Bitcoin Mining Comes To Radeon Open-Source OpenCL

[chithanh]

Afaik, unless you get power for free mining bitcoins is actually fairly unattractive in most countries by now.

Only if you sell the bitcoins immediately after mining. If you speculate that the exchange rate will increase further then maybe not.

Also, be wary of people linking to Litecoins: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22120833.

Um, be wary of downloading and installing programs from unknown sources? You don't say.

Litecoin itself is a good addition to electronic money. One of the dangers that may bring down Bitcoin is if someone finds a weakness in the protocol or cryptography. For that reason, having many different currencies and not betting everything on one horse is preferable. (Similar to central banks' often diverse currency reserves)

[Wildfire]

I am interested in digital currencies and mining of it. [*]AMD GPU's are more efficient at mining than Nvidia GPU's

"Efficient" probably depends on your definition of the word. If you mean "bitcoins/initial cost" this may be true, but you should probably also regard "bitcoins/running cost", so take performance/watt into account. Afaik, unless you get power for free mining bitcoins is actually fairly unattractive in most countries by now. Also, be wary of people linking to Litecoins: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22120833.

Not really a fan of the whole Bitcoin business, reeks too much of a "get rich quick" scheme.

[chithanh]

While I*agree that bitcoin is in fact less of a pyramid/ponzi scheme than ?normal? currencies, it still has a very unfair distribution (early entrants may have thousands of btc just because they did it first, while new miners may never get a full bitcoin)

That is the reward that the early adopters get for their speculative investment, I see nothing wrong with that.

Also lost bitcoins are never recovered.

This is also not a problem: If the number of bitcoins in circulation becomes too low, then additional decimals can be added to divide the remaining ones even further.

The performance aren't that bad for a proof of concept, IIRC Tom get 98Mh/s which is 60% of fglrx throughput. Some OpenCL intrinsic are not optimized at all, for instance we fetch thread block size value in vram instead of using cached value.

In addition the free drivers don't always run GPU/memory at the same clocks as the proprietary driver depending on your power_profile. To verify, run

# cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info

[vljn]

The performance aren't that bad for a proof of concept, IIRC Tom get 98Mh/s which is 60% of fglrx throughput. Some OpenCL intrinsic are not optimized at all, for instance we fetch thread block size value in vram instead of using cached value.

[Fenrin]

I am interested in digital currencies and mining of it.

What I have read/heard so far:

• AMD GPU's are more efficient at mining than Nvidia GPU's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvhpOQHVZpM, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison)
• LiteCoin mining is probably more interesting than BitCoin mining (http://www.hardcoreware.net/litecoin...ve-to-bitcoin/)
• for LiteCoin mining it is more important to have a fast memory
• LiteCoin mining is a bit more efficient with CPU mining, but GPU mining is probably still more worth it than CPU mining

My system has only DDR2 RAM at 800 MHz, but I suppose LiteCoin GPU mining depends much more on the GPU memory. If anyone knows it better, please tell me.

[przemoli]

What about nouveau? Can I do mining on nouveau?

Its back end for r600g.

Nouveau need their own (multiple? for multiple families) backends.

[peppercats]

Shame that mining isn't worth it at this point, in most areas you'll lose money from the cost of electricity.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/04/11/bitcoin-or-gold-which-is-more-fiat-proof/?ss=strategies-solutions

[erendorn]

1) Central banks print money to account for the expansion of the economy the money serve. Not so easy with a finite amount of currency.
2) A ponzi scheme is a scheme where early adopters rely on new entrants in the scheme to generate money. I don't see how you can consider the dollar to be a ponzi scheme. But clearly given the percentage of bitcoins owned by early adopters, and how the value per bitcoin grows with new adopters (because the amount of bitcoins doesn't scale, see 1), it can easily be considered as a Ponzi scheme.
3) Economics 101 might help some of the posters understand why we use money.

[stqn]

Bitcoin is NOT a ponzi scheme like the Dollar or the Euro because there's a finite number of them that can ever exist. Central banks can go on a printing spree like the Weimar Republic. The Bitcoin Foundation can't. They also can't just reach into your Bitcoin wallet and take money like they can from your bank account (think Cyprus.) The dream is that more and more firms start accpting payment in Bitcoin and that one day we'll be able to buy everything at the store with Bitcoins using a debit card or similar. It would also forever end the state control over money. The bubble component of Bitcoin was mainly due to Cyprus and is over with now. In case anyone's wondering, not having enough Bitcoins will never be an issue because you can transat with up to many decimal points.

While I*agree that bitcoin is in fact less of a pyramid/ponzi scheme than ?normal? currencies, it still has a very unfair distribution (early entrants may have thousands of btc just because they did it first, while new miners may never get a full bitcoin), and I think the limit of 21M btc is a problem, even if they can be divided up to 8 decimals (21M * 10^8 / 7G people on Earth = 300k units per person, which would be the equivalent of people only having $3k on average? Well it might be close to reality or even better? But doesn?t leave much room IMO.) Also lost bitcoins are never recovered.