Bitcoin mining is exactly arms race competition, what is the current situation of amateur refusal?

ByMalcolm Craig

Virtual currency without centralized currency issuing organization "Bitcoin (bit coin)In addition to the method of getting it at the exchange, there is a big feature in being able to "mining" by the method called "mining" which runs a dedicated program using my PC. However, alchemy that produces "gold" from this absence is no longer a casual user to participate easily, but seems to be a world of shura who is irresistible.

Blockchain Smashers | TechCrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/16/blockchain-smashers/

Bit coin takes a system that can uncover new bit coins by running the special software "Bitcoin miner", and mining work is called mining. The bit coin system is maintained by the machine power of the minor (minor), and in that way it is given a bit coin.

A bit coin produced by a mysterious person "Tetsushi Nakamoto"In addition to freedom not having a centralized monetary issuing organization and extremely high anonymity, there was also a unique mechanism that you can find out for yourself, and it gained popularity. Nakamoto has adopted a clever algorithm of setting a limit to the amount of reserves of bit coins and keeping the excavation pace constant, so the more the number of miners doing the mining work, the more difficult it is to excavate newly as the number of miners increases there is. This is a structure that the more you use the higher performance CPU, the more you go through others and the more you get rewarded, and it is clever that the bit coin system is stably operated by mining with nature competing with each other It has a mechanism and the competition of mining PC specs will be developed.


At the beginning of 2009 when Nakamoto made a public announcement of bit coin, mining was a so-called hobby area, so to speak, mainly computation processing by the CPU was done. However, as the transaction price of bit coins improves, we will shift to calculation processing by graphic board (GPU) in search of faster processing. Mining mining speed is measured in number of hashes processed per second (H / s). The migration speed from the CPU to the GPU reaches about 600 MH / s.

Also,Bit coin is used for settlement of bad deals such as illegal drug trading site "Silk Road"As the transaction volume increased and the investment money also flowed into the bit coin market due to Greece credit uncertainty, the bit coin price further increased, the number of mining participants increased at a stroke, and in search of a lot of return Competition to increase processing speed is accelerated.

The well-known Winblesbos brothers, who are famous for having settled at least $ 65 million (about 5.1 billion yen) from Facebook, invest 11 million dollars (about 880 million yen at that time) in the bit coin in June 2012 I will. According to brothers "Investment in bit coin is much better than gold".


Working with a single GPU shifts to multi-task mining using multiple GPUs, and accordingly the energy consumed by mining explosively increases. In the work using multiple GPUs, electricity costs increase, and in consideration of the bit coin obtained by mining, it falls into a situation that it can not cover the electricity bill. Nonetheless, in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the electricity bill is about one tenth (1 kWh per 3 kWh) compared to the West and the United States, 105 systems of GPUs in parallel are operated in a 24 hour full-time room in the air-conditioning room The strong man who makes "gold" of 114 dollars (about 11 thousand yen) per day also emerges. Following the fiercest people around the world who knew this, we built a huge system. There is no idyllic landscape like waiting long for bit coins to be mined using their own PC.


"Army race competition" still continues. Uniquely programmedFPGAHas appeared, achieving 400 MH / s while keeping the power consumption at 15 W and succeeding in lowering the electricity cost. However, the FPGA will soon be a bit coin mining dedicated chipASICIt is overtaken by the hardware on which it is equipped, and finally the mining speed reaches 1 GH / s (1000 MH / s). In addition, a "pool mining" system in which bit coins are distributed according to the degree of contribution by cooperatively processing arithmetic processing of ASIC hardware on the network has emerged, and hurdles for participation in mining in private more and more will rise.

The number of companies selling special hardware also increases rapidly, and its sales competition also overheats. However, as soon as taking a preorder, fraudulent acts that disappear immediately are rampant. For example, the company Terrahash suddenly collapsed with the announcement "Seeming to be able to refund about 50% already deposited" in September 2013, causing problems with the pre-order buyer.

This is Cointerra's "TerraMiner IV". It boasts specs of 2 TH / s.


Due to such fraud, recent trend is lease sales of dedicated hardware.LeasebitHas leased hardware of 1.49 TH / s specification with a monthly charge of 149 dollars (59 months payment). "The use of dedicated hardware is the only way to discover bit coins, the era of leisurely morning is over," said Rowan Horta, vice president of Leasebit.

In April 2013, the transaction price of bit coin recorded an unprecedented high price of 266 dollars (about 26,000 yen) per one sheet, and the price has been stopped high, even after repeated repeated fluctuations. A bit coin investment consulting company that built a bit coin data center "Alydian" to operate ASIC hardware 24 hours a dayCoinlabCompanies that make huge investments like those also appeared. Mining is no longer an individual hobby but seems to be a huge business.