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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

#291

Post by parasubvert »

int_19h wrote: post #289
alexasmyths wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> The 'value' of a product is different for everyone, and it's what you (or anyone else) will pay for it. Marx did not dispute that. His point, rather, was that workers are paid significantly less than the actual value of the work that they do (because said value is directly measured by how much their product sold for, minus all the non-labor expenses). And from there he concluded that the difference is the economic…

The part he missed was there was value in risk taking, innovation, experimentation. The profits aren’t always completely a rent (though they can be in an uncompetitive market). Profit often covers real costs in a dynamic economy.

“Profit motive” was bunk psychology created by 19th century economists to explain away this discrepancy.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#293

Post by parasubvert »

colordrops wrote: post #286
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. It most certainly doesn’t come down to that, and it’s a reduction of what I’m saying. I’m drawing a distinction between the specific way bitcoin verifies its ledger versus cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers themselves. I took pains to enunciate that repeatedly, so let me try to illustrate with an example: Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy…

There is no other way to secure a distributed ledger at the moment other than using large amounts of power. That leaves two choices: 1. Admit that you think that crypto currency is not worth the energy cost. Even if you believe that, it's just wasted breath on your part because they are absolutely not going to go away. 2. Propose another solution. No one else on earth has found a better solution than proof of work. D…

It’s not wasted breath to say it’s not worth it. The point is that distributed ledgers will not be the future of currency and banking - they’re not worth it. They’ll surely exist as a niche technology or religious artifact for the libertarian set.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#294

Post by fvdessen »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #281
alexasmyths wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""Aggregate market demands" are capitalism, where wine is a status symbol and "good" wine generally refers to price" No - what I meant by 'aggregate market demand' was really just 'average price / perception of value' - and 'good' does not refer to 'price' - good wine literally is better. I am not equating value and profit. I am equating value and price. Some goods are generally better than others (i.e. most people w…

Like I said, someone else brought up the wine example and I just continued it despite finding it clumsy. Price is value plus profit, thats the only reason to distinguish between the two.

I think my original point about wine was misunderstood. Good wine is not good because it is scarce, it is good because it is good, but it is more expensive because it is scarce.

If you could produce infinite quantities of Chateau-Petrus, it would be extremely cheap. But since it depends on being produced at a specific location, with a specific know-how, the quantities are limited. In this case, the amount of labour involved has little effect on the price of the wine.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#295

Post by jsmthrowaway »

keymone wrote: post #288
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. It most certainly doesn’t come down to that, and it’s a reduction of what I’m saying. I’m drawing a distinction between the specific way bitcoin verifies its ledger versus cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers themselves. I took pains to enunciate that repeatedly, so let me try to illustrate with an example: Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy…

> which energy was better spent for humanity? Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose. The right question is given X watts, what is the ideal distribution for Y purposes and the answer is that we dont know but we tend to value some things more than others and that will be reflected in the distribution > no benefit aside from securing the ledger This is the crucial point that…

> Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose.

No. Both computers did hard work, and earned credit toward proof of work in my example. I’m rather repeatedly saying energy can be used for two purposes (securing a ledger with a difficult computation that also means something), and I have no idea how else to explain this.

I’m not sure why your incentive would drop to zero. Say I swap in a universal simulation from the Big Bang instead of SHA2. A miner simulates a portion it chooses, which involves quintillions upon quintillions of gravitational fields. Eventually it simulates a rare event, like two black holes colliding or something. It somehow notates this as proof that it worked on the problem for a while, hashes that proof combined with the transactions, and boop, mined a block. Meanwhile, all along, we have learned science. I could think of other problems that work: SETI@home and the other BOINC apps come to mind, as does LHC analysis. Large search space, demanding algorithm, rare thing to find (SETI/Higgs candidates), and valuable science along the way. Some issues I could see are unpredictable nature of block time, verifiability being expensive, and problem spaces that move forward in time, like my first example. But I don’t see those as insurmountable.

Why would incentive drop to zero to search the space? I’m not following that claim, nor why you’re scare quoting important.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#296

Post by keymone »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #295
keymone wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which energy was better spent for humanity? Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose. The right question is given X watts, what is the ideal distribution for Y purposes and the answer is that we dont know but we tend to value some things more than others and that will be reflected in the distribution > no benefit aside from securing the ledger This is the crucial point that…

> Wrong question. It implies energy can only be used exclusively for single purpose. No. Both computers did hard work, and earned credit toward proof of work in my example. I’m rather repeatedly saying energy can be used for two purposes (securing a ledger with a difficult computation that also means something ), and I have no idea how else to explain this. I’m not sure why your incentive would drop to zero. Say I sw…

> earned credit toward proof of work in my example

they both did work, they didn't yield any proof of it.

> Say I swap in a universal simulation from the Big Bang instead of SHA2

if you have an idea - express it in pseudocode. what is your `f(candidate)` here? what is the return value? how does return value ties in "is candidate valid" and "simulation data" in a way that prohibits modifying source code to only do "is candidate valid" part?

you're trying to handwave your way through some of the most complex questions in computing. "what if we just swap sha2 for blah, where blah is something that solves humanity's problems" - well sure, let's do this, show me the code.

> Why would incentive drop to zero to search the space?

because the axiom we're operating with is: though shalt not run ledger security code without "useful" code. as soon as the problem is solved - nobody secures the ledger anymore.

> why you’re scare quoting important

because you're forcing upon me what i should consider important problems humanity has to solve. your opinion is that distributed ledger isn't one of them. your opinion is wrong.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#297

Post by [deleted] »

parasubvert wrote: post #293
colordrops wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no other way to secure a distributed ledger at the moment other than using large amounts of power. That leaves two choices: 1. Admit that you think that crypto currency is not worth the energy cost. Even if you believe that, it's just wasted breath on your part because they are absolutely not going to go away. 2. Propose another solution. No one else on earth has found a better solution than proof of work. D…

It’s not wasted breath to say it’s not worth it. The point is that distributed ledgers will not be the future of currency and banking - they’re not worth it. They’ll surely exist as a niche technology or religious artifact for the libertarian set.

[deleted]

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#298

Post by mrguyorama »

wyldfire wrote: post #25
mrguyorama wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin doesn't replace credit card transactions or system. You have to judge it by it's actual value, not what it pretends to want to be

Yes, fair enough -- it is truly unique and difficult to compare w/credit cards. But to further the debate, how would you evaluate it in these terms ("waste"/"extravagance")? Would you stipulate that it has value or that it at least has utility? What sort of analogy or baseline would you compare it to, so that we could evaluate how efficient or wasteful it is?

My personal opinion is that bitcoin originally was meant as a transaction medium, and that could have been very valuable. However, as it stands, it's obvious to me that bitcoin cannot become that, as scaling is proving to be very difficult, and for more reasons than technical.

Also bitcoin has heavily failed in its "decentralized" dream, as most of the hashing power is under the control of very few individuals.

This seems to leave its only purpose as some sort of strange "HODL" and speculation machine, and I don't believe that is worth burning an entire small nation's worth of power to promote. In fact, my opinion is that such a system is actively harmful.

Even if you believe that bitcoin is not some eternal pump and dump, that just leaves it as a valid investment vehicle. I don't consider a single investment vehicle to be worth the energy spent to maintain "trust" in the chain

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#299

Post by boomboomsubban »

fvdessen wrote: post #294
boomboomsubban wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, someone else brought up the wine example and I just continued it despite finding it clumsy. Price is value plus profit, thats the only reason to distinguish between the two.

I think my original point about wine was misunderstood. Good wine is not good because it is scarce, it is good because it is good, but it is more expensive because it is scarce. If you could produce infinite quantities of Chateau-Petrus, it would be extremely cheap. But since it depends on being produced at a specific location, with a specific know-how, the quantities are limited. In this case, the amount of labour i…

First, and this isn't really relevant, price and scarcity play a much bigger role in what is considered "good wine" than you're saying.

Back on topic, "expensive" and "price" again add the concept of profit to the value produced. The only value of wine is enjoyment, so even Petrus wine has little more value than similar wines.

That increase in value is largely labor from learning the trade and long running slow maintenance. The only part that is scarce is the soil composition, something that could be recreated with a large amount of labor. Similarly, discovering that that area produced quality wine was labor intensive as well.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#300

Post by codemac »

alexasmyths wrote: post #229
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,…

I don't think the 'labour' concept of value has any meaning at all. Given how much our labour is amplified by machines, energy, machine intelligence, parts, equipment, R&D, support - it's not a very helpful way to think about anything. It's also very unhelpful when considering prices of IP related things. You study your whole life to become a great actor, you make a film - it only takes a month. Is it only a 'one mon…

It depends -- how would we price things when everything takes 0 labor from humans?

Because I bet the price changes drastically, and that's the labor-value represented in object.

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