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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

#191

Post by Marazan »

legohead wrote: post #122
goodroot wrote: post #50

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…

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..

The power expended on mining directly correlates to the value of bitcoins. If the amount of power expended on mining decreases to far then it becomes cost effective to attack the network.

Power expended on mining must remain constant or ever increasing lest the whole thing collapse.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#192

Post by apexalpha »

marknadal wrote: post #154
corford wrote: post #146

Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited. Watching https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this :)

Hey, I was there at the event (I did the lightning talk at the beginning). Would love to answer any questions about Chia that anybody has, that I learned first-hand from Bram.

Going to watch the video in a bit but I've got a question: could I turn my home NAS into a farmer for this blockchain simply by reserving some of my storage space for it or does it still require a lot of computing power (CPU/GPU)?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#193

Post by pjc50 »

xelxebar wrote: post #132
goodroot wrote: post #50

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…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles. AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs? I feel like China probably…

Among other things, nuclear has a ridiculous cost overrun problem. We can't wait for it to be cheap, we have to deploy the working renewables now while waiting for "better" nuclear to be researched and built.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#194

Post by keymone »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #142
colordrops wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

> brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing

wrong, bitcoin network brute forces through sha2 to find the one that secures the distributed ledger and transaction platform on top of it. the rest is irrelevant since it's based on wrong assumption.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#195

Post by boomboomsubban »

owlmirror wrote: post #181
codemac wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 still ignores scarcity and arbitrarily picks one specific limiting resource in the production process as essential. Labor theory of value might be interesting from a philosophical standpoint but really has no practical application when it comes to understanding the market. And it introduces a major can of worms when it presumes stuff like intrinsic value.

It doesn't ignore scarcity, scarce goods are inherently more labor intensive. And it doesn't presume intrinsic value, the labor necessary is a subjective concept so the value must be as well.

You're probably right about it's use in understanding a capitalist market, Marx spends no shortage of time on how capitalists warp that basic idea.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#196

Post by Squithrilve »

lilyball wrote: post #30
Squithrilve wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 ) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computation…

If bitcoin's power usage is like a massive drain in the middle of the ocean sucking down millions of gallons of water per second, your comment is like complaining about the drip on your kitchen faucet.

Maybe not exactly on my kitchen but rather all kitchens around the world as we all use monitors, TCP etc...

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#197

Post by Squithrilve »

traverseda wrote: post #32
Squithrilve wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 ) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computation…

The problem is that coin incentivizes* the use of electricity, which is a dumb thing to incentivize. Sure, we can incentivize the use of electricity, but we can also decide to incentivize something else. A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional softwar…

> but we can also decide to incentivize something else.

This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#198

Post by tzahola »

kiddico wrote: post #53
toomim wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?

Certainly the latter.

I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#199

Post by Squithrilve »

viraptor wrote: post #43
Squithrilve wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 ) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computation…

The comparisons fall short. - pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. - SSL provides sec…

> - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information

And protecting money is not important?

> - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.

Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining?

> - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.

The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#200

Post by Squithrilve »

joe_the_user wrote: post #37
Squithrilve wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 ) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computation…

Uh, power that isn't used for bitcoin mining could be used to improve human lives in innumerable way - or not used at all and allow a decreased production of greenhouse gases.

Why do you think the power is not already being used to bring useful services for people?

It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy...

By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...

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