211–220 of 309 posts
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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.
The problem with mining rigs is that they have high upfront cost AND a short life span. Once a faster rig comes out, NOT upgrading is effectively a tax against future profits
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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…
10 years and 1000's of lawyers to find out whether Microsoft is a monopoly? Give me a break! Just look at their income statement! Profit margins of 30% and more for 30 or more years? Do you seriously believe nobody would or could do the same for 20% profits?
A real market economy would tax away most of the excess profits after a certain number of years (depending on industry?). But then you would not have Apple and Microsoft and all your other beloved monopolists.
Ps: I'm a bit undecided but maybe it's OK for luxury products to not be part of the market. If you want to pay $200 more for an additional 1 GB on your iPhone when the price for 1 GB is $20, then it's no skin of my nose. But please make sure Apple pays their taxes.
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> 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…
You can't possibly be comparing SSL with bitcoin mining. SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. The price of bitcoin is EXTREMELY speculative no matter how you look at it. What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? All the computation dedicated to mining coins which were never spent would be wasted. Entirely d…
And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties?
> Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything.
Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right?
> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?
You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed?
> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?
That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).
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> 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…
What are you even getting at here? That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.
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> - 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…
> The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that) On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin…
They are only proposed solutions, not implemented in any existing systems so it's not fair to compare them. Proof of stake for example has numerous drawbacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
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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.
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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.
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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...
If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining.
Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money.
Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
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?
There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work: https://curecoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ https://golem.network/ http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...
I really wish coins like these would catch on more than they have. Proof-of-work is, to the best of my knowledge, the only system that provably works. If we could just harness that computational power to do useful work, we'd be in a great place.
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> 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…
> Why won't you complain about monitor pixels or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is