 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Bitcoin Mining by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 06/21/2013, 8:04pm PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| Well, I lost the original message because I stupidly went to another website to check my mail and look it up instead of opening a new window. So let me see if I can reconstruct it.
A message that got past my Spam filter was from a Chinese company selling a six-node machine using 31 watts/node to mine Bitcoins. This machine is for sale for $3000. In fact. let me quote from the message: 9.3-9.9 GHash/sec 6 Board (has 48 chips) - 30 BTC - $3000 USD This unit will make: Coins per 24h at these conditions 0.2965 BTC Revenue per day 29.08 USD Each module board uses about 31 Watts of power. Mining board's supplied , Case, power supply , On-board heat sink , USB connectors. Ready assembled All the boards are linked together , With one main controller. Easy to Install Software (Disk Provided) I'm not sure if they're saying it produces 29c a day or $29 a day. I looked it up, bitcoins are not worth about the equivalent to a Euro - about US$1.30 - as I suspected, but are worth about the equivalent of a 1/10 of an ounce of gold, about US$129.00. So this company is essentially saying that for 3 grand you can buy a computer that will produce 1 bitcoin every 4 months for 3 grand, meaning that it will pay for itself in 3000 days, which is about 16 years. At first I was going to say that this sort of device was a good reason not to get involved with Bitcoin if someone can make them, until I ran the numbers and figured out it's 16 years, so this is not a threat to the issue. But, as some group - it might have been the Electronic Freedom Foundation - who designed and built an encryption cracker using custom hardware for $50,000 and I think it could break 56 bit DES in a week, wants to tackle it, I suspect someone will figure a way to design a set of custom chips and multiprocessor devices to design a machine that can crack Bitcoin a lot faster than people have been so far. I'm sure I'm not the first to consider the idea of using the huge simultaneous multiprocessor calculation capacity built into graphic cards to use the multiple processors built into them to do calculations of this kind. In fact, it is on the Wiki of one of the bitcoin sites itself that mentions that a typical CPU can do 8 instructions per clock cycle, so a 12-core machine which would do about 48 instructions per cycle and will set you back $4700, a Radion HD 5790 can do about 3700 32-bit math instructions per clock cycle, or to put it another way, the GPU on a video card can do 800 times as many instructions in the same number of clock cycles as a standard CPU for less than 1/10th the price or about $350. As I read more of the article I quoted, it's because a standard processor is relatively bright, but it can only do a few things and takes a lot of real estate on a piece of silicon, the processors in a video card are stupid, can't really do much except repetitive tasks, but because they don't need a lot of real estate on a chip, they can put lots more of them in transistor form on a video card. And as long as all they have to do is some simple, repetitive task (and aren't interrupted), they can do lots more of them, typically each processor on a video card can do 5 simple tasks in a clock cycle, but since these processors are tiny by comparison to a complex instruction set full blown processor, a video card can have hundreds of them as opposed to one with 4 cores attached to a motherboard. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
Bitcoin Mining by 06/21/2013, 8:04pm PDT  Why do I notice errors after saving. 3000 days is about 9 years. NT by 06/21/2013, 8:07pm PDT Aw hell, maybe I do have Autism by 06/21/2013, 8:31pm PDT |
