Bitcoin

[ZPDM]

Radeon cards have been around for a while with different # series. But i wouldn't do anything older than a r9270x because of not enough hashing power. There are the 7950's but hard to get. Are there any 1X pcie slots on your board? You can use those too with a 1X to 16X riser cable.

I wouldn't use the computer while mining. I do, but it is problematic if you have the intensity on the mining up too high. I have 2 x 270x's in my tower that I mine with when I go to bed. If they're running while using computer, it works, but the screen gets glitchy plus you have to sit there and listen to the fans. If you turned the intensity down to 10 or something, then much better - I leave them at 20 (max). That's why to get just a cheap processor for the dedicated rigs - sempron 145 - almost 3 ghz chip and only $30-40 and low power 40 watt max or so.

You will have trouble mining with XP - can't even get the proper graphics kits for them from amd - they were all yanked. If you can find them, let me know. Win 7 is minimum to preserve your sanity or use the free linux on usb drive - especially if it is dedicated to mining.

Each r9 270x draws maybe 160w max at full 20 intensity. You're under 700 watts on a 4 card machine like that.

Aaron,

I put a full copy of Xbuntu on a 16 gig thumb drive for my mining rig. Thumb drive was like ten bucks and as it was USB 3.0 it is actually faster than 95 percent of the disk drives out there. Ran pretty well for the little I used it as both a computer and a miner. While I am not now I may start running my day-to-day laptop from a thumb drive, would be faster and you could just take the stick with you wherever you went and sort of take over any computer wherever you traveled, ala Agent Smith. Two things I have not yet had success with that I took a quick stab at and wonder whether it is worth trying to get up to speed on (i.e. before it becomes obsolete). Okay 1) Do you use the config file on cgminer? I haven't been able to get it to do anything at all. The main reason I want this is to set a fall-over mining pool if the first goes off-line. 2) can you remotely log into a headless miner? I only have one mining rig now, but I also only have one display and already it is getting old switching out the display if I am worried something went wrong. On Linux it is supposed to be SSH and I can't remember the program Flounder or something else, but are you doing anything with remote access, because I've never done that? Might become more important if bitcoin survives and I set up second rig. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on it.

[Aaron Murakami]

Aaron,

I put a full copy of Xbuntu on a 16 gig thumb drive for my mining rig. Thumb drive was like ten bucks and as it was USB 3.0 it is actually faster than 95 percent of the disk drives out there. Ran pretty well for the little I used it as both a computer and a miner. While I am not now I may start running my day-to-day laptop from a thumb drive, would be faster and you could just take the stick with you wherever you went and sort of take over any computer wherever you traveled, ala Agent Smith. Two things I have not yet had success with that I took a quick stab at and wonder whether it is worth trying to get up to speed on (i.e. before it becomes obsolete). Okay 1) Do you use the config file on cgminer? I haven't been able to get it to do anything at all. The main reason I want this is to set a fall-over mining pool if the first goes off-line. Okay 2) can you remotely log into a headless miner? I only have one mining rig now, but I also only have one display and already it is getting old switching out the display if I am worried something went wrong. On Linux it is supposed to be SSH and I can't remember the program Flounder or something else, but are you doing anything with remote access, because I've never done that? Might become more important if bitcoin survives and I set up second rig. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on it.

I edit the config file for my pool, worker and pw. The only things I edit in the config settings in that file are the TC, engine and mem.

I login from a regular windows based pc - I first tty (I use putty - it is a free small download) into it, set user and admin passwords. There is a command I run on it to install the remote access. Can't recall what that is off hand. Then I exit and log in remotely with mstsc through the ip address and username/pw. That will give you the entire linux screen that looks likes the basic windows setup then I edit config files there, etc...

[ZPDM]

Thx Aaron, Putty, not Flounder, I need to take an afternoon one of these week-ends and see if I can learn it.

[ZPDM]

Tom,

I think I may have found what you are looking for. AMD is releasing an R7 265 GPU at the end of February. It is priced around $150 and is supposed to be a bit faster than the 7850 GPU. The 7850 GPU does about 400 KHash/sec. That would be a great cost per hash. If bitcoin is still around in another month or two and I build another rig that would probably be what I would look to go with. The only question would be getting ones hands on them before they are sold out.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computi...ce-on-r7-260x/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7754/t...-sapphire-asus

[ZPDM]

I don't know how much to do with this whole thread because I realize it is off-topic, or at least only indirectly related to energy and science but I have to just do another update here. The superintendant of financial services for New York is working on drafting regulations for bitcoin, which at least to some extent will probably be a pretty big deal. So today he opened a thread on the bitcoin reddit (went of his way with a picture of him holding a reddit sign on his twitter account to prove it was him) asking for input on the upcoming regulations. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...endent_of_the/

There have been over a thousand replies so far and I've only glanced at the first page as of yet. Well most of the responses are serious attempts at providing input for the regulations, it is the other two fifths that are slaying me, he is getting a lot of questions along the lines of "what is your favorite dinosaur?", "what hats do you like to wear?", "Do people ever call you Super Nintendo Lawsky". Then the other fifth are shall we say more "spirited" one example,
"Hey Ben, how about you and your government buddies just stay out of the way? It's you ****ers that have handed the banksters their planet destroying monopoly on the fake money system we're being forced to use. Every time the government tries to solve a problem, all they end up doing is making it 10 times worse? Until you start putting the bankster scum like Jamie Dimon in prison, you deserve zero respect."
Zing, Ah bitcoin you irrepressible rascal, though I can't imagine replies like that will help with any forthcoming regulations.

Had another thought today, that being if the NSA and others have backdoor access to the actual chips on intel processors will that allow them to defeat the encryption protecting the bitcoin ledger, I don't know, hope not. I actually feel sorry for Lawsky and hope he does a good job (for the people) with forthcoming regulations, but it is something to see even the bueracrats for the finacial types being taken so far out of their comfort zone. Man I hope bitcoin continues on, at the very least it is massively entertaining.

[aln]

Here comes another hit "Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox disappears in blow to virtual currency" article found at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A1O07920140225

[Aaron Murakami]

Here comes another hit "Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox disappears in blow to virtual currency" article found at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A1O07920140225

Mt. Gox supposedly says they are going to reopen branded under another name so looks like plans are not to disappear but to re-emerge.

Going to be bumpy road for something new like this and I hope it makes it because it can be important to be able to detach from the banks even if just a bit.

If it all crashes, I don't have a very big stake in it so not too worried, but many people have risked quite a bit.

[why_me]

I trust in metal coins only.......Have you looked at the coins whose metal is more valuable than the engraved amount? Nickels are 25% nickel and 75 percent copper. The penny used to be 97.7% copper and then zinc. Now it is 97.7% zinc and then copper. You better hoard them suckers to hedge against the bad times.

[ZPDM]

Bitcoin Update
-----------------------
Well MtGox just declared bankruptcy and stated some 750,000 bitcoins are missing. There are three possibilities here, 1) MtGox's (Mark Karpeles's) story 2) Mark is a thief, i.e. pulled a bankster 3) Mark was made an offer he couldn't refuse. Okay 1) this just defies any semblance of belief, supposedly there was an ongoing hack through faulty transactions which allowed an individual to request a resend of bitcoins that they had already been sent, claiming the transaction never went through. While this is a theoretical problem it never affected (to any known appreciable degree) any other exchange. More importantly, Mark claimed the users funds were in cold storage, i.e. an offline wallet however, he kept using the offline wallets to process these redundant requests until Gox was insolvent. As others have noted he would have had to have been processing 30,000 bitcoins a month from cold storage for years to have lost so much, without ever noticing that he was going bankrupt. You can't even say it was automated as someone needed to connect the offline wallet to the internet for a transaction to go through all the while never checking the balance in the wallet (which is very prominent) for years on end to not see they had a problem. Literally it strikes me as a scenario where they would need to repeatedly connect an offline wallet to the internet, close their eyes so they never see the balance, then hunt for the key to send money out of their business on a disputed "charge-back". It is absurd, and others smarter and more experienced then me in this area have noted these problems. So as 1) is an obvious crock ... 2) This seems most likely, and most likely Mark wasn't a great businessman or programmer, he was unable to run his rapidly expanding business and at some point realized, you know these suckers have left me a half billion dollars (well that's what it's worth now that the price has declined by a lot) worth of untraceable funds. I like a half billion dollars. He just declared bankruptcy and no one knows where the bitcoins are. 3) Perhaps he was made an offer he couldn't refuse, I would have put this in the 1-5 percent range but what is strange is that the day after MtGox said that "transaction malleability" caused all his problems there was a massive DDOS attack on all other major exchanges attempting to exploit transaction malleability. To my understanding not a cent was lost, but more importantly Mark and MtGox didn't have the resources to do such an attack, so either cockamamie scenario one is correct, or someone with the ability to launch such an attack is also behind the missing bitcoins from MtGox. So I don't know what to think perhaps an amalgam of 2 and 3.

On the bright side no one asked you to bail out the half billion lost in bitcoin, and as a commenter on reddit noted the bank of Scotland just acknowledged http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...-taxpayer.html they lost the 46 billion pounds they were "given" in the 2008 bailout. Likely goes along with the trillions "given" to other banks in that bailout.

I would have thought this would have ended bitcoin, a half billion+ dollars and 10 percent of bitcoins poof. Not the Bitcoin protocol mind you, the method of sending a "thing" validated and securely across the interwebs, I think that is here to stay as long as there is an internet, even if it becomes co-opted, but this particular first iteration I would have thought would be in more trouble. I give this a ten to twenty percent chance of killing bitcoin. But, the price has held up so far at better than $500 dollars, down a good bit but up what ten fold or more from a year ago, meanwhile and just as important, the number of new bitcoin wallets and new merchants didn't even hiccup in its advance during this whole snafu. So I don't know what to think. To Aaron's point, I feel very very bad for people who lost a great deal, though it is perhaps not to unkind to point out that bitcoin didn't exist 4-5 years ago. For myself, I've learned how to slap together a computer from its components and run an operating system off a thumb drive along with other things, which is the mindset I had when I went into supporting something I believe in.

This Spring I may have some more resources to put towards free-energy initiatives so perhaps I will shut up about bitcoin already, unless I am a bitcoin billionaire in which case you might need some sort of electromagnetic brainwave entrainment to get me to shut up, if even then. Ciao, Peace and Love, Pray for Ukraine.

[why_me]

I am so old I once saw George Washington skip a silver Bitcoin across the Potomac River.

[ZPDM]

Update:
AuroraCoin: The AirDrop
Very Positive, very, very, very fricken positive. Let me calm down because I just found this out. So my mining pool just automatically switched to mining Aurora coin, http://auroracoin.org/? I had never heard of it so I looked it up. It just came into being in February is an Icelandic based Crytocurrency and here is where it gets interesting. It is 50 percent pre-mined (i.e. half the currency is already in existence without needing to mine it). On March 25th, this 50 percent will be "airdroped" to every citizen of Iceland. That is to say after the 25th anyone who is an Icelandic citizen may claim their portion of the pre-mined coins. So I thought, that's neat, they may all get a a few cents or couple bucks and really spread interest in cryptocurrencies. Then I started to do the math and I couldn't believe it, I'm still astonished. I guess because it is so new it didn't show up on any of the sites I was using to track these things, but when I looked into it, in the just over a month it has been in existence it has become the second largest crypto with a market cap in excess of 750 million dollars, that is 3/4 of a billion dollars. http://coinmarketcap.com/

So let's do the math. Using today's prices and assuming every one who gets the distribution converts it to bitcoin and then to U.S. dollars. 1 Auroracoin is currently worth =~ 0.114 bitcoin. 1 bitcoin is currently worth =~ 691 dollars (up quite nicely today). Each Icelander will be able to claim 31.8 Auroracoins starting March 25th. 31.8 * 0.114 = 3.625 bitcoins. 3.625 *691 = $2,505 dollars.

On March 25th, every citizen of Iceland may claim a distribution of Auroracoins currently equal to over 2,500 U.S. dollars. Auroracoin has appreciated at least 4 fold against bitcoin since it was started and may appreciate further before the 25th. Bitcoin is also back to appreciating rapidly against the dollar over the past couple days. The actual distribution could reasonably be much higher than $2,500. Wow, just wow.

[Tom C]

Z,

so with the Mt GOX scandal, I am leery of crypto currency.... there is NO difference between crypto and FIAT currency, its all based upon who will accept it. and each crypto currency "printer" is now a little tiny Federal Reserve. how does aurora coin create wealth out of thin air? they set up a currency with some algorithms and all of a sudden there is a few million dollars of it floating around? what if every iclander decided to convert his aurora coin to hard cash (kroners?) all at once, where does the hard cash come from, where are the assets covering the value? its pure arbitrage, its value only pegged to another currency, pure forex style trading. and the only way anyone finds value is because someone will trade it for a REAL asset like food, gas electricty or ammunition. in that sense its just another fiat currency.

I am not saying it is not worth doing, because its a great idea and worth trying it out. have a friend of mine who is mining bitcoins with a rasberry pi set up, 30 of them chained together, running off a usb stick.... he has been mining for 6 months and has 1/2 of 1 bitcoin, lost all of his investment when bit coin went down.... so another 6 months just to break even on his hardware costs.

this game is definately not for those who do not have extra cash laying around.....

Tom C

[aln]

I'm with Tom,

"and the only way anyone finds value is because someone will trade it for a REAL asset like food, gas electricty or ammunition. in that sense its just another fiat currency."

Mine digital coins: buy ammo and gold Al

[Aaron Murakami]

With most (not all) crypto coins, there is a finite amount that will be produced. Bitcoin is limited to 21 million, Litecoin limited to 42 million - something like that. The difficulty rating of mining is set so that the same number of coins is mined over x number of seconds or minutes. If the hash power doubles, then roughly half the amount can be mined with the same equipment to maintain the consistent x coins per x seconds/minutes. The point is that a steady stream of them come into circulation so the market isn't flooded, which would devalue the coin since there would be more supply than demand. What this does by limiting the amount that will ever be produced is prevent "quantitative easing" type scams like the Fed is known for - therefore, the value stays high per coin. And it gives time for the demand to grow at a reasonable rate compared to the supply of the coin. It is a very responsible system in this respect.

There is no resemblance to common fiat paper money because of this benefit. There is no inflation because of unlimited ability to keep making the coin after the x million are released. That means it is more secure as a financial instrument. $100 US bills are the most counterfeited bills in the world. There are zero instances of fake bitcoin/litecoin/etc... being produced because to do that, someone would have to modify the blockchain on every computer in the world and that isn't happening. And there are all the privacy protections put in place that is impossible to implement with cash, credit or debit cards.

The Fed charges our govt interest on the money it prints out of thin air that it never had to begin with. There is no debt associated with the crypto currency. Since the Fed prints money out of thin air anyway, might as well give the money making business back to congress, which is the only thing that is constitutionally authorized anyway, and we can print our own money out of thin air with zero interested attached to it! If that was done, then it would be closer to the cryptocoin, but only when it comes to whether or not there is interested attached to its creation but almost no other similarities.

Mt. Gox is a human failure - it doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin. If a someone started a bank and someone robbed it or drove it into the ground, that wouldn't have anything to do with the US Dollar either. For people to leave a bunch of bitcoin in an online wallet is just asking for trouble. Record them in paper wallets, etc... and lock that up somewhere. That way if anything happens to any exchange, etc... then you're immune to their troubles. There are some viruses that are stealing coin out of people's local wallets on their computers, but that is their own fault. They just need to encrypt the wallets with the built in password encryption system and that solves that issue.

@Tom, the Raspberry Pi and mining blades are not even worth using anymore. That is SHA-256 algorhythm and the bitcoin difficultry rating is way too high for that low of hashing power. There are others coins that are SHA-256 that your friend should look at mining with that equipment that has lower difficulty rating. For bitcoin, my opinion is that it is a waste of time to do anything less than 500 gigahash per second and preferably 2 terrahash per second. Problem is, they're almost impossible to get because demand is too high. We're talking about literally getting into super computing territory with that kind of processing ability. As hash power is added to the network, difficulty goes up. And there are quick advancements in the ASIC chips for bitcoin mining. They're usually rated in how big the cores are. I'm happy with my 8 core AMD CPU so it can do a few things lightening fast. But the graphic card processor has THOUSANDS of cores so it can do a whole load of processes simultaneously - not as fast as a CPU but in a reasonable amount of time and that is why GPU's are used to mine the coins. Even NASA uses graphics cards for astronomical related math calculations and not the CPU's. The size of the core is important and are rated in nanometers. I think the latest are like 47nm or something so you could get twice as many cores on the same size chip as 80nm for example. So when a breakthrough like that happens, suddenly you have twice the hash power for the same size chip that you can put on the network and the difficulty ratings goes up per hash power added. If we get ASIC chips down to 20nm or something, then we double it again per size of the chip, which is really getting to ridiculous sizes. The standard profitable bitcoin miners now are 500ghs to 2+ths and the usb asic mining blades are really a complete waste of time anymore. If another SHA-256 coin isn't profitable with your friend's equipment, he should sell them on ebay and put the money into a regular pc/linux based SCRYPT algorhythm miner and get some litecoin or other scrypt coins. Even at these lower values since the Mt Gox crash, Scrypt mining with GPU's is still profitable.

Bitcoin is already back close to $700 per coin. That is the resiliency of a free market with its higher volatility as well, but it shows that the faith in cryptocoin really hasn't been that deterred by Mt. Gox.

This whole cryptocoin concept is still relatively new and very experimental so in this early stage, the downfalls, etc... We don't know what we don't know and that is the area of awareness that most of the cryptocoin issues resides. But at the rate that everything is accelerating, I don't think it will be long until most of that makes its way into our conscious competence area of awareness. If suddenly a simple real free energy device was mass produced and made its way into a lot of people's hands, all hell would break loose because we wouldn't know what the hell we were doing with that much power. The average person would be completely vain with their energy use just because they can. That would be a human issue and not an issue with the technology. That alone could trigger martial law with plans by the govt to confiscate it under some false pretense, etc... to maintain oil control. Anytime something is that new and that disruptive, its going to be volatile and unpredictable at many levels. That is all we're going through right now - growing pains. And as far as we know, Mt. Gox could have been a pre-planned setup way ahead of time in order to scare people away from cryptocoin. I'm not claiming that, but when anything big enough happens, I never trust the official story of what is going on.

I hope the cryptocoin method makes it long term and if not, I'm only going to have invested the amount that I can stomach to lose, which would be my rule for any investment anyway. But for the gamble of it, it might be a good idea for everyone to at least get a bit of bitcoin/litecoin, put it in a paper wallet and keep it safe and forget about the whole cryptocurrency deal altogether. Down the road, if 1 bitcoin goes to $10k or $100k or more, then it'll be a good day!

A while back, I bought $100 worth of Iraqi Dinar just for the hell of it. Still not worth much, but what if? LOL I know one thing for sure just like the lottery, if I don't play, its guaranteed I'll never win.

[Tom C]

thanks for the long post Aaron, my only point is that it trades in reference to a fiat currency, it needs to be pegged to GOLD regardless, as in 1 bitcoin is 1 ounce of gold, in essence a GOLD standard or gold value equivilant. then dollar fluctuations would not matter it would be worth something as opposed to what the market feels like doing.

Tom C