LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs

or bitcoins -> cryptsy -> ltc -> wallet.

i've traded on both sites and its worked out relatively well

There are even mining pools such as middlecoin that shift from one scrypt-based alt coin to another depending on what is easiest to mine and sell on exchanges for BTC. As a miner, you don't have to lift a finger, just point cgminer at the pool's address and supply a BTC address for payouts, the pool operator takes care of the rest.

Some smaller altcoins (such as stablecoin) have had to make changes to their difficulty calculations because these pools, with relatively massive amounts of hashing power, come in, push up a coin's difficulty and then leave again once it's no longer profitable. Sitting on the sidelines, it's been really interesting to watch.

https://www.google.com/#q=stores+that+accept+litecoin

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

Sure, but the total energy being "wasted" by Bitcoin mining globally may still be increasing.

Shame this isn't just arbitrary math instead of contributing to something like folding@home.

Describing the relationship as 'pegged' is also sort of aggressive. A better statement would be that most people will only spend electricity if they are able to recover that cost in bitcoin (and probably a small profit). So there is some upper limit of mining activity to be expected given the current bitcoin price, size of reward and typical efficiency of mining hardware (cost of electricity will also factor in, but that should be relatively stable).

No, its not. "Mining" is a misleading term based on the early-phase reward. A better name for the function would be "providing resources for transaction processing". In the early phase, the reward is new bitcoins (hence, "mining" as the common name for the process), in the late phase it becomes transaction fees.

> And transaction fees shouldn't change this too much. Competition amongst miners should eventually drive those towards zero too.

Competition among miners only drives transaction fees to zero if there are a large number of miners compared to the number of transactions -- i.e., if either usage isn't high or lots of people are dedicating resources to mining (and thus, electricity usage isn't going to zero.)

> It's not just bookkeeping that's happening, it's dispute resolution.

No, its just bookkeeping.

> Currently your financial disputes are solved by calling your credit card company and having them deal with it.

True for certain classes of financial disputes when credit cards are used, but not generally the case. But, whatever.

> There's a whole network of dispute resolution services going all the way up to the SCOTUS. All of which uses resources. Bitcoin does all that through mining.

No, it does not do the same function as the entire court system in terms of financial dispute resolution. Disputes involving Bitcoin are still resolved through the legal process. In fact, the absence of chargeback like mechanisms means that any disputes require escalation to more expensive mechanisms of dispute resolution sooner.

(Now, if transactions are done in a manner which is anonymous, dispute resolution may be practically impossible in the same way that that can be become the case if you are doing anonymous drops to exchange cash and goods -- but that doesn't mean that mining is fulfilling the dispute resolution function, just that you've adopted a protocol which excludes dispute resolution.)

If the problem was purely mathematical in nature, that's where you don't really need authority.

It has to do with the different architecture allowing more 32-bit operations per second.

The reason, more or less, is that AMD GPUs tend to have way more cores than Nvidia GPUs, and their cores can, in hardware, do the integer operation necessary for the hashing algorithm. Nvidia can only emulate the integer operation, so it takes three instructions on Nvidia vs one on AMD.