Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by wmf on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @11:03PM
(#7028675)
Right now the ASIC vendors seem to be capital-constrained and are not producing enough ASICs to meet demand. At equilibrium we should expect that the cost of mining will equal the rate of BTC generation and a significant fraction of the cost of mining will be power.
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by DennisP on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @11:10PM
(#7028699)
Probably. On the other hand if chips get as optimized as they can get aside from further advance of Moore's Law, and they're produced in mass quantities, maybe people will start using them as heating elements in home water heaters.
A lot of the emerging currencies are focusing on memory-constrained hashing algorithms. RAM has price/energy ratios similar to what I mentioned for ASICs, and is already in mass production and about as optimized as major industry is able to make it.
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by analog31 on Thursday January 09, 2014 @12:12AM
(#7028896)
Just a ballpark, how many bitcoins would be earned by such a machine per unit time?
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by maxerickson on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:12AM
(#7030529)
The network hash rate is currently about 13,000,000 Gigahash / second.
That unit does 1.6 Gigahash / second.
The bitcoin earned in a period of time will roughly follow that proportion.
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by dllthomas on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:35AM
(#7030649)
A piece that's missing is the total bitcoins earned, which depends on payout size (possibly including transaction fees) and difficulty.
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by maxerickson on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:53AM
(#7030747)
Right. I figured the part where it represents something like a 1 in 8 million stake in the mined bitcoin answered most of the question.
For example, on Amazon right now I see a Bitmain AntMiner U1 USB miner. It costs $70 and they claim it uses 2 watts and is a recent chip.
Let's say it has a lifetime of three years. Three years of two watts is 26 kWh, which will cost about $2.60, which means that for this chip, the electricity is only 4% of the total mining cost.
Of course the rest of the computer uses power, I'm assuming that either the computer is being used for something else as well, or a large operation has a special chassis holding lots of these chips and not wasting power on much else. Anyone who's not so efficient won't be able to compete.
The fact that bitcoin's mining cost is becoming dominated by hardware rather than energy is a very positive development, in my opinion.