http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34225...oins-with-its-two-new-motherboards/index.html ^^^ Am I missing something here? As far as I knew CPU and GPU bitcoin mining is no longer feasible. You need dedicated mining processors. From what I understood, regular CPU and GPU were long since obsolete for bitcoins?
You aint missed anything, CPU mining is fully dead on bitcoin, GPU mining is basically gone also. If your a miner these days its ASIC or shutdown really if you want to break even. Even with the new prices that bit coin is selling for. They have marketed it pretty badly in truth if they had called it a mining board or something, Then maybe litecoin ect might get a look in.
You can still mine bitcoin using ASIC cards which plug into a motherboard using standard PCI-E slots, many people use X1-X16 riser cards so these boards are fine. You can also still use standard graphics cards for doing scrypt based mining such as Litecoin.
I believe it's just that they've got 6 pcie slots so, using risers, you can pack in loads of gpus - most blatant false economy ever...
So basically it's false/misleading advertising. It's not like they have an ASIC addon board. I didn't know you could get PCIe Asic addons but I haven't looked into bitcoin mining much. It thus appears to be purely a trying-to-be cool and edgy gimmick by creating a false association with bitcoins.
They probably started developing a few months ago, when it might have been feasible. Bitcoin mining: stay away. Bitcoin trading, on the other hand...
Just a thought, they could be designed in a way that all PCI-E slots will provide adequate power to the cards installed without the requirement of powered risers, so maybe slightly bitcoin orientated.
I'd love to trade bitcoins but I'm too stupid. So how about a peddle powered asic mining system. That and solar powered. I could exercise and generate bitcoins. I'd have to peddle longer and longer distances to generate bitcoins but my fitness level should increase.
Not at all; that would work fine. Well, for values of 'work fine' equal to 'never recover the outlay on hardware.' If you want to actually make any money at Bitcoin mining, this is the sort of setup you need - and that's going to start eating more electricity than it earns in Bitcoins within the next couple of months, necessitating yet another jump in performance-per-watt to stay in the game. Oh, and if you're wondering what happens to the hardware in there once it's obsolete: it's sold for thousands of dollars in actual money to people who aren't so good at maths and haven't realised they'll never recoup their investment. If you're curious, The Genesis Block has an excellent dashboard that allows you to stick in various ASIC types (or custom values for hashes per second, power draw and cost) and see when they'll pay you back. In the majority of cases, the answer is 'never' - and it's fascinating to see how even the most powerful hardware, bought at half-actual-cost with impossibly-immediate delivery, stops paying its way within a month or two at the most. Basically, Bitcoin mining for profit is a mug's game these days. (Which hasn't stopped me sticking an ASIC on the back of my Raspberry Pi NAS - keep your eyes peeled in a future Custom PC mag to see how and why!)
Interesting. I will stay well away from it. From your genesis link: "Historical Difficulty Increase 30 Day 81 % 60 Day 375 % 90 Day 714 % " That's a phenomenal difficulty increase. So at a certain point no one can generate any more bitcoins right?
In theory, it'll be possible to generate Bitcoins right the way through to 2140 - but the difficulty continues to ramp, so it becomes exponentially harder. The difficulty spike you're seeing there - and in the graph on the dashboard - is when ASICs started being used. Suddenly, the amount of computational power in the network vastly increased - which means so did the difficulty. That ramping continues today: where it once took six months to double the difficulty, it's now taking six weeks. Soon, that'll be six days - unless the ASIC builders hit a brick wall and stop pouring more and more compute into the network. That said, it must always be remembered that Bitcoin is, at heart, an artificial system. There'd be nothing to stop Satoshi from changing the rules to manually force down the difficulty - the Bitcoin equivalent of quantitative easement, if you like. Whether the rest of the network would accept the change - unlike regular currencies, Bitcoin is decentralised - is another matter.
