Topic: Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Mini Rig Box - page 54. (Read 186946 times)

Agreed. I misinterpreted your initial comments. Mining is only a small, but necessary, fraction of the current bitcoin landscape; I too hope bitcoin diversifies further than it has. More miners coming to town don't help much; but people setting up barber shops, saloons, supermarkets, banks, blacksmiths, etc., do. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Thanks for the speedy response BFL; just placed an order for my first 

Regarding the Rev 3, it has slight changes on the PCB to accomodate our new advanced Heatsink,
custom built for our singles. We expect a considerable increase in heat-tolerance and improved
heat evacuation. Some modifications are made to the enclosure as well.


Good Luck,

What is the difference between revision 2 and 3? Didn't see that this was answered elsewhere.

EDIT: Sorry, found: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/single-revision-3-68093

Is that all it is, is the heatsink?

i'm not sure how that impacts my opionion that more/easier mining doesn't have a huge upside to spreading bitcoin...that more main stream acceptance will come with a deeper market buying and selling services, products and accepting donations in bitcoin.

i'm not saying there is anything wrong with mining and selling on mtgox, nor was i trying to imply that there was any increase in coins being sold if mining was further diversified amongst new miners, just that if mine and dump is all they do, they don't benifit bitcoins advancement.


silly me, i was under the impression there were wide and diverse means to get bitcoins.  things like exchanges, otc markets, and to a lesser extent meat space exchanging.  i must also be mistaken that people are acquiring bitcoin by selling services and products like on silkroad, bitmit and other online companies:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

and a small but growing number of brick and mortar companies accepting bitcoin:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Real_world_shops

personally, i'd rather my grandmother accepted bitcoin for her incredible baked goods then have her set up a mining rig.

yes, mining helped spread the popularity of bitcoin.  i'm of the opinion that we've reaped the majority of the benefits there.  sure, there may be some additional popularity gains to be gained from making mining more popular, but as mentioned, your not considering that the more popular mining gets, the less profitable it becomes.  its a way forward that shoots itself in the face.  show people that they can donate to wikileaks even though paypal and vc/mc tried shutting them down, show them they can pay for their offshore seedbox anonymously, show torrent sites they can accept donations and pay for their servers anonymously and be insulated from corporate payment processors actions, show individuals and companies that they can save a non negligable percentage on processing fees, and then use those same bitcoins to puchase items for their company and profits in bitcoin can be spent for their personal needs desires...then and only then will bitcoin start seeping more steadily, more permanently into the mainstream.

as long as the bulk of the bitcoin economy consists of miners dumping bitcoin on exchanges and speculators, it will remain fragile.  strength and permanence will only be gained through broad and diverse use of bitcoin as a tool of commerce and money transfer.

My point is that in time he won't be earning 3-4 BTC per month he will be getting 0.1 BTC per month "for free" and paying 20 BTC in electricity to get it.

Either he will be forced to become a specialized miner and devote significant capital and other resources or he will start buying his coins.   Lots of people buy Gold Coins, not that many people mine them.  Even if you had gold under your house you likely couldn't extract it for less than market rates without specialized equipment and skill (or pay someone else to do it).

My hypothesis is that over time the miners as a % of Bitcoin users will decline (from 100% prior to exchanges) down to 10% or so.  The margins will be so small even for optimal miners (cool summers, low electrical cost, lots of space, capital for largest most efficient rigs, etc) that non-optimal miners will simply be mining at a loss.

Then again maybe I am wrong.

Part of it yes, but I think another part of the miners population will be a crazy load of really small miners. I don't think my grandmother will run a full rig with 4 radeon and FPGA all-around. More in the way of:

"Hey Grandmother, click that icon there, and your computer will generate you Bitcoins".

One of my friends asked me if I could sell him 1 to 3 Bitcoin each month, because he needed it for small purchases (like a VPN). I showed him that he could mine them with a Radeon he had, and make 3-4 Bitcoins each month. He's really happy of getting his 3-4 Bitcoins/month and he doesn't really need more than that.

Some people will just mine for their needs of Bitcoins, like they make a little farm in their backyard for their needs of food. The network is already at 12 THash, but it doesn't prevent people from mining with CPU or with their gaming GPU. They are happy with their 0.3 Bitcoins/week, and that's ok.

Miners will never be more than a small fraction of the Bitcoin population.

By protocol the reward if fixed.  More miners simply means the reward is split into smaller and smaller chunks.  The price/difficulty ratio is set by the lowest cost miners (in terms of uptime, electrical rates, size, skill, hardware, etc).  If there is profit for the network to expand they will expand.  When there isn't sufficient profit people like your Grandmother will be the ones forced out.

As time goes on Bitcoin mining will become a more and more specialized industry.  Someday giant warehouses with rack and rack and racks of ASIC servers will hash full time being monitored by dedicated staff with profits going to owners or even shareholders.

Dude, there's only two way to get Bitcoins:
-Mining them
-Being on the receiving part of a transaction.

If you want people to spend Bitcoins, they need to get them first. Mining already had a crazy impact on Bitcoin popularity, and giving a better accessibility will just add to this impact.

I'll be happy when my grand-mother will be able to mine her own Bitcoins to spend, not before.

You forget that no matter how many new miners come online (or go away), the rate of bitcoin generation will not waver: difficulty self-adjusts so that it will ALWAYS be 300 BTC/hour (until the reward per block gets cut in half, later this year). So whether we have a 2 TeraHash/s network or a 20 TeraHash/s network makes no difference ... the # of coins getting dumped on MtGox remains the same.

Back on topic: EasyMiner looks ok. If I had a mixed farm (GPU/FPGA) I wouldn't be too thrilled running 2 different mining apps ... I would prefer to stick with one centralized place (cgminer, BAMT, Anubis) where I can keep track of all miners. But I wouldn't mind booting up EasyMiner once in a while if it offers something the other apps don't (like Single temperature monitoring). I can't imagine BFL releasing new firmware very often, so the 'firmware upgrade' feature of EasyMiner may be the only thing it is really useful for.

If the only mining hardware you have is a Single(s), then EasyMiner might be a reasonable option. Especially for someone new to mining, buying a Single, and EasyMiner comes on a CD along with it. Plug and play, so to speak.

BTC will continue to be viewed as yet another quirk of Libertarians and other kooks as long as sheeple continue to have confidence in their fiat currencies.

BTC will take off when people start buying goods and services directly without converting to fiat currencies or even worrying what the exchange rate is.  This will only happen in the aftermath of a major financial crisis worse that the one in 2008.

i don't think accessibility to mining will have a huge impact on bitcoin popularity.  we need more people spending bitcoin, we need more organizations accepting bitcoin, we do not however need more miners simply dumping their coins on mtgox.

Ironic you mention that since that's one of our targets for the BitDex.

I hope so. The more people mining, the better it is. Just look at the development of Bitcoins since last June, it's crazy. Even the price indicate it, now it's around 5$, five times its price from last year.


Well, if I compare myself to some of the people around here, I qualify as an average user. 1 year ago, I hated Linux to death, knew almost nothing about cryptology and didn't knew what a Radeon was. I've studied Marketing, and was passionate by social networks and video game business(I still have wet dreams when I think of Nintendo, one of the greatest company of all-time!  )

Today, 3 meters behind me, I have 12 GHash/s running, owning a couple of hundred of Bitcoins, and currently working on two new Bitcoin-related projects. And this never happen if mining is too hard for me to do.

So, if mining become easier and more accessible, it's only going to benefit this network. You can never have too much people.


Make it easier for teenagers. We gave a couple of Bitcoins to people we know, and the more active one is this 14 years old kid. For them, there's never been a world without Internet, they have cell phones, they're everywhere on social networks and now, you present them "hidden and rebellious" money that they can manage by themselves, without having an adult telling them what to do. It's going to take a couple of years (since teenagers have no money), but they'll have capital in the future, and you can bet they're going to use the money they've grown up to.

It doesn't matter how much easier it becomes over time to make Snuggies®, people will still think they're gay.

Bitcoin's problem is a social one. No one wants to take risks. It starts with us, not the miners.

I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts on how this easyminer will effect the long term success of bitcoin. If BFL singles and easyminers significantly decrease the technical skills needed to mine bitcoins, will we see another boom of "n00bs" enter the network? If it becomes easy enough for the average user to mine, will these benefit the acceptance of bitcoin as an alternative currency?

lmao!

Sonny confirmed that other pools will be configurable in it at some point anyway, so all good.   Right now it's a handy way to upgrade the firmware in the boxes if nothing else

Noobs that just want to make a buck don't care whether it is open source or not.

Is Easyminer OpenSource?
(the web site doesn't have a link for it - just names it)