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Latest Shipment of Avalon ASICs Could Increase Network Hashrate By 500%
- ihsw 13y agoThe flood of newly minted BTC will likely cause exchange rates to crater. Hopefully the increase in available BTC will stabilize prices as individuals/small groups will have to expend more capital to influence prices in their favor. The next six months are probably going to be a little crazy, hopefully it'll drive BTC out of the hands of speculators and into the hands of actual users of the currency.
- cgi_man 13y agoThe creation rate of BTC is fixed every 10 minutes. More ASIC power does not equal more BTC.
- jeffasinger 13y agoNot quite. The difficulty is set to average that a new block is found approximately every 10minutes. However, if lots of capacity is added all at once, the difficulty might not change for several days, and blocks will be generated at a faster rate during that time, as it is only updated every 2016 blocks. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
- cgi_man 13y agoSomewhat splitting hairs... it's adjusted to 10 minute blocks, and there's also a huge variability in how frequently they are discovered. Even if the average was 10 min, there are blocks found within the same minute, or with 30+ minute gaps.
- sp332 13y agoVariability wouldn't matter if the average over time was alright. But it's not just spitting hairs: BTC generation is significantly ahead of schedule. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5780861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5780861
- ihsw 13y agoCreation is indeed fixed and constant, but the supply of BTC within the exchanges isn't. The new owners of these ASIC boxes will find themselves in an excess of supply and they'll quite happily flood the market with this increased supply, or they'll spend the coins at merchants. Contrastingly other miners with inferior machines will find themselves behind the curve with a smaller source of income.
- Afforess 13y agoI doubt it. After the a few hundred (thousand?) blocks are mined, the mining difficulty algorithm will kick in, making mining just as difficult as it was before, relative to the new hash rate. It will mean gpu miners won't make anything at all, but the overall volume of new coins won't increase. Further reading: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
- nullc 13y agoThere isn't really a "flood" of newly minted BTC. The system performs closed loop control keeping the supply relatively constant.
- swang 13y agoWill these things be good for anything else once faster/better miners are introduced?
- CrunchyJams 13y agowhat kind of faster miners are you referring to? ASIC is the best available technology
- cgi_man 13y agoThe chip technology is an older process using 110nm technology. There are already several companies working on 40nm technology which will be more power efficient and be significantly faster per chip.
- rorrr2 13y agoThey will keep making money, just slower.
- ambiate 13y agoASICs are going to rid a large amount of pools. GPU mining and FPGA mining will fade out, because the value returned will be so minimal compared to these monsters. There is a finite amount of bitcoins released for a set amount of time. The power consumed/bitcoin return ratio on GPUs/FPGAs as the difficulty rises due to the ASICs will just leave people frustrated. GPU mining had one benefit. Once you gave up, you could at least resell the video card or play games. ASICs are basically trash. The FPGAs can be recycled on ebay. For those uninitiated: Assume I am on an i7 2600k and you are on a Pentium 2 clocked at a fine 200mhz. If we are mining in the same pool (just us), I will probably do 99.99% of the processing, and receive that return. You probably spent more power than me with your outdated technology, and only received 0.000001% of the payout.
- enraged_camel 13y agoI think the tech has gone CPU > GPU > FPGA > ASIC. Makes me wonder what will come next.
- zanny 13y agoYou do realize the whole premise of an application-specific-integrated-circuit is to do one thing the best. If properly architected, an ASIC that does the most SHA hashing with the least transistors will be the best miner, inherent to the technology.
- aristidb 13y agoThat doesn't mean the designs cannot be improved... And once somebody releases an improved design, the older ASICs become far less useful.
- ohazi 13y agoAt this point, an "improved" design would have to mean algorithmic improvements to a hardware SHA algorithm (i.e. not likely). Improvements that you can actually count on would be die shrinks, but these will provide returns in accordance with the tail end of Moore's law. Compared to the multiple-order-of-magnitude improvements from the CPU -> GPU/FPGA -> ASIC jumps, these improvements likely won't even be worth writing home about.
- rheide 13y agoWould a quantum computer be able to solve these kind of problems instantly?
- ambiate 13y agoThe difficulty would rise to compensate for the advent of quantum computing. The danger of quantum computing in bitcoin is holding the 51%+ computing power and being able to forge transactions in the 'books'. Source: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/what-effects-would-a-scalable-quantum-computer-have-on-bitcoin http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/what-effects...
- MichaelGG 13y agoHashing isn't affected by quantum computing. Quantum computing would only affect Bitcoin if the public-key aspect is vulnerable to quantum computing.
- trothoun 13y agoDoesn't the reliability of bitcoin stem from it being very difficult for any one entity to control over 50% of the computing power in the network? News like this makes it seem like a state sponsored actor could do it without too much trouble.
- wmf 13y agoIt's easy to get over 50% of the hashing power: just buy it. Bitcoin is especially vulnerable during technology transitions; e.g. in July 2010 a single Radeon GPU was more powerful than the entire Bitcoin network so you could have performed a 51% attack for $300 plus some epic hacking.
- xyzzy123 13y agoRight, but of course Satoshi's argument is that it would be far more valuable for you to have just used that Radeon to mine ;)
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Right, but of course Satoshi's argument is that it would be far more valuable for you to have just used that Radeon to mine Value depends on personal desire... Not all people want the same things.
- xyzzy123 13y agoThat's why we use money to exchange goods and services ;)
- justanother 13y agoI for one, look forward to all the cheap 6990s that are about to hit eBay.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoAnd Butterfly Labs still hasn't shipped their orders from Day 1. There will be an awful lot of people who will never see a return on their investment from this venture.
- deelowe 13y agoWould you ship them if you could make money by simply using them yourself? I'm a bit skeptical of this whole situation.
- Aqua_Geek 13y agoIt looks like they're shipping orders up to Oct 2012 now: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/ https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/ Or am I reading that wrong?