[hackerspaces] bitcoin

[Agent 5]

Saw a blurb about China using their prison population to mine WoW Gold. I
wonder if they're doing this with BitCoin too. Anyone heard anything?

-David Johnson

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Niall Kearney <mantel at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's a large main reason why individual people aren't generating
> bitcoins any more. The difficulty of generating them is determined by how
> much computing power is being thrown at the network, once you reach a certin
> point the dificulty get recalculated and if coins are being mined too fast
> the difficulty is being raised. Better info then I can provide is available
> in the white papers posted earlier.
>
> The first milestone in rasing the difficulty was the pools, people have
> made groups where you can throw some computing power at generating bitcoins
> but in a group, all the power goes to discovering one block and when that
> block is discovered the 50 found are distrubited to everyone that has
> contributed in an even manner (the more you contribute the more you get)
>
> The second is CUDA and GPU mining. People with several GPU cards running in
> paralell have supreme mining machines.
>
> Combine both and you have groups finding multiple blocks a day and the
> difficulty shoots through the roof when it's recalculated.
>
> ATM bitcoin mining pools are the best way to get a bit of the bitcoin
> action instead of changing real money in to bitcoins but don't expect much
> from them if your only going to use cpu's to mine, using 4 lower powered
> PC's I now have 1.08 bitcoins to my name after 2 weeks.r
>
> The groups might disperse in time as the difficulty goes up and up but
> considering the stubborness of some people I'd say only more GPU power will
> be thrown at mining.
>
>
> On 29 May 2011 14:57, Yves Quemener <quemener.yves at free.fr> wrote:
>
>> I have a similar experience : I generated 50 bitcoins a month ago or two
>> and none since. But that is not a problem, mining is just a way to
>> bootstrap the system now we need to use it as a transaction tool if we
>> want
>> it to have any use.
>>
>> > What still puzzles me, wtf can i do with bitcoins??
>>
>> You can pay me to develop software. (I'm a freelance developer) I'll
>> exchange a part of these bitcoins for cash (unless I find a way to buy
>> local food with BTC) and I'll use another part for similar dematerialized
>> work. I have occasional needs for 3D or 2D models from CG artists, if I
>> find one that accept BTCs, I'll be happy to bypass the transaction fees of
>> banking systems.
>>
>> I really see BTC as a banking framework for the people who work in the
>> "cyberspace". It may be a cheesy term but it really describes a virtual
>> space where hundreds of millions of people interact without concern for
>> physical borders. But only non-financial interactions have been authorized
>> so far : discussion, OSS development, chit-chat. "Serious" things like
>> contract making or monetary transactions still rely on national legal
>> frameworks.
>>
>> The legal framework for international collaboration is close to
>> inexistent.
>> Non-profit OSS is the only one that a small number of persons spread over
>> several countries can use to collaborate. In order to have a structure
>> that
>> manages money, you need to have a legal team per country involved. No
>> wonder we are still in the prehistory of the global village.
>>
>> I see bitcoin as a way to change that by bypassing many national barriers.
>> Tomorrow, if I want to team up with a US developer, and one of our
>> Japanese
>> clients uses bitcoins, we can collaborate without the need to go through
>> an
>> obsolete bureaucracy and banking system sharks. We can get paid by day (or
>> by hours) we can do a quick payment to the German OSS dev that gave us a
>> hand by correcting a small bug. It is also possible to design systems that
>> rely on micropayments. Note that this is not a way to evade tax : selling
>> bitcoins have to be declared as a revenue, but it is a way to evade
>> ridiculous transaction fees that banks apply on international transactions
>> and that have really no justification.
>>
>>
>> > And also, it seems that if you haven't generated bitcoins months ago,
>> you're
>> > pretty much doomed. Unless you invest thousands of euro's in GPU's,
>> which I'm
>> > not really prepared to do :) I hear people saying they have machines
>> crunching
>> > away for weeks and haven't found a single bitcoin. Anyway, i'll read up
>> on the
>> > matter, because so far i've only heard things and have no clue what it
>> is all
>> > about :)
>>
>> Mining is now the hardest way to earn bitcoins. The quick fortunes were
>> already made. Now is the true test for bitcoin : will people start to
>> exchange them and trade goods and service for these ? I'll surely try, so
>> if you know someone who needs a computer vision and augmented reality
>> specialist or a CG artist that accept BTC payments, don't hesitate to
>> contact me :-)
>>
>>
>> Iv
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