Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation

[slush]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Kyle Williams <kyle.kwilliams at gmail.com>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 at 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

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