The power needed to create a HD need to be accounted for and the metal supply that it lowers could create issues that needs electricity to make up for, just a theory.
BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
161–170 of 309 posts
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand on this?
The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production.
Except this ignores scarcity. And also ignores post-scarcity; this is the time period when robots do all work and farm all resources leaving humanity to decide the value of things divorced from rarity and labour. I will concede to Marx one aspect of his maxim; that is, scarcity is directly correlated with human effort towards a reseller market. So it still applies even if indirectly. For example, there is less labour spent trying to skim off the top of automotive mechanics work than labour spent reselling gold or limited edition Nike Airheads, etc....
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use o…
I read someone’s estimate — rough, I’ll grant you — that mining bitcoin (just bitcoin) consumes as much total electrical energy as an entire medium-sized nation . Divide network hashrate into how much power the most efficient ASICs use, and I don’t think it’s an unfair estimate. You can’t dismiss the argument that maybe we can do better as “naysaying,” nor that there is something about cryptocurrency that the people…
straw man. I was responding to the statement that the computation is doing nothing, and not arguing one way or another that the energy used is reasonable for the benefits gained.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, let's do it the other way. Let's pretend (in BTC's favour) that market cap and GDP are the same thing. World GDP is around 100 trillion. So by your own figures, if it were denominated in BTC or equivalent cryptocurrency, we'd require more than 100% of the world's current power output just to store and send people's money. That's more power output than is currently required for all the world's homes, factories, ho…
This is a strawman argument. I'm trying to think of a charitable interpretation, but it's difficult. The world's currency isn't ever going to be 100% bitcoin. It's an invalid basis to start from. I kind of see what you're trying to hint at, but it would be helpful for discussion if you could think of a more persuasive example. (It may be difficult though, because it seems true to say that if Bitcoin starts becoming a…
> Where "little" is relative to the ratio of BTC's wealth vs the world's wealth, vs BTC's power usage to the world's power usage.
If that's your metric then bitcoin gets an F- right now. Its world power usage fraction is much much higher than its world wealth fraction.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand on this?
The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production.
"The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production"
This is one of the most problematic statements ever made in Econ.
The 'value' of a product is different for everyone, and it's what you (or anyone else) will pay for it.
The idea that 'work = value' is one of the most distortionary ideas in business, even today.
Just had a discussion today about pricing a product, and it was derived from component prices. Trying to convince a room of people that 'price is not a function of cost' ... in 2017.
Yes - when things are commodities, often, price is a function of cost, because competitive pricing means just a small margin above cost, which will roughly be the same for most.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So instead of just using energy we'll be wasting physical resources on making hard drives? Doesn't sound eco-friendly to me. It does sound like a good way to drive up costs for the NSA to store everyone's data. That's a really clever way to fight mass surveillance.
One might make a general claim that as any coin stabilizes, the money spent on generating it will always approach the amount of money received.
So for bitcoin, if miners get X on average to mine it, they will spend X-ε in electricity (in bitcoins case), where ε is a tiny profit margin (or perhaps paying back investment).
This will remain true for any other coin and its proof scheme. The amount spent on generating it will asymptotically approach the amount received. The difference is that it might be possible for the byproducts to be useful.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#167so 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…
Ideally >99% of the power used by bitcoin would be in sharing and storing the blockchain and pending transactions. The security mechanism would use as few resources as possible.
Be careful when you compare to existing infrastructure, because bitcoin has to do all that too, plus mining costs on top.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waste: use or expend carelessly, extravagantly , or to no purpose.
IMO it's none of those, and I think I'm being honest and fair here -- not just a bitcoin fanboy. What's the baseline for a corresponding transaction? Maybe that's a credit card which will cost (not waste here either) 1-2% of the purchase price. But even that's not quite fair because the merchant is taking some risk on this purchase that usually amounts to some additional cost. Also credit cards can't be used to secur…
Bitcoin would work just fine with 1/1000th the mining activity. Mining costs round to 100% extravagance.
It doesn't matter if bitcoin is still the best way to spend money ever. The mining is a waste, a tragedy of the commons.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#169I 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…
When there are no more bitcoins to mine, will the power consumption drastically fall? There will be fees to mine, but I can't imagine everyone is going to be fighting that much on fees, but I don't really know..
You would hope that in 140~ years we have the power problem sorted out, if not, Bitcoin mining is probably the least of our worries.
Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production.
"The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production" This is one of the most problematic statements ever made in Econ. The 'value' of a product is different for everyone, and it's what you (or anyone else) will pay for it. The idea that 'work = value' is one of the most distortionary ideas in business, even today. Just had a discussion today about pricing a product, and it was de…
Exactly, which is why Marx uses the concept of a labor value, use value, and exchange value.
Labor is what's gone in, use is the inherent/intrinsic value in the object, and exchange value is what people will trade in exchange for it. That's a bad summary, and there's a lot more to the dialectic examination of them.
Reading Capital (along with David Harvey's lectures) is worth it if you find these things interesting, it's a deep analysis of markets and capital.