The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread
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@mark are you better off mining bitcoin or a different currency?
I’ve been thinking about buying a moderate mining rig and having Lucas run it at college…
Me/rry/Christmas
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@LuFins-Dad Right now I am mining Monero (XMR).
I am looking to get a couple of small Bitcoin miners and probably one or two that can mine more than one coin and are proven profit centers.
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I am a noob at all of this myself. Mining is just an application that generates hashes which in turn are used to look for blocks. As you contribute to the building of the block, you get credits for helping out (Proof of Work) and occasionally you hit the jackpot actually find a block. When you find a block I think you are rewarded with a full coin or multiple coins. I have no idea how long it will take for a reward to be issued. I will let you know how it goes.
Anyone can do this. You can allocate the number of processor threads you want to dedicate to the mining process. I am using half of my 32 threads on this AMD 5950X workstation. I have another 5950X machine that I am going to use all 32 threads. Then I am probably going to invest in a dedicated ASIC miner for something that will generate monthly profit. Helium is one that I have read about. There are a few money makers to choose from. I just need to do a lot more research.
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@mark said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Mining is just an application that generates hashes which in turn are used to look for blocks. As you contribute to the building of the block, you get credits for helping out (Proof of Work) and occasionally you hit the jackpot actually find a block.
You typed too fast...
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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It's using your computer's cpu to brute-force the solution to problems that are known to have no elegant, non-brute-force solution. The time-consuming nature of solving these problems, is what enforces scarcity of the results, and that scarcity is what allows the results to be used as currency.
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Isnt the electricity cost in many cases higher than the actual bit coin made?
I was reading something about how the only people making money are the big companies that can have thousands of computers running on cheap electricity.
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@taiwan_girl DIY solar using used equipment is very cheap and one you pay off the solar power equipment, it's free.
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I will admit I dont know much about crypto currency, but it seems to my non-understanding mind that I would have just as much luck ( and may be save money) if I just went out and bought a lottery ticket. LOL
QUOTE
Mining is the process of adding new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain to validate transactions. It involves a process of trial-and-error that resembles a competitive numeric guessing game in which a correct “guess” completes a block and only the winner obtains rewards in the form of both newly minted Bitcoins and transaction fees. The Bitcoin software automatically adjusts the difficulty of guessing a correct number to maintain a constant time of 10 min between the creation of new blocks. In May 2021, approximately 2.9 million specialized hardware devices worldwide competed in this game, generating 160 quintillion guesses per second2 and consuming approximately 13 gigawatts (GW) of electricity (see Data S1, sheet 10 and 11).
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I’ll take a shot. Blockchains are a “chain” of transactions that are public and permanent for all to see. The transactions are chained together in blocks. In order for a block to fit on the chain a very hard math problem needs to be solved. All “miners” are trying to find a solution. The one that successfully does first adds the “block” of transactions to the “chain”. They get a nifty coin as their reward for successfully mining and validating a block of transactions.
So - when people mine at home, they participate in the guessing game to hopefully solve math problems and get coins of their own.
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@George-K , this video shows you the technical, mathematical, computational basics of "blockchain" and from there tells you what "mining" is.
Link to videoThis next video talks more generally about "mining," not just the computational aspect.
Link to videoIn general, yes, you can "mine" by doing all the calculations by heart or by hand, it will just take you a ridiculously long time to do it. Hence "mining" in practice is done by computers, the faster and the more of them, the better.
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@jon-nyc said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@Horace said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
I wonder how many levels deep you have to go under Biden before you reach the first person who has a clue about crypto.
Gensler. I guess that’s technically one layer down but pretty far removed operationally from the WH.
He has a good course on Crypto on YT.
He doesn't really have a deep clue about the tech stuff behind it, but he knows enough about it to be very good about the economic implications.
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@George-K ill take a shot.
Mark use computer to run program non-stop. Mark pay for electricity to run computer. Mark must keep computer cool too, so Mark need cooling components sometimes. Mark is l337. George is n00b. 89th is Uber n00b. When/If Mark computer find crypto solution, Mark get paid. The more Mark dig, the better chance to find treasure.
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@89th said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@George-K ill take a shot.
Mark use computer to run program non-stop. Mark pay for electricity to run computer. Mark must keep computer cool too, so Mark need cooling components sometimes. Mark is l337. George is n00b. 89th is Uber n00b. When/If Mark computer find crypto solution, Mark get paid. The more Mark dig, the better chance to find treasure.
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@mark once it’s going it’s pretty autonomous, right?
Me/rry/Christmas
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@LuFins-Dad Yes. Not much to do once you have it setup.
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@George-K said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@mark said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Mining is just an application that generates hashes which in turn are used to look for blocks. As you contribute to the building of the block, you get credits for helping out (Proof of Work) and occasionally you hit the jackpot actually find a block.
You typed too fast...
Imagine a black box which has this property: You stick a number in and it gives you a number back. You have no way of predicting what number it will generate, but for a given number it will always given you the same output. In tech speak, that's called a "cryptographic hash function". It's not necessary to understand how it works; it is sufficient to understand the property I just described.
Now imagine you want to proof to somebody that you invested a lot of "work" in something. He gives you a number, say, 589328. He asks you to find another number, n, such that if you put 589328+n into the blackbox, it will give you a number whose digits start with a 77777. You'd need maybe 100,000 invocations of the blackbox to find such a number (using random n's). It's very easy to check that it is indeed a solution (you need only one blackbox invocation), but hard to find the solution. That's a proof of work. You can make it arbitrarily hard - e.g., you can demand that the number from the blackbox starts with 12 7s, or 28. But it's always very cheap to verify a solution.
Mining in "proof of work" crypto currencies is all about solving such puzzles. Every page in a blockchain "ledger" is "validated" by the solution to such a puzzle.
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@George-K said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
You typed too fast...
I found a few explanations.
This is long, but will probably answer your questions in understandable language.
History, cost, benefits, economics
In a nutshell, you buy a computer and let someone else use it.
You can make some money, with some luck you can make more than the other guy. -
Education is extremely important.
