As the bitcoin economy has grown in recent months, mining has become an increasingly specialized activity. The most active miners have been engaged in something of an “arms race,” purchasing high-powered graphics cards and building increasingly elaborate set-ups to the point where one miner was recently raided by police because his power-use profile resembled that of a marijuana grow-op. However, Donny Nadolny bucked this trend last week when he launched Bitcoin Plus, a browser-based mining pool aimed at the casual miner with nary but a mere CPU at his or her disposal. To get a better sense of the logic and logistics of Donny’s project, I requested an interview:
The Bitcoin Sun: In a paragraph or two, what is BitCoin Plus?
Donny Nadolny: Bitcoin Plus is a website that lets anyone start mining bitcoin easily. I’m a fairly technical computer user, and even I found it annoying to get started with bitcoin. The progression I went through, which I’m sure was typical, is:
1. learn about bitcoin, and that they can be mined
2. download the standard client and check “start generating coins”
3. wait for a day or two and realize that nothing has been generated
4. learn more, find out that now you have to join a mining pool to mine bitcoin
5. find a mining pool, join it
6. download a dedicated mining client, set it up with the mining pool
7. finally start to get bitcoin
That’s way too much work. I reduced it to just going to a website and clicking “start generating”.
Bitcoin Plus is a simpler way to mine bitcoin.
TBS: The consensus among many hardcore bitcoin users is that the age of CPU mining is past, and, unless you have a powerful GPU rig, mining is simply uneconomical. However, your service seems intended for the casual miner – what’s the reason behind your bucking conventional wisdom?
DN: Yes, the consensus is that CPU mining is over, and GPU mining is the only way to do it now. I think that’s wrong. In fact, I think it’s the other way around – CPU mining will soon make most of the dedicated GPU mining rigs uneconomical. The reason for this is that dedicated GPU miners rely on being profitable compared to the cost of their GPU plus the cost of electricity. By bringing CPU mining to the masses, people can run the Bitcoin Plus miner anywhere, including places where they have zero cost for mining, like an apartment where they don’t pay for electricity, or at work where they don’t pay for electricity or their computer. And once this mass of CPU miners pushes down the profitability, likely even below the cost of electricity to generate the bitcoins, the GPU miners will have to turn off their machines. This will go down even more once I introduce my embeddable version.
TBS: How do you determine how much your site’s users receive for their participation? Does BCP take a set percentage, or does it vary by the total processing power in the pool?
DN: I wanted to pay a competitive price, because I want more people using Bitcoin Plus and bitcoin in general. I currently take 3% of the total amount generated. As far as I know, this is the lowest fee for a pay per share mining pool.
TBS: How much use has Bitcoin Plus experienced since you started it?
DN: Bitcoin Plus has got great use so far – it is, by far, the most popular website I’ve run. I’d rather not reveal exact numbers/hashrate/btc, but I will say I’m very happy with how popular it is, and I’ve got lots of plans to make it even better.
TBS: You are developing a website plug-in that allows people to mine for the benefit of others. What’s the idea behind this?
DN: This will be an embeddable version of the miner, where you can add a couple of lines of javascript and it will start up a miner in the background whenever someone visits your website. The idea is that website owners can use it instead of (or as a complement to) traditional advertising, by using their visitors CPU power to mine bitcoin on their behalf. Traditional advertisement is based on the number of people who see or click on an ad on your website, whereas bitcoin “ads” measure user engagement. If you can keep people on a single page for half an hour, you’d get 60 times the revenue compared to a website that has people clicking on a new page within 30 seconds. I’ve already been contacted by a few people who have video or audio streaming websites who want to get in on a beta test, because it’s such a perfect fit for their model: relatively fewer page views, but with people staying on a page for tens of minutes. I’ve actually had a non-profit email me, saying one of their donors told them about my website, and they asked me if they would be able to use this so that people can go to their website and mine bitcoin as a donation to them. I thought that was pretty cool.
This embeddable version should be ready soon, and I’m also working on an API that would let programmers implement other ideas using an embeddable miner.
TBS: As the mining economy moves from being funded by newly-created coins to fee-based processing, how do you envision BitCoin Plus will change (if at all)?
DN: I don’t think it will change too much. The fees should adjust so that there’s always room for profit in mining – the miners, by definition, are the ones running the network, and as long as bitcoin is popular they should be compensated for that.