AMD Optimizes Bitcoin Mining On R600 LLVM OpenCL

[Kivada]

Everything has the value the majority perceives. Money is only paper after all. As an anonymous way of exchanging/buying stuff etc i don't think bitcoins are bad. Trying to get rich from it no way. Anyway.

Real currency is backed by something real, the US dollar is "only paper" that is backed up by the value of all the raw materials, manufacturing potential and financial holdings of the entire country and of those using the dollar as the basis of their economy outside of the country.

Fun fact, there are more physical paper dollars in circulation outside of the US then in it.

What does bitcoin have going for it? A bunch of retarded libertarians, doomsday prepers, mafias and cartels and likely a few terrorist organizations.

[archibald]

What does bitcoin have going for it? A bunch of retarded libertarians, doomsday prepers, mafias and cartels and likely a few terrorist organizations.

Those people can also use cash.

[Kivada]

COnsidering most countries are OFF the gold standard... no currency has any real value. Its not really backed by anything. Bitcoin is just as legitimate as any other currency, more so than some to an extent because there's a finite amount in circulation at any given time. People decide if anything has value, if people decide something has value, then it has value.

Wrong. We moved off gold as there isn't enough gold unless you eventually want to start splitting atoms to make change. Thus you base it off the value of your countries ability to generate wealth.

So as before, what does a bitcoin represent? Absolutely nothing. With the power needed to generate it it's actually not even worth the electromagnetic energy used to store it on a single hard drive.

[varikonniemi]

So many butt-hurt people in this thread angry at not being savvy enough to be in the ones who benefited most of Bitcoin. But fear not, even though the gold rush is over and no easy money is to be made anymore, it still works as a revolutionary technology bringing cash to the world of internet.

You have to realize that we simply have not had cash online before. And if you cannot see the benefit of having it compared to the strictly controlled world of credit cards and paypal, then you must be blind.

[archibald]

Thus you base it off the value of your countries ability to generate wealth.

Which is difficult to predict, and the predictions about how much wealth your country can generate (measured in what?) affect the amount in can generate (as in the Eurozone).

[AJenbo]

Bitcoin is backed by the computational power of peoples computer systems.

It's to bad that mining bitcoins doesn't produce scientific data like Boinc work units.

[chithanh]

Real currency is backed by something real, the US dollar is "only paper" that is backed up by the value of all the raw materials, manufacturing potential and financial holdings of the entire country and of those using the dollar as the basis of their economy outside of the country.

That's all fine and dandy, but any value of your "real" currency can be destroyed at the whim of one organization at the center. The desire to eliminate this single point of failure lead to Bitcoin and similar schemes.

In that respect, Bitcoin is much more similar to commodities used as money, such as gold. Gold is not backed by anything either, aside from a few insignificant industrial uses.

What does bitcoin have going for it? A bunch of retarded libertarians, doomsday prepers, mafias and cartels and likely a few terrorist organizations.

Don't laugh, but the retards, doomsdayers, mafias and terrorists have managed to create a worldwide decentralized system where you can exchange goods for Bitcoins. Bitcoin may not be enough to run a country's economy on, but it serves a number of people's interests well enough.

[chithanh]

Bitcoin is backed by the computational power of peoples computer systems.

I think the previous poster meant something else when saying "backed by".
People must contribute their computational power in order to keep the Bitcoin scheme functioning. But that does not mean that you can get usable computational power in exchange for your Bitcoins.

The exchange rate of Bitcoins is loosely related to the cost of creating them (ie. the cost of the computation invested). But it is not always close and heavily influenced by external events, like news reporting.

So saying that Bitcoin is backed by computational power is the same as saying that gold is backed by the prospecting, mining and handling of it.

[cbamber85]

even though the gold rush is over and no easy money is to be made anymore

Quick, someone tell Zuckerberg!

[Ericg]

Somehow it feels that Con Kolivas is disliked by some guys, or why else would you talk about bfgminer, a fork of Koliva's cgminer that mainly just merges in his patches as he keeps on developing?

Also the whole situation of BFS not being in-kernel. Many tests show BFS to have superior performance to CFS in some workloads and anyone can agree the complexity is an order of magnitude smaller.

What has he done to be closed out like this?

BFS got rejected because it didn't scale. for 2 to 8 CPU cores it was fine, but beyond that it tanked. CFS scales perfectly from 1 to 100 cores, and beyond. Developers thought it wiser to go with the system that scales the most. especially considering Octo-Core CPU's are already in the market and probably aren't that far away from being used.