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10,000 Bitcoin Mining ASIC Chips Arrive in Switzerland – 3 TH/s
- oh_sigh 13y agoWhat happens when all 21 million bitcoins are mined? How will transactions be archived if no one is putting in the effort to mine bitcoins?
- nadaviv 13y agoTransaction fees are expected to replace the block reward by the time that happens.
- chmodd 13y agoWhich is year 2140 or so
- richcollins 13y agotransaction fees
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nullc 13y agoThe supply of "subsidy"— newly created coins— declines exponentially over time. So a long time before all 21m is mined, sometime around the year 2140 the amount of new coins created this way will be insignificant. Bitcoin transactions can optionally provide transaction fees which are paid to the first miner to include their transaction. Blocks have a limited size in order to prevent the biggest nodes from centralizing the system by producing more load than smaller ones can handle, so there will be competition for access to that limited space. Miners can then be funded collecting these fees.
- chris_mahan 13y agoso, just like in the gold rush of 1849, those getting rich are those selling equipment to the miners.
- cryowaffle 13y agoIt's more like "there ARE people getting rich selling equipment". There are plenty of miners getting rich.
- betterunix 13y agoPlenty of people found gold during the gold rush. That does not mean it is even remotely representative of the norm.
- astrodust 13y agoThis isn't manufacturing money out of nothing. This isn't generating physical materials with tangible value. The only money being generated here is simply being vacuumed out of the pockets of investors losing money on trades or exchanges. In that sense it's not unlike online poker.
- ethanbond 13y agoOr the US dollar (or any fiat currency).
- jnbiche 13y agoIf "generating physical materials with tangible value" is your benchmark, what are your feelings about Internet companies like Google and Facebook? They make very little in terms of physical goods. Recall that Bitcoin allows people to send money around the world in an extremely simple fashion, and at almost zero cost. Banks typically charge $15-$20 for international wire transfers on both ends of the transaction. I grant you that there a huge amount of speculation, but surely the ability to transmit value around the world, securely and very cheaply, is worth something?
- 13y ago
- dragontamer 13y agoThis basically will signal an end to the typical BTC pools. At .1 BTC (~$10) per chip, it is now possible to beat a $400 AMD 7970 with just $20 worth of chips.
- cryowaffle 13y agoThis doesn't change the pools at all (pools don't change if everyone uses ASIC). This does probably signal the end of GPU mining though.
- tomjen3 13y agoFuck bitcoin, if custom chips are that much cheaper the GPU power in cracking hashes then most key streching algorithms are worthless.
- tomjen3 13y agoApparently people downvote me. I don't hate bitcoin, but if the relative power is true then this is so much bigger than bitcoin.
- dragontamer 13y agoLol. You made a good comment, I dunno why you got downvoted. One thing to note: key stretching is a good idea nonetheless. hashing ASICs will be millions of times slower _regardless_. They may be hundreds of times faster than a computer, and hundreds of times cheaper... but the effect doesn't get you what a good Bcrypt-difficulty 12 gets you (ie: key-stretching with ~4million hashes)
- fatjokes 13y agoSuch a waste of electronic computing power. EDIT: what I meant by a waste of electronic computing power is that it does nothing for the world beyond pumping out more bitcoins. I guess it's more of my opinion on bitcoins in general than this particular artile. All the computational energy is not used to search for a cure for cancer, or aliens, or crack a code, or used to compute a deep neural net. I guess I would compare it to high-frequency trading---it makes people (a lot) of money, but doesn't deliver any net gain for society.
- gbl08ma 13y agoThat could be said in the time of CPU, GPU or FPGA mining, but since these ASICs do nothing but Bitcoin mining, I think computing power is only wasted when they aren't running. In other words, I don't think they qualify as "computing power" for anything but Bitcoin mining.
- DanBC 13y agoBut even when they're running all they're doing is pointless "mining bitcoin". And these ASICs are worse because they can't be re-purposed to do anything else. All that computing could have gone to Folding@home and done some actual science. Instead it's just burning power and creating heat.
- cdh 13y ago...and keeping Bitcoin working, and possibly enriching the ASIC's owners. So it's not just burning power and creating heat.
- testbro 13y agoThe same's true of mining equipment used to pull worthless diamonds out of the earth and the pollution it creates. The "problem" is the pointless mining generates valuable stuff in addition to waste heat.
- nadaviv 13y agoWhat about the electronic power and human work that goes to operating banks? By that logic, the alternatives to Bitcoin are much more wasteful. Edit: What I was trying to say, that maybe wasn't quite clear, is that Bitcoin mining isn't wasteful because it helps protect the integrity of the Bitcoin network. Other methods for holding and transferring money requires trusted third parties, who also "waste" (probably much more) energy, time and resources to operate.
- atte 13y agoI'm fairly new to the Bitcoin world, but it seems to me that ultimately (in 10 years or so) one of two things will happen: 1) Bitcoin will gain large-scale adoption. As a result, the value of Bitcoins will greatly increase from what it is today. 2) Bitcoin will fail due to government regulations, better alternatives, or other unforeseen reasons. As a result, Bitcoins will become effectively worthless. Am I oversimplifying so far? If I'm not, then it seems like investing substantially in Bitcoins (purchasing coins) now will either make me very rich in 10 years, or I'll lose my initial investment. By the same logic, if I earn coins by mining now and hold them, I will either be rich in 10 years, or I'll lose my mining investments. I'm not interested in diving into mining to earn a quick 10-20k while the market fluctuates, so as a long term strategy it sounds like investing is the more sensible and less time consuming option. Thoughts?
- nullc 13y agoA lot of people agree with this thinking. It's not the only possibility— e.g. Bitcoin could putter around for a long time basically where it is now, maybe acting as a very mild threat the keep the alternatives on their toes enough that Bitcoin never gets widespread adoption. Right now it's possible to make a decent amount _today_ with mining as a small / hobby business, supplying coins to people who don't want to get into the mining stuff, without engaging in major speculation yourself.
- ISL 13y agoPuttering would still be inflation-corrected.
- nullc 13y agoMaybe. Puttering could still have a small positive or negative slope.
- ams6110 13y agoI see this "puttering" as the most likely possibility, since if they do hit some level of adoption that starts to threaten sovereign currencies, the GP's option (2) will come into effect.
- vehementi 13y agoAm I missing jargon or are they saying terahertz per second?
- laserbrain 13y agohttp://i.imgur.com/zAMkNCV.gif http://i.imgur.com/zAMkNCV.gif
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nerdo 13y agoWhat is this in current $/hr?
- jnbiche 13y agoIf my off-the-cuff calculations are right, then a little under $10/hr for the whole batch of 10,000 chips that just arrived(i.e., each chip will generate about $0.01/hr), which seems pretty low until you realize that each chip costs only about $10. Break even point is about 40 days, right? Not bad at all. Unfortunately, difficulty will probably spike, so these rates are not sustainable. And who knows what the price will do. Unless you're a very shrewd businessman and want to do this full-time, you're far better off just buying Bitcoins if you're interested in speculating on them. Just remember that Bitcoin prices will inevitably plummet, go sky high a few months, and then re-plummet. It's just what Bitcoins do.
- pontifier 13y agoSo... I agree that Bitcoin has some advantages, but it's disadvantages are quite high as well. It seems to me that all the money going into Bitcoin mining equipment, and all the power being used to run it is essentially an indirect tax on Bitcoin usage... I wonder what the total value of Bitcoin transactions in USD compared to the cost of electricity to keep the block chain up is. The true value that Bitcoin mining provides must be some low percentage of the total Bitcoin transaction volume... or am I missing something?
- dragontamer 13y agoIt is impossible for Bitcoin transactions to take place without miners. BTC miners provide cryptographic integrity, proving that transactions took place at a certain time between certain people. Bitcoin is purely held up by the community of miners. The integrity of BTC becomes greater and greater the more trusted miners enter the system.
- pontifier 13y agoCouldn't this be achieved in some sort of other way? One that does not require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and electricity? Couldn't a regular PKI message digest on the transaction list work? I suppose there's something I'm not getting about this.
- dragontamer 13y agoBitcoin is a voting-based protocol. The "vote" with 51% of the computational power of the system wins. By performing very very hard math problems with every PKI digest (ie, the "proof of work"), with a "difficulty level" such that it'd take the entire BTC network approximately 10 minutes to find a solution... then it becomes extremely extremely difficult for someone to enter the BTC system and screw up the public ledger. You see, BTC is a distributed database, cryptographically signed by the BTC miners every 10 minutes. The difficulty of _performing_ the signature is automatically adjusted to take a ridiculous amount of time.