Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The value of Bitcoins
In July 2010, the value of Bitcoin was below 1 USD. Investing in Bitcoins was very
controversial and a huge risk, since it was difficult to predict if the currency would
be accepted or rejected by the community. As of writing this topic, the Bitcoin value
has exceeded 1100 USD.
You can search the Internet and find interesting articles on early adopters mining
Bitcoins, or buying a few hundred dollars and leaving their wallets lying around.
Just like one person in the UK who threw away his hard drive with 7500 BTC stored
on it. After going public, thousands of people flocked to the public dump ground
to search for the hard drive. Other stories include a student who invested a few
hundred dollars in 2010, and sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With such large amounts, it is important to consult your local TAX authority
or council.
The trend seems to be that the more people find out about Bitcoins and the more
media publicity it gets, the higher the value of the currency rises. This also looks
like it applies to alternative currencies such as Litecoin.
Mining for Bitcoins
Without getting too deep into the specifics, mining is all about verifying transactions
and solving blocks with mathematical computations. Each time a block is solved, the
miner gets a reward in Bitcoins. It used to be 50 BTC, but is currently 25 BTC.
In the early days of mining, it was enough for a popular dual-core processor to
generate enough hashes to keep the network going. As more and more people
mined, the difficulty to accomplish these blocks arose. The next stage was to use
the GPU found on powerful graphics cards, and that proved to be profitable for
some miners. As of writing this chapter, it is no longer viable to mine with the
CPU or GPU, and instead, you should invest in specialist devices, such as the
ASIC Block Erupter.
Mining for Bitcoins in solo mode can take an extremely long time and there is no
way to predict when you might solve a block. Instead, people join mining pools and
combine their computational power in one place. Mining in pools can find up to
5 blocks in a day, but on bad days it can take up to a week with the same hash rate.
Once a block is found, the reward is split up proportionally by the number of miners
and their hash rate. These coins go to your Bitcoin address, and sometimes there is a
small fee that goes towards running the pool.
