BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia • Hacker News Board

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#251

Post by wila » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #246

simias wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC. People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed. Pe…

The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity, both paying and receiving are as simple as scanning a QR code, many people already do that when paying with the European Ideal system. As for safety, central storage with insurance and a police that understands cyber crime will still have a role in a BTC(-like) economy.

The iDeal payment system is great. Unfortunately it is only used in the Netherlands. Not quite a European system yet.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#252

Post by scatters » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

obmelvin wrote: post #245

cellularmitosis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many megawatts are being consumed by electric heaters up north? Replacing those heaters with GPUs seems to be a “green” mining strategy.

while computers give off heat, they are terribly inefficient creators of heat and in no way make a good replacement for dedicated electric heaters

Computers are well over 99% efficient as heaters. The only energy they emit is a tiny amount of EM from LEDs, clock signal and the transformer, and a minuscule amount of fan noise (which is almost all absorbed by the immediate environment anyway). Electric heaters similarly emit EM and noise, so I wouldn't be surprised if some are actually less efficient as heaters than the average computer.

It is possible for a heater to be over 100% efficient by removing heat from an external environment, but heat pumps require significant supporting infrastructure.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#253

Post by boomboomsubban » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

alexasmyths wrote: post #230

boomboomsubban wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are bad wines made? Making better wine requires more training, more time, better tools, and/or better grapes. All four require more labor.

That has little to do with 'scacity'. Also - it's entirely possible that you make spectacular wine with the same effort I make bad wine. They are somehow 'equal' in value? It's just ridiculous. Labour theory of value just doesn't have a lot of meaning.

If your example isn't scarcity I don't know what to tell you, if better wine is "scarce" those labors are what is needed to make better wine.

Explain how it is possible, and how the situation does not immediately solve itself with you stopping doing something you hate and are bad at.

As many have pointed out, "value" is subjective. Your terrible wine may be loved by someone. Or you may really enjoy making wine. As wine has zero intrinsic value, it is a luxury good, it's very possible for both wines to be just as valuable.

It has plenty of meaning, it just doesn't explain "profit."

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#254

Post by m-p-3 » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:33 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #244

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

If you think it's for nothing you don't understand bitcoin. If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless. Moreover, banks also burn energy. Arguably Bitcoin is potentially even more green than other carriers of value because it can be completely produced from natural resources such as wind and sun, whereas mining gold or other precious metals often requires more damaging techniques.…

Yeah, isn't the heavy computational work what's provide value and security to the blockchain?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#255

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:36 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #235

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…

No, I actually agree with the person. Cryptocurrency is horrendously wasteful. But that person ignored what I said because that's not what I was discussing. That's the straw man argument I mentioned.

[deleted]

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#256

Post by SilasX » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #144

SilasX wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. It's at least partly a technical limit, because there are technical issues faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of transactions/sec you think i…

The limits are primarily political, as there are other blockchains doing thousands of times more transactions.

Which ones are you talking about? Litecoin and ETH, the closest PoW competitors, are on the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin. (Ripple might do more but is not PoW.)

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#257

Post by SilasX » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:43 PM UTC

ktta wrote: post #203

SilasX wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>real economy Interesting you don't consider this real economy. Do you think banking is also not part of the 'real economy'

I may have been imprecise in terminology, but that's no reason to pearl-clutch about my choice of words.

Resources spent on PoW are effectively an arms race (outrunning attacks on the network that other systems don't need to deal with). It's meaningful to distinguish between resources devoted to zero-sum arms races vs. positive-sum satisfaction of human desires. Resources spent on PoW take from the latter and add to the former (at the macro level).

Edit: So yes, in that categorization, I would count (at least some) banking as in the positive sum part: they identify which opportunities for investment will pay back, and help enforce the agreement, thereby increasing over capital allocation efficiency and therefore wealth.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#258

Post by alexasmyths » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:52 PM UTC

boomboomsubban wrote: post #253

alexasmyths wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has little to do with 'scacity'. Also - it's entirely possible that you make spectacular wine with the same effort I make bad wine. They are somehow 'equal' in value? It's just ridiculous. Labour theory of value just doesn't have a lot of meaning.

If your example isn't scarcity I don't know what to tell you, if better wine is "scarce" those labors are what is needed to make better wine. Explain how it is possible, and how the situation does not immediately solve itself with you stopping doing something you hate and are bad at. As many have pointed out, "value" is subjective. Your terrible wine may be loved by someone. Or you may really enjoy making wine. As wi…

One wine being generally better than another, is not about 'scarcity'.

Yes - of course people will have differing opinions - but aggregate market demand can be different for something made with the same amount of labour - that is not an issue of scarcity.

i.e. 'most people' can view one wine as better than the other with equal amounts of labour.

Again - surely you can, if you want get into issues of 'scarcity' i.e. you can talk about production volumes etc. but that's kind of a second order issue.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#259

Post by mankyd » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #249

mankyd wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're suggesting is replacing an electric heater with ... an electric heater. That's not "green". It is perhaps more practical, assuming one considers crypto-mining practical, but not green.

It’s green if the 1:1 conversion of a “useless” heater into a money-generating heater, partially displaces the logistics pipeline of the US Mint, no? No matter how efficient it is to dig up/farm materials and process them into coins and bills, it can’t be 100% efficient.

Until cryptocurrency proves that it can use less energy than our current system while being equally useful at the same time, it's hard to argue that it's an improvement.

The same can be said of this new "Chia" network, but it's much easier to call it "green" in relative terms compared to other existing crypotcurrencies, at least.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#260

Post by heptathorp » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #244

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

If you think it's for nothing you don't understand bitcoin. If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless. Moreover, banks also burn energy. Arguably Bitcoin is potentially even more green than other carriers of value because it can be completely produced from natural resources such as wind and sun, whereas mining gold or other precious metals often requires more damaging techniques.…

> If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless.

Why would an alternative consensus mechanism that doesn't involve finding a low target hash make it useless?