Bitcoin Discussion

[jeffdamann]

Having these 6970's, I just started mining bitcoins. Ive read a lot of info on it, but the currency's inner workings are still unknown to me.

I have 1 lingering question.. What gives a bitcoin value. Is it really just because people give it value? The wiki states that the mathematical prrof of work problems that your gpu performs are internal to bitcoins operations.This doesnt make sense to me.

I mean couldnt we all have just decided to make rocks a currency and decide to pay so much per rock? Would it be any different?(assuming there would only ever be 21 million rocks in the world and it takes time and effort to find a rock.)

Im giving this thing a go, considering the rates of increase. I currently make around 1 BTC per day(15$ at current exchange rate) I am also dumping excess cash into bitcoins, I hope the bottom doesnt fall out.

Am I wasting my time?(please dont comment on this without more knowledge of the system than me)

Also discussions about bitcoins are explicitly FORBIDDEN at overclock.net . I wonder why? What is so bad about them to FORBID any discussion about them?

Please share any thoughts you have on this phenomena, Id really like to hear your input.

[sl1982]

From what I understand of mining bitcoins is that it is mostly useless now. It requires massive GPU power to 'find' a bitcoin, and the calculations are only going to get more complex. In my opinion you are going to spend more on hydro then you will make on them.

[Kudistos Megistos]

I have 1 lingering question.. What gives a bitcoin value. Is it really just because people give it value?

That's how currency works. What do you think gives a $1 bill value?

Also discussions about bitcoins are explicitly FORBIDDEN at overclock.net . I wonder why? What is so bad about them to FORBID any discussion about them?

Surely the answer to this should be obvious? bitcoins are "controversial" and topics about them are liable to turn into a shitfest. The mods are probably tired of cleaning up after the flamewars.

Anyway, you should be wary. There was a huge crash in the value of bitcoins recently, after someone "stole" bitcoins and dumped them, and the belief that the currency is unstable and vulnerable was proven to be true. Since the currency is so small, it can be greatly affected by this kind of incident.

I think that bitcoins are the next €uro. A currency gleefully adopted by the hopelessly optimistic, but doomed to eventual failure.

[pyrozen]

well, this is the first i have heard of it. i would imagine the government stepping in at some point if it got out of control, mostly due to the money laundering aspect. But for now i assume it can be considered "safe", and if enough like minded people could mine together with monster computers i think a bit of cash could be made.

However, once the near limit of coins is reached, i see people leaving in droves because it will become to time-consuming to generate BT coins, and those coins will be worth significantly less than older ones.

Still interesting piece of tech, i had never heard of it before. And if you've got 2 decent GFX cards just  lying around, why the hell not? I would definitely avoid putting any "real" cash towards it though, your better off playing wall street or simply saving it in the bank.

lee

[jeffdamann]

Just to give you some stats on what Im getting and have found out.

My gpu's pull 350 megahash each(idk what a hash is, but its the calculation speed I assume)

I joined a pool, which is several hundred users working towards the same block, every block has 50 bitcoins, but it is unknown how long it will take to solve a block.

A commonly used analogy is rolling dice. Imagine you have x number of dice(x being the difficulty) and a rolling for a specific combination of those dice. Your gpu rolls 1000's of times a second, and it could roll the specific combination in 1 roll, or ten years worth of rolls(wont happen but you know how probability works, you theoretically "could" flp a coin a million times and have it always come up heads)

When the block is solved, the pool manager keeps 0.5 bitcoins for maintenance , and the other 49.5 are distrubuted According to the % of work you put forth to solving the block. I currently am #25 in my pool, and get around 0.35 BTC for every solved block. Usually 1-2 are solved over a 24 hour period. The current market rate for a bitcoin is around 15$.
At that rate I am making roughly 10$ a day, but if you look at how WILDLY the bitcoin market fluctuates, there is great chance that 1 BTC could become worth 100 USD in the coming years.(Also great chance of it being worth 0 usd unfortunately)

I have found many places to legitamately exchange bitcoins for cold hard cash, prepaid debit cards, or goods.

I have personally bought a real life bitcoin(no value, just for looks) Plated in gold(brass) Of very nice quality for 0.59 BTC, so I can attest that you can at least do that with them.

There are currently 710.3946 BTC in demand worth an estimated 12,493 dollars.

There are many users who buy POS cheap ass mobo's with a ton of pci-e slots and build minimalist rigs with top end gpus, hooked up vie PCI-E extender cables, so that heat becomes less of a problem from stacking. Heat is also counteracted by SEVERELY underclocking the GPU memory. They underclock like many people overclock, finding the highest core to lowest memory ratio that runs stable.

One guy in my pool currently draws 12-15 ghash... I get 1.2 ghash max. He has apparently built a massive mining farm and invested a lot of resource in the Bitcoin craze. He gets around 3-3.5 bitcoins per block, which translates to roughly 100$ a day at current difficulty and market rates.

Just a bit of info I have found on the subject for you guys.