Cryptocurrency Mining
 

I dislike Bitcoin because it's fundamentally flawed and wastes enormous amounts of electricity, but I do like blockchain and distributed ledger...

Hard to ignore the price of Bitcoin these days though. That got me to thinking (I'm pretty slow), I have powerful hardware laying around, I've banked excess electricity from solar, and this is the heating season...

I finally figured out how to find how much excess electricity I've banked. It's at the bottom of my $12 bill ($11 for the connection, and $1 taxes). 800 kWh.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1610153093

I don't know how much electricity the mining rig would consume, but it has dual 1600 watt power supplies requiring 240v. If I pulled 1000 watts continuously, I could mine for a month using my banked solar credit. 2 months if it only pulls 500 watts.

As a bonus, I'd run the gas furnace less during the ~6 month heating season.

Here's a similar setup to what I've got to work with, only 1 GPU instead of 2. I think it can take up to 3.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1610153108

Makes a lot of sense. There are certainly worse ways to use electricity, you're getting resistive heat out of the deal and already have the appropriate hardware. Might be worth considering lifespan impact of the GPU(s), I find they tend not to last nearly as long as anything else.

I mined a couple of coins very early on in Bitcoin when I could get electricity for free in college, but didn't feel it was really worth my time (they were a few tens of dollars). I think I sold them and cashed in $100 or so. :rolleyes:

Across the lake from where I live, in Plattsburgh, there's a huge hydro dam, and the town gets electricity for something like 2 cents per kwh. When Bitcoin got big, the city started having brownouts from all of the miners that moved in.

I advised a coworker to sell his Bitcoin at $70 pointing to the fact that it's flawed and worthless. I just missed the prediction on when worthless would occur, and the intervening high worth.

My friend has 2.4 bitcoin from his setup of 10 GPUs x2. One is at his house, the other at his moms. It consumes the max power a 15 amp circuit can handle. Good thing he didn't listen to me tell him to sell at the last peak, maybe.

Anyhow, I like the process more than the prospect of riches. Wealth doesn't bring me joy, but I do want to have enough one day to comfortably say whatever is on my mind and not care how people take it; not to abuse people, but to be candid. That freedom will be worth more than Bitcoin in the future we're constructing.

Crazy to think a $500 investment back in the day could have you at $40M today. Maybe I should become an expert at combing the dumps for people who threw away computers containing their Bitcoin. Split the find 50/50.

10'000 Bitcoins - Laura Saggers (Original Music Video)

That was six years ago. I got a hard wallet at Fry's but never got over the hurdle of sitting in a coffee shop and handing someone cash.

A year ago March I gave it to my son and asked him to transfer some of his into it and I'd reimburse him. I figure he owes me six grand at this point. :)

If you have Bitcoin, I think you print out the 50-digit address or laser etch it on stainless steel ingots or something so it won't go away. The value is held in common by the network.

The energy requirement is a flaw, but as you see that can be exploited. Iceland's geothermal power is best, but IIRC it's exacerbated by competition between the miners.

When the value of a single Satoshi equals $1, a single Bitcoin will be worth 1 million dollars. After the Democrat depression, if not already, a single dollar will be worth a single penny. I think it's about 4¢ now.

There's other flaws besides power requirements. What will be the incentive to participate once the last Bitcoin is mined? I suppose nodes could charge transaction fees like everyone else. While the ability to print money is a great evil, the inability to print money creates problems as well. There are legitimate uses of monetary policy to stabilize inflation. As we can plainly see, the USD is more stable in value than Bitcoin at the moment, and stability is a cornerstone of a currency.

Anyhow, if Aerohead isn't going to schedule compute time on my setup, I might as well learn about crypto.

I don't follow the financial side of things, but I understand that the Federal Reserve is now under the Treasury Department. So the runaway inflation of the dollar may be halted.

Transaction fees will persist after miners have wrung out all that they can. Bitcoin will continue to deflate. Satoshis will attach to smart contracts at negligible cost. Wealth transfers will subsidize the system.

Bitcoin aren't printed. They're agreed to.

As with all things, the greatest strengths are simultaneously the greatest weakness. The government can't regulate bitcoin, which is a great advantage, but the government can't regulate bitcoin, which is a great disadvantage. Taxes must be collected, and if there is a way to shirk that responsibility, then people will do it. Economic sanctions on countries are sometimes necessary diplomatic tools, yet cryptos provide a pathway to circumvent it...

Probably our method of governance, education, and other institutions are archaic and in need of fundamental updating, but a smooth transition is preferable over abrupt and violent change.

I agree. As Scott Adams sez, people can't tell really good news from really bad news.

Maybe this is the smooth transition. :)

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...

Just a thought. (Not that I can be bothered!)

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.

Ten watts? Pshaw.

https://raspi.tv/wp-content/uploads/...ed-768x397.png
raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power-measurements

Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these? That reminds me I haven't visited Slashdot in a while.

edit:
Yikes! This is on-topic: it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/08/2132205/a-crypto-mining-botnet-is-now-stealing-docker-and-aws-credentials

This is the sort of content I went to Slashdot for: tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/09/0645247/the-case-against-section-230-the-1996-law-that-ruined-the-internet

This one has a good comment section. We talked about this 20 years ago on /. (Score:5, Insightful)

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.

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.

I'd have to review to take a crack at that, and it's sunny outside.

The part that amazes me is that you can pick any arbitrary 50-digit string and be assured it hasn't been taken simply by the Power of Big Numbers.

Well my attempt to migrate the Tesla P100 GPU into a tower seems to have been misguided. The GPU has no active cooling, meaning it depends on the airflow of the rig it's in, and therefore designed to be in a 2U server with plenty of noisy cooling fans. The OS was reporting a resource conflict (error 12) and I couldn't figure out how to clear it. Probably it isn't possible for that hardware. The hope was to cut 100 watts of server overhead and reduce noise to a level where it could live in my office instead of the boiler room in the basement.

New plan is to relocate the server to my parents who have more excess electricity production than me. I've made about $1000 mining since February and had to pay $60 in electricity since I couldn't quite produce everything I needed.

I'll build up that spare tower to be my surveillance PVR (BlueIris), media server (Plex), and 3 display gaming rig, though I'll hardly ever get a chance to game.

I may be a little behind, but it sounds like this is not a Tesla P100D OEM computer running off-label, but maybe something by Nvidia? Not the Dojo architecture? It looks the same here.

If you'd paid for all the power at the rate the $60 segment was, what would it have cost then?

You have the PCIe card? The [$200] reTerminal has a PCIe slot. I wonder if they would work together. If you follow Major Hardware on Youtube (www.youtube.com/c/MajorHardware), you could take one of his winning designs and then undervolt a few of them.

Stick it in a bucket of baby oil. Aquarium pumps are pretty quiet.

Yes, Nvidia P100. It wasn't clear to me that it had no fans. Also not sure if it can run in a normal tower workstation given the vague error I was getting about insufficient resources. These cards are finicky. There was a server that would detect the card but wouldn't enable it. Turns out it wanted a power connector from a specific spot from the server, and not an identical looking one that it was plugged into. The difficulty in figuring out that mystery is how I ended up with this "extra".

The server runs 500 watts when mining, and 250 watts at idle. If I didn't have excess solar generation, it would cost me $440 per year in electricity. That's nearly half of my "profit".

Maybe I'm trying to kill to many stones with 1 bird by combining a surveillance PVR, gaming rig, media server, and crypto miner all in one.

https://files.seeedstudio.com/wiki/R...overview_2.png
www.seeedstudio.com/ReTerminal-with-CM4-p-4904.html
See what you think. With the Power over Ethernet and PCIe hosting it could potentially be a lid to your aquarium full of baby oil (Not made from real babies). 5V@4A DC, how much power does the Nvidia card draw?

edit: Currently on back order, but it includes a cryptography chip and accelerometer.

I'd be interested if I didn't get my hardware for free, and had time to learn something other than Windohs.

My quick and dirty solution is to move the mining to my parents house. They forfeited 1068 kWh in March during the 10 months they had solar. They did get a Nissan Leaf this year, so I better re-evaluate how much excess they actually have...

Just had the thought to put the miner in my grandmother's empty house. The heat is being run just to keep the place from decomposing, but I could at least put those 500w to useful work there.

I've already spent $68 on electricity since March (the true-up month) and we haven't even hit the cold and dark season yet.

That's smart.

The quickest option was to move my mining rig to my parents house. They have a cold spare bedroom, and I placed the server under the bed so it's out of sight. If someone wants to use the room, I can shut the server down (remotely).

It's quiet enough they can leave the door open and allow the heat to disperse through the house. I'm told the heat is making the heat pump run less often, and it's certainly a lot warmer in the room now.

It's taking about 100 days to mine 0.1 Ethereum. If the mining rate is cut any further (April), it probably isn't worth my time to mine even with free electricity. Wondering what other promising currencies can still be mined with GPUs?

I've got 0.35 Ethereum so far and was hoping to get to 1. Not gonna happen now it seems. I'll be lucky to hit 0.5

I haven't given up on the notion of moving the GPUs into the more efficient Tower PC I've got. Just need to solve how to cool the card, and I suspect the "This device cannot find enough free resources" error is due to improper power.

I've never had the compute power to think I'd get anywhere*. Perhaps the better way is to earn them?

Non-fungible tokens and such....
I'd imagine massive copper and brass steampunk heat pipes to a bin full of dry ice.

Well the one thing I'm the worst at is predicting the future. I thought about NFT but a blockchain record of ownership doesn't seem valuable to me considering the digital content can be replicated anywhere with 100% fidelity.

The flaw I saw in the Star Trek utopia is that even if anything can be replicated perfectly, there would still be a market for originals such as paintings. Somehow a perfectly replicated work of art is less desirable than the original. A classic car is more valuable than a replica.

The high level explanation is really simple. Blockchain is a database that a lot of people maintain copies of and have to agree on. The question is how do you make it costly for a potential attacker?

Proof of work's solution is have everyone waste some significant amount of money mining, so that it is very expensive to acquire a majority of mining computing power.

Proof of stake's solution is to take away all your staked tokens as punishment for being wrong.

The weaknesses depend on the details where you do need to know the technical bits.

I've since found those explanations, but I still need to dig into proof of stake a bit more. It's unclear to me how it reduces power consumption which was my major complaint with Bitcoin (and others). Wasting an enormous amount of energy for every transaction isn't cheap, and having to wait minutes to validate a transaction isn't fast, and that limited bandwidth to process transactions doesn't scale.

Bitcoin will fail to sufficiently meet the economic definition of a currency, and therefore it's doomed to failure, just that bubble hasn't burst yet. I don't know enough about Ethereum 2.0 to know if it has staying power. If I had to bet long term on any crypto, it would be Ethereum, perhaps only due to my ignorance.

Think about how much computing power value it would take to record your credit card purchase of say 50 dollars. For reference, Visa charges the merchant something like $1 for that.

What does it cost Visa? Basically 0. They're writing a few bytes to some disks after sending it around their network a bit.

If they had to record that transaction a million times separately, it would cost on the order of maybe 1 cent. This is what proof of stake uses, because the consensus mechanism is based on economic punishment, not economic barrier to entry. There's not much calculation to do.

Bitcoin *by design* uses the entire dollar up, because that's the transaction price the market can bear. The algorithm is designed to burn up electricity at a certain rate per year (measured in terms of the value of bitcoin), it adjusts the computation requirement to hit that target, assuming perfectly liquid markets (they aren't, that's why miners can still make good money).

The libertarian anarchists who have a hard on for bitcoin argue that this price is cheaper than the existing financial system. In a way, that's true, at the end of the day banks and payment processors do charge around the same percentage for a transaction. To me, this is a stupid argument, because paying a high transaction fee is worse than paying a low transaction fee, and it seems pretty far fetched to suggest it is impossible to adequately secure a blockchain without those high costs.

Will mow lawns and stack firewood for Bitcoin?

Thinking about NFTs as pictures/content or replica vs. original is I think the wrong angle, you have to think about it as buying status. Kind of like buying baseball cards (people don't really play baseball card games right? the cards are just for collecting AFAIK). It doesn't matter that anyone can have the same cat picture or a replica of whatever rare card, it matters that everyone knows you are the "real owner" and the bragging rights are what's worth money.

A replica car is just as useful as the original car as a vehicle or as a costly piece of physical artwork, if the craftsmanship is equal then the replica should still be worth substantial money. An NFT on the other hand is digital and has close to zero inherent utility, so you are 100% purchasing it for status. A painting is somewhere in between, where you can have a reproduction of the original that's somewhat expensive to produce and is easily differentiated from just a print, but the original is still worth much more.

My thought about crypto has been that distributed ledger is a superior record of account, but there needed to be a way to efficiently execute the implementation including not just power requirements, but scalability and rapid confirmation of transactions. Perhaps Ethereum has a pathway to accomplish this? Pretty sure Bitcoin has no pathway for that.

As I say, I'm constantly wrong about the future. Perhaps the market will greatly value some NFT.

I'm not much of the collector mindset for bragging rights. Most of what I collect has intrinsic value or utility. That said, of the few things I have collected from childhood, Desert Storm trading cards are most interesting to me. I do have a Colin Powell card, but my collection is only about 90%.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon...._QL70_ML2_.jpg

I was listening to the radio to a channel called CPR. I don't know how biased the report was, but it made crypto seem pretty bleak. Apparently it's very energy demanding, and accelerating very quickly. Whole power plants are being used to supply giant crypto mines of shelves and shelves of computers all running at full blast.

That's a second order effect. Mining doesn't require massive inputs, but people who want to get rich quick running mining rigs instead of earning them. The competition heats things up. The real metric is compared to what. Citation needed of course, but IIRC mining gold requires more energy than Bitcoin. And then you get to banks and credit card system that could be rendered redundant.

Once the Bitmine runs dry, the system will continue to run on transaction fees.

There are a lot of metrics that I just don't know.

Gold mining is energy intensive. But not everyone mines for gold.

How much money and CO2 is generated from the total gold, iron, lithium, silver, petroleum, gas, diamond, etc. etc. etc. industries? How much is used for the entire Bitcoin industry?

One thing I do know, is Bitcoin doesn't offset some other mineral that's being mined literally. It only adds more money and more CO2. This is different than a gold mine that opens up and causes more supply and therefore less demand which in turn can cause other gold mines to slow production or maybe even close and therefore doesn't necessarily increase CO2 production.

Another thing to think about, is Bitcoin isn't the only crypto currency. Once it's all mined out, the question is could another crypto currency emerge, followed by another, then another, then another, causing a perpetual use of energy that may even continue to increase?

That has been among the fatal flaws from the beginning.

These "revelations" aren't meant to inform, but to manipulate price. When Elon bought a bunch of Bitcoin and then "realized" it's a waste of electricity, he's simply profiting by driving the price high, and then causing it to tank.

It's algorithmic purity vs human nature, is what it is.

The algorithm must factor in human nature or it isn't a very worthwhile algorithm.

I'm all for a currency that cannot be manipulated by the government by inflation, and distributed ledger, and blockchain... but current implementations don't lend themselves towards being a good currency. Specifically, crypto is not a good store of value (stable price) and it's not a good medium of exchange (10min to authenticate a transaction). It's also extremely energy costly, and those are real costs.

This one is a bit of a slog [1:41:48]:
Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia
...but it has good production values (CryptoBro Glossary bugs) and you can scrub the timeline for chapters. I'm stuck in NFTland, but it looks promising down the line.

Maybe I'll take it in chunks, it's sunny outside.

Yeah, getting breaks of sunshine up here too, so I'll wander outdoors.

I think münecat (Moon-cat) is my new favorite Youtuber. Next up Climate Change: Capitalism's Final Boss


Via Slashdot: news.slashdot.org/: Bitcoin Reaches Milestone: 19 Millionth Bitcoin Mined

That scheme alone suggests a plan to massively inflate the value of the so-called currency with no real thought to how to make it an enduring and actual currency. Satoshi is a wealthy person along with everyone else that gambled correctly, but there's zero chance Bitcoin is even uttered in conversation in the year 2140 unless referring to early development of digital blockchain or distributed ledger.

Satoshi's White Paper was built on earlier efforts like Digicash. It's a tour de force demonstration of the power of big numbers. As an example, you can generate a random 50-digit string and the odds of it duplicating an existing one is 1/three multiverses.

Bitcoin is possibly one or two algorithmic breakthroughs from a viable crypto. münecat has convinced me, and not just of green-screening in front of a green backdrop.

I, for one, would like to be around in 2040 to see how it turns out.