Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner 490
An anonymous reader writes "There's a popular discussion happening at the Bitcoin forums about a new browser-based bitcoin miner released today. This lets people mine for bitcoin straight from the browser. There's talk of making an embeddable version. How long until websites start using CPU power from their users to create Bitcoin for their owners?" As Bitcoin gets more attention, I foresee malware with payloads promising to do the same thing.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:1, Interesting)
What exactly gives a Bitcoin its value? At least with a dollar, I can pay my taxes and not be imprisoned.
What gives a yellow chunk of gold its value?
Humans.
"mining" for bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?
Sounds like a fine use of resources to me!
Re:Bitcoin - (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin network charts [bitcoincharts.com]:
In the last 12 days "There are 201 unconfirmed transactions".
That's not an "economy" by any means. Your average American highschool probably has more kids purchasing drugs, smokes, and booze from one another in a 12 day time period than that.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a finite supply of BitCoin, specifically 21 million, more than half of which have already been mined. Let's say each BitCoin is worth 1 USD, so the total money supply of BC is equal to 21 million USD. Now let's say the BitCoin economy expands (more merchants start accepting BitCoin). One of two things has to happen: either 1) BitCoin rises in value to >1 USD or 2) the velocity of money in the BitCoin economy has to go up.
In the first case, it starts to become more profitable to simply hold on to your BitCoin rather than spending them, and you have the beginning of a deflationary spiral. People who want to convert USC to BC have to start paying more USD simply because the supply of BC has been reduced by hoarders. This is a positive feedback loop. Prices denominated in BitCoin start to plummet (ie. deflation). Basically, the exact opposite of what happened in Wiemar Germany, except that instead of incentivizing people to spend/invest their money as quickly as possible, you incentivize people to hoard it. In the very best case, you get a wildly unstable currency that rises and falls in value unpredictably.
Basically, it would have been nice if the people who invented BC had taken Econ 201 or any sort of engineering class dealing with control theory.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:4, Interesting)
What, exactly, has to make it have value?
I just finished up a property class in law school. Way back in the day, people thought it nuts to purchase or transfer rights as opposed to a real, tangible thing like, say, gold. For instance, rights to land. You can't transfer land, I can't pick up my little corner of the earth and carry it over to you, only plate tectonics can do such a thing. So, people came up with "enfeoffment:" When I sell you land, I gotta hand you a clump of dirt, or a handful of wheat, or put your hand on the door to the house or somethin' weird like that.
To me, smells a lot like the fear of fiat money. All you guys are just scared to transfer rights, or in this case, a measurement of the value of your services/wealth.
That simple. Money doesn't have to be tied to shit, just like an estate.
If you're interested and not a member of a Commonwealth country or derivation thereof, take a look at estates in land under the English fuedal system after William the Conqueror. Owning a piece of land is a lot more complicated than you would expect.
Re:Getting you at the exit nodes (Score:5, Interesting)
That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
I find Bitcoin interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Both as a technical concept and as a social phenomena. Quite a lot of people using Bitcoin are not doing so for practical benefits.. they're installing the software and promoting the concept as a sort of protest against the fiat banking system. Oh, and because they hate paypal.. but that's mutual.
http://susansayler.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ever-seen/ [wordpress.com]
That's a pretty interesting article.. and it demonstrates the power of portraying yourself as persecuted to attract new members.
However, I think they're pretty delusional about the robustness of the system. From the paper that started it all:
This obviously assumes the attacker is interested in profits that can be extracted from the system. An attacker who is already wealthy, and has a greater interest in undermining the system than extracting profit from it, can trivially overwhelm the network by assembling processing power - especially if the attacker already has a stockpile of processing power.
National governments obviously fall into this category, so if they ever decide to destroy Bitcoin they won't need to issue any bans or even tell anyone.
I'm sure you can think of some other potential attackers who have the capability.
Er. Uh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been seeing bitcoin mentioned here and there for a few weeks now.
With this FA, I've been introduced to the concept of "mining" Bitcoin. (It seems I'm a few months late, perhaps -- and yes, you can get off my lawn.)
Which, I must say, is interesting -- if people are willing to pay for it.
But in my own preliminary experience, I will generate two 10,000ths of a bitcoin per hour on my Intel Core2 Quad Q6600. (I found it interesting that all 4 cores were appropriately maxed out with in-browser Java, and that the system still seemed as responsive as always.)
But that's for my years-old CPU, which everyone seems to agree is the wrong way to mine Bitcoin. And while I can harness my GPU(s) to do the work considerably faster, given appropriate kit, here's something I've been so far completely unable to figure out:
What in the fuck are these cycles being used for? Is there some problem being solved? Is it just a measure of masochistic tolerance? What's going on here?
Re:what can you get with bit coins? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the articles it looks like you can trade US dollars for bitcoins and bitcoins for us dollars. And that the $7.70 you put in two days ago is worth $7.10 today.
Same as with any other currency, the rate goes up and down - but historically, it has gone up more than down [mtgox.com], so if you had bought bitcoins three years ago and kept them around, you'd get 10x as much as you paid by selling them today.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, bitcoins are no currency because there's no real market linked to it. There are no people only accepting bitcoins.
Bitcoins are more like gold, except that instead of mining them, you "mint" them. And of course, unlike gold, they cannot be used for anything if they lose their monetary value. Gold at least can be used as great conductor and for tooth crowns, or if all else fails, it still has decorative value.
Bitcoin is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
The few people who found out about bitcoin back in 2009 were able to mine a very significant percentage of all the bitcoins that will ever be created, just because there was no competition yet (back then you could create a block with on average 4 billion sha-256 hashes; now it's about a quadrillion). If they hold on to their bitcoins, and bitcoin trading becomes big, they'll be filthy rich just because they found the website before slashdot did.
I'll be staying away from doing any bitcoin transactions. Humanity does not need any more undeserving elites.
Re:Er. Uh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately the workload isn't doing protein folding or anything. Though that woulda been cool.
Re:Still wondering... (Score:4, Interesting)
The scarcity of bitcoins depends on cryptographic principles - there are no more than ~21 million bitcoins that can potentially exist, regardless of how hard 'miners' work to discover them.
Is it really cryptographically guaranteed? From what I heard, it seems it's merely agreed upon by the majority of bitcoin users. They agree on the speed with which new blocks are produced (adjusting the difficulty required for a block to be accepted), and they agreed that after a certain number of blocks, the number of bitcoins rewarded for mining a block will halve. Blocks need to be accepted by the network in order for related bitcoins to be accepted as currency, but technically, it sounds like the network could simply change their agreements, and more bitcoins could be allowed to exist.
Suppose bitcoin gets a huge influx of new users who don't like the idea that all money has been mined (and possibly hoarded) by the early adopters. They agree to increase the mining rate and the reward. If there's enough of them to outnumber the old bitcoiners (let's say that China switches to bitcoins and distributes its own bitcoin software), wouldn't that have an impact?
Automotive Analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
No /. discussion is complete without the bad car analogy:
I see this as being a similar false economy to the plug-in hybrid that people drive to work and charge for "free."
At this very moment, my work computer has all 4 cores pegged, generating one bitcoin every 45 minutes (except when the java periodically hangs up...) So, I'm using my employer's landlord's electricity (which my employer gets for a fixed price in the lease) to generate bitcoin. I win, but ultimately, somebody else is paying the price.
Really, it's the landlord's own fault, the air-conditioner is from the 1960s and only has one setting which results in about 64F at my desk, if I weren't generating bitcoin, I'd be doing un-necessary FPGA compiles to keep warm.