271–280 of 361 posts
A quick search of eBay shows no good deals on gtx 1070s. Used cards are selling for what I bought my cards new for a month ago or more (380).
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This is not entirely true, as cash requires energy after it's been minted. Money transport, cashiers and gold old fashioned vaults all require energy. With that being said, PoW is definitely wasteful, and for crypto-currency to be taken serious on the world stage, another form of consensus algorithm is required. Personally I'm partial to Proof of Stake[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
Don't cryptocurrency transactions take a lot more time & energy than, say, a credit card transaction?
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This is not entirely true, as cash requires energy after it's been minted. Money transport, cashiers and gold old fashioned vaults all require energy. With that being said, PoW is definitely wasteful, and for crypto-currency to be taken serious on the world stage, another form of consensus algorithm is required. Personally I'm partial to Proof of Stake[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
Don't cryptocurrency transactions take a lot more time & energy than, say, a credit card transaction?
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Consider that the alternative is all of the banking infrastructure that exists. The energy that banks and their employees consume is orders of magnitude less efficient.
Bitcoin does not replace more than a small corner of banking. It doesn't even include any loans.
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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…
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…
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Bitcoin does not replace more than a small corner of banking. It doesn't even include any loans.
lol not sure lending would work if the currency is always increasing in value, why lend money when it will be worth more if you keep it?
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> 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it. 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.
In the words of Scott Alexander: "People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear…
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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…
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…
I think this wording obscures why the mining process gives the network trustworthiness.
You are changing the nonce over and over again until the HASH of the block meets some criteria. For example, your hash is below some value (it starts with a certain number of zeroes). This is important.
It's important because you can't 'fake' the work. The only physically possible way to come up with a block that has a conforming hash is to change the nonce and run the hashing algorithm and repeat this until your hash matches the criteria. There's no way I can know the nonce I need to use without running the hashing algorithm. Hence, if I present a block that hashes to a conforming value (you don't just take my word for it, you run the hashing algorithm on the block yourself to independently verify the work), you know that I've invested time and electricity (tangible, real-world things) in the creation of that conforming block.
Alone this doesn't seem like much, but the time and energy limitations it imposes gives a blockchain properties that make data more 'immutable' the longer it is stored in the chain by making it computationally more expensive to change data further back in time from the most recent block in the chain and makes it computationally expensive for a single bad actor to change past data that nodes in the network have 'agreed' upon. This computational expense is important when combined with the other rules that a node uses when receiving a new block and trying to independently determine that the block is valid and should be treated by that node as 'truth'.
The trustworthiness of the blockchain is an emergent network effect. It's not provided or enabled by one single thing, but by many things all contributing at the same time. Proof-of-work is just one small piece of a much larger system. For example, you also need to consider what other rules make proof-of-work useful in the system, such as the rule that a node must accept a chain with more work in it as more truthful than one with less work (hopefully I'm wording that somewhat right!).
Saying 'the miners provide security by hashing' is a massive oversimplification of what's going on. It's very much a sum-of-all-the-parts thing.
I found this helpful in particularly driving this process as a whole home: https://anders.com/blockchain/
I'm still really getting my head around blockchain itself, so if I'm way off base on anything in my understanding here I'm happy to be corrected :)
As I understand it, the challenging question is - is there something else we can use that's as independently verifiable as proof-of-work that's more energy efficient? What independent verification do we give up if we do choose something that's less energy consuming (but maybe less 'provable')?
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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…
How are bitcoin and ethereum censorship-less and permission-less? Most cubans for instance don't have access to the internet without a permission. China could shut down the bitcoin easily by simply blocking bitcoin traffic.
Why would you conflate two separate systems like that?
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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…
>Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable No it didn't. I follow Ethereum development closely and I know for a fact that's absolutely untrue. I'm not sure why you're misleading people about this.