BitCoins dynamically adjusts the computation needed in order to claim coins. It will just make the computation harder. Of course, you would get more than the other users with less CPU power.

You'll really clean up until the difficulty increases though.

> How much different from MD5 can that be? Answer: Very.

(MD5: 128 bit | SHA256: 256 bit) :: (2^256/2^128 = 2^128) => 3.40282367*10^38 of a larger keyspace.

I know nothing about the specifical implementation details of either hashing method (and I eagerly await tptacek to offer a far more comprehensive response) but I'm sure the difference in keyspace alone is enough to make this practically impossible.

Interesting. Would you mind sharing some information regarding your hardware and performance (ghash/s)? Does your estimate include amortization of hardware cost, electricity consumption? Because the general consensus is that BTC generation is not cost-effective unless:

a) One does not pay for resources consumed. b) Speculates about future value of BTC.

Regardless, very impressive. I would love to hear more!

Hm, there is a market value for bitcoins? 25$/hour sounds like a very good deal - as long as power consumption is less, it is a license to print money?

Maybe this is the final incentive for me to look into EC2...

EC2 is NOT cost-effective at all for hash computations as I describe in detail in:

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=42

(This is the machine I built to develop whitepixel).

I'm not a bitcoins expert - but wouldn't any jump in the availability of bitcoins necessarily cause deflation, as with any currency?

If someone finds a way to generate,say, 5x more bitcoins that what the average expected amount is - they have a temporary advantage, but once those coins hit the market, the market is diluted and will quickly catch up.

Bitcoins has replaced mining gold with generating bitcoins - so it will be harnessing server infrastructure and good code / math -vs- digging big holes in the ground.

That's true. Also, as more computing power is added to its network, the difficulty of the hashing problem is increased to maintain the bitcoin creation rate at about 50 per ten minutes.

They say there is a limited amount of BitCoins, though - I think 21 million?

the difficulty of the calculations is adjusted so that 50 bitcoins will be released every 10 minutes. so this would only affect the distribution of bitcoins, not generation speed.