Quote:
Originally Posted by Stubby79
I don't know squat about BC. Buuuuut...if it can be mined on something other than a GPU - ie CPU - then it occurs to me that the very low power (consumption) on the CPUs of things like my Netbook (1.6ghz, quad core, 10 watts) might equate to making profit rather than spending more on electricity...
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CPU cores are really single threaded, meaning they can compute 1 task at a time. CPUs these days are often offered in 2 or 4 cores, meaning they can simultaneously calculate 4 things at once. GPUs on the other hand have many cores, allowing them to calculate many different things simultaneously. The GPU I have has 3584 cores, meaning it can calculate 3584 things at the same time. They are way more power efficient for tasks optimized for this multi-threaded capability.
My GPU can generate about $100/mo in Bitcoin, and my insanely powerful 32 core CPU can generate about $10.
Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
I read Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper back in the day. IIRC it is only eight pages. But it went right over my head when they got to Merkle Trees. I get what they do, I just can't explain how.
Mining is a competition as I understand it. In early days you could run a PC in a closet, but then the custom ASICs upped the ante. |
Lots I don't even fundamentally understand, like why a necessary component of establishing trust is presenting insanely compute intensive math problems, where "guesses" are made. I don't know any math that involves guessing. I don't know why that is a critical element to establishing trust, and I don't know how it can be known when a guess was correct since knowing the answer would defeat the purpose of the guess.
Like most things, I assume there exists a relatively simple high-level explanation, but nobody is forthcoming with it.