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MtRed Bitcoin mining pool will be shutting down
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoMore and more small pools are closing their doors due to the influx of ASICs. It's sad to see, and a big worry for the future security of the blockchain.
- pygy_ 13y agoWait until ASICS become widespread, and pools are once again needed.
- brador 13y agoWhat is ASICs? Google is giving me tennis shoes.
- codesuela 13y agoIt's basically a computer with specialized hardware whose sole purpose is to mine Bitcoins, see http://www.butterflylabs.com/ http://www.butterflylabs.com/ for an example
- mfenniak 13y agoAn ASIC is an application-specific integrated circuit. Basically, dedicated hardware like this: http://www.butterflylabs.com/ http://www.butterflylabs.com/
- phormula 13y agoApplication Specific Integrated Circuit in the bitcoin context they chips created for the specific purpose of hashing, allowing you to mine for bitcoins quickly and effficiently.
- litecoinguru 13y agoHere's an explanation: http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/02/17/bitcoin-asic-roundup/ http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/02/17/bitcoin-asic-roundup/
- mheathr 13y agoASIC is an implementation of a circuit. They will be the fastest implementation of the logic, however they are the most expensive implementation of that logic by far. Unlike FPGAs once logic is implemented in an ASIC the implementation is set in stone, so if there is a bug in the hardware fixing it will require producing an additional run and incur the expensive cost again. The high cost is why FPGAs are popular for both prototyping and production units when possible as it is much cheaper for smaller quantities. ASIC having exactly the logic necessary to target a task is why they are the most efficient at the task compared to general purpose hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrate...
- sp332 13y agoBTCguild got the lion's share of ASIC miners (so far, anyway). There's actually been some worry since that pool is approaching 51% of the network's power! That means with a malicious server, the admins could (theoretically, not saying they would) take over the entire network. They have taken some steps to reduce the number of miners in the guild, and have pledged to raise their fees if their control goes over 40%, to force miners to other pools. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168108.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168108.0 (The way they could take over the network is by crafting a new blockchain, forging fake transactions or even claiming that they own all bitcoins. If they solve blocks faster than the rest of the network, soon their malicious chain would become longer and therefore accepted by all clients! Clients always trust the longest chain because it takes the most work to make, so you would have to control most of the mining power to fake anything for long.)
- michaelbuckbee 13y agoSo say they did all of the malicious things you've stated, is that illegal?
- apalmer 13y agoLegality is an interesting question. I would guess it would not be illegal to manipulate the bitcoin protocol for personal gains, however any fraud committed would probably be illegal on its own merits.
- sneak 13y agoIllegal in which of the ~200 countries that Bitcoin is currently being used in?
- lgeek 13y ago> The way they could take over the network is by crafting a new blockchain, forging fake transactions or even claiming that they own all bitcoins. If they solve blocks faster than the rest of the network, soon their malicious chain would become longer and therefore accepted by all clients! Clients always trust the longest chain because it takes the most work to make, so you would have to control most of the mining power to fake anything for long. This is incorrect. Having 51% or more of the computing power of the network doesn't allow you to replace the whole blockchain (there are checkpoints, and it gets more difficult as you want to replace a bigger part of it). You also can't forge new transactions, since transactions need to be signed by the sender. Basically the only practical attack (assuming no serious bugs in the clients) is a double spend: they could pay out of their own wallet a sum X to a third party, the third party checks that the transaction has Y confirmations (remember, as Y grows, it gets more difficult to pull this off), they receive whatever they've bough from the third party, and then they start pushing a different and longer block not including the transaction.
- betterunix 13y agoIf only there were a formal definition of "security" that we could work with...
- eddywebs 13y agobitcoin pool shutting down are there any implications in terms of network hashrate or the overall exchange rate ?
- pygy_ 13y agoIndividual miners will use other pools. Switching is very easy.
- wmf 13y agoNot really; miners will switch to other pools.
- gibybo 13y agoOn top of the already mentioned fact of indivudal miners switching easily, MtRed was also a comparitively small pool so it had little impact on the network as a whole.
- ghshephard 13y agoWould anyone like to translate this? I'm reasonably familiar with bitcoin mechanics, but I couldn't understand what had occurred based on this post.
- yebyen 13y agoA mining pool collects work from miners who are too small to mine on their own. In Bitcoin today, this is basically every miner (other than the bigtime dudes who already got ASICs). Time to complete a block is in the years for GPU miners. Put together hundreds of miners at varying rates and collect their work into a pool, now you can afford to pay small miners something even if their work would not approach a single block in the amount of time that you see them. A negative buffer means they've been paying per share the going rate per share (however they've calculated that), and not some other way of calculating that avoids negative buffers (say, dynamically calculating the value of the shares based on how many buffers they touched and how much is in the buffer.) They have missed their projections for too long and they are closing their doors to avoid paying out of pocket, rather than change to a scheme that does not depend so much on the pool's luck.
- makomk 13y agoNormally, Bitcoin mining has fairly high variance - you only get paid when you find a block, and because blocks are relatively rare and found at random intervals your income varies a lot too. MtRed were what's known as a PPS pool, which meant they basically ate the variance and paid miners based on the amount of mining work they did. The trouble is that running a PPS pool requires a huge buffer of your own funds to cover payouts during periods of bad luck, and if the buffer isn't big enough the pool will inevitably go bankrupt. It appears this has now happened to MtRed and it sounds like they only have enough funds to pay out half the money they already owe miners. (Technically, over a long enough period of time PPS pools will go bankrupt with 100% certainty no matter how big the pool buffer.)
- tantalor 13y agoWould adding a fee allow them to continue? What if they only paid out when a block was found?
- brador 13y agoQuestion: At current electricity prices, what is the total cost of mining the complete 21 million bitcoins set?
- tantalor 13y agoIn other words, what is the expected cost for the electricity to mine one Bitcoin?
- gibybo 13y agoIn the average, general case, it is slightly less than the cost of one Bitcoin. Due to the recent volatility it has been a lot less, probably about half at the moment (expect this to increase though).
- gibybo 13y agoThis depends on a lot of factors that change rapidly and are hard to predict. Essentially it will take until 2130 to mine all Bitcoins, regardless of how much electricity/computational power is thrown at it (there are some technical exceptions to this, but they are unlikely). Current mining is probably using on the order of ~30-50 MW. At 10 cents kw/h (low estimate), that's ~$100k/day. It also grows with the price of Bitcoin, so it has been growing rapidly recently.
- mikeash 13y agoThe difficulty of mining is dynamically adjusted based on the currently available mining capacity so that bitcoins are produced at a constant rate over time no matter what. In other words, you could mine the full set of bitcoins for virtually no electricity whatsoever if you could convince the world to abandon bitcoin mining completely, then just let a single old, slow, cheap miner run in the corner for the next 100+ years. Or you could use as much electricity as you wanted on the project by throwing more and more computational resources at it.
- scrambam 13y agoQuestion: I love bitcoin but how come all the bitcoin sites either get hacked or close down?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mtred 13y agoHey, This is RR, To anyone curious, I will be on #mtred@freenode this evening answering questions.