The Future of Mining | Bitcointalksearch.org

lunarboy

hero member

Activity: 544

Merit: 500

Seems to be the Elephant in the room.

good segment on LTB https://soundcloud.com/mindtomatter/e22-asics-forensics-and-other?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyBitcoinShow+%28Let%27s+Talk+Bitcoin!%29

but really just asks more questions and offers no answers. Huh

Its About Sharing

legendary

Activity: 1442

Merit: 1000

Antifragile

With the difficulty and hashing rising by the day, what is going to happen when the small guys can no longer compete? (I have a 5Gh BFL on order, but things have slowed down again and I'll be lucky to see it this year.) 5 and 10 GH mining rigs have what, 6-8 months of life left in them? It is the much bigger rigs, if you can get one, where the profitability is at. The fun part seems to be leaving.
And this almost exponentially difficult level really cuts out the small players (except for group buys and such, but that still is a taking the mining out of the home).

This will probably mean we essentially have a fairly centralized network, which is against what BTC represents.
Will the network reach a max level and then just near halt or barely grow then?

Something about this just doesn't feel right. Agree with lunarboy, looks like a near fatal flaw and it is exponentially sneaking up on us!

Logical predictions about the effect of all this?

IAS

lunarboy

hero member

Activity: 544

Merit: 500

With only 4 or 5 main companies producing ASCI chips The future of mining seems very centralised and in my opinion is the biggest danger bitcoin currently faces.

1 CPU 1 Vote that was the initial idea but the reality is far from that now.

can anyone point me to threads with decent discussion on how to prevent this nearly fatal flaw in the bitcoin protocol.

Dan Kaminsky predicts

Quote

that the current proof-of-work function isn’t going to be used by the end of the year — he assigns 0% probability it’s going to be used

if this is indeed the serious problem many believe it is what is the solution.?

how do we restore the power to the individual 'average computer user' now that the network is already in the hands of the few big asci producers, and their army of pre orders and hence already deeply invested followers who have essentially bought their dominating vote of the bitcoin network?

organofcorti

donator

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1007

Poor impulse control.

Quote from: shmadz on February 14, 2013, 07:38:37 PM

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

Hey shmadz, I've got a family emergency atm.

I have the second part of the "Weekend Dip" trading strategy posts lined up and ready to publish, and I'll have time for the usual weekly posts. I'll try to make time for the next "ASIC choices" post soonish, and definitely before the next retarget. Sorry it can't be sooner.

It will consist of bitcoin earnings, difficulty, and cumulative cost per day, to make it more relevant to more people, and for longer (especially since I have no idea what btc will do).

/OT (apologies to eleuthria)

eleuthria

legendary

Activity: 1750

Merit: 1007

Quote from: shmadz on February 14, 2013, 07:38:37 PM

this "mega-miner" is now above 2.2 TH - unless he somehow has roughly 35 Avalon devices, I'm guessing that this is ASICminer now online and steadily ramping up production.

even without adding those 12 estimated TH to OOC's charts it looks like we should go past 10 million sometime in early march.

I suspect that it's possible that some of the people who got in on the second batch of Avalons might get theirs before march, (though I still haven't seen much evidence of batch one) but I highly doubt that any bfl orders placed after July 31 will arrive before the 10 million mark.

I'm expecting to receive my ASIC (which was ordered very late) on exactly my birthday Cool

(an undisclosed day in May) And I'd be ecstatic if the difficulty were still below 100 million! (OOC's charts say we should be around 30 mil by that point, but those are long range forecasts and have a pretty high degree of uncertainty at this point)

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

It has been confirmed this miner on BTC Guild is ASICMINER. So far there have only been two high profile confirmations of any Avalon units (Bitcoin Foundation and Jeff Garzik).

shmadz

legendary

Activity: 1512

Merit: 1000

@theshmadz

this "mega-miner" is now above 2.2 TH - unless he somehow has roughly 35 Avalon devices, I'm guessing that this is ASICminer now online and steadily ramping up production.

even without adding those 12 estimated TH to OOC's charts it looks like we should go past 10 million sometime in early march.

I suspect that it's possible that some of the people who got in on the second batch of Avalons might get theirs before march, (though I still haven't seen much evidence of batch one) but I highly doubt that any bfl orders placed after July 31 will arrive before the 10 million mark.

I'm expecting to receive my ASIC (which was ordered very late) on exactly my birthday Cool

(an undisclosed day in May) And I'd be ecstatic if the difficulty were still below 100 million! (OOC's charts say we should be around 30 mil by that point, but those are long range forecasts and have a pretty high degree of uncertainty at this point)

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

organofcorti

donator

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1007

Poor impulse control.

Quote from: MaGNeT on February 14, 2013, 02:27:49 AM

Unless you ordered before august, you won't see difficulty under 10,000,000 when your ASIC arrives.

You base this on what? Please show working.

MaGNeT

legendary

Activity: 1526

Merit: 1002

Waves | 3PHMaGNeTJfqFfD4xuctgKdoxLX188QM8na

Unless you ordered before august, you won't see difficulty under 10,000,000 when your ASIC arrives.

repentance

hero member

Activity: 868

Merit: 1000

Read it and weep.

organofcorti

donator

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1007

Poor impulse control.

Quote from: crazyates on February 13, 2013, 12:19:15 PM

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

There's still a lot af variance. At 1Thps and 3 300 000 Difficulty, you'd expected to see ~ 6 blocks per day. But for such a small number the variance will be quite large - standard deviation of blocks per unit time is proportional to square root of of the average, so the smaller the average, the larger the standard deviation is in proportion.

In this case we can say that for the above parameters, in 95 days out of 100 the number of blocks per day will be more than 2 and less than 11. If you're relying on 6 blocks per day, that could be a problem.

OTOH if you can wait a month for the earnings to stabilise, and if your proportion of the network doesn't change, then for 95 months out of 100 you'll have ~ 150 to 210 blocks per month.

Simply put, the variance is going to be quite large. If you don't want more than (for example) expected +/- 5% variability (of blocks found in a given time period), then you'll want to be expecting about 1500 blocks in that given time period. So even if you have half the network, the time to reduce variability to within 5% of the mean will still be about 3 weeks.

PPS pools are already very familiar with this bit of maths.

Gabit

full member

Activity: 145

Merit: 100

Quote from: Sitarow on February 13, 2013, 12:29:08 PM

Quote from: crazyates on February 13, 2013, 12:19:15 PM

Question: wouldn't 1TH (or 4-5% of the network) be enough to justify solo mining?

Seems every device being added increases speed by 250 and is now at 1.3TH

Edit: it is at 1.5TH as of 12pm MST 2/13/2013

That would actually mach my calculations... as in 1 (unit) x 10 boards x 64 x 355MH/chips = 227,2GHash (ASICMINER).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.1480.

cypherdoc

legendary

Activity: 1764

Merit: 1002