To be honest I only barely understand all the concepts behind bitcoin but it seems like a great idea. Since people have suggested real monetary donations in the form of paypal before, and I have a real career that earns me more money than kernel hacking likely ever will, I've refused. However, I'm quite happy to accept bitcoin donations. So here's my bitcoin address:
1PXcnF7vpW7rUnmaT3sbrAvzNrHLnaQSmu
EDIT:
For those who have not heard of bitcoin, it is an online currency not underwritten by any country but by mathematical computations. It's an interesting concept where the currency itself is slowly increasing in value as the amount of "coins" "generated" decreases with time. You can convert real money into bitcoins, and you can currently purchase a few things with them. The number of services and products you can buy with them is increasing steadily. One bitcoin is worth about 18 USD at the moment. You can actually "mine" for coins by work in the form of CPU or GPU power, which is a perfectly valid way of generating "money" but the ability to generate these coins gets harder as time goes on. Currently, mining for coins with CPU power is unlikely to generate any coins directly unless you join a pool, as it would take 50 years to generate them with CPU power. In a pool such as http://ozco.in (which I use), a modern CPU will generate about .01 coins a day. However, GPUs (and more so ATI ones) are much better at this mining. See http://bitcoin.org to learn more about bitcoins.
The concept behind Bitcoin is very interesting. I've spent several hours reading about how it works and I now have my computer participating in pooled mining for Bitcoins. Thank you for posting about this. I don't think I would have found out about this for some time if you had not posted it. So far I have contributed 24 hours of CPU time on a AMD Phenom X3 8450. If this yields a payout, I'll gladly give you a bit of a donation.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Alas CPU mining will generate nothing unless you join a pool as you'll find something only once every 50 years at the current level of difficulty. So join a pool to generate small amounts regularly instead like deepbit. GPU mining is the only thing that generates coins at any meaningful rate these days.
ReplyDeleteFor CPU mining, you'll be paying more for your electricity than the bitcoins are worth. You need a high end AMD card to really make it worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's untrue that their value "slowly" increases.. Their value has increased from pennies to $18 in a matter of months.
Only 7200 bitcoins are generated globally per day, so the more people mining the fewer each person will get.
Indeed CPU mining is not going to be earning you any significant money. I use it to warm the room up in winter and pretend it's doing something useful.
ReplyDeleteI'm contributing to a mining pool with mining.bitcoin.cz and using the cpuminer application. I do realize that the energy cost will be more than the payout. I'm just doing it more out of curiosity than anything else. I have it running with niceness of 19 with SCHED_IDLEPRIO. With the ck patch, I don't even notice that it is running with the exception that my CPU is a little warmer and being utilized at 100%. I think I might try to also get it running on my pfSense router.
ReplyDeleteI also sometimes use a computer to warm a room. I sometimes even clean all the dust out of it just so it'll heat the room more efficiently.
Good but not much as this
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hi-coder.com