what software can i use to mine bitcoin

[Mr. Scram]

It was a bad attempt at a joke.

CCs have a massive number of issues. In the same way having a lot of (fiat? like the car?) currencies in the world complicates things, having an abundance of different cryptos can only lead to people arguing about what to and not to accept. It is, however, easier-ish to accept a variety of CCs than it is normal currencies.

I personally don't see them becoming truly mainstream, and the money-grab attitude does worry me to the point of humor. (You know it's bad when I am making jokes about it).

Yes, fiat currency is any money you use to buy a Fiat with. Can't be a Ferrari or Volkswagen, though.

[NiHaoMike]

PSSS/related: I'm hoping for a crash so that video cards can return to $200 - 300 USD instead of $500 - 800. I wonder if its worth getting used cards though. Some say they won't last cause of daily bitcoin mining. Others say it would be worth it.

I have been running Folding@Home (what's used to mine Curecoin/Foldingcoin) pretty much 24/7 on my GTX 970 for over 3 years. Based on the thermal cycling theory, 24/7 Curecoin/Foldingcoin mining should actually be less stressful than idle most of the time with occasional VR gaming and upscaled-to-4K SexyCyborg viewing.

[Mr. Scram]

I have been running Folding@Home (what's used to mine Curecoin/Foldingcoin) pretty much 24/7 on my GTX 970 for over 3 years. Based on the thermal cycling theory, 24/7 Curecoin/Foldingcoin mining should actually be less stressful than idle most of the time with occasional VR gaming and upscaled-to-4K SexyCyborg viewing.

Wear is not just thermal cycling though, and increases with temperature and voltage. Both are typically maximized to increase the hash rate. I doubt regular or even enthusiast gaming with at least 98% idle time is worse than an all out voltfest trashing.

[NiHaoMike]

It's not common for mining cards to be overclocked - on the contrary, they might actually be underclocked a little to boost efficiency.

[nctnico]

Unlike paper money where the lowest you could go is 1 cent in most currencies, it's technically easy to divide an Ethereum coin (or other coins)  into smaller units, like 0.00001 ETH, so the total number of coins in the world is not a big deal : if the demand is high, the value of each individual coin can go up, and you use divisions of a coin to pay for things.

You are missing the point. The value of a coin going up is exactly the problem! The value of a coin should decrease by about 2% per year to be useful as real money in a real economy.

[mariush]

You are missing the point. The value of a coin going up is exactly the problem! The value of a coin should decrease by about 2% per year to be useful as real money in a real economy.

Why?

Why should all the normal rules of paper money, where you have so many middle men (banks and all that) and a single issuer of coin (centralization)  be the same with cryptocurrencies which are decentralized?
It's just as easy to adjust the prices of products, instead of adjusting the value of a coin.

[VK3DRB]

There is a friend of mine in Wangaratta who mined about 90 bitcoins on a gamer's PC in 2009/2010. No great feat, no big power bill. He lost interest and most unfortunately lost his hard disk after he upgraded it and threw it in the rubbish bin about 5 or 6 years ago.

Sounds fishy to me. It's like showing off your friend I hit the jackpot and lost the ticket.

Nope. The guy is and was extremely IT aware. I have know this fellow for 25 years. He and my son have both were online before most people had even heard of the Internet or even seen a PC. Today, their knowledge of what is going in the networking world leaves most of us, including myself, for dead. They told me about bitcoins years ago and I thought at the time "yeah, whatever"  . I could say a lot more, which includes associations with to Kevin Mtnk (sic), Assange and the Wizard of Woz but you would accuse me of ing so I won't.

In any case, hard disks are not hermetically sealed in order for air pressure to be equalised. They typically contain an absolute filter, but these may break down and moisture will get in. My guess is after several years in a rubbish dump, the contents of hard disks will be destroyed forever. Of course a garbage compactor can do severe damage.

Bitcoins is not the biggest loss when a hard disk crashes. I once was asked to repair a hard disk for a major software development company. The hard disk had the software repositories for projects that had 200 employees working on them over course of two years. No backup. Fortunately, the hard disk had a fractured r/w head wire and a damaged boot sector on track 0. I fixed the HDD, and used  trusty old XCOPY under a OS/2 command shell to copy the entire user data contents to a new hard disk. I named the volume "LUCKY_YOU" and had the HDD returned. I concluded from this and other experiences that many IT managers simply don't know much about computers.

In 1987, a colleague hurriedly put in a diskette and typed "del *.*" and answered "yes" to "Are you sure?". He lost his root directory. No backup. All his files created over two years were on that root directory. He did not know about qkuneras, and fooled around to the point the data would have been overwritten anyway.

Many people did not back up their data, and maybe they still don't. But I know an engineer who has backed up every email he has sent/received since the mid-1980's BBS days... both private and business. EVERY single message sent and received. He backs them up on several media. He fires up the backup HDDs monthly to protect the HDD's from stiction. He is somewhat strange.

[Halcyon]

Nope. The guy is and was extremely IT aware. I have know this fellow for 25 years. He and my son have both were online before most people had even heard of the Internet or even seen a PC.

I'm sorry but several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree says something different.

Failing to properly back up is a rookie error. I don't care how "aware" you are in "IT", if you don't create proper backups of your critical data, you might as well be working at a Level 1 IT help desk; telling people to reboot their machine to "fix" their problems.

[ruffy91]

Critical data? A wallet worth 3$ IF you can sell it isn't really critical data.
I also threw away a wallet with 14 bitcoin I mined myself on the CPU. I didn't care about them when changing harddisk. But to be honest I lost nothing.
I would have sold them when they were 1$, 10$, 100$, 1000$, 10000$...

[Halcyon]

Critical data? A wallet worth 3$ IF you can sell it isn't really critical data.
I also threw away a wallet with 14 bitcoin I mined myself on the CPU. I didn't care about them when changing harddisk. But to be honest I lost nothing.
I would have sold them when they were 1$, 10$, 100$, 1000$, 10000$...

I have data sitting on my archives which is worth "nothing". Not everything has a dollar value. But to me, its loss would be devastating, regardless if the data was created now or 10 years ago.

Likewise I have data in backups which is classified a certain way, that in itself is valuable, depending on who has access to it.

Whether it be a photograph from a family BBQ in 1990 or an Australian Government document, it has value.

[Mr. Scram]

I'm sorry but several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree says something different.

Failing to properly back up is a rookie error. I don't care how "aware" you are in "IT", if you don't create proper backups of your critical data, you might as well be working at a Level 1 IT help desk; telling people to reboot their machine to "fix" their problems.

With that amount of experience you know that people suck at making consistent backups, including those that should and do know better. Practising and preaching and all that, and let's not get into the qualifications versus quality debate. People not making proper backups is a fact of life regardless of who they are and what they do for a living.

Don't overlook the humble reboot either. It being a trope isn't mutually exclusive with it being helpful.

[VK3DRB]

Nope. The guy is and was extremely IT aware. I have know this fellow for 25 years. He and my son have both were online before most people had even heard of the Internet or even seen a PC.

I'm sorry but several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree says something different.

Failing to properly back up is a rookie error. I don't care how "aware" you are in "IT", if you don't create proper backups of your critical data, you might as well be working at a Level 1 IT help desk; telling people to reboot their machine to "fix" their problems.

Wrong. Let me back up my claims of "aware in IT". Trying not to blow any trumpets here. The guy has a degree in Computer Science. He has run his own IT company and has been the key support for a major part of the state's IT infrastructure in school education. My son has two degrees - Engineering and Computer Science, and works for a large globally well known company as the leader in anti-hacking, cyber-security and network architecture. My son earned an award from the Premier of Victoria for being only one of three students in the entire state of Victoria earning a perfect score in Systems and Technology in his final year of high school. In his last few years of high school these two were writing code part time for companies on the side.

The fact the guy lets his Bitcoins be lost when they are worth cents without backing up the data, no way implies they are help desk level 1. The guy didn't have the foresight and definitely neither did you. Your "several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree" failed to provide you the foresight to invest heavily in bitcoins in the early days. As with all of us.

I agree with you on one thing. Backing up important data is basic. Bitcoins were not considered important at the time, and no-one would have known their future value. Not even you.

[amspire]

I agree with you on one thing. Backing up important data is basic. Bitcoins were not considered important at the time, and no-one would have known their future value. Not even you.

This is the truth. I remember listening to a podcast "Security Now" where Steve Gibson was describing how Bitcoin worked. At that time, anyone could have bought Bitcoins for $1 or less. There was a website where you could log in and they gave you a whole Bitcoin for free.

Do you think anyone would be giving away free Bitcoins to total strangers if they had any idea that a Bitcoin might one day be worth 10's of thousands of dollars? The attitude was "This is a bit of fun. Here is a free Bitcoin so you can try it out".

[Mr. Scram]

Obviously, the Bitcoin wouldn't be worth today what it is if everyone started hoarding it from the start. That's not how these things work.

[mikeselectricstuff]

This is a nice overview of the evolution of mining, from software to cutting-edge ASICs
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/papers/Taylor_Bitcoin_IEEE_Computer_2017.pdf

[NiHaoMike]

This is a nice overview of the evolution of mining, from software to cutting-edge ASICs
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/papers/Taylor_Bitcoin_IEEE_Computer_2017.pdf

Too bad they didn't go in depth of how the ASIC logic is designed. And also about the algorithms used in altcoins and how some of them are ASIC resistant. One example was Scrypt with a N factor high enough to make it difficult to make an ASIC with the required amount and bandwidth of RAM to have a substantial advantage over GPUs. Another example is Curecoin/Foldingcoin where the problems being solved are wide enough in scope that an ASIC designed to solve them would basically be a GPU.

[nctnico]

You are missing the point. The value of a coin going up is exactly the problem! The value of a coin should decrease by about 2% per year to be useful as real money in a real economy.

Why?

Why should all the normal rules of paper money, where you have so many middle men (banks and all that) and a single issuer of coin (centralization)  be the same with cryptocurrencies which are decentralized?
It's just as easy to adjust the prices of products, instead of adjusting the value of a coin.

No it isn't because the value of the cryptocurrency has to decrease constantly (inflation) to make an economy work. Adjusting the prices of products should be an effect of the decrease in value and not the scarsity fof the cryptocurrency. It is not about the rules of money but it is how every economy works in it's fundamental principle which is like the laws of physics. You may see cryptocurrencies as something providing freedom but the ones which have scarsity built into them are just not useful to replace the money issued by central banks.