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Re: The Kestrel Project

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rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> writes:
> My 4 year old PC runs as well now as it did when new (well, pretty
> must so) and I am just as productive using my old software on it.

Well, that's an artifact of your workload; if you're in the weather
prediction business, you always want the latest supercomputer and you're
on an upgrade treadmill.  Or maybe a car analogy: if you're a cab driver
putting on 5000 miles a week, you have to expect to simply wear out a
car after a year or so, and budget around that understanding.  Or
professional photographers (they wear out cameras) are the same way.
The equipment becomes a consumable and you figure its cost into your
business decisions just like any other costs.

> With a limit to the number of bitcoins mined, advancing technology for
> some decreases the revenues of the others.  It is one of the few truly
> zero sum games.

We're still pretty far below the limit, but the day will come when
mining is no longer worth it no matter what hardware you have, and when
that happens, large scale mining will pretty much stop.  Meanwhile, it's
non-zero-sum in the sense that mining with state-of-the-art technology
is an income producer.

> They already "mine" the parallelism of the GPU so I expect there is
> nothing to be gained by doing this in the CPU.  Remember, the current
> state of the art is limited not by performance, but by the cost of the
> electricity used to run it!

Yes, and the electricity is running large parts of the chip that are
doing stuff other than SHA256.  With an ASIC you can put basically all
the power into SHA256.  A handful of gates or tiny cpu core would
generate input sequences and notice good hash results, and the rest is
dedicated hashing logic.

> it is a speculative investment ...  it has no real value and will only
> have a value as long as folks believe in it. 

Sure, that's just like lots of things people invest in.  Think of stamp
collections.

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The Kestrel Project visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2012-11-18 21:11 -0800
  Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-18 21:25 -0800
  Re: The Kestrel Project daveyrotten <danw8804@gmail.com> - 2012-11-19 07:29 -0800
    Re: The Kestrel Project visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2012-11-19 11:56 -0800
    Re: The Kestrel Project Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-11-20 01:15 +0100
      Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-19 16:26 -0800
        Re: The Kestrel Project Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-11-21 00:52 +0100
          Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-26 18:43 -0800
            Re: The Kestrel Project Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-11-28 00:13 +0100
        Re: The Kestrel Project rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2012-11-20 19:55 -0500
          Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-21 12:54 -0800
            Re: The Kestrel Project rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2012-11-21 18:11 -0500
              Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-21 22:50 -0800
                Re: The Kestrel Project rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2012-11-23 16:20 -0500
                Re: The Kestrel Project Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-11-23 18:51 -0800
                Re: The Kestrel Project rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2012-11-24 18:29 -0500
                Re: The Kestrel Project arc <arc.deletethis@vorsicht-bissig.de> - 2012-11-24 18:18 +1300

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