BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

Post by neilwilson » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 10:07 AM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #166

narrator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by ktta » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 10:16 AM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #135

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…

I don't think that approach avoids the core problem; it just shoves it onto a different resource; the same fraction of general economic output is still incentivized to convert from "satisfying human needs" to "mining". It will just manifest in difference ways. Remember, the whole point of proof of work is to make it too expensive for "bad guys" to amass enough work to force their skewed version of the ledger[1]. As l…

Post by alfiedotwtf » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 11:25 AM UTC

jwilliams wrote: post #104

tpallarino wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.

Post by akerro » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 11:48 AM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #82

pmlnr wrote: post #41

Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there as well!

In the long run it will make them both cheaper.

Post by chairmanwow » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 12:23 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #184

carussell wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try responding to the most charitable interpretation of others' comments. It's clear that nerdponx is referring to the same thing that jsmthrowaway went into greater detail about. Try this as a habit: If in response to something someone else has said, you find yourself thinking, "That would be ridiculous! Who would think that?", then follow up by answering your own question: "That would be ridiculous, so the person I…

While I grant that you may be correct in this case, this isn't a tenable position to take in general. An overwhelming amount of people do believe patently ridiculous things, and frequently talks about them as if they make sense.