Fourteen years ago, almost to the day, Satoshi wrote,
The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn't get more coins than before.
We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.
The only post before it in the thread that mentions GPUs, and that Satoshi might have been responding to, was this one from user SmokeTooMuch,
Suggestion :
Since the coins are generated faster on fast machines, many people will want to use their GPU power to do this, too.
So, my suggestion is to implement a GPU-computing support using ATI Stream and Nvidia CUDA.
Does anyone have an idea if there was a gentlemen's agreement that temporarily levelled the playground? Or was there another fix?
It'd be bit of Bitcoin history it'd be good to know more about.
I thought that the mention of GPUs (presumably mining Bitcoin) that it would be a reference to Laszlo Hanyecz mining bitcoin using GPUs before anyone else (Laszlo mined so much that he bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin).
However, it seems that Laszlo's discovery might have happened the following year, in 2010, exactly six months later.
Updated Mac OS X binary which uses OpenCL
It will use your GPU to generate bitcoins. This works really well if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800 or something like that. So far I only have it for Mac OS and only for 10.6+. 10.5 didn't have OpenCL yet so if you're using 10.5 stay with the previous release.
If that's correct, does this mean that Laszlo wasn't the first to use GPUs to mine bitcoin?
If only it wasn't Friday night, and @DarthCoin wasn't on the beer, he might have jumped in (I seem to remember that he knew bitcointalk well enough to know who the forum user themadhatter was in one of my previous post).
Maybe I'll have to wait till tomorrow to hear back from him...
reply
Sorry, I am not so expert in mining stuff. Yes I was mining in the early years of Bitcoin, but then was really simple. Nowadays is much much complicated and I will not be able to answer this. Sorry, when I do not know stuff, is just STFU.
reply
Okay, thanks dude.
reply