Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Kyle Williams kyle.kwilliams at gmail.com
Tue Nov 16 02:41:23 UTC 2010


Coderman sent this to me, and I'm a little upset because the extra
$60.00/month for 0 bitcoins is very annoying.  I have since stopped trying
to generate bitcoins, because it's just wasting electricity.  More comment
inline below debating this point.


For those who are wondering if it's worth trying to generate bitcoins, here
is something to think about.
I've had a single Quad-Core (2.6GHz/core, 12MB L2 cache) server crunching on
bitcoins for about 6 months now.  About 2-3 months ago, it stopped
generating bitcoins.
Someone is out there with a lot of GPU's, crunching away at the bitcoin
network and is hording/generating all the bitcoins.  I say this because the
amount of chatter on the bitcoin forums in regards to GPUs vs CPUs has
exploded, and new GPU clients are being released.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jeffrey Paul <sneak at datavibe.net>
> Date: Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:22 AM
> Subject: Re: Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation
> To: coderman <coderman at gmail.com>
> Cc: Sarad AV <jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com>, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>,
> cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
>
> On 15 Nov, 2010, at 19:19 , coderman wrote:
>
> >
> > the cuda cards are killing bitcoin, why bother?
> >
> >   (i suppose it is an interesting footnote...)
>
>
>
> Nothing could be further from the truth.  Mining/Minting operations
> have little/nothing to do with the viability of the network itself.
>

That's correct, it has to do with the number of operations per second you
CPU/GPU can do.  The network is based on the number of supporters.  Apple's
and oranges.


> It's a novel way of dealing with inflation, but, if anything, the easy
> availability of cheap and fast GPUs is accelerating adoption.
>

You're twisting facts together here, again apple's and orange's.
Inflation aside, GPUs will generate bitcoins much, much faster than a CPU.



Opportunists will quickly drive the profit from generating down to
> almost exactly that of the power costs, but that's to be expected.
>

No, the value of bitcoins starts to be cut in half as the more bitcoins are
generated.

"The number of blocks times the coin value of a block. The coin value is 50
bc per block for the first 210,000 blocks, 25 bc for the next 210,000
blocks, then 12.5 bc, 6.25 bc and so on." --
http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#What-s_the_current_total_amount_of_Bitcoins_in_existence

So when the value of BTC's starts to be cut in half, and with INFLATION now
at a record high, the cost of electricity is NOT GOING DOWN.
Hence, the chance of you generating bitcoins will go down because a CPU can
not compete with someone else's GPU, more power/electricity is being used to
generate (or not generate) bitcoins, and after the last six month's of
running bitcoin, I haven't generated a single block in over two months
because someone has already cornered this market with GPU's.

They are also the driving force behind a free market.  Or do you think
> they are killing those, too? :)
>
>
Of course someone quotes the "free market" when they have a large corner of
it.  Free market's always FAIL when someone is hording all the (bit)coins,
and while it may support free market's, it certainly is not a fair market
today.  If 2,000,000 bitcoins are spread about a few thousand people, and
19,000,000 coins are held by 1 person, your "Free Market" goes down the
drain because one person could out-buy anyone else.

One last point; by looking @ the #bitcoin channel on IRC, it shows that
about 600 people are wasting their CPU cycles because someone has most
likely has a cluster of GPU's working away at this.  This is the wasted cost
of TRYING to generate a bitcoin.  If only one person can generate the block
(ie, 50 Bitcoins right now), then 599 people are wasting their electricity
and time.  So the ~$60 a month (increase in my electric bill) * 599 =
$35,940.  Even if we decide to be really conservative (not realistic in this
case) and cut this cost down by a tenth, it's still ~$3,594 being wasted per
month while someone else get's the coins.  How "green" or "eco-friendly" is
that?

Now I ask the community, If your chance of generating a bitcoin block for
yourself is slim-to-none,  would you want to waste your time and money
trying to generate bitcoins?

Don't get me wrong, I hate what is happening to the USD, and love the idea
of crypto currency, but I see some serious flaws with bitcoin.
He who has the biggest cluster will win the day, and leaves the rest of us
with next to nothing.

- Kyle
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20101115/628f729b/attachment.htm>


More information about the tor-talk mailing list