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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

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Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#111
post #92
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bitcoin price is derived from the bid ask, most of the worlds money would have to be parked in bitcoin, does that even make sense?

"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.

Now that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine writes and edits ICO whitepapers. He's very skilled and gets paid pretty well for those skills.

The fact alone that writing and editing ICO whitepapers (plural) is something an individual can do as a job makes me trust ICOs significantly less.

How is that any more objectionable than the existence of professional grant request writers?

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#113
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If BTC cracks 1 million won't that mean there's 2.1 trillion dollars worth of USD BTC in circulation in addition to all the other currencies?

Only in the most theoretical sense. Since there is no underlying asset, you are going to run out of buyers real fast at that amount.

You only run out of buyers if there are sellers.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine writes and edits ICO whitepapers. He's very skilled and gets paid pretty well for those skills.

The fact alone that writing and editing ICO whitepapers (plural) is something an individual can do as a job makes me trust ICOs significantly less.

Over last couple of weeks, I received a dozen or so contact requests on LinkedIn from "Blockchain and ICO experts". They don't have any other verifiable jobs on their resumes.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#116

> It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need. He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of hashrate he can now.

It would be way more effective to work a minimum wage job and buy some Bitcoin with that money.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#117

> It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need. He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of hashrate he can now.

Hmm. If you can mine 15 trillion hashes per second you are likely to find one bitcoin after 486 days (derived from numbers on this site www.cryptocompare.com). The human rate of hashing is .67 hashes per day. Based on a price of $1 million for one bitcoin, that would translate to a break even salary of one million-billionth of a penny per hour. Probably be hard to find good people at that rate.

China might be a good place to setup shop?

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the most theoretical sense. Since there is no underlying asset, you are going to run out of buyers real fast at that amount.

If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying. Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.

There's a VR webapp that was shared recently that shows live btc transactions. Just thought i'd share that for the 10 minutes I watched it the other day I saw numerous 10M+ transactions

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#120
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for brainpower.

That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;) Comparing capital cost between the two is also fun. Creating a literate person who can perform arithmetic certainly requires more resources than creating a person who can "merely" pedal a bicycle. There's a lot of embodied energy in a person's education, and the cost reflects that.

Fair point :)

I guess the right comparison would be how much it would cost to produce another human capable of doing the SHA-256 hash by hand rather than the "fuel" to sustain it.

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