[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yeah, and now that they are building hardware specific for bitcoin mining,
> it could get very interesting. There is NO POINT whatsoever to trying to
> mine bitcoin with a CPU these days.
>

Let me underline that.  I tried it out a few weeks ago, for grins, on
an old machine that doesn't have a separate GPU, only a CPU.
(Or at least, what passes for a GPU isn't modern enough to be
recognized by the mining software I used.)  I tried chipping in on
one of the popular pools, figuring that would at least give me
feedback as to how far behind the curve my setup was.

Turns out, the mining software's optimized to be run on GPUs, so
"old + CPU" meant I was running about 1,000 times slower than
most miners despite my hardware being only about 10 years old.
(That's, what, 5 doublings, or 32-fold, according to Moore's Law?)

At that speed, new blocks were being created and checked faster
than my computer could do enough work to be measured.  As a
result, I did not get a tiny tiny share of the blocks being mined, but
literally zero shares.  That is, my computer contributed exactly
zero work, despite being correctly set up (as verified by miners
using modern hardware), since it was beneath the threshold of
"fast enough".

At least I got a bitcoin wallet out of it, though I doubt I will make
use of it soon.
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