10 ms·
Bitcoin Network Doubles to 2 PH/s in Four Weeks; the First 1 PH/s Took 4.7 Years
- WayneS 13y agoAhh that is kinda how "exponential growth" works. But clearly the exponential part is recent because if you project backwards at doubling every 4 weeks you find the hash rate started at one hash every 28 days. ;-)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nullc 13y agoIt actually had as-high/higher rates of growth in 2011: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png
- deletes 13y agocache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthegenesisblock.com%2Fbitcoin-network-doubles-2-phs-four-weeks-first-1-phs-took-4-7-years%2F&btnG=Search&hl=en&safe=off http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
- geetee 13y agoWhen this lunacy ends and people are left with racks of useless miners, is there anything they can be repurposed for?
- kiba 13y agoNope!
- brianbreslin 13y agowill they be able to repurpose them to mine other types of coins? like prime/lite coin? maybe turn them over to SETI @HOME style projects?
- calinet6 13y agoPaperweights for the wads of cash resulting from their former jobs...
- rnicholson 13y agoIf were talking about graphics card rigs, well I guess could attempt to re-sell them to gamers and the like to attempt to get some money back out of them (although, in the end probably still a loss unless you covered the purchase+power/cooling+maint costs in mining with them) ASIC BTC mining hardware, I don't think can be re-purposed.
- chx 13y agoASIC miners are, well, Application Specific Integrated Circuits -- they can't be used for anything else than their original purpose. However, I am not familiar with the original purpose -- Bitcoin mining means taking a random number, calculating the SHA256 hash twice and compare with another number. If the chips are just massively parallel SHA256 circuits then they can be reused for other SHA256 needs (if there's any on this scale...) but if their hardwired operations is the whole mining round as described then no they can't.
- nwh 13y agoThey're generally not usable for anything SHA256 related. The input they take is a string, and a range of nonces to attempt. The only data they return is a positive if a particular nonce gives a low enough value. There's nothing useful there except for hashcat-like operations.
- Karunamon 13y agoWhat's to say this "lunacy" will end? Seems to only have a bright future to me.
- choult 13y agoAs I understand it, there are only a finite number of Bitcoins. Hence there will be an end to mining.
- geetee 13y agoPeople will continue to mine to earn fees from processing transactions.
- eterm 13y agoI find it ironic that proponents of bitcoins tend to argue that: 1. Bitcoins will take off because it has tiny fees for wealth transfer. 2. Future mining to keep the blockchains up will be supported by transaction fees. If all this mining power has to be kept up as the 25 bitcoin bonus runs out then the transaction fees could well end up just as high as the current 2.9% + 0.3 seen everywhere.
- obi-nine 13y agoUnlikely unless large banking cartels take over this service (which is possible). In any case there is approximately a century to figure this out.
- jafaku 13y agoThe free market will decide on that, and it will be fair. Even if we end up with ~3% fees, it would be totally worth it knowing that your account can't be randomly frozen, or your funds stolen by whoever is in charge of the fake wars (eg: war on drugs).
- betterunix 13y ago
- qnr 13y agoWhy lunacy? You need a huge amount of computing power to make a distributed currency resilient against attacks by the likes of NSA, hostile foreign states, etc. And to answer your question, no, the chips cannot be repurposed for anything else.
- mikeash 13y agoThis is a good point that's easy to forget. Mining is not a zero-sum game, but rather increased mining activity increases the security of the network as a whole. Whether it's worth throwing all these resources into Bitcoin in the first place is another question, but at least it's not the case that nothing changes when everybody doubles their hashing power.
- gabemart 13y agoI'm curious if the development of ASICs generally increases or decreases the security of the network. It seems to me that the resilience of the network to attack doesn't depend on the total computing power of the network, but on the dollar cost of the total computing power of the network. If ASIC deployment increases the computing power of the network 10x, but the availability of ASICs reduces the cost per unit of computing power by 11x, I would think it makes the network as a whole less secure. In other words, the existence of ASICs increases the computing power of the network, but the existence of ASICs also makes it cheaper for an adversary to buy boatloads of targeted computing power to attack the network.
- mikeash 13y agoIt would depend on your supposed adversary. If you're defending against "random wealthy person wants to subvert the network" then I think you're right. You make it cheaper for them at the same time it's cheaper for you. Your defense is adding more people (or at least more money for legitimate mining), not technology. On the other hand, if you're defending against e.g. the NSA, then they already have the ability to make their own hardware like this, so you're not helping them any further.
- 13y ago
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThat is the trick, they are disposable (in theory). You use them to mine more than their net cost in bitcoins and then you throw them away, investing X$ in the miner getting out Y$ (where Y > X) $ in bitcoin. Return being (Y/X)/period I doubt the ASICs can be retargeted. Although the cabinets and power supplies etc could (in theory) so you could turn around and re-populate it with SHA1 ASICs or something and start passwords or something with the boxes (would need new boards and programming though)
- TylerE 13y agoBut that can't work. It just _can't_. While the cost of producing bitcoins < value of bitcoins, more people will mine. More miners = higher difficulty = lower reward for mining.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoExcept that it has, at least once that I know of, one a friend who build a 16 video card setup in a re-purposed NetApp filer box, cost them $4,500 to put together all told and they sold enough bitcoin on the first bubble to return a bit more than double that ($10K). That setup is too slow these days (and it ran for about 6 months, so figure the cost of 6 months of electricity at (basically 36kWH/day, which at 25c/kW added another $1638 to his cost, but his heating bills were lower :-) What happens though is that the goal posts move, and of course if you get yours late and the difficulty has increased after you get one and you're under performing, well you lose. A number of people on the various forums claim to have made money on their miner setups as well but the forums are not really verifiable sources. As far as I can tell it works when the market price for bitcoin greatly exceeds their cost to produce, and that seems to happen frequently.
- TylerE 13y agoYea, but they're making money BECAUSE THE PRICE OF BITCOINS ROSE. Not because they "created value". That would have made just as much, without all the hassle, just by buying bitcoins at the initial lower price. Think of it absolutist terms, denominated only in BTC. If you buy a bitcoin miner, today, for 50btc, what do you think your odds are for mining 50btc + enough extra to pay for electricity before the device either fails or is obsolete, or returns at such a low rate you might as well of stuck your money in municipal bonds?
- tocomment 13y agoThey can be used for other currencies. For example namecoin must be getting a huge boost from all the bitcoin mining. My mining pools just throws in namecoins for me. I guess they can check the same hash against both systems.
- tocomment 13y agoThey could also be used for other blockchain based technologies such as bitmessage, or future voting systems. (I think, correct me if I'm wrong)
- betterunix 13y agoAssuming that the hash function does not need to be changed for some reason, of course. That is part of the risk of using hardware crypto: a vulnerability in the cryptosystem is expensive to fix.
- sirsar 13y agoBitmessage isn't blockchain based. Bitmessage, at the moment, is entirely separate from Bitcoin. While in Bitcoin, every full node has a complete transaction history since the network's inception, Bitmessage nodes simply hold every message since 2.5 days ago.
- tocomment 13y agoIsn't the proof of work the same as bitcoin though? (I shouldn't have said blockchain, proof of work would be what the ASIC's are relevant to.)
- VMG 13y agoSpace heaters. Future mining rigs will just be that.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoHeh, I have been looking at that for heating already. Would be nice to have a bitcoin electric shower :)
- Groxx 13y agoExcept they keep getting more efficient in computing and less efficient in heating.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoYeah I bet there are some surface mounted resistors you could desolder. Also, boat anchor?
- Synaesthesia 13y agoAnd 3PH is just around the corner! http://bitcoin.sipa.be http://bitcoin.sipa.be
- TomGullen 13y agoAm I correct in saying this is good news for BTC, as it makes a 50% network attack more and more expensive to execute? Going into the future, when difficulty is high enough or all Bitcoins are mined, would some of this computing power shut down?
- jafaku 13y agoYou are correct. No, because the payer can decide the fee to pay, and the miner can decide the minimum he will accept. So the free market will take care of the fees for the miners.
- jasonlingx 13y agoI think most people are missing the bigger picture implication here: if 1 or 2 companies can double the bitcoin network in 4 weeks, then the network is not and probably never will be safe from attacks by the likes of the NSA and such.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- modeless 13y agoI think you're missing the implication here. Until now, an attacker could go after Bitcoin by using superior technology to compute hashes faster than everyone else. But now, these new companies are using the best technology available. There is no superior technology that would allow the NSA or any other single attacker to compete with 28nm ASICs produced in commercial volumes. Once 28nm bitcoin ASICs are widely distributed, the bitcoin network will be safe from a 51% attack even from governments.
- jasonlingx 13y ago> There is no superior technology I think you need to assert that there never will be any superior technology...
- modeless 13y agoAll I need to assert is there will never be any radically superior technology that is accessible to the NSA long before it is accessible to commercial bitcoin miners, and I think that's plausible. The NSA doesn't innovate in semiconductor fabrication, Intel and TSMC do. The only way the NSA could plausibly gain a significant hash rate advantage over commercial bitcoin miners is by breaking SHA-256, which has nothing to do with hardware.
- mrb 13y agoNo. What you are missing is that there was a one-time window of opportunity for attackers due to the ASIC tech not having been deployed on the Bitcoin network 10 months ago. But now that the network is rapidly adopting ASICs, the network speed has been doubling every month for the last 10 months, so this window is quickly closing... For example, if an attacker wanted to attack Bitcoin, they would have to get funding today, develop or acquire an ASIC design, build and develop a ~150 meggawatt datacenter, all within the next 6 months, to have a chance to attack the network. Details: at 2.2 Phash/s today, 6 months from now we should be around 2.2 * 2^6 = ~150 Phash/s. The best ASICs, 28nm KncMiner, are approximately 100 ~Ghash/s and 100 Watt each. So the attacker would have to build 150 Phash/s of these to clearly outperform the network: that is 1.5 million chips at 150 meggawatt total. And to plan for a potential delay of 30 days, the attacker would have to build not 150 Phash/s but 300 Phash/s of ASICs to attack the network. 3 million chips. 300 meggawatt datacenter. For comparison, Facebook spent $210 million on their 28 meggawatt Prinevill datacenter. So a 300 meggawatt datacenter would probably cost $2 billion. Therefore I doubt such an attack against Bitcoin would be even within NSA's capabilities. They can't even get their Utah datacenter to run correctly and it has been delayed by more than 1 year: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052960/nsa-data-center-suffers-meltdowns-is-delayed-by-a-year-report-says.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052960/nsa-data-center-suffe...
- taariqlewis 13y agoMy question would be: How will the blockchain stop attacks when all the bitcoins have been mined, but computing power continues to increase thereafter, even at a slowing rate? Couldn't someone develop better ASICs, long after mining has ended, to launch a 51% attack? Granted it would be expensive, wouldn't that expense decrease continuously?
- Groxx 13y agoI suspect you're missing one critical bit: miners get the transaction fees of whatever transactions they include in the block. They're mining blocks of transactions, not coins, approximately once every 10 minutes. Coins are just blocks that the mob of users claims are valuable. This is true even after the last "coin" has been mined. Coins are incentive to jump-start the economy when there isn't much activity, the end-game is all in mining blocks to get transaction fees, at which point it pretty much self-balances. Miners continue mining as long as it's profitable, and transaction fees maintain a level which keeps it that way (but not too profitable, or there would be more miners competing for them).