BitCoins

[Ragehottie]

Yes you can, though technically that's not a pool since it's all done by you. A mining pool is a bunch of people pooling their resources to do bitcoin mining, and they split the rewards. There is a list of current pools here  that you can join, and it talks about how rewards/work is split.

No, it would be considered a pool, a pool is just more than one computer working together to mine bitcoins.

[Daemon]

No, it would be considered a pool, a pool is just more than one computer working together to mine bitcoins.

My mistake then, must not have read deep enough into it. thanks for the correction

[Ragehottie]

My mistake then, must not have read deep enough into it. thanks for the correction

Don't quote me on it, but that is what I understood.

[lucid]

This is also how bitcoins are added to make the available currency pool larger.

Is this to say that bitcoin mining will hurt the bitcoin economy in the long run?

[Ragehottie]

Is this to say that bitcoin mining will hurt the bitcoin economy in the long run?

Technically, Yes. But if it would take a while to get there and in the meantime it is helping it.

[p_2001]

Hmmmm... But if more people keep joining it and trading in it... Mining won't farm will it...?

[Daemon]

Mining still has to happen, but it will become.more difficult for an individual to solve it by himself. Its readjusted every week or two so that the reward for solving blocks is payed out at the same rate that gold is mined. I forget the exact numbers, but its X payouts in a 2 week period. Which means more people equals less likely to earn the reward yourself, though the coins are "mined" at the same steady rate

[p_2001]

Yes.. But if more coins are traded... More worth.. And thus earning smaller portion can be compensated...

[Simba]

I still don't know what is actually mining?
Miners could bruteforce passwords, help scientists do research, other stuff like one big supercomputer.
But miners are building super mining machines and they are wasting electricity for nothing?

I laughed at story that police did a raid on a farm suspected of growing marihuana due to increased electricity consumption. Turned out dudes were just mining bitcoins.

[EmilKXZ]

Now, hitting the ground, this is what I found about how to do mining (technically speaking):

  During mining, your computer runs a cryptographic hashing function (two rounds of SHA256) on what is called a block header. For each new hash, the mining software will use a different number as the random element of the block header, this number is called the nonce. Depending on the nonce and what else is in the block the hashing function will yield a hash which looks like this:

93ef6f358fbb998c60802496863052290d4c63735b7fe5bdaac821de96a53a9a

You can look at this hash as a really long number. (It's a hexadecimal number, meaning the letters A-F are the digits 10-15.) Now to make mining difficult, there is what's called a difficulty target. To create a valid block your miner has to find a hash that is below the difficulty target. So if for example the difficulty target is 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, any number that starts with a zero would be below the target, e.g.:

0787a6fd6e0782f7f8058fbef45f5c17fe89086ad4e78a1520d06505acb4522f

If we lower the target to 0100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, we now need two zeros in the beginning to be under it:

00db27957bd0ba06a5af9e6c81226d74312a7028cf9a08fa125e49f15cae4979

Because the target is such an unwieldy number with tons of digits, people generally use a simpler number to express the current target. This number is called the mining difficulty. The mining difficulty expresses how much harder the current block is to generate compared to the first block. So a difficulty of 70000 means to generate the current block you have to do 70000 times more work than Satoshi had to do generating the first block. Though be fair though, back then mining was a lot slower and less optimized.
The difficulty changes every 2016 blocks. The network tries to change it such that 2016 blocks at the current global network processing power take about 14 days. That's why, when the network power rises, the difficulty rises as well.

Optimize this process to death, 'til you cannot optimize it anymore.

 

[Simba]

Yeah, but what's the point?
Couldn't the author implement some use of it?

Or maybe is it silently being used to bruteforce passwords, that would be funny.

[EmilKXZ]

Yes, it would be definitely funny lol.

Perhaps the author receives 150 bitcoins per challenge solved, and then the people get 50 bitcoins... That'd explain easily why Satoshi is retired and left development to others.

[namespace7]

I had bad experiences with BitCoins. That stuff is unstable man, wouldn't waste my time on it. Not yet anyway.
I used to do bt mining with some of the most powerful GPU in the world and still it was a waste of time.

[Naer]

I had bad experiences with BitCoins. That stuff is unstable man, wouldn't waste my time on it. Not yet anyway.
I used to do bt mining with some of the most powerful GPU in the world and still it was a waste of time.

If someone is still intrested in mining, look for mining hardware like the ones from butterflylabs.com

I have started to think about buying these some weeks ago and there are really good feedbacks.

[vezzy]

The ASIC miners that are currently present will quickly go futile once they become used en masse. The difficulty will jump significantly.