on-why-bitcoin-is-surging.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/jeff-gundlach-has-a-theory-on...
        • ihalip 9y ago
          IMO, this happened because of the Ethereum ICO fever. While there are a number of exchanges that allow you to trade USD -> BTC, there aren't as many that allow trading USD -> ETH. So there are people who might have traded USD -> BTC -> ETH, and this increased demand for BTC.
          • eightysixfour 9y ago
            You can check this thesis pretty easily: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/ As you can see, ETH <-> Fiat pairings have more volume than BTC -> ETH right now.
        • matt4077 9y ago
          Speculation. FOMO.
        • paulpauper 9y ago
          erethium yes, but other factors too: Bitcoin is a form of safety and asset diversification in a world of economic uncertainty. Wealthy foreigners like bitcoin because it is in many instances safer than keeping money in a bank
          • pmontra 9y ago
            Foreigners relative to which country?
    • nikcub 9y ago
      You can get over that feeling very quickly by reminding yourself to focus on what you might be missing out on today that you don't want to regret in years from now.
      • matt4077 9y ago
        Or, alternatively, by remembering the efficient market hypothesis. And going for ice cream with someone you like.
        • thatcat 9y ago
          That would be good consolation, but EMH doesn't really apply to emerging markets due to the large information gap about the market. So if you were part of the informed population and thought it was a good investment, but didn't follow through it's still pretty hard to not feel like you made a costly mistake.
      • paulpauper 9y ago
        It's annoying when ppl try to dull the pain of regret with statements like that. You're right but it's not helpful in practice. Bitcin turned anyone who bought even just a few dollars of it in 2009-2010 and held, rich And those who bought $1000s if it in 2011 into millionaires. This may be is the greatest gain of any tradeable instrument in the history of civilization. You can't find those kind of returns anywhere else, short of investing in the next Uber or Facebook but those were private ventures and unlike Bitcoin not open to the public. Selling 1000 books on amazon for $8, although virtually possible for ordinary people to d, is like a piddly 3 bitcoins that any fool could have bought have bought in 2012. Goes to show how capital beats labor. To get rich, look for things that will go up and put your money in it early. Easier said than done, but the returns are astronomical when you get it right.
      • dghughes 9y ago
        Ethereum.
        • dghughes 9y ago
    • xyz1237795 9y ago
      How would you cash out on a huge BTC gain? What would happen if you sold say $500,000 worth at an exchange, then had them wire that to your bank account? Let's say no account in your name ever had a monthly deposit total greater than $10,000 and suddenly that shows up. Would you be under investigation by several organizations? Would you be flagged for audit every year for the rest of your life?
      • Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
        Your bank might be worried, but if you use a 'reputable' exchange that does KYC/AML, e.g. GDAX or Gemini, it should be alright. You might want to space out the bank transfers. As for the tax man, declare the capital gains and you'll be right as rain.
    • ferentchak 9y ago
      The huge mistake you really made was not taking those two dollars and buying a winning powerball ticket. Had you known then what you know now losing some cash on Bitcoin was the least of your lost opportunities. ;)
• 19eightyfour 9y ago
  Am i correct in assuming that floating point operations would stress these machines even more so, so in other words if the hash computation somehow required lots of floating point calculations the time taken to crack would be much longer?
  • m1el 9y ago
    There aren't any widely used hashes that require floating point computations. Other than that, floating point instructions are usually slower.
    • shaklee3 9y ago
      True on a CPU, but on a GPU floating point is as fast, or usually faster.
• mtgx 9y ago
  > Moore's Law is still alive and kicking (contrary to what many claim)! That statement is so often misunderstood, in multiple ways. First off, Moore's Law isn't technically about performance increases. It's about doubling of transistors every 2 years on the same die space. We still got that on CPUs until very recently, even though CPU performance has stopped doubling every 2 years like 15 years ago. But now even the transistor count doubling doesn't happen every 2 years - for CPUs. If that were to happen we'd all have 32- or 64-core laptops by now. And even then the performance wouldn't be anywhere close to 64x (compared to single core). The second misunderstanding, which exists in your post, too, is that most people refer to Moore's Law dying when they talk about CPUs (especially if we discuss performance). However, GPUs have indeed kept doubling or so their performance every 2 years, also until very recently. Now it's more like a 30% improvement per year, or 70% improvement every 2 years, which is still way better than CPUs. And the reason for this is because GPUs pretty much scale with number of cores. If you have 4000 CUDA cores in 2017 for 150W TDP and a $1000 price, then you're going to have let's say 7000 CUDA cores for 150W TDP and $1000 price in 2019, and the performance will be 70% greater. It doesn't work like that for CPUs, and it hasn't for like 15 years.
  • mrb 9y ago
    On a GPU more transistors = more compute units = more performance. Hence my over-simplification of Moore's Law. I strongly disagree that the rate of CPU perf improvement has slowed down "15 years ago". What a laughable statement. You have to look beyond core count to gauge performance. Microarchitectural improvements, new instruction sets (SSE, AVX), bigger caches, etc certainly still help keep the pace. Have a look: https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/20/top500/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/20/top500/ In particular: https://6lli539m39y3hpkelqsm3c2fg-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/TOP500-SC15-Tech-Trends-Scalar-Processors-Moores-Law-is-fine.png https://6lli539m39y3hpkelqsm3c2fg-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp... Also perhaps you get confused by the fact the average wattage of CPUs sold to consumers is dropping. If, from the performance of a 60-70 watt Netburst Pentium 4 from 2001, you project the expected performance of a 2017 CPU according to Moore's Law, then you should look at today's 60-70 watt CPUs, not at modest 10-20 watt CPUs that seem to be quite popular these days.
• andruby 9y ago
  > incidentally posting this machine on HN is how I got pointed to Bitcoin thanks to the reply of a HN user :) Mining in 2010 with such a machine. That must have yielded a considerable ROI.
  • shawabawa3 9y ago
    Someone in that thread calculated 50 coins per 26minutes. Assuming they didn't sell any, that would be worth $250k/hour today...
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
    I kick myself because in 2010 I had 2 HD5970s was all set up for mining and got bored and did something else.
• bitL 9y ago
  > Moore's Law is still alive and kicking (contrary to what many claim)! In GPUs, which is why tech that can take advantage of parallel processing such as Deep Learning, AR or coin mining has a bright future, whereas the rest is slowly falling into standardized oblivion with low-paying jobs.
  • dave_sullivan 9y ago
    A different way to look at it might be that there are fewer applications that can benefit from higher speed that can't be parallelized. 2x speedup on your CPU gives you what exactly? And at 64gb of ram, I don't need 128gb unless I'm moving into HPC territory. Consumer PC hardware is good enough and everything new people want to see has to do with flashy graphics in low-power small-form-factor devices (or people want decisions made for them in what turn out to be computationally intensive ways). As you point out, graphics, deep learning, AR, and others can benefit from increased computational power. Therefore, we're seeing Moore's Law (which didn't start with Moore) appear where that increased compute ability can be most readily applied. Meanwhile, when an exciting new technology appears, there are always a small group of people that have the required expertise. With IT, young brains are able to learn these new skills incredibly quickly, so markets respond very quickly. From what I've seen, there's usually an overshooting effect where people think "there's a future in X" for longer than they should. Maybe school is to blame. But basically, you have a ton of new entrants to the market, and they fill demand, but demand levels off sooner or later, and that leads to the low-paying oblivion you're talking about. I point all this out because there's nothing magic about deep learning, AR, etc. They may not be high paying niches for long. And already, the most-reliable/highest-paying opportunities seem to be working in small groups serving defined markets.