Test: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
May 30th, 2011Update: Good Video Cards for GPU Mining
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Update: HAHA Never Mind
This misses doing anything worth doing by about four orders of magnitude. lol.
Thanks to everyone who tried this out, but it’s the Bitcoin equivalent trying to win the lotto.
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A crew calling themselves bitp.it have created a distributed javascript Bitcoin mining system. Since many tens of thousands of you are apparently waiting for some other method of supporting Cryptogon, besides the ones available already, *grin* I thought that maybe you’d be up for opening this Bitcoin mining page on Cryptogon [Update: Page taken down] in your browser, and leaving it open for as long as you like. You don’t have to do anything else. The code will run inside your browser until you close the tab or window. Open as many instances of the thing as you want. If you monitor your processor utilization, you’ll see the browser using more with each instance.
On a modern computer, you probably won’t notice any difference with just one instance running. On smartphones, old computers and netbooks, you may notice a slowdown, or your fan turning on or becoming audible.
Bitcoins are so hard to mine now that I doubt that this will accomplish anything, but I just wanted to see how many hashes per second you guys could reach.
About a month ago I hit a block for 50 bitcoins, by sheer dumb luck I am sure. The very next day, the difficulty went up and so did the TH/s. I did some GPU and combined CPU since then with no more luck, but its so far off the scale now it’s not even worth trying. Only the big mining pools and people with significant assets are getting any new coins these days. Good idea about the JS, but without a pool with dedicated GPU miners it wouldn’t get far, as you already know 🙂
Did you post on the bitcoin forum about that? I saw a post by someone with a 2000 kh/s machine who got a block in two days. haha. According to the current difficulty, 95% probability of solving a block would be 32381 days.
Anyway, this javascript thing is a cool idea, but a few factors make it untenable:
The biggest problem, of course, is that it’s just too hard to mine now.
Second, bitp.it dialed the script down to prevent it from being too obnoxious for people.
Third, javascript is slow as dirt compared with regular executables—which, aren’t even useful now. As you say, the whole thing has moved to tandem GPUs now.
The JS thing is kinda fun 🙂
Meanwhile, I’ve got seven AMD 6990 cards hashing away in my kitchen. Had to make a run to the gun store today, though, to buy some uber headphones to block the noise when I go in there.
Bitcoin is one of those things I wish I’d gotten in early on but now seems like a big waste of electricity to me now.
Don’t remember if it was on your site but some Bitcoin farmers are getting (illegally IMO) busted based on their electricity/heat profile making them look like pot farmers.
@Kevin lol, yeah that was probably me…before I got my graphics card streaming working. Even with that its not worth it at this point…unless dumb luck strikes twice hehe.
@FRLVX hahaha it’s a small world.
When I first heard about the Bitcoin thing I thought it might be one of those interesting grassroots gigs where clusters of folks with related interests get together and barter with their homemade script. But then it got taken seriously. Seriously? A grassroots effort to compete with the standard monetary system that gets taken seriously? Gotta be kidding.
I heard a wee radio article about Bitcoin last night on NPR/BBC. Tried to find a link to a podcast but failed, so I’ll paraphrase from memory –
“The Bitcoin isn’t nearly as anonymous as people claim it to be” (referring to IP tracking, the rest of the internet being sucked up and eaten etc)
Followed by (get this)
“Once it is accepted, I fully expect to see a Visa card denominated in Bitcoins.”
I think that game isn’t fun anymore.