181–190 of 361 posts
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And I can attest to learning this lesson personally in 2012.
lol, sorry, but how long until your landlord contacted you? What was the conversation like? I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business.
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If you knew the technical details of blockchains, you would not think that. And yes, the process IS much more than wasing massive amounts of energy. > 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this You are welcome to try. If you do come up with a less waisful solution you will be able to create your own altcoin and will make billions worth of dollars on it. Some very smart people have tried in the pas…
There's already a less wasteful solution, it's called fiat money.
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But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.
High risk, high reward. If you buy the average piece of real estate and rent it out, you are looking at 30+ years to cover the cost. You can also lose it all (housing bubble) or quadruple your investment (investing in SF 10 years ago)
The intrinsic value of 1 BTC is ZERO
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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…
1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.) 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 arg…
> 1. Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% of the energy consumed by the world.
This doesn't change the fact that you're using energy. The second argument is basically the same, just extrapolating into the future.
> 3. Mining would be a waste if there was another more efficient way to implement a Bitcoin-like currency without proof-of-work.
This is a logical fallacy. Mining means wasting energy regardless if there are other ways of producing digital currencies or not.
Now, this one is actually interesting:
> 4. Bitcoin is already a net benefit to the economy. Venture capitalists invested more than $1 billion into at least 729 Bitcoin companies which created thousands of jobs. You may disregard the first three arguments, but the bottom line is that spending an estimated 150 megawatt in a system that so far created thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste.
This example is a bit special because the jobs haven't been created by BCs themselves but by VCs spending their own money into BC-related companies. I just hope most of these aren't BC mines, otherwise we'd have a vicious circle here...
>5. The energy cost per transaction is currently declining thanks to the transaction rate increasing faster than the network's energy consumption.
Again: this kind of argument is of "it's not as bad as it sounds" type, and does nothing to refute the claim that mining is wasteful.
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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…
>A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. 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 compens…
If you changed graphics cards to use 0.1% of their current power, then miners would not immediately buy 1000 times more graphics cards.
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Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic hardware proliferation.
I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down, they should be able to buy a card now.
These cards also signify the use of electric generation towards 'mining' for virtual currency instead of more productive uses for society: even including entertainment. The mining raises the overall cost of electricity for everyone.
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There's already a less wasteful solution, it's called fiat money.
That's because you are not actually considering the electricity usage of fiat money at all.
http://gizmodo.com/a-huge-fire-took-out-a-bitcoin-mining-ope...
Because banks aren't setting themselves up in places based on the electricty cost. And shoving rackmount servers in close proximity and underventilating them. Even huge fintech operations aren't chasing cheap power at the exclusion of other concerns. Banks do not use the kind of electricity that cryptocurrency uses, when you control for the volume of usage of each.
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…
It depends on what you're "mining." I've been mining Gridcoin[1] for a while, which basically pays crypto-currency for working on BOINC projects. I feel like I am at least contributing to something worthwhile, rather than simply wasting energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.) 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 arg…
The other side of the coin: a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system also re-introduces a substantial set of significant problems that societies have already long solved for themselves.
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…
If you are creating a currency, then it has to be backed by something: gold, silver the cost of electricity, people's faith that the currency is worth something. A currency not backed by something will keep deteriorating until it is worthless (assuming a free market, the dollar doesn't collapse because only the us mint can make them).