141–150 of 361 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average price paid for electricity in many regions is 20 cents/kwh. Just using your numbers that translates into $300/month in costs for under $400 in ETH. At the national average it would be $200/month by rough math.
In downtown Manhattan, maybe. In most other places near a power station, it's not.
Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling. The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH. So basically for miners who are in the right s…
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
But with Ethereum, it's not waste. The miners are providing storage and compute, a la Amazon Web Services. It's not like Bitcoin, where the hashing is just there to verify the blockchain.
In general, it's a valid concern... Do we really need to compute these things over and over to secure a fixed set of computations?
But in reality, the cryptocomputers that make more efficient use of miners will create more value and associated currencies will be more valuable. Bitcoin is essentially a proof of concept and therefore totally unoptimized.
Eventually the cryptographically verified computing market and the trustful computing market will find the sweet spots between efficiency and redundancy. I'm not generally trusting of the free market, but in this case the free market seems perfectly capable of solving this problem.
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Until we come up with a viable way to secure cryptocurrency without proof of work, such incentives are necessary. If good people weren't incentivised to spend energy on securing the network, it would be easier for bad people to spend energy on cheating the network.
Until we come up with a viable way to secure cryptocurrency without proof of work, such incentives are necessary. This assumes, of course, that cryptocurrency itself is necessary.
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Without physical security, someone can walk into the data center next to the hydro plant and take all the equipment they want . They can also install rootkits using their physical access to their computers, so they don't even have to move the equipment. No, you cannot replace physical security with cryptocurrency. Nor will you replace the use of gasoline or computer chips.
Data centers need security regardless of cryptocurrency, you can't say the same about money and banks; so your point is moot. To install rootkits you need to know where the computers are or some way to get to them, and that's 100% impossible with bitcoins unless you reveal your own info some other way (e.g. a security mistake)
"Haha, you don't know which computer to steal" is the worst security-by-obscurity idea I've ever heard of.
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Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
Until we come up with a viable way to secure cryptocurrency without proof of work, such incentives are necessary. If good people weren't incentivised to spend energy on securing the network, it would be easier for bad people to spend energy on cheating the network.
Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling. The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH. So basically for miners who are in the right s…
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent?
Especially if you consider that the process of "mining" is literally computing hashes over and over again until you find the right nonce that meets some arbitrary criteria, it's hard to see this process as anything except wasting massive amounts of energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…
10 years ago people would have told you there is no possible solution to this.
Proof-of-work cryptocurrency is a tremendous breakthrough. It will certainly be surpassed one day, but it's currently our best available option for a system of money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…
2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it.
I have presented multiple arguments why (Bitcoin) mining is not wasteful here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/
Good, maybe video cards will start to come back in stock at their MSRP.
Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic hardware proliferation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…
A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…
Note that this is zero-sum.
If a device is invented tomorrow that is 100x more efficient per dollar/watt to mine, the cost to 'secure the blockchain' remains the same because people will just buy 100x more computing power for the same investment and the difficulty ramps up to compensate.