Topic: A Public Plea to Bitcoin Developers and Supporters alike - page 2. (Read 10866 times)

One that doesn't include any transactions at all could be marked as "malicious".

What is malicious about a BTC botnet ?

Where is FPGA in your little story ?

Nice post, otherwise !

The difference here actually being that it is impossible to alter the production rate of bitcoins.

With oil/gold/anything else, capital investment can be used to raise productivity or fund innovation to raise production.  With bitcoins it cannot.

The best you can do is tip the constant production in your favour, you get more of that fixed pie; which is what BFL are selling.  When ASIC/FPGA miners push the total hash rate up (which is great for users, the blockchain is more secure) one of two things will then happen:

• The unprofitable GPU miners will give up; very slightly (relative to the new order of magnitude higher rate) lower the total hashing power of the network.  This will make very little difference to ASIC miners, since they will already be taking the lions share of the block rewards.
• The unprofitable GPU miners will upgrade to ASICs.  This will tip the reward ratio back to where it was.

In either of these cases, the end point is the start point just with a considerably more secure blockchain and a load of money in BFL's pocket.

I don't envy the miners; they're in a horrendous position.  They all start mining with CPUs.  Then one of them invents GPU mining; any CPU miner who doesn't upgrade instantly finds their share of the pie reduced to minuscule proportions therefore everyone becomes a GPU miner, and they have to invest in the equipment to do it.  Then one of them invents ASIC mining; any miner who doesn't upgrade instantly finds their share reduced to minuscule proportions therefore everyone becomes an ASIC miner.  Then one of them invents quantum mining...

Miners are doomed to constantly play catch up with the other miners, who are inventing better technologies.  It's no fun for them, but that is the nature of a free market -- innovate or die.

Bitcoin's peculiarities mean that the rewards for innovation accrue to the innovator, not the miner.  BFL are the ones who will profit from this, not the miners.  And there is nothing wrong with that, because for the rest of us, we see ever increasing efficiencies -- and more hashes per Watt means a more secure blockchain for less energy expended.  Great.  This is about as far from destroying bitcoin as it is possible to be.  Bitcoin ends up stronger (for example: malicious bitcoin botnets will vanish pretty quickly).

BTC are being hoarded by peoples like me and loads of others on the forum. Oil isn't Price will get to $10 surely by Dec

I too think ASIC is good idea now I think about it.

Difference here being oil is burned and bitcoins aren't. You need new oil being produced, no one "needs" new bitcoins being mined - old bitcoins will be traded over and over again.

BFL is speculating, by pricing their asic product to reflect their idea of where the price of Bitcoin will be after the halving. They show they don't understand Bitcoin or other markets that are affected by supply and demand. If total oil production goes down by half, what happens to the price of oil? Bitcoin is no different. Also, projected value of Bitcoin places it in the $12 per BTC range just before halving time.

1880:



2012:

This sounds entirely plausible and is now on my list of reasons for ASIC!
Thank you.

++1

Not to mention several other projects including an open source one in the forum.

Someone might even be bright enough to build a CPU designed with multiple algorithms on the silicon and outdo BFL, it would hardly cost any more and folk would pay extra for the future-proofing. Like realnowhereman said it looks like a pretty ordinary business model and an open market where quick witted cpu manufactures can make the Fiat they want so much and quickly, even if the application is extra-ordinary.  

It currently takes just under 10 years for the USPTO to approve a patent. In Bitcoin time that is an eternity. There has also been a recent trend to reject patent applications with little merit. I would imagine a hardware implementation of SHA-256 falls under such a category.

My theory is that the people against ASICs are botnet owners as their whole network of zombies will suddenly become a lot less profitable and they won't be able to find any zombies with ASICs idling.

The problem I see here is that the increase is so great and the mechanics of Bitcoin, there won't be too much profit motive to get into ASIC once the first products gets out, especially with the large cap-ex investment in development.  I don't think we will see a competitor for this in plain words.

You are correct sir.   

I don't see the big deal with this as other manufacturers are sure to move in if there's so much profit to be made there. Though is it possible to patent something like 'ASIC SHA-256 hashing' in general, so nobody else is even legally allowed to compete? That could be disastrous for Bitcoin as BFL could then have >51% at any time, and nobody would be legally allowed to challenge it by producing their own ASICs. I assume this isn't a potential problem though, or somebody would have mentioned it already?

Sorry peeps. There is no such thing as safe high-yield investments.

You won't know difficulty beforehand with certainty. Deal with it.

I stand corrected,  THIS would be the best case scenario.

You might be wrong thinking that would be the best scenario. If BFL will slowly but constantly ramp their sales, people will constantly be misguided about the speed at which difficulty will go up, so they will buy "too many" asics and risk to all make losses.

The best scenario is that BFL makes their production and delivery schedule public. Simply state we will sell no more than x TH over the next Y months. Then, and only then can potential customers make a somewhat informed purchase decision. I say somewhat, because of course any other asic coming to market or mining in the dark could still kill them.

This would be the best scenario and if they made that policy, it would make me feel much better.

Are you trolling right?

maybe they will only sell the coffee warmers at first to slowly ramp up the difficulty rather than release the 1TH units straight away.