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China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

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Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#81

Post by jwilk »

SolarNet wrote: post #37
joe_the_user wrote: post #18

As to mining farms owned by smaller players, especially those in the mountainous areas of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, simply locating the miners is a near impossible task. A growing number of private owners of hydropower plants in the two regions have begun to operate mining machines themselves as the price of bitcoin has surged, Du Jun, founder of Node Capital, a Beijing-based venture-capital firm focusing on the…

That's a naive view of networking. The physical location of an IP address can be very difficult to track down (and of course IP addresses aren't part of the bitcoin protocol). Bitcoin is also super low bandwidth, and it would be very easy to build a custom proxy to circumvent the firewall. We are effectively talking about 3 megabytes (or even less) every 10 minutes (5 kBps). It could also be obfuscated with stengraph…

> stengraphy

steganography

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#82

Post by bamboozled »

koonsolo wrote: post #78
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #2

I am personally of the opinion that China swiftly killing off its cryptocurrency mining industry overnight would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity it wastes is an environmental disaster.

I am personally of the opinion that cryptocurrency swiftly killing off the (central) banking industry would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity, human energy, infrastructure, material and real estate it wastes is an environmental disaster.

100% agree with this, imagine the carbon foot print of all current financial institutions combined.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#83

Post by bamboozled »

mehrdadn wrote: post #45
bamboozled wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value provide by these systems is trust, which literally requires proof of work to establish. Facebook news feeds don't require proof of work in the same sense.

> The value provide by these systems is trust, which literally requires proof of work to establish. This is going to go on a tangent but I do not see why proof of work has anything to do with trust. Does your trust in me increase somehow if I give you a string whose hash ends in twenty zeros? i.e. if I subsequently told you I had found a number whose hash ended in thirty zeros but didn't give you the number, would yo…

It's computationally expensive to trick the network by rehashing all blocks in the chain, which is essentially needing to re-do all the proof of work operations since the begging of the BTC ledger. This is how POW adds integrity, for bitcoin and how you can trust your not dealing with a tampered system.

I'm not saying it's efficient, but it's worked well so far.

Good explanation here: https://decentralize.today/how-does-proof-of-work-um-work-f4...

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#85

Post by mcv »

tromp wrote: post #76
mehrdadn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not really a waste, it's proof of work Every kind of waste I can think of is a proof of some kind of work. That doesn't make it a good thing.

No; most kinds of waste are not instantly verifiable , but proof of work is.

What's verifiable is that you wasted a lot of work.

Is anything useful actually being done with all those calculations that are being performed? It seems the only purpose is to prove that you performed this amount of useless work, because the system is built on rewarding new bitcoins to those who waste the most work this way. It's intentionally wasteful just because the system needs something that isn't easily gamed without massive investment of equipment and energy.

Other cryptocurrencies manage to exist without being designed around wasting energy.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#86

Post by mcv »

bamboozled wrote: post #80
astrodust wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook buys servers to meet their needs, not to grind away on useless "proof of work" systems. They're also interested in aggressively optimizing how that capacity is used, and where possible work to reduce power consumption, compute requirements, and other such things. They can alter how their software interfaces with their systems, how many requests it makes, what kind of data they return and how often. Facebook…

I believe if you're a serious miner, then you're just as interested in building the most energy efficient system possible [1], that way you will receive the greatest return on your investments. Just like FB, Amazon, Google etc. I would also say the majority of miners buy their own servers, so I don't get your point on that front. > You must run your systems flat out, all the time, no breaks. Apart from more efficient…

SETI@Home and Folding@Home actually solve real problems. Are the calculations done by bitcoin miners actually applied in a way that accomplishes anything other than being used as a score to decide who gets a new bitcoin?

The problem with bitcoin is not that it costs energy, but that it's specifically designed to waste energy. If it was designed to help SETI and Folding, every conceivable @Home problem would probably have been solved by now.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#87

Post by mcv »

bamboozled wrote: post #82
koonsolo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am personally of the opinion that cryptocurrency swiftly killing off the (central) banking industry would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity, human energy, infrastructure, material and real estate it wastes is an environmental disaster.

100% agree with this, imagine the carbon foot print of all current financial institutions combined.

I have no idea, actually. But bitcoin consumes more energy than a small country (Denmark, I think?), which is quite a lot, yet it's much less useful than all current financial institutions combined.

I'm all for shrinking the carbon footprint (or social footprint, even) of banks and other institutions, but I don't think bitcoin can do that.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#88

Post by astrodust »

bamboozled wrote: post #80
astrodust wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook buys servers to meet their needs, not to grind away on useless "proof of work" systems. They're also interested in aggressively optimizing how that capacity is used, and where possible work to reduce power consumption, compute requirements, and other such things. They can alter how their software interfaces with their systems, how many requests it makes, what kind of data they return and how often. Facebook…

I believe if you're a serious miner, then you're just as interested in building the most energy efficient system possible [1], that way you will receive the greatest return on your investments. Just like FB, Amazon, Google etc. I would also say the majority of miners buy their own servers, so I don't get your point on that front. > You must run your systems flat out, all the time, no breaks. Apart from more efficient…

SETI@Home doesn't pay out, it's purely voluntary. If it's too hot out and I don't to turn things off that's fine, no big deal.

If I turn off any mining equipment I get nothing. Zero. I'm no longer participating in any meaningful capacity. I have no "vote", I have no upside.

> How about serious gamers or people who watch a really big screen TV all night while on their phone hardly watching it?

Let's not "whatabout" this.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#89

Post by joe_the_user »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #69
littlestymaar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Miners find a block and distribute them to the P2P Bitcoin network. Blocks do not carry IP addresses You just need to become part of the p2p network by yourself, and log the IP of people you communicate with …

Miners also do not need to be part of the p2p network. A mining pool for example will distribute the block for you and send you the bitcoins. There's also a tool to send transactions [1] so you do not even have to be part of the network to send/receive transactions. [1] https://insight.bitpay.com/tx/send - These still require your signing key, so you can use Bitcoin without ever being on the network. It just requires…

If China decides it doesn't want bitcoin mining, a miner won't be able to hide behind other miners...

Of course, the question is remain what authorities actually want to stop it and how much.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#90

Post by puranjay »

miscreanity wrote: post #63
puranjay wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed at how BTC supporters don't even know who invented BTC and the blockchain (Satoshi), yet champion it to no end. If I was to tell you to invest in a company whose founder is 'invisible', yet controls a large chunk of the company's stock, would you do it?

Who invented the internal combustion engine? Does it matter?

Did the inventor of the internal combustion engine limit the number of engines that could be produced, then locked away 20% of those for himself?
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