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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#81

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

Bitcoin adjusts difficulty based on how many people mine it. So cheap power doesn't reduce the cost, since it will just mean even more mining.

Exactly, the amount of money spent on energy to mine is equal to the amount of mining revenue. Energy consumption is more closely related to price.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#83
post #61
post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

within roughly 5 years or so (very rough guess on my part), all of the available Bitcoin will have been mined. At that point, the mining part of the equation will be moot, leaving only the blockchain infrastructure to consider. Note that this may not hold true for various "forks" of the bitcoin blockchain, or for other cryptocurrencies.

Not true at all. The security of the bitcoin blockchain is fundamentally based on mining; after the inflation schedule runs low enough that it's not the major component of mining rewards (which won't be for decades), miners will continue mining, but for the transaction fees instead.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#85
post #47
post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in sp…

I believe this is the recording of that Berkeley talk: https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...

Still a lot of implementation details to be revealed, but looks really interesting.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, the legal system is gonna surprise anyone who thinks they are operating outside of it. And not in a good way.

Look up pinkapp. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_stc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389364 https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-ano...

Sure. But also look up all the dark markets the FBI busted.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#87
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't thi…

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense. When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens. Curious to read about and see how that works

My understanding is that your computer computes the answer to a difficult calculation ahead of time and stores the output up to a specified size (ex. 1GB worth of digits of pi) . Proof-of-Space asks you to respond with a segment of the output at a certain offset. The amount of time given to respond is less than the amount of time it would take to calculate the output, and so by replying you prove that you had it stored already.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up pinkapp. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_stc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15389364 https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-ano...

Sure. But also look up all the dark markets the FBI busted.

The interesting thing is, this founder has apparently put in contingency plans in case they mess up. The organization can continue.

I'm not sure how true that will turn out to be, but it's an interesting attempt.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean a 2 trillion dollar market cap? That's not the same as GDP. I mean, Apple is close to a 1 trillion dollar market cap. I'd argue a 1% increase in world power output simply for Apple to store its money and make transactions would be a remarkably poor use of power.

Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation. If anything, my "GDP" comparison was off the mark because GDP typically represents a country's total wealth, and bitcoin can't have a GDP. But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close. Those bitcoin paper millionaires are investing in startups like Pinkapp, and Pinkapp is hiring programmers. All of this is happening outside the le…

GDP is more akin to a Country's income rather than wealth (for simplicity: the sum of all salaries and corporate profits generated by the country's residents, either physical or legal entities; imports and exports of goods and services have an impact too but let's ignore it for the sake of simplicity). So the similitude with Bitcoin would be with the added coins in one year. Just for some reference. In 2016 Italy had a GDP of 1.8 Trillion USD, 2.5% of Global GDP, close to the 2T of comments here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ). In 2012 it had share of 1.5% (321 / 20,900 PWh) of total electricity power ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption , let's assume that share has not changed much since 2012). Global GDP growth is around 3.5% in 2016-17 (a bit more than 1.5 Italies get added to the Global economy).

Broadly speaking, Central banks today feed this growth by printing money (i.e. increasing the money supply), hence inflation. A deflationary currency like bitcoin would have to grow in unit value accordingly because of its cap, if it were to become the de-facto new gold standard. How much power consumption is appropriate for mining needs to be considered in relative terms vs how much mower hungry is gold mining, for example. I am not sure how power hungry is printing and managing cash (incl. security, transport...). Also, all these activities (gold mining, bitcoin mining, cash printing) also contribute to GDP. Eventually if the power source is renewable and generation capacity is kept at appropriate level (e.g no one dies of cold because power must be prioritized to mining) does it matter? Or am i missing something?

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