Topic: Are GPU's Satoshi's mistake? - page 3. (Read 8213 times)

Yes but F@H use computing power to do something, while for bitcoin if it's only cpu or only gpu mining doesn't change, since difficulty will simply change to adjust with the increased computing power.

Probably not, just like F@H, it was all CPU till they found a way to fold with gpu's and was much faster, just like bitcoin mining.

Thats pretty much correct. Although there are some nuances; for instance, an individual who already owns a (gaming) PC may not have to factor in the cost of hardware. A "professional" will have to. Same applies to electricity, an individual would only have to take in to account the marginal electricity consumption caused my mining (for the time his machine would be powered on anyway), a pro would have to take the entire power consumption in to account.

But yes, by and large, eventually mining will only be (marginally) profitable for those who can achieve the lowest cost /MH.

Maybe I am looking at this wrong but, lets say for a minute that somehow it were even pssible to forever limit mining to CPUs (which I don't believe it is but that's another discussion)...

Wouldn't eventually pretty much the same thing happen, it would become only profitable for those with the most  (and fastest) CPUs and the resources needed to support them (electricity, etc) at the lowest costs.  So for the average person with one or two average computers in their house eventually would not  be able to profit?

And even if there isn't specialized hardware available to those with the know-how and resources to use it, there would still be specialized setups/datacenters (like mine in my basement, lol), and enough of them, that the same end result would happen as we have now with GPUs, and will have with some other technology in the future that we might not have even considered yet.

Am I wrong in thinking that as long as there is profit to be made, there will likely be many people competing for a piece of it which will always and automatically lead to those with the skills and resources will be the ones getting the profits, regardless of any limitations of what technology can be used?

No. The causal chain is Market => Price => Total mining reward => Incentive to mine => Amount of miners => Difficulty => Cost to mine. The other direction, the direct influence of the specifics of mining on the coin price, is negligible. If cost per hash was lower, there would simply be more hashes and larger difficulty thus maintaining market equilibrium. (though there are indirect effects due to network security, popularity etc).

Who cares?

I mean it might hurt you personally but bitcoin doesn't need to have any set price.  If the price was stable it wouldn't matter if BTC was $10,000 per coin or $0.01 per coin.  Now GPU miners would be crushed if the price of bitcoin (relative to difficulty) fell 90% but the economy would work at any exchange rate.

You say this but don't understand the real-world relevance. Bitcoins have most certainly gone up in price due to GPU mining and lack of energy efficiency. The more energy put into the system, the more coins cost to make, the higher the bitcoin price is. If less energy is wasted, more people mine because it is profitable. For now, of course. But the more demand that is created, the more tempted coin hoarders are to sell and waste your effort. Such a self-sustaining system.

Agreed!


Not agreeing with this one, but perhaps it's just because I mine with FPGAs

First of all, FPGAs are more power efficient than GPUs. GPUs get about 2 Mhash/J, but good FPGAs get about 20. Getting the same work done with less wasted energy (and environment) should be the goal of any sane person. Of course, the initial cost of FPGAs is a problem, and GPUs are better in the short run.

Secondly, if the algorithm really only works on a CPU, then I'll download a CPU design on the FPGA and keep on mining Though the point of reconfigurable hardware is that you'll almost always find a more efficient implementation than copying the original hardware.

As for ASICs, I think we should be open to changing the algorithm anyway, so fixed-function chips would not make sense in the long run. For example, if SHA2 is broken.

I agree. We're talking money! It doesn't have to be fair, it has to be secure! GPU mining is only increasing security and this will not change in the near future. If anything, there should be anti-FPGA and anti-ASIC protocols, but GPU is more than fine!

I believe it means they are built for hashing huge sets of data. Latency is not a problem since you have to wait for entire incoming data anyway. However, Bitcoin miners hash lots of small packets, and the I/O latency becomes important. In FPGA miners, this is solved by generating new datasets inside the chip (by incrementing the nonce), and only getting external data in (from bitcoin getwork) every few seconds.

like Garvin said, the problem is msg relaying

My reading is that he realised the error after it was too late to easily fix (big blockchain existing), but before any GPU miners had come online. Thus calling for a gentleman's agreement.

GPU-minning is the only thing that saved Bitcoin from being overrun by bot-nets. And one of big reasons of Bitcoin growth.
GPU-minning is much more scalable than CPU-minning. And it attracts much more "investors".
So it's neither a mistake nor a bad thing.

Care to elaborate? What is streaming in this context?

If the vision is that Bitcoin will be completely decentralized and that everyone will mine (and I'm not saying this has to be the vision), then this is a problem, regardless of if it is an inevitable problem.

At-home miners use hardware they already purchased for other purposes; they have a place for their PC with presumably sufficient cooling; they can mine only when their PC is on anyway so they pay only for the additional electricity of the CPU load, not to keep their computer running. Commercial miners need to pay for all of this as well as other expenses; they take the risk that Bitcoin value will decrease, that competition will increase, or that the hashing function used will change obsoleting their investment; and they still need it to be profitable enough to make for a viable business. For this, their hardware advantage needs to be huge.

How huge will it be? The idea with scrypt is that every core needs a certain amount of RAM, the exact amount being configurable. So those many-core severs will need lots of RAM to go along with it, which will get pretty expensive.

Yes, this is what I alluded to when I said that "the change can be gradual", but it can only be done for a transitional period because you need to hardcode how the difficulties of the two hashing functions relate. Either have a shared difficulty, and you hardcode the ratio of the targets, or you have separate difficulties and you hardcode the difficulty adjustment algorithm to target a certain percentage of the total blocks coming from each method. A "gradual" change would be starting with 100% old method, 0% new method and slowly shifting to to 0% old, 100% new.

But this is only required when we make changes that obsoletes existing investments. It will be necessary at the time we adopt a "change every year" strategy, but once that's adopted there's no need for a gradual transition each year because there will be no investment in hardware specific to the function of the year.

Yes, this would really eliminate specialized mining. I guess you could also have two or more hashing functions concurrently. You'd still need to update all clients but the switch would not be so dramatic from the miners' aspect (e.g. GPU's would still generate but now CPU mining would be more profitable).

I had tested scrypt, but I guess I'll need to look at the paper more closely. Thanks for the link.

Did you read the scrypt paper (linked by the alt currency Tenebrix)? It sounds promising. In the end it's a numbers game, and I don't know what the numbers will be. But I think that if the Bitcoin economy as a whole decides it doesn't want specialized mining, it can be done - for example, by deciding to change the hashing function every year, so that noone will want to design chips that will expire by the time they are out.

Did you read the quote in context? (The quote header is a link.) The immediately preceding comment says

So, this means GPU mining still wasn't implemented (and I think this remained the case for another year). And, like I and others said, GPGPU is old news (and was probably foreseen well before the popular implementations).

This is a common misconception. Miners are the slaves, not the masters. Protocol changes require primarily the agreement of the majority of the economic power of the network. In theory, if everyone who actually uses Bitcoin - exchanges, eWallets, merchants, end users - switched one day, miners could try mining for the old protocol all they want but their blocks will be rejected by the network and be worthless.

In practice, having a majority of current miners leave will create a shock in the generation rate, and the difficulty adjustment algorithm doesn't handle such things well. But changing the hashing algorithm is actually easier in this regard, because you'll need to hardcode a new difficulty value anyway. There could be a brief period of vulnerability while people adjust to the idea of being able to mine on their CPU.

Oh, I didn't say it would be easy. But the protocol was designed so that things that should be changed, can be changed, if there is a good enough reason and someone makes a case for them and achieves consensus. The only thing which is fundamental and must never be changed is the coin generation schedule. And that's not due to something technically special about that part, just that nobody in their right mind would agree to change this.

Like I said, miners aren't all-powerful. They do have some bargaining power, which is more reason to do any necessary changes sooner rather than later. The change can be gradual so the people who are already invested won't lose their investment entirely.