[HH] Bitcoin mining hardware

[Greg London]

> The BitCoin paper is here, that should explain how the scheme works:
>
> http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Hm, skimmed it. Maybe I'm not enough of a math geek to get this.
Most of this paper feels like a scam.

>From page 4:

;>By convention, the first transaction in a block is a
;>special transaction that starts a new coin owned
;>by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive
;>for nodes to support the network, and provides
;>a way to initially distribute coins into circulation,
;>since there is no central authority to issue them.
;>The steady addition of a constant of amount of new
;>coins is analogous to gold miners expending
;>resources to add gold to circulation. In our case,
;>it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.

So, I do some math, I find some number, and everyone
calls that a "coin"?  These "coins" would be, in my
estimation, be worth less than a penny per "coin".

from the next paragraph:

;>Once a predetermined number of coins have entered
;>circulation, the incentive can transition entirely
;>to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

This makes no mathematical sense. The value of these "coins"
must neccessarily go down as computational power goes up.
The easier it is to make these "coins", the less they
would be worth, adn eventually, they would become
worthless once hardware can find a "coin" per
processor clock.

What this DOES tell me, however, is that this bitcoin
thing is either a scam from the get-go, or it is some
sort of "perpetual motion device" invented by some
paranoid gold-bug.

When that PDF tries to go into the "why" of bitcoins,
it invariably starts rambling about not wanting to
trust a third party. "Not trusting" taken to a point
becomes "paranoia". And if this isn't a scam, its
feels like something invented by some paranoid
anti-government folks.

If I understood the math, it wouldn't take much
to crank out these "coins" using the FPGA fabric
in the zedboard. But, this thing feels like its
run by (1) crazy gold bugs or (2) scammers or
(3) people looking to launder money.

I think I'll just steer clear of it all.

Greg