ha, good luck with that
28nm asic miners are out and they do 600GH/sec at $4k + 1Watt/GHs
bitcoin is just about out of reach for normal people, we missed the train
I know to collect a mining reward you have to calculate a SHA256 hash of a block of transactions (or a block header -- I can't remember which) combined with a nonce. This hash must be below a certain value, and this value becomes smaller over time so that there's a lower chance of finding a nonce that satisfies the inequality.
I know mathematically, it's essentially impossible to find collisions or figure out some data that produces a particular hash, but what I wonder is whether it is possible to figure out some technique to speed up the hash calculation.
For instance, you have SHA256(nonce1 + block data). That doesn't work, so you try a new nonce: SHA256(nonce2 + block data). It seems to me that because there is a lot of redundant initial data used within the calculation (same block data every time) that there might be a way to exploit this and speed up the calculation of all future attempts. If this was this case, you'd have a huge advantage over all the people starting each new calculation from scratch.
Another option would be to figure out a way to compute SHA256 more quickly than is currently done. I know there's incremental speed-up techniques that are figured out from time to time, but what are the chances of discovering a vast speed-up?
Any cryptographers here? What is the feasibility of either of these options?
Solving a SHA256 hash for a particular value would require breaking the hash in some currently unknown way. However, looking at how past hash algorithms have fared, it seems likely this will eventually happen.
I believe the only optimization efforts possible beyond this point will be better utilization of GPU drivers (or maybe custom GPU drivers?), as well as designing new hardware.
Is this a game only playable by those with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars?
The problem is that your card will arrive in January. In 2 months, if the bitcoin difficulty keeps growning at a steady pace (which is improbably, it probably keep growing exponentially), the break-even will be closer to 2 months. While you will probably keep making a few hundred of dollars after the break-even point, your chances to "double up" your initial 4500$ investments are close to zero. I have no idea about the profit marging ButterflyLabs make on those cards, but I'd bet it's larger than "a few hundred of dollars". That's why the mining gear business is probably more profitable than the mining business itself.
Of course this doesn't stop Butterfly Labs from having large farms of those cards...
[1] http://bitcoindifficulty.com/
[2] http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/
[3] http://www.alcula.com/calculators/finance/bitcoin-mining/
600 * 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 * 3 / 4000 = 1166400000 thousand hashes per dollar. If the average person spent 60 at 20,000 Hashes seconds on your site you would need 972,000 people to connect to make a dollar... ouch.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrenc...
I'm Jeremy, one of the devs of this hackathon project. Thanks for checking this out, glad to see the community has interest in it. We made this project for NodeKnockout, and did not intend for it to be posted on HN.
In the current release, we have a couple of things blocked out for various reasons (legal, ethical, etc) so that it is not 100% functional.
We are very well aware that our current hashrate is pretty impractical. However, there are a number of optimizations we plan to implement to greatly improve this, including using WebGL. The problem that we're looking at starts with bitcoin, but we're also looking at more general purpose computing in the client too (ie, text mining).
And in terms of battery life, yes, it does run up the cpu a bit. However, for certain users (ie, desktop), spare processor cycles could be more worth it than seeing ads. Web services using tidbit could make it an opt in thing for desktop clients.
Personally I think advertising has been dying for years now, especially with all the adblockers that become more and more popular. It's time to come up with an alternative business model for websites (no, not talking about SaaS here..).
What's your share in this? You take a certain percentage of the mined coins?
Too bad mining is becoming more and more difficult, meaning that you will earn less and less.
To put this in perspective, for $5 you can buy a USB ASIC miner that will do 335MH/s, worth tens of thousands of full time JavaScript clients.
You won't. Litecoin's scrypt is (purposely) much slower.
Mmm... Although if it's legit I'd use it, but only if it's open source.
The site offers virtually no information, so is the user notified that their machine is being used as part of a mining effort, or does it occur silently in the background?
Any site that constantly has 500,000 active users would have server costs that dwarf any revenue this would bring.
Given current network difficulty, this won't earn 0.000001 $ per impression (more exact calculations are needed)
The idea is "make money with your phone, in the background."
Sign up here....
