Best Way To Mine Bitcoins - Allow Errors! 167
An anonymous reader writes: A recent paper from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that bitcoin mining profits can be increased considerably if mining hardware is allowed to produce occasional errors. The research shows that mining hardware that allows occasional errors ("approximate mining") can run much faster and take up less area than a conventional miner. Furthermore, the errors that are produced by the miner do no corrupt the blockchain since such errors are easily detected and discarded by the bitcoin network. Mining profits can increase by over 30%.
BeauHD (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Thanks for asking! While I don't like to shamelessly plug myself, you can always google search 'Beau HD' to see some of my work. I've covered a wide range of technology news in video form over the past 7 years or so. Usually, I focus on consumer electronics but lately I've been covering a broader array of breaking tech news.
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This the first article of the day. The last one was 14 hours previous. Are some articles not showing up? Or did I misunderstand the question?
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To tell the truth, I wouldn't change a thing. In fact, I kinda hope you don't. I'm one of the more content people around here.
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Shifting the workload onto other people? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, they basically shift part of the workload necessary for mining onto the nework, and thus pay less?
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Why expect me to do the work? It's on your ass if you're not satisfied!
See also Flint, Michigan. If you can't afford to test your own water, you shouldn't make us pay the price.
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Lol I wish I had mod points to give you.
Re: Shifting the workload onto other people? (Score:2, Interesting)
You got it wrong. Democrats are the ones creating jobs to fix their mistakes.
Re:Shifting the workload onto other people? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing "wrong" per se with either type of program as long as you can keep inefficiencies down. In that respect it's good to have both R and D at each others' throats - helps keep their pet programs honest. Corporate welfare helps to guide the direction of economic development and technological progress (renewable energy being the latest example). Social welfare helps to act as a safety net allowing people who fall on hard times to pick themselves up and become productive members of society again more quickly.
But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit. Corporations take the subsidies without producing a meaningful product. People mooch off welfare with no intent to re-enter the workforce. If you can see the possibility of that happening with only the half of these programs your political party opposes, you're part of the reason our government wastes so much money.
Re:Shifting the workload onto other people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both parties are the same. Republicans shift workload onto society via corporate welfare. Democrats shift workload onto society via government welfare programs. ...
But when any of these programs are given a free pass (as the most staunch conservatives and staunch liberals do), inefficiency (corruption) begins to creep in and their cost to society eventually exceeds their benefit.
True, and an insightful point. Though I would argue that the result of corporate welfare abuse is that the already rich 0.1% benefits the most. The result of social welfare abuse is that the poorest 25%+ benefits the most.
Neither form of waste and corruption is ideal, of course, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils I'd prefer to direct the inefficiencies to the 25% of the poorest people in society living day to day with underfed kids and horrible health care than I would to millionaires wanting to add an extra comma to their net worth.
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I look at it this way: Any government spending hurts the poor and benefits the rich.
When the government spends money, it borrows it. Borrowed money is created out of thin air by the banks. Reserve requirement.
Money creation causes inflation.
Inflation means it costs more for the poor to buy stuff, and it means the stuff the rich own becomes more valuable. (if you bought a $100k house 30 years ago, it's worth $300k now thanks to inflation... you made $200k simply by owning it).
Unfortunately this means huge go
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Except many of your points are just plain nonsense, sorry. Borrowing does not by definition create money out of thin air and cause inflation. The US government borrowed tons of money in 2015, and inflation was way below average. Inflation can be due to a government printing money because it CAN'T borrow enough. If lots of people are willing to lend the government money at low rates (like in the last couple years), then inflation can be really low even if govt borrowing is high.
Inflation means it costs more for the poor to buy stuff, and it means the stuff the rich own becomes more valuable. (if you bought a $100k house 30 years ago, it's worth $300k now thanks to inflation... you made $200k simply by owning it).
Whoa, that's absurdly inco
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I don't believe my premise is wrong, but I may have not made it all clear due to brevity. Of course reality is more complex than a few sentences in a slashdot comment; if it were this simple we'd all be economy experts. Let me try to clear things up.
Inflation can be due to a government printing money because it CAN'T borrow enough.
The government doesn't print money. Well, it does, but not nearly enough to matter, and in order to print it, the money has to be created first via a borrowing event. Look up how that all works.
When the news says the government is 'creating money' they really me
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Did you even look at Sanders' plans? Or are actually so ignorant just to take the Fox talking head's word that you would pay more taxes under Sanders' plan? The middle class is no longer in the "middle 25%" - in reality the middle 25% is barely better off than the bottom 25%. If you want to get to "middle class" these days you're talking top 30-40% of income, few of whom will see ANY tax increase (yes, only the top 1/3 of US households make more than $60k per year).
If you are making $250k+ you are in the
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AC is right. Forget the tax system. It's just a net loss of productivity in dealing with it. Make it a flat tax to eliminate the vast majority of financial wasted labor. How many accounting and tax law jobs exist solely to deal with an unnecessarily complicated tax system? All of it a waste.
Meanwhile, we have a spending problem. Until someone figures out how to balance a budget, it makes little difference as we are just printing money and IOUs to cover the rest.
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Yeah, the irony is much of the tea party thinks they are in the middle class but most of them haven't been for a while now.
The 1% has already taken 14 of the 15 cookies [huffingtonpost.com] and left them to fight over the last one with everyone else.
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So corporatism is a huge problem, but every dollar they have they've earned? Am I getting this right? The government sucks for giving breaks to corporate America, but companies are pure because they earned all their money through blood, sweat and tears?
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If you want to screed against something of that ilk, I'd suggest railing against the corporatism that is rampant in this country. The current administration dumped a trillion bucks to their buddies on wall street, and another trillion in "shovel ready" stimulus pork, right out of the gate!
Exaggerated, but partly true. But what you fail to understand is Mark Zuckerberg did not inherently create $300B in value by creating a large website. It's worth $300B because Wall Street made it worth $300B. He and the other Facebook investors made money because Wall Street investors decided it was valuable. So, yes, most of these companies gained much of their value from Wall Street speculation, partly enabled by the government in bailouts (it wasn't just GM: it was the investment banks now inflating
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There is no such thing as a zero sum game.
Of course there is, that's a stupid statement. There are many zero sum games. It's a huge branch of game theory.
And while long term investing may not be one of those, much of the short term investing of Wall Street (options, futures, many of the strategies of hedge funds) are for all practical purposes zero sum games. And of course usually the professionals (i.e. the already rich people) win, and the average middle class investors convinced to try their "luck" or forced to invest in retirement accounts,
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I don't get it. I thought the whole idea was that a hash was quick to calculate, but it was hard to find a nonce that yielded a correct hash since there are so many nonces to try. So once your approximate hardware finds a nonce, why don't you just check it on a regular processor before sending it to the network? Sending off a possibly bad block to the network seems like a lazy (not to say sleazy) thing to do.
Hey, I've got an even better idea to increase profits: just send loads of random blocks to the netwo
Re: Shifting the workload onto other people? (Score:3)
Because that would defeat the whole purpose of this method. This method only works faster by simply offloading the actual checking (recalculating the hash) onto the network (which has to do it anyway but now you've increased the workload on the network with a ton of false positives).
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From reading the linked page (which is woefully short on details), this isn't approximation, it's more akin to overclocking hardware so it goes faster even though it occassionally will make a mistake. If it can run twice as fast, but only create 10% false positives and negatives, it's worth it (as long as the overclocking doesn't use twice as much power).
Sending it on to the network without double-checking that it's valid would be stupid, though, considering it takes less than a microsecond to check a resu
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Reading the paper further, while they do discuss overclocking, they are also allowing for occasional errors in an adder, specifically by assuming that long carry chains won't occur, thus avoiding the need for carry lookahead circuits to ripple the whole word length. That means occassionally an add will get the wrong result, but not very often, but the add circuit can be made faster. It's still deterministic, just that a few specific bit patterns aren't handled correctly.
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The real problem isn't the false positives but the false negatives, as those are missed wins.
Could BTC be "lost" this way, I wonder. Do candidates get checked by more than one person, or is it organized like other distributing computing systems where blocks of work are allocated to avoid duplication of effort?
Allowing errors is somewhat like how GPUs work. The reason the professional cards cost more despite having the same hardware is that they are guaranteed to produce correct results. Gaming grade cards might produce the occasional error, but it will likely be unnoticable to the player and the ca
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BRILLIANT!!!
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Basically, it is the same sort of thing that has been done in medicine for ages -- use a cheaper test with a high rate of false positive, but low rate of false negative, and verify the (few) positives with a more expensive and reliable test.
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No, verification is trivial. I have no idea why he wouldn't verify the result.
Mining pools use a similar scheme to distribute work, sending each miner what amounts to a partial problem only, while checking answers to see if they're valid before submitting to the network and awarding any bounty to the miner. This was done so that miners with varying hardware could all effectively help the pool without their tasks expiring and so that miners couldn't submit work to the pool and then submit any blocks found
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Really? (Score:3)
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Dead to bitcoin! Long live Dogecoin!
Dreaming of a day where it also peak at USD$1000.
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A virtual currency that really shouldn't even have any value at all, if it weren't for the idiots who decided it was worth something when it really isn't.
Since they gave up the gold standard that's pretty much true for every currency.
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And how was it also not equally true of gold itself?
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I don't think that's a very good analogy. You know that they sell unrefined ore, right? They do an assay and figure out an estimated value, agree on a price, and they buy the rocks and then refine the ore. So you can, I guess, show up at *a market* and foist a bunch of rocks on 'em and say "there's gold in there, pay me." Obviously, there needs to be gold in them there rocks.
I'm pretty sure there's operations for that with a bunch of different valuable metals. The mining company isn't always the same compan
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Gold has intrinsic value to humans.
So does water, iron, and air. Yes, modern society requires a small amount of gold but gold is only worth anything because of its scarcity and it's perceived value. You can see that taking place in the oil market right now. Yes, modern society needs oil to run and is willing to pay $100/barrel for it but if it's plentiful it loses much of its value. Like water, if water was scarce people would pay hundreds of dollars per gallon for it but it's not scarce so it's worth relatively little.
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> Yes, modern society requires a small amount of gold but gold is only worth anything because of its scarcity and it's perceived value.
Its scarcity is quite real: The world supply of gold is quite limited. It has very real industrial value because it's easy to refine when found, it's very soft and easy to smith when refined, and it's extremely stable and non-reactive with other. It's also extremely conductive, both thermally and electrically, and is invaluable for making good electrical contacts between
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http://www.numbersleuth.org/wo... [numbersleuth.org]
http://www.visualcapitalist.co... [visualcapitalist.com]
http://www.24hgold.com/english... [24hgold.com] this one would seem to indicate your premise in the sense that there is actually very little gold "consumed".
He also notes "Based on available information, the 166,606-tonne figure seems to be the most accurate. However, the 1,200,000 figure wouldn’t surprise me at all. As Philip Barton says it so well, “No claim to precision can be made with regard to the amount of gold in the world. All that c
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Yeah, it's not like you can dig it out of the ground or anything.
And lots of other minerals are useful for lots of other things.
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"Industry use of gold is very small"
What? Come again? Industry use is small? Gold is required for many medicines, plating electrical contacts for corrosion resistance, used as power leads for every LED die, processor pins, aerospace, dental fillings, etc.
http://geology.com/minerals/go... [geology.com]
AND THE USES KEEP GROWING.
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http://www.24hgold.com/english... [24hgold.com]
Some analysis. Mebbe good, mebbe not.
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This was "Gold vs. BC" not "Gold vs. Bricks."
Even if Gold were $0.025/Troy ounce" it would still have almost(?) infinitely more utility value than BitCoin.
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if you exchange sticks for rocks, you still need to pay the taxes on that transaction in dollars. that means you must have dollars. there is the value, since you can't run a business legally without them in USA. of course you could try to argue that what if everyone in the USA just ignored tax laws, then it wouldn't have value. then you wouldn't have USA either though.
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I don't live in the US, so i can't pay any of those things with USD either, nor can i pay those things with gold or stocks. However what all of these and bitcoin have in common is that they can be exchanged for local currency which i can use for all of the things you've listed.
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Better way to mine bitcoins (Score:2)
Just scam them from Martin Shkreli's dumb ass. [imgur.com]
Standard academic practice (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what is done with writing research papers these days: pay sufficient lip service to the notion of science to get published, and if errors turn up, just ignore them. Increases rate of publications significantly, and that's what people get paid for these days.
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> That's why the peer review process exists - it significantly cuts down the amount of BS that makes it to "print".
Tell that to the "soft science" journals. I did my postgrad degrees in stem, but studied psychology as an undergrad. The math in every single psych paper I've read from 1970 onward is not only wrong as fuck, but so wrong that everyone with even a modicum of sense for basic statistics will be able to instantaneously figure out that it's garbage. My favorite was when one paper that experimente
This is cheating (Score:4, Insightful)
The research shows that mining hardware that allows occasional errors
All you are doing is making other people do the checking work for you.
This is wasting other people's CPU and bandwidth.
Your mining pool should ban you if you're caught doing this.
Completing 'fake' shares, which ultimately enrich yourself at the cost of the total profits of your pool and other miners.
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I think the exploiters have already grokked those issues...
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If I can mine up a coin, cash it in for....cash, and go buy a lollipop at the corner store, it's got value.
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Local error checking? (Score:2)
If the hardware misidentifies a solution as valid, the network will quickly identify that the solution is invalid when the miner broadcasts it. “These are essentially immediately rejected.”
Why broadcast the block straight away? Surely checking if a given solution is valid is quick enough that it could be checked by a different system before being broadcast?
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The savings come from smaller/faster hardware due to approximate carry propagation in the hashing cores. It has nothing to do with submitting false positives. False positives as easily weeded out by a regular CPU in less time than it takes to prepare a block and send it over the network.
So it's just how mining has been done since at least 2011, soon after we developed the first FPGA miners. Clock rates are gradually increased until a suitable error rate is reached, which depends on the individual chip and other factors.
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Indeed. How the hell is this innovative?
Souldn't these guys be working on HAL? (Score:2)
Breaking News: Sky is Blue (Score:2)
This is super obvious...how did this paper get published?
Re: Great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
> worthless
All value is subjective. Back to ECON101 with you.
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not all value is subjective, that's libertard nonsense
True, but if you're talking about money, be it bitcoin, USD, or rupees - that's all subjective value.
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Nope. Value is an opinion that differs per person, and is therefore subjective.
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Oh cool, another economist on Slashdot. Well then you're probably familiar with how Smith's theory of value has been superseded by Menger's subjective theory of value and marginal utility; and how Marx is total garbage for doing anything useful.
Physicists know about heliocentrism, Kepler's laws, and Newton's laws. Some are pretty good theories that work well for day-to-day kinematics, some are total garbage that don't even give us good enough estimates to do anything useful with, and if you want to launch a
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Indeed, that came across crass. I should have said Oh cool, there's a fellow economist on Slashdot. It is my passion, and I think it is the hardest science we have. (Indeed, economists invented game theory.) It is not (merely/necessarially) a social science, people who think of it that way or criticize economists are being rather narrow-minded.
Re: Great news! (Score:1)
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If you don't mind, I have a question... What doesn't have subjective value?
I really can't think of anything that doesn't have a subjective value - at least at an individual level. I am not trolling, I am not being snide, I am not fishing for an answer to then pounce and say, "Ah ha!" I really don't understand and you're far more adept at it than I. I can assure you that you know more about the subject than I do and I will happily defer to your expertise.
Yes, it's sad that I pretty much have to include that.
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Re:Great news! (Score:4, Informative)
I can't exchange BitCoin for a real house either.
Oh, really? [wsj.com]
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I hope that no one believes that Bitcoin has no value. It has whatever value is assigned to it by the people willing to use it.
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
However, much could be said about fiat currencies especially if they are poorly manage
Bitcoin has lots of problems (Score:1)
The problem with Bitcoin is not that is has no value, the problem with it is that it has significantly less utility than legal currencies, can have significant shifts in value, and that things like this "innovation" can affect the value in a way that isn't representative of any economic indicator.
You missed one of the largest problems with Bitcoin: It was designed to be deflationary. Most fiat currencies are designed to be slightly inflationary, which encourages people to spend or invest it (the economy,
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..... with Bitcoins, I'd promptly tell you to go fuck yourself.
Really? Just for asking a question? Don'y you think that is a bit extreme or do you answer all questions in the negative with "go fuck yourself". E.g., if I asked if you had the time and you didn't would you say "go fuck yourself"?
.As would most people.
I very much doubt it.
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Technically, its already widely adopted on consumer computing hardware. If you're going into the gigabytes of memory that isn't EEC (RDIMMs), every so often, there are incorrect values being passed/caused by the RAM. Only finance/science and some engineering cares about a potential false value being returned every few months.