The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:

I�m down for some choice quotes

Here's a fun one, but I think it's bargaining, rather than denial:
Would you support a hard fork that obsceletes ETH ASICs?

This guy's still stuck in anger, though (or just stupidity)

CryptoBlockchainTech posted:

You have little understanding the way BitMain works. They use ASICs to mine coins long before they release them to the public.

Take a look at the ETH difficulty chart over the last few months when it has been impossible to buy GPUs. Answer where all that hash power has come from? Bingo BitMain.

Now take a look at the ETH/BTC chart and notice ETH price two months ago was at .123BTC and is now at .056 down over 50% in two months. Where did all that ETH selling pressure come from (and no it was not all EOS). Bingo Bitmain.

I love how every goddam libertarian loves freedom until they suddenly stop winning. Then it just isn't fun anymore and they need their special protections.

Stickman fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Mar 29, 2018

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 07:34

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 4, 2024 06:49

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

Don Lapre posted:

savedroid coin just exited

https://ico.savedroid.com/

Posting a (presumably identifiable) picture of your whereabouts seems pretty cheeky after defrauding investors for millions. I guess we'll see how dumb he actually is in the coming weeks.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2018 21:32

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

Don Lapre posted:

People already found the beach hes on in egypt.

So no extradition treaty with Germany, but the only Arab country with an extradition treaty to the US? Apparently he allowed "accredited American investors", so that might come back to bite him.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2018 21:54

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

Palladium posted:

This is good for bitcoin.

The dawning realization that it is neither decentralized nor secure enough to warrant its enormous cost, then being put out of its misery? Sure!

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 06:20

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

divabot posted:

this has been the case since 2014, but bitcoin is here

it turns out bitcoin completely refutes the Efficient Market Hypothesis

I keep holding out hope that if enough people get screwed by exchanges and enough real money starts shifting out of the US, we'll actually see some regulation. But America :smith:

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 22:55

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

QuarkJets posted:

- Solving the honesty problem means being able to easily verify computational outputs. This is easy by design in cryptocurrency, figuring out the correct nonce for the next block is hard but then verifying that the nonce is correct is easy. This is lot harder for computational problems. Say that I need to convolve one billion matrices with one billion other matrices; the only way to verify those outputs is to do the difficult computation yourself and check the answer. You can't solve this issue but you can mitigate it; other providers on the network can perform the verification, and you could wrap that into the cost offered to people looking for computational power (e.g. a user could ask that N% of the outputs be independently verified X times by Y independent providers; N could be 100 for renders, and maybe this degree of redundant computation is still cost effective because you don't have to purchase and maintain your own hardware)

It seems like you could also use redundant computes to weed out bad actors - X% failures and your reinbursement rate takes a hit, Y% and you lose your account (perhaps even banning the GPU device ID, though you'd want some sort amnesty for second-hand purchases).

# ¿ Sep 19, 2018 23:01

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

QuarkJets posted:

Yeah and you need a way of ensuring that your redundancy is independent.

And there's also a matter of padding your hours. Say that provider X takes 4 hours to process some data and provider Y takes 4.5 hours. Did provider Y pad their hours for greater payout? Hard to say. Or if you pay based on availability instead of wall time, how do you detect fake "outages"?

These are tough problems but I doubt they're insurmountable.

I assume you'd probably pay by the computation rather than hour in order to promote efficient computation (like *coin mining, but with a more useful outcome). If there are deadlines, you could add a bit extra for priority processing (i.e., the data cruncher would see the deadline for their computation component and receive a bonus if they dedicate enough resources to meet the deadline), or if the problem supports it, simply distribute small enough chunks that you can cut off processing at a certain time. I see your point, though - some problems might not quite be so granular, so there might need to be some additional incentives to meet availability targets.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2018 02:26

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 4, 2024 06:49

Stickman: Feb 1, 2004

Eyes Only posted:

Man I hate to contribute to this thread, but cryptonerds did make my machine learning box pay for itself. Plus I guess it's not really crypto if we're talking about legit computation.

This seems pretty simple to me; the answer is you can beat bad actors easily enough as long as you split the computation into discrete jobs and only pay out an address once it has completed N jobs.

The way I imagine it, before payout the system randomly duplicates some % of the jobs and gives them to other actors to check. If you don't trust the checkers, you can establish trust by checking a fraction of their checks, recursively going up the tree with progressively fewer checks until you get to some "central" authority - presumably the original issuer of the job since their interest is aligned here.

At payout time, you randomly check X% of jobs for that actor. If any fail, the actor forfeits the entire payout. The math works out such that as long as N is greater than 1/X cheating will be entirely unprofitable. If you cheat 100% of the time you'll never get paid. If you cheat more intelligently just some of the time, you may have a chance of getting away with it, but you'll also have to contribute real compute to ensure that chance isn't zero. In the end you will wind up forfeiting more real compute than you gain from cheating, regardless of what fraction of your results are fake.

Naturally you'd want some buffer room in either N or X to account for the checker trust system, but in total you can get the overhead to be pretty low. At a 1% checkrate you only need 100 jobs per payout to secure the system - achievable for most distributed tasks if you're targeting weekly or monthly payouts for a typical actor.

You'd need a reverse-check system to prevent the job issuers themselves from maliciously marking everyone as cheaters at the root level, and one for preventing actors from DDoSing the system by spamming fake results for no benefit. I think this idea can be applied to the former in the same way with little overhead since the issuer isn't checking a large number of results. I presume the latter is already solved in existing blockchain protocols somehow.

I'm not really convinced that a public blockchain structure would offer any advantages over simply centrally controlling the distribution of jobs and verification work. With that sort of central control, you don't have to worry about malicious job issuers and you can simply kick out bad actors after a certain number of infractions, and ban their GPU identifiers to prevent them from creating a new account. You could even create a "trust" system where verification jobs are performed by the most reliable users who have built up solid reputations. Using a public structure would let you create a system that would theoretically run itself, I suppose, but it seems like it would have a hard time competing with more reliable managed systems that could afford to do less validation.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2018 02:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay