Intel chases after Bitcoin miners with dedicated chip Later this year Intel will start selling a chip designed to mine Bitcoin as it rushes into the digital transactions market. The company says it will ship an energy-efficient accelerator for those cryptocurrency miners; Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square), and GRIID Infrastructure will be among its earliest users …
What's the point ? Bitcoin is nearing end-of-life, the number of minable coins is almost depleted.
Once again, industry is reacting once the forest has burned down.
Make a chip to mine Ethereum, that thing that redefines what it is on a whim.
What's the point ?
The hardware will eventually make the cryptocurrency obsolete. The hash rate will be so extremely high that you hit results all the time in a blink of an eye. Who cares it costs a forest in electricity. Eventually, every noob can mine fast enough so that there is no value left. That is the cryptocurrency singularity. Well, yes, you can make a new algorithm, but the hardware shall catch that too.
The effect is always the same. The first ones in the pyramid-scheme are those who profit. The hardware-pushers may be late to the party, but they still have lots of profitable sales on the horizon.
Block chain is a terrible ledger system. It's like voting on what version of the ledger is correct. OK, so someone can work out if the vote has been thrown, but there's nothing they can do about it. They have to form their own majority to correct the ledger.
Thrown votes has already happened on at least one crypto scheme.
You really are better off with a paper ledger in a safe.
I think the naysayers are mostly consoling soothing themselves for not having got in on Bitcoin early. Firstly, there's nearly 10000 other cryptocurrencies presently. To say "Bitcoin is nearing end-of-life, the number of minable coins is almost depleted." is ridiculous, although the Headline did specify "Bitcoin" rather than the more accurate label "cryptocurrency", so Garbage In, Garbage Out.
And again "Block chain is a terrible ledger system" (Blockchain is one word, bazza) perhaps may apply to Bitcoin only, maybe for 8000 other cryptocurrencies, doesn't apply to the entire blockchain concept "it is also being used to record and track transactions of assets in verticals like manufacturing and real estate". So, such a bad system is getting quite a bit of traction again the Register doesn't mention the financial sector. The "City of London" is certainly taking notice.
But who am I? I'm just a guy watching my $100US Bitcoins bounce back to over $41,000US. I guess I'm a total idiot!
The hash rate will be so extremely high that you hit results all the time in a blink of an eye
That doesn't happen because the difficulty goes up (or down) to ensure that the "puzzle" is solved on average in the same amount of time. e.g. with BitCoin there is on average one winner every 10 minutes. Double the amount of hashing hardware and the difficulty doubles so there is still just one winner every 10 minutes.
Very true but it doesn't apply to BitCoin. With gold mining no matter how fast you dig if there is no gold in the ground you won't find any, as most of the gold rush miners found after buying their spades.
With BitCoin you will strike that "gold" everywhere. How much you get depends on how fast you mine in comparison with everyone else. How much profit you make depends on your energy and equipment costs. To make money you need a relatively low energy cost per hash.
"To make money you need a relatively low energy cost per hash."
Yes, but the energy cost is calculated in dollars not watts. The most successful miners get their energy for free or even get paid for it.
Example 1 - at times of high sunshine / wind when there is excess power on the grid, spot prices can fall to zero or even negative.
Example 2 - oil wells typically flare off excess gas, and there are (at least in the US) limits on how much gas they can flare. No flare, no oil, no profit for the drillers... Too little gas to sell in bulk, but miners run a generator off it and get it for free
Finding all bitcoins is not an end to mining.
You can optionally agree to pay a fee for your Bitcoin transfer to be processed. The miner gets that fee. Naturally, when choosing what transactions to include, the miner will choose the ones with the biggest fees
So finding all the bitcoins may well be the end of free Bitcoin transactions, but not the end of mining. Sadly.
Thanks to the way the algorithm works the last bitcoin can't be mined much before 2140 provided bitcoin is still a thing.
If the Intel chip is really good it would make financial sense to use them themselves and just sell enough to stop them getting more than one third of the total hash power as this would undermine the way bitcoin works. The only downside is that burning so much energy for no real purpose would not make good PR.
and therefore no longer seems serious.
I mean, fine if you want to cash in on the idiots who envisage a future where people spend non existent money in non existent worlds on non existent stuff, but couldn't you better spend your time on innovation that can benefit real world applications of computing?
Nice one Intel, seems like a great idea to waste limited production capacity on a chip designed to mine imaginary fun bucks when there is a global chip shortage.
And just think the US gov are about to give them a big chunk of American tax payers money to build some more fabs, so they can push out useless stuff like this.
The fail may be not reading the article; to wit:
"This architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact to the supply of current products,"I'm guessing that most of the silicon on a GPU is superfluous for mining. So using General Purpose GPUs for mining is far more wasteful of capacity than a line of custom ASICs.
To paraphrase Jim Samuels (fortune), Intel is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.
They have their one hit wonder, the x86, and they've shown time and time again that even after throwing money at everything, they're really not innovators. They're scared now because their cash cow has become sickly because of neglect, so we see stuff like this.
You need a 24GW power supply which is about 2/3 of the UK's total demand at the time of writing (Sunday evening).
Solar panels produce about 200W/m², so you would need about 117km² of solar panels, which in terms of area, is a bit bigger than Bristol.
Solar panels of course only work during daytime, so for continuous operation, you would need more solar panels and some sort of energy storage solution.
That's all a moot point, as any individual controlling the bitcoin network will be left with just a very expensive toy, since at the point the network security consensus is broken, the value goes to zero even for those people heavily invested in the success and high value of bitcoin.
(also, someone might notice if Dr. Evil ordered half a trillion dollars worth of solar panels!)
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