Topic: FPGA mining for fun and profit - page 6. (Read 67204 times)

Wrong. If only one person or entity utilizes that kind of power, that could destroy the bitcoin. What we need is a public service to lower the barrier to entry for people. If FPGA miners are as cost-effective as the Th/s figure quoted earlier, then it would probably be quite profitable for a person to invest in an FPGA mining business. In the long run, it's really just the cost of keeping a cluster running that matters most, assuming you can make back your initial investment.


I second the question.

[edit]


True. But could you humor us anyway? Your claims would have a bit more veracity to them if you provided evidence. As they say on teh interwebz: pics, or it didn't happen.

Are you sure they are on?  I can't see a noticeable bump in total network power.  The increase is steady within normal variance.  Perhaps a lot of GPU miners shut down their systems at the exact same time?  Sure you didn't mix hash/s and Mhash/s?

So you did bring a cluster online?  What sort of GH/s is this cluster putting out?

I stand corrected then, I haven't really put time into researching attack vectors yet.

Actually it was 25% and an NDA on the implementation.

If I did a screencast of the system then someone could say it was faked with a script too.  In the end there are always people who don't believe despite whatever you show them.

Only if you could get several blocks ahead of the rest of the network. If someone waits for a couple confirmations you have to have 3 blocks in reserve with the double spend in them to beat it.

It would basically show that you had several confirmations before the network finally rejected it, right?

No, no, no.  This is completely 100% WRONG.  You don't seem to understand how any of this works at all.

With more than 50% of the hashing power, you can hide a double spend for a few minutes, and only from funds that you have legitimately.  You can not counterfeit anything.

I still find absolutely no evidence of a massive hashing machine, whether powered by unicorn dust or by FPGAs.

One person has been making very sketchy claims, which of course he can't provide any evidence for because the Men In Black offered him 25% to keep quiet.  That is 25% of a venture that is highly unlikely to be profitable even if they didn't have to pay him hush money, by the way.

If you think that the recent jump in difficulty was caused by a mythical super-cluster coming online in the last day or two, you really need to go back and read up on the retargeting process.

It would be trivial for them to do as well.  Once you get >%50 of the computational power you can basically counterfeit transactions and as long as > 50% of the network validates it, it's valid to the protocol.

if that kind of mining power gets utilized it will completely destroy the BTC

edit...

sorry the terahash / sec that was quoted earlier...

Wow, I'm sorry for getting off-topic, but completely disagree. If these people even exist, the technology exists, and if the technology exists, the idea exists, and if there's an incentive to implement this idea, then there will be competition among all.

Do you think people are just going to sit idly by with this newfound information, and all the people "in-the-know" are going to huddle together and laugh maliciously at taking over bitcoin? Hell no, there going to start competing amongst themselves! And let them! Let bitcoin go huge, let people put big money into it! Why? Because they'll be the ones with the biggest interest to advance it, to market it, and to incorporate it into a reasonable currency.

No, people always go a little crazy when power appears to be consolidating, but don't underestimate the free market my friend. We're all competitive, and I can only hope that someday, engineers are being hired to develop for bitcoin, research bitcoin mining, and market for bitcoin.

EDIT: I love what I see here. Lots of smart people huddling together attempting to open-source the new idea. I'm continuing on my GPU mining route (as a programmer), but I may become obsolete by the time I finish! That's technology for you!
EDIT2: Ok, some of you now have me concerned. :tinhat: I still don't expect 50%+ ownership by any single entity however

Did you really intend to hotlink a hotlinking notice?

And no miners do not control my transactions, because all that they can do is refuse to process them, and there are thousands of others who will not.

They control the transactions that you might want to make with your bitcoins.

Now for a picture to help you feel better:


Seriously though, we need to get this tech into the hands of the rest of the community ASAP.

They don't control mine.

I don't know, I think we had different opinions about his.

Didn't we already determine that fpga's aren't any faster than GPU's?

Yes the problem is not the lower profits of the average miners, it's the high centralication of hashing power. And if some universities or whoevers fpga cluster can put this much hashing power to the network, some 3 letter agencies can put bitcoin down with the snap of a finger (ok, not REALLY putting it down but performing the >50% hashing power attack, thats not much better).
What bitcoin needs to get strong enough is that the average miner is using the same maximum effective technology which any entity could bring up. Therefore miners must switch to fpga/asic mining or the algorithm needs to be extended to be no more highly parallel computable (but I don't know if that's even possible as every software basically is faster if implemented in hardware).

Ah, gotcha.  Yes, that would be a problem.