Re: Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation

[slush <slush@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Kyle Williams <kyle.kwilliams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So when the value of BTC's starts to be cut in half, and with INFLATION now at a record high, the cost of electricity is NOT GOING DOWN.

Hence, the chance of you generating bitcoins will go down because a CPU can not compete with someone else's GPU, more power/electricity is being used to generate (or not generate) bitcoins, and after the last six month's of running bitcoin, I haven't generated a single block in over two months because someone has already cornered this market with GPU's.

Kyle, there was introduced GPU miner before few months, so your experience sounds reasonable. GPUs are approximately 100x faster on hashes than CPUs, so i7 probably won't help much. But almost everybody has now GPU capable for mining and code is opensource. Yours complaints are on the same level as if you say 'I have only 486DX, those guys with Quad cores driving me crazy'. Bitcoins are 'fair' on level that everybody can go to shop and buy strong GPU. 

There is also mechanism (called 'difficulty') which control amount of blocks mined every day. So nobody can buy extra-hyper-mega-gpu-cluster and get rich by finding millions of bitcoins per week. He will always find maximum ~200 blocks per day, because it is limit of network. And I'm pretty sure that it won't be profitable business, because current difficulty makes mining more expensive than actual price of bitcoins.

Regards to wasting electricity. There are many kinds of wastes. Somebody waste electricity to finding bitcoins, somebody find UFO using seti@home. And our EU government spend bilions of EUR on 'green energy' using ineffective solar and wind technology. I think using nuclear energy and mine bitcoins (as government independent currency) is much better combination. So it is just another point of view to 'waste'.

Marek