Topic: What you don't know about bitcoin... - page 2. (Read 3828 times)

The largest "supercomputer" in the world and it's calculating numbers to keep our money safe because someone else can't calculate them as fast.

This really says something about the human race.

Wasn't that computing power supposed to do something else too, like moving tons om bitcoins around? Oh, that's why it's so slow? Tinfoil point!

Well I doubt bitcoin is a password cracking operation, but I was thinking that crackers probably soon will have their own p2p network to crack passwords.

I don't think Bitcoin is anything that sort. But I'm pretty sure people at NSA and such are banging their heads to the wall for not inventiung this themselves. To be honest I don't understand the specifics behind the cryptography of Bitcoin so my opinion is not worth much here. If somebody has anything to prove this point, I would be glad to hear more.

This is an obviously-incorrect conspiracy theory. If you want a more plausible one -- the goal was to create a massive community project to develop optimized hashing hardware and software.

Not just poorly planned, completely unlikely. There were two years of GPU-unassisted mining. The newest version ATI cards are actually slower at mining. There's been talk on here of getting hashing ASICs made. If AMD came out with a 10000 core hashing-optimized GPU for high performance computing, then they would have a real game-changer. There's no need to do that now, miners are not buying nVidia (name anybody on this forum who's main gaming rig is running nVidia now), but AMD should have a strategy when nVidia leaps ahead. A 5x jump in performance and a 5x power reduction would make every video card you own obsolete.

Duh, I made a joke with my OP, but you see how long it takes you to try to find documentation of exactly how and where the 'difficult problem' hash is generated, and verify that it works that way in the code.

It's amazing how much electricity and processing time is being used for nothing at all, when it could actually be a distributed computing project (as long as the difficult computing part was impossible to bypass with hacked software and would never end, it would still stand the test). With the bitcoin network at 9,876 gigahashes/second currently, and the cheapest gpu hashing coming in at about 500 watts per gigahash/s, that is about 5 Megawatts of electricity being generated and used for computing nothing. Add to that the nasty chemical pollution from third-world chip fabs, and Bitcoin is the most earth-unfriendly project ever created (well, maybe second to General Motors).

I'm about 99% sure the OP was joking.  Always fun to see people get all serious and jump on a poster in cases like this.

Sadly, if there really were some kind of AMD and Satoshi conspiracy (as BkkCoins suggests), it was poorly planned. AMD's evil plan to sell more GPUs has done nothing to help their stock price! Lackluster performance since the start of the year, and just plain awful in June.

Not trying to feed the troll or anything, but isn't this something you could debunk just by looking at the source code? Just making sure I understand how BTC works...

Wow, glad to see that was a bunch of drivel. I'm new to bitcoin and here and reading that was making my head hurt - still trying to figure out where my wallet.dat is and along comes this nuttery.

Thanks all for the smiles. Some people just love to be an arse, huh. 

hahaha, it's a quite good idea then.

at least better than seti or folding@home, at least get people motivated by "real" money, instead of just mental satisfaction...

Actually I was on the marketing team at ATI when they came up with this idea. We gave Satoshi heaps of free options for allowing changes to his white paper and then we pushed into the right hands. Every time the difficulty doubles we're ready with the next GPU gen. It's been wicked fun.

No More Secrets. 

Amazing. So when bitcoin topples the government's currencies then what?

Btw, we never went to the moon.

Oooh I'll buy two.  One for me and one for my wallet 

This would actually be pretty cool and is something I've talked with some friends about. They're usually pretty tinfoil about this kind of stuff.

Also, per Grouver's vote. I am going with #5. Skynet is online 

Being open source, I think someone would have noticed if the Bitcoin software was programmed to scrape our HDD's for info.

I always did wonder about the enormity of the hashing power generated by Bitcoin though. It could be used to achieve awesome feats even if only a portion of the total hashing power could be periodically siphoned off.

Vote:
1) CERN had extra money to set this up to get more computing power to find the Higgs Boson particle.
2) We are calculating Elvis Presley  back into the world.
3) Bitcoin is a giant Botnet.
4) Bitcoin is a evil plan from some funds. In a few months all wallets get emptied and donated to charity.
5) Skynet is taking over our money supply.

So we are also helping decrypt Osama's harddrives? COOL.