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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

#261

Post by jsmthrowaway »

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.

How am I building a strawman? I didn’t ignore anything you said; I’m responding directly to it. The computation does nothing. Until the brute force finds a hash that meets difficulty, it’s computing literally nothing of value. That’s computation and energy we do not get back. You’re not folding proteins, you’re not rendering climatological models, you’re not training machine learning. You are hashing, then throwing it away. It’s a “nope, not it, next.” There is no measurable value until by chance you find one, then the energy you threw away getting there gains value in that you threw it away. Millions and millions of watts of absolutely zero computation of benefit to humanity.

Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#262

Post by marzipan »

SilasX wrote: post #257
ktta wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor.

So banks would be defined as not real economy since they are transacting in debt, savings, and other instruments that exist on balance sheets, while Bitcoin mining would be defined as real economy since it bottlenecks on an energy input.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#263

Post by SilasX »

marzipan wrote: post #262
SilasX wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In economics jargon, financial services are explicitly defined as not the real economy as an outcome of how "real value" is defined. Finance deals primarily with nominal(price) values, versus real ones(cost of inputs, utility to consumer). There is some imprecision to this, of course: banks do use paper and labor, but not in the same way that a factory uses pig iron and labor. So banks would be defined as not real ec…

Did you mean to reply to the parent?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#264

Post by mangecoeur »

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.…

It's for nothing as in, energy is consumed and nothing of value to society is produced. When a bank uses energy to run its services, those computers actually achieve something (like, for instance, managing to process more than a handful of transactions per second). Bitcoin's 'proof of work' is just a very complicated heating system. You are literally going through the whole rigmarole just to increase the entropy of the universe. Considering the effort we are putting in to squeeze more efficiency out of everything from washing machines to jumbo jets, this is kind of waste is pretty shocking.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#265

Post by mangecoeur »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #234
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.

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

Or you could do the same with a data centre or supercomputer that runs useful services, like hosting websites or doing research (in fact there are already projects to use heat from servers for district heating).

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#266

Post by jsmthrowaway »

keymone wrote: post #194
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK. Of what utility to mankind is SHA256(SHA256(candidate)) after it is discarded by the miner? What do we get from that?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#267

Post by boomboomsubban »

alexasmyths wrote: post #258
boomboomsubban wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. y…

I also found the wine example peculiar, as good wine and scarce wine aren't often the same, but I kept with it as it was brought up. Mistakenly I thought you had brought it up, sorry.

"Aggregate market demands" are capitalism, where wine is a status symbol and "good" wine generally refers to price. You are continuing to view this only in the eyes of capitalism and considering "value" to include "profit."

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#268

Post by shock »

mangecoeur wrote: post #265
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.

Or you could do the same with a data centre or supercomputer that runs useful services, like hosting websites or doing research (in fact there are already projects to use heat from servers for district heating).

> Or you could do the same with a data centre or supercomputer that runs useful services, like hosting websites or doing research (in fact there are already projects to use heat from servers for district heating).

That depends on your definition of "useful". It looks like you don't think bitcoin adds value, but I'm pretty sure many people think the opposite and as such bitcoin is useul.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#269

Post by keymone »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #266
keymone wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

OK. Of what utility to mankind is SHA256(SHA256(candidate)) after it is discarded by the miner? What do we get from that?

isn't that obvious? it is of utility of verifying that candidate can't secure the ledger.

this really comes down to question whether you think the distributed, writable by anybody ledger is useful to humanity. personally i think it absolutely is. do you?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#270

Post by joe_the_user »

Squithrilve wrote: post #223
imtringued wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really work this way... 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 su…

Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste. > Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit. That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?

Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here).

Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.

Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.

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