Another bitcoin death. Now asic
Already many times on Habré foreshadowed the death of the only "non-state" currency Bitcoin, someone said that it was not a tenant in itself , someone that hackers finished it , and some even gave practical advice on their own annihilation.
And yet, despite all the problems, threats of hackers and other troubles, now Bitcoin system is alive and well, but only because they have not ceased to believe in it.
Now there is a new threat - the threat is already from those who, despite all of the above, continued to dig, buy, sell and use Bitcoin in every way. And the name of this plague is ASIC.
At a time when the Bitcoin system only appeared, the only way to “earn” coins was to dig these same coins (mining) through the CPU. Mining, in a simplified form, was the solution of a cryptographic problem, according to a specific, strictly specified algorithm. Who solved this problem relied reward - one Bitcoin block, which contained 50 coins. After each certain number of extracted blocks, the complexity of the task that had to be solved increased - this is such a simple and straightforward way to avoid inflation of this electronic currency. In principle, these basic rules of the game have not undergone any changes since those shaggy times, but the production process has undergone significant changes.
')
PC processors in their current state were not powerful enough to solve the problem of finding Bitcoin blocks. Although the word “powerful” is somewhat inappropriate here, it would be more correct to say that they do not know how to effectively solve such tasks. And the complexity of the tasks does not stand still - each time you need to sort out more and more options to find the right solution. And instead of a couple of hours, during which the unit was usually located, we had to spend a day or even two searching for a solution. And here the miners (as those who “extract” this currency call themselves) turned their attention to the most powerful “number crushers” that could be obtained by a simple user - video cards.
The speed increase was simply amazing - no joke, the current “top” from Intel gives out a speed of about 40 Mhash / s (this is the designation of speed of solving problems adopted in the Bitcoin network), and the old Radeon 5770 video card already issued 200 Mhash / s. The difference, as they say, on the face.
Since the beginning of the use of the GPU, the complexity of the tasks began to grow exponentially, but despite this, at that time, the money spent on the purchase of a video card fought off in just a week - two, and after that the mining started to bring profit. But over time, the complexity of the tasks again began to approach the threshold of “unprofitability”. In a simplified form, for the cost of production, they consider the cost of electricity consumed by the video card, plus the depreciation of this video card. And while this figure was less than the cost of mined coins, it can be said that mining is “profitable”. And in order to cross the threshold of unprofitability, which occurred at the moment of excessive complication of the problem, a new solution was found, which was called a “farm”.
A farm is the n-th number of video cards connected to one computer, and they manage to connect 6 video cards to one motherboard, connecting them even via PCIx1. It looks something like this:
In contrast, the usual users who do not want to buy a pack of expensive video cards, and began to bother with their connection and configuration, began to unite in "pools". About pools on Habré there is a wonderful article , I recommend to read it.
Well, now let's talk about the current state of affairs.
Currently, mining in the pool, in fact, is the only way to somehow make money on the Bitcoin network. Moreover, even the owners of large farms are mined in the pool, solo mining dies out as a class. A person with a single video card, if he is not, of course, the owner of the current “top” Radeon 7970, except to pay the electricity bill, mining will not help. The complexity and number of earners is growing, profitability is falling.
In addition to pools, various “financial pyramids” based on coins began to appear, some provide their computing power for a certain deposit, some work like the notorious MMM - bring coins, bring friends, get 10% more.
Of course, all this cannot save the project, only slightly prolong the torment. A new method of extraction was required, which, due to the increased complexity, would ensure a reasonable rate of production.
And of course, there were people who invented this method - it turned out to be the engineers of Butterfly Labs . They created specialized expansion cards that only knew how to dig coins, but did it well. Even the first generations, at a penny power consumption, were given a speed commensurate with the best representatives of the GPU. Of course, this didn’t have a strong effect on the overall picture; after all, the GPU device is more functional and, at approximately equal cost, users preferred video cards.
But the time has come for the new development of the “Butterfly Labarotary” - ASIC.
ASIC is a family of specialized processors. who in life are not able to do anything except how to solve puzzles Bitcoin. They use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm (a special case of the SHA-2 algorithm), thanks to which the mining performance of these babies is simply fantastic - the youngest model of the BFL BitForce BitForce Jalapeno ASIC-based products (test sample) yields about 3,500 Mhash / s . For comparison, the current top Radeon 7970, with extreme overclocking gives 800 Mhash / s. And again, "the difference in the face."
It is not known for certain what is used as the CPU on these boards - test samples were not given to anyone, and delivery to buyers will begin only in November. But the Bitcoin community assumes that it is a modified Spartan-6 chip, which was previously used in the development of the Butterfly Company.
What will happen is that bitcoin will die as a free currency, and will only become “candy wrappers” suitable for paying for services on underground sites like SilkRoad.
Surely you ask "Why?". Let's estimate the development of events. For this, I will give a few numbers.
I think from the table it becomes clear that with the current disposition of forces, the GPU will be out of work. And while compiling the table, I even had a few gossip - the values ​​for the Radeon were taken from the best ones that the miners were able to achieve. Its average performance will be only 600 Mhash / s. But believe me, this does not play any role in the current state of affairs.
Now let's arm ourselves with a calculator and calculate a little. It turns out that in order to build a farm, with a performance that is commensurate with the youngest BFL BitForce Little Single model, you need to buy 38 video cards. And this is $ 15,960! Which, in turn, is almost 25 times the cost of this specialized digger! I will better keep silent about how much electricity will be eaten and how the farm from the 38th Radeon will warm up. Let me just say that you can not pay for heating in the apartment.
From an economic point of view, the conclusion is obvious - the GPU has now become useless. After all, even digging in the pool, you get a proportion proportional to your contribution to the prey. And it’s no more talking about digging in solo mode, it will take a year, if not more, before you find the block.
Now we abstract from economy and we will look on the other hand. For me, digging coins has never been a way to make a profit, but the opportunity to earn a couple of hundred rubles. In order to earn them, I only needed to leave the computer turned on, while I was not at home, and it would be foolish not to use it. I change the benefit of the video card through the generation and always take the top, so I have a good production speed.
What now? And now, even mining 24/7 coins, in a month I will at best receive 50 rubles. The complexity grows in proportion to the speed of production of new blocks, and with the advent of ASICs, it will simply take off. Of course the idea to get 50 rubles for the devils-knows-how long, with a full load of the GPU, is simply stupid. It turns out that in order to keep my extraction rate at the current level, I need to purchase one of these “diggers”. It would seem a good way out, and it costs not much more than a video card, and the performance in digging is much higher, but there is one thing - it is not universal . This is the main reason why Bitcoin leaves the masses, no one wants to buy "in the appendage" to a good video card one more thing for $ 650, just to dig coins. After all, this thing doesn’t know how to do anything else, I won’t be able to watch a movie on it, connect 2 more monitors to it, in the end I won’t even be able to play new toys! The Bitcoin network will lose the main thing that gives it life so far - the mass character.
Despite all the problems, millions of people, every day, dig, dig, dig coins. Then they spend them, change them for another currency or invest in “pyramids”. Let the turnover of such “diggers” be several times smaller than those who dig on huge farms, these very simple people provide confidence in the Bitcoin currency. But without faith in them, these coins will only become abstract "candy wrappers" for exchange. Like stickers or liners from chewing gum. You never go to the stock exchange and try to exchange your collection of “Love Is” inserts for rubles, although if there are those who sell something only for inserts, you may find someone who exchanges them for money. But the market does not consist of 2 people. There must be millions of them, those who buy, sell, produce, change, store ... And in Bitcoin there will be only a few left.
When the largest Bitcoin exchanges will conduct 10 transactions per day, they will become unprofitable. Moreover, how can you set the exchange rate, which will be owned by only a small part of the people? Here you get the problem as with the pictures - how much does the Mona Lisa really cost? Priceless? But it seems to me that it costs exactly as much as they are willing to pay for it. Also here, each coin costs exactly as much as money, people are ready to pay for it. Only the picture, in contrast to the coin, gives pleasure, pleases the eye, well, it's just +500 to the pathos, because no one else has the original Mona Lisa. A coin does not give anything of the above, but as a currency it should give the right to exchange it for anything from the real world. Even if it will be drugs, weapons and pornography - but it is these things that give the right to call Bitcoin currency, and it is these things that show us how much one coin costs .
Of course, with the advent of ASIC, SilkRoad and other “cereal” places where you can buy something for Bitcoin will not disappear, but most exchanges will disappear - those sums of coins that are now in their hands will be depreciated due to the huge production speeds that ASIC will give us, and New coins will be very difficult to get. At such a moment, the seller on SilkRoad will be free to exhibit his goods for any cost that he deems acceptable, because in the Bitcoin world there will be an analogue of our default when the cost of goods changes every hour. No one will know how much their coins are worth now and how much they will cost in just a couple of minutes.
After reading this, you probably thought: “after a month or two, the collapse in the value of the coins will stop and normalize, it has already happened more than once,” and you will be right, but again - the main problem is not that your stock of coins will turn into nothing, that you cannot get more coins by any other means than to buy them. After all, to get them in the usual way, having dug for a couple of days, it will become impossible. And to buy Pribluda, even for $ 600, just for the sake of a dubious opportunity to buy something on SilkRoad or to receive, even let 1000 rubles in the first two or three months (and then again increase in complexity, again problems with speed ...), would be just stupid.
Everything written in this article is only my vision of the situation, and is not “true in the last resort.”
So, let me leave, thank you for your attention and have a nice day!
And yet, despite all the problems, threats of hackers and other troubles, now Bitcoin system is alive and well, but only because they have not ceased to believe in it.
Now there is a new threat - the threat is already from those who, despite all of the above, continued to dig, buy, sell and use Bitcoin in every way. And the name of this plague is ASIC.
A bit of history
At a time when the Bitcoin system only appeared, the only way to “earn” coins was to dig these same coins (mining) through the CPU. Mining, in a simplified form, was the solution of a cryptographic problem, according to a specific, strictly specified algorithm. Who solved this problem relied reward - one Bitcoin block, which contained 50 coins. After each certain number of extracted blocks, the complexity of the task that had to be solved increased - this is such a simple and straightforward way to avoid inflation of this electronic currency. In principle, these basic rules of the game have not undergone any changes since those shaggy times, but the production process has undergone significant changes.
')
PC processors in their current state were not powerful enough to solve the problem of finding Bitcoin blocks. Although the word “powerful” is somewhat inappropriate here, it would be more correct to say that they do not know how to effectively solve such tasks. And the complexity of the tasks does not stand still - each time you need to sort out more and more options to find the right solution. And instead of a couple of hours, during which the unit was usually located, we had to spend a day or even two searching for a solution. And here the miners (as those who “extract” this currency call themselves) turned their attention to the most powerful “number crushers” that could be obtained by a simple user - video cards.
The speed increase was simply amazing - no joke, the current “top” from Intel gives out a speed of about 40 Mhash / s (this is the designation of speed of solving problems adopted in the Bitcoin network), and the old Radeon 5770 video card already issued 200 Mhash / s. The difference, as they say, on the face.
Since the beginning of the use of the GPU, the complexity of the tasks began to grow exponentially, but despite this, at that time, the money spent on the purchase of a video card fought off in just a week - two, and after that the mining started to bring profit. But over time, the complexity of the tasks again began to approach the threshold of “unprofitability”. In a simplified form, for the cost of production, they consider the cost of electricity consumed by the video card, plus the depreciation of this video card. And while this figure was less than the cost of mined coins, it can be said that mining is “profitable”. And in order to cross the threshold of unprofitability, which occurred at the moment of excessive complication of the problem, a new solution was found, which was called a “farm”.
A farm is the n-th number of video cards connected to one computer, and they manage to connect 6 video cards to one motherboard, connecting them even via PCIx1. It looks something like this:
In contrast, the usual users who do not want to buy a pack of expensive video cards, and began to bother with their connection and configuration, began to unite in "pools". About pools on Habré there is a wonderful article , I recommend to read it.
Well, now let's talk about the current state of affairs.
The present
Currently, mining in the pool, in fact, is the only way to somehow make money on the Bitcoin network. Moreover, even the owners of large farms are mined in the pool, solo mining dies out as a class. A person with a single video card, if he is not, of course, the owner of the current “top” Radeon 7970, except to pay the electricity bill, mining will not help. The complexity and number of earners is growing, profitability is falling.
In addition to pools, various “financial pyramids” based on coins began to appear, some provide their computing power for a certain deposit, some work like the notorious MMM - bring coins, bring friends, get 10% more.
Of course, all this cannot save the project, only slightly prolong the torment. A new method of extraction was required, which, due to the increased complexity, would ensure a reasonable rate of production.
And of course, there were people who invented this method - it turned out to be the engineers of Butterfly Labs . They created specialized expansion cards that only knew how to dig coins, but did it well. Even the first generations, at a penny power consumption, were given a speed commensurate with the best representatives of the GPU. Of course, this didn’t have a strong effect on the overall picture; after all, the GPU device is more functional and, at approximately equal cost, users preferred video cards.
But the time has come for the new development of the “Butterfly Labarotary” - ASIC.
ASIC
ASIC is a family of specialized processors. who in life are not able to do anything except how to solve puzzles Bitcoin. They use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm (a special case of the SHA-2 algorithm), thanks to which the mining performance of these babies is simply fantastic - the youngest model of the BFL BitForce BitForce Jalapeno ASIC-based products (test sample) yields about 3,500 Mhash / s . For comparison, the current top Radeon 7970, with extreme overclocking gives 800 Mhash / s. And again, "the difference in the face."
It is not known for certain what is used as the CPU on these boards - test samples were not given to anyone, and delivery to buyers will begin only in November. But the Bitcoin community assumes that it is a modified Spartan-6 chip, which was previously used in the development of the Butterfly Company.
What will happen
What will happen is that bitcoin will die as a free currency, and will only become “candy wrappers” suitable for paying for services on underground sites like SilkRoad.
Surely you ask "Why?". Let's estimate the development of events. For this, I will give a few numbers.
| Title | Mhash / s performance | Watts Power Consumption | Cost $ |
| Radeon 7970 | 825 | 214 | 420 |
| BFL BitForce Little Single | 30,000 | 40 | 649 |
| BFL BitForce Single 'SC' | 60,000 | 60 | 1,299 |
| BFL BitForce Mini Rig 'SC' | 1,500,000 | 1,500 | 29,899 |
I think from the table it becomes clear that with the current disposition of forces, the GPU will be out of work. And while compiling the table, I even had a few gossip - the values ​​for the Radeon were taken from the best ones that the miners were able to achieve. Its average performance will be only 600 Mhash / s. But believe me, this does not play any role in the current state of affairs.
Now let's arm ourselves with a calculator and calculate a little. It turns out that in order to build a farm, with a performance that is commensurate with the youngest BFL BitForce Little Single model, you need to buy 38 video cards. And this is $ 15,960! Which, in turn, is almost 25 times the cost of this specialized digger! I will better keep silent about how much electricity will be eaten and how the farm from the 38th Radeon will warm up. Let me just say that you can not pay for heating in the apartment.
From an economic point of view, the conclusion is obvious - the GPU has now become useless. After all, even digging in the pool, you get a proportion proportional to your contribution to the prey. And it’s no more talking about digging in solo mode, it will take a year, if not more, before you find the block.
Now we abstract from economy and we will look on the other hand. For me, digging coins has never been a way to make a profit, but the opportunity to earn a couple of hundred rubles. In order to earn them, I only needed to leave the computer turned on, while I was not at home, and it would be foolish not to use it. I change the benefit of the video card through the generation and always take the top, so I have a good production speed.
What now? And now, even mining 24/7 coins, in a month I will at best receive 50 rubles. The complexity grows in proportion to the speed of production of new blocks, and with the advent of ASICs, it will simply take off. Of course the idea to get 50 rubles for the devils-knows-how long, with a full load of the GPU, is simply stupid. It turns out that in order to keep my extraction rate at the current level, I need to purchase one of these “diggers”. It would seem a good way out, and it costs not much more than a video card, and the performance in digging is much higher, but there is one thing - it is not universal . This is the main reason why Bitcoin leaves the masses, no one wants to buy "in the appendage" to a good video card one more thing for $ 650, just to dig coins. After all, this thing doesn’t know how to do anything else, I won’t be able to watch a movie on it, connect 2 more monitors to it, in the end I won’t even be able to play new toys! The Bitcoin network will lose the main thing that gives it life so far - the mass character.
Despite all the problems, millions of people, every day, dig, dig, dig coins. Then they spend them, change them for another currency or invest in “pyramids”. Let the turnover of such “diggers” be several times smaller than those who dig on huge farms, these very simple people provide confidence in the Bitcoin currency. But without faith in them, these coins will only become abstract "candy wrappers" for exchange. Like stickers or liners from chewing gum. You never go to the stock exchange and try to exchange your collection of “Love Is” inserts for rubles, although if there are those who sell something only for inserts, you may find someone who exchanges them for money. But the market does not consist of 2 people. There must be millions of them, those who buy, sell, produce, change, store ... And in Bitcoin there will be only a few left.
When the largest Bitcoin exchanges will conduct 10 transactions per day, they will become unprofitable. Moreover, how can you set the exchange rate, which will be owned by only a small part of the people? Here you get the problem as with the pictures - how much does the Mona Lisa really cost? Priceless? But it seems to me that it costs exactly as much as they are willing to pay for it. Also here, each coin costs exactly as much as money, people are ready to pay for it. Only the picture, in contrast to the coin, gives pleasure, pleases the eye, well, it's just +500 to the pathos, because no one else has the original Mona Lisa. A coin does not give anything of the above, but as a currency it should give the right to exchange it for anything from the real world. Even if it will be drugs, weapons and pornography - but it is these things that give the right to call Bitcoin currency, and it is these things that show us how much one coin costs .
Of course, with the advent of ASIC, SilkRoad and other “cereal” places where you can buy something for Bitcoin will not disappear, but most exchanges will disappear - those sums of coins that are now in their hands will be depreciated due to the huge production speeds that ASIC will give us, and New coins will be very difficult to get. At such a moment, the seller on SilkRoad will be free to exhibit his goods for any cost that he deems acceptable, because in the Bitcoin world there will be an analogue of our default when the cost of goods changes every hour. No one will know how much their coins are worth now and how much they will cost in just a couple of minutes.
Epilogue
After reading this, you probably thought: “after a month or two, the collapse in the value of the coins will stop and normalize, it has already happened more than once,” and you will be right, but again - the main problem is not that your stock of coins will turn into nothing, that you cannot get more coins by any other means than to buy them. After all, to get them in the usual way, having dug for a couple of days, it will become impossible. And to buy Pribluda, even for $ 600, just for the sake of a dubious opportunity to buy something on SilkRoad or to receive, even let 1000 rubles in the first two or three months (and then again increase in complexity, again problems with speed ...), would be just stupid.
Everything written in this article is only my vision of the situation, and is not “true in the last resort.”
So, let me leave, thank you for your attention and have a nice day!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/154969/
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