This falls in to the same category as the news where they calculate and announce that you can save over 9000 jiggawatthours when you remove phone chargers from the socket when you're not using them. But then they fail to mention that it's a tiny miniscule fraction of the energy used by lets say street lamps or even toasters (who needs toasters, you can eat your bread without toasting it, right!?). It probably used more energy to create and view the news article than they would save by removing the chargers from the wall...
Did you see that I was saying "on your home PC" though? I agree that the ROI can be there if you use the right hardware, but I don't think it's there for the average Joe using their home PC. The fastest GPU setups are about 3Mhash/Joule whereas most of the ASIC setups are over 100. MHash/$ is another one - the ASIC's are so far out in front I don't think there is any ROI on doing it on your home PC.
Could be wrong though, I haven't been keeping that up to date with the latest.
Umm, right. I'm talking about apples and you're talking about apples.
CPU mining is absurdly inefficient. GPU mining has excessive power usage. I wasn't talking about people running mining rigs with those.
Bitcoin to me is a really interesting currency system; I'm not sure why you'd want to petition to ban it. I believe I read somewhere that if the mining returns drop to a point where it's not profitable, then the "foundation" could tweak the system to award a larger transaction fee to the miners to make it worth it.
Bitcoin to me is a really interesting currency system; I'm not sure why you'd want to petition to ban it. I believe I read somewhere that if the mining returns drop to a point where it's not profitable, then the "foundation" could tweak the system to award a larger transaction fee to the miners to make it worth it.I'm not against virtual currency or whatever and I'm not endulging myself into conspiracy theories either. My beef is that we really don't need something new in this world which wastes a lot of energy while everybody is (forced to) conserving energy. You can't argue against that or claim its insignificant. The people behind bitcoin could have developed different methods for a gradual release of bitcoins.
I'm not against virtual currency or whatever and I'm not endulging myself into conspiracy theories either. My beef is that we really don't need something new in this world
which wastes a lot of energy while everybody is (forced to) conserving energy.
You can't argue against that or claim its insignificant.
The people behind bitcoin could have developed different methods for a gradual release of bitcoins.
Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy.
I guess I'll put all my incandescent light bulbs back in the lamps and dump the CFL lights... Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy. Still don't see the light?
how do you intend to ban information/data? have mandatory logging of every packet transmitted and mandatory analysis of every encrypted packet?
Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy.
Whatever happened to changing hearts and minds rather than making stuff illegal?
It's obviously a futile exercise to try to people from trading BTC. A "ban" would likely consist of banning/blacklisting BTC exchanges, and maybe even banning companies from accepting BTC as payment. This would make it practically useless for many users. Such roadblocks are already in place even though they they do not constitute an outright "ban" at this point.
I guess I'll put all my incandescent light bulbs back in the lamps and dump the CFL lights... Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy. Still don't see the light?
MacAttak: In just the last two weeks alone, the global hashing speed has increased ridiculously quickly. My mining pool alone has seen a 30% - 40% rise in hash rates. I'm not sure what hardware suddenly went online, ...