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The Bubbly Bitcoin Thread -- Merged Threads


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HOLA441

So the smart play is...AMD stock?! :lol:

I decided today that I might as well get my underused 4850 doing some mining, and figured Worldcoins were as good a punt as any. Try as I might though, I cannot get cgminer or multiminer to recognise the card and do anything. I fired up a 3d game, and it's definitely still working for its intended purpose. If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

google "guiminer scrypt" by Tacotime. It's windows plug and play frontend that controls CGminer in the backend.

M

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HOLA443

I have a Core i7 desktop with a HD 4850 I don't use - what sort of LTC could I mine with that do you think?

No idea, it's all about the number of Stream processors (shaders). The higher the number and the bigger the onboard GDDR5 memory the higher it can hash scrypt. A 7950 has 1792 SP and 3GB ram.

A 4850 has 800 SP and 512mb Ram. Don't expect much as it's very Ram light my 2012/2013 standards and probably pulls more power too! I would guess under 100 k/h. Google "4850 litecoin mining", someone is bound to have tried and posted on a forum.

M

Edited by markyh
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HOLA444

No idea, it's all about the number of Stream processors (shaders). The higher the number and the bigger the onboard GDDR5 memory the higher it can hash scrypt. A 7950 has 1792 SP and 3GB ram.

My link

Someone has done a lot of work to compile that list. Basically, a 4850 gets about 15% of the results of a 7950.

At current prices 100 kHash/s should bring in a revenue of about £1.60 per 24hours.

--

Update: Another card has arrived from ebay. This is an MSI 7950. Holy hell! This thing is unbelievably loud, scorchingly hot and a veritable slug. Starting mining, the temperature jumps into the low 90s, the fan starts screaming like a banshee, and it only gets 500 kH/s. The XFX card runs near silent and a good 15 C cooler even when pushed to 650 kH/s.

I really had no idea there was this much variation between manufacturers. I guess I lucked out on the XFX cards; they seem to be smashing for this sort of thing.

Edited by ChumpusRex
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HOLA446

guy at the video above has created a web based app for purchasing with bitcoins (takes apple and google out of the loop).

is this the future?

No. most people in the world cant afford the phone, the monthly bill and the agro of running a website app, taking a photo and causing a wait at the till...it took longer to process that purchase ( unconfirmed of course) than to order it.

The only way this is going to work is if some counter is installed in your arm/head just like in the film In Time.

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HOLA447

Alderney seems to think they are the first to come up with the idea of a physical bitcoin.

The physical bitcoins in the past have been novelty tokens that carry the number of a bitcoin. If the number is used (spent) then the token has no Bitcoin value.

However....

What if Alderney held a 'stock' of Bitcoins in their own wallet, and then issued their own, unnumbered Bitcoins, on the assurance to the public that they can be redeemed for a real Bitcoin at any time. That could have 'currency', I suppose.

Then they could shoot themselves in the foot by hypothecating their Bitcoins and issuing too many physical Bitcoins.

The questions to ask is; what is Alderneys angle? How do they expect to make money from Bitcoins? Perhaps as a tax haven for Bitcoin trading. I hope they don't have designs on fractional reserve Bitcoins - they would be avoided by any Bitcoin fan with any sense.

A separate article in the FT gives some more info on the proposed physical coin. It's suggested it would have gold content worth around $500.

They also say:

"Holders of the Alderney Bitcoin would not be able to spend it in stores but would be able to exchange it for a virtual Bitcoin by travelling to the island.

Got to laugh at the irony – physical specie being backed by electronic currency at the bank!

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HOLA449

Interesting Economist article on Bitcoin, which made me think, and now I realise why Bitcoin will fail 100% guaranteed.

The answer is obvious, and essentially I'd ward people of touching Bitcoin with a barge pole now. Aside from the the fact it is in a speculative bubble, there is another reason why it will fail, and it is a technical reason - application scalability.

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HOLA4410

Interesting Economist article on Bitcoin, which made me think, and now I realise why Bitcoin will fail 100% guaranteed.

The answer is obvious, and essentially I'd ward people of touching Bitcoin with a barge pole now. Aside from the the fact it is in a speculative bubble, there is another reason why it will fail, and it is a technical reason - application scalability.

Can you explain more about application scalability?

The article seemed to miss the point a little I thought. Surely the ridiculous computing power requirements are precisely what stops governments or supercomputer owners gaming the system?

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HOLA4411

Can you explain more about application scalability?

The article seemed to miss the point a little I thought. Surely the ridiculous computing power requirements are precisely what stops governments or supercomputer owners gaming the system?

Application scalability

In the past people used to make computer jobs run faster by buying faster chips, so called scale up computers, and this also then included symmetric multiprocessors systems with a multiple cpus, but a single memory space. These systems got faster, though the more cpus and the higher the clock speed the more money you'd fork out eg a 32 CPU SMP in 2000 could cost as much as £2m if it had a decent amount of memory.

With these sort of systems most applications, assuming they were multi-threaded, ie could run many processes at once and even when these parallel processes need to communicate between themselves or handle shared parts (rather than independent parts) of memory, you could still get good speed up as the latency (ie delay) for processes to communicate was low - basically the CPUs and memory were all next to each other.

In the 2000's we started to see more clustered systems, ie high performance systems made up of larger numbers of small computers working together. Many problems could run faster, as they essentially consisted of many so called loosely coupled processes - basically what one process did was irrelevant to any other processes. However, many other applications have tightly coupled processes, and these didn't scale so well on this clustered (or distributed) systems as the processes needed to talk between themselves and adding a network (rather than shared memory bus/switch) adds significant delay to such apps each time the independent processes need to share data.

Now we skip a bit to the mid 2000s and the advent of web applications. These could be huge, on what is described as Internet scale, ie many millions or even billions of users, but all relatively interacting with systems like Google/Facebook/Last minute dot com etc in a fairly independent way. But even so these companies spent a fortune on IT infrastructure.

Now we look at Bitcoin. And whilst we have lots of fairly slow moving transactions, ie one to one exchanges of bit coins, you have to realise there is a lot of complex maths going on to handle the encryption and processing of the block chain, in essence every holder of a bit coin wallets need to be able to handle and verify and update the block chain. Now this would be fine if everything was running on one single massive fast computer, but in practice it is running on a fairly rubbish peer to peer network with differing levels of hardware performance and slow networks. So firstly I can see plenty of scope for slow system processing with data propagating too slowly due to thw weight of the block chain.

But secondly I can also see issues like so called "split brain syndrome", suppose for instance there was a network link down between the US and UK for 3 days, in the intervening period people have traded bitcoins in the US and UK, but the UK and US haven't exchanged any data between themselves over the main link, how does the system reconcile the two different sets of wallets and what if some users in the US and UK had managed to exchange coins between the UK and US over their company's private network link? Or what happens if say Manchester's network was cut off.

The split brain syndrome is why is has apparently been possible to clone bit coins.

Anyway the above it quite complex, but in simple terms, most applications also reach a stage when they no longer work or need upgrading due to changes in use, increased usage or hardware changes with Bitcoin, you don't have a Microsoft, Oracle, IBM , HP etc upgrading the application and continuously developing the application and who is going to co-ordinate all the Bitcoin wallet holders to update.

My predictions is, that if the transactions ever reach a decent level of liquidity, ie giving someone the ability to liquidate say 1,000,000 bitcoins in a day, then the infrastructure will just collapse. And then who is going sort out the mess??????

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HOLA4412

Interesting Economist article on Bitcoin, which made me think, and now I realise why Bitcoin will fail 100% guaranteed.

The answer is obvious, and essentially I'd ward people of touching Bitcoin with a barge pole now. Aside from the the fact it is in a speculative bubble, there is another reason why it will fail, and it is a technical reason - application scalability.

In a bubble, it's getting to be worth a lot of money. The hackers won't be too far behind "faking" bit coins once trust is lost in the system it will become worthless. Alternatively someone else is going to create another electronic coin currency.

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HOLA4415

Mikhail, if the long post was the article you were referring to it's so far off the mark technically it doesn't even deserve a response. Whoever wrote doesn't have the first clue how bitcoin works. It's wrong in just about every way possible. I also saw a terrible guardian article from an economist which was similarly absolute trash from someone who had totally failed to understand it.

You know what the actual scale issues are? The fact that the devs and miners are still to determine the block size limit / transaction resolution. It's eminently solvable but they didn't expect bitcoin to explode at this point. Long story cut short, it's not ready to be a currency, at least not for blockchain transactions.

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HOLA4416

Can you explain more about application scalability?

The article seemed to miss the point a little I thought. Surely the ridiculous computing power requirements are precisely what stops governments or supercomputer owners gaming the system?

precisely. These guys so obviously spreading fud betray their lack of understanding of bitcoins with every sentence they write. It is either ignorance or malevolence, take your pick.

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HOLA4421

Mikhail, if the long post was the article you were referring to it's so far off the mark technically it doesn't even deserve a response. Whoever wrote doesn't have the first clue how bitcoin works. It's wrong in just about every way possible. I also saw a terrible guardian article from an economist which was similarly absolute trash from someone who had totally failed to understand it.

You know what the actual scale issues are? The fact that the devs and miners are still to determine the block size limit / transaction resolution. It's eminently solvable but they didn't expect bitcoin to explode at this point. Long story cut short, it's not ready to be a currency, at least not for blockchain transactions.

Agree completely. What he is saying amounts to ; "What would happen to e-commerce if the Internet went down between the UK and USA, or between London and Liverpool.

Ummm, there is no magical special single link from point A to B on the internet, and the Bitcoin miners run the blockchain, via nodes, over the internet. Also you can be offline from the blockchain for months with one wallet and make transactions from another, when you open the first again it wont work until it catches up with the blockchain.

To stop Bitcoin transactions you would have to shut down the whole Internet worldwide. And that Genie is long out of the bottle so that wont ever happen now, it would cost the world economy $ Trillions to stop the net.

M

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HOLA4422

To stop Bitcoin transactions you would have to shut down the whole Internet worldwide.

Sure but to shut-down the bitcoin economy you simply shut down the exchanges. Very easy to do even if in foreign jurisdictions (ask a Mt Gox client how withdrawing their USD is going..)

Sure transactions could still happen. But they won't. Show me one thing i could buy in bitcoins, price fixed in bitcoins, that won't route me through an exchange.

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HOLA4425

Did you buy some when they dipped under $500 during the last 'slump'?

I think I must have blinked and missed it. Also, I've only just set up an account with an exchange and had it properly KYC'ed.

I've recently become more willing to invest in bitcoin as a concept. I think there is real transformative potential and I want a bigger stake in the experiment. I'm not by nature a speculator and would prefer to invest time and money in a business. But, if (a big if, I accept) BTC does drive a financial paradigm shift then a stash of BTC is likely to be almost as remunerative as a stake in a BTC related business.

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