Moore’s Law will find a way to continue
One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
11–20 of 231 posts
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#12It seems these large players will do everything in their power to make sure this bubble does not pop. I do not know the size of such investment, but it seems to me that these players have the ability to keep the price from crashing and keep the bubble from popping.
Wouldn't that hasten and worsen the inevitable pop?
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#13Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?
Nothing more useful for humanity, I think. It is literally mining electronic gold which facilitates transactions removing need for trusted third party. You may not ever pay for something "useful" in your life in bitcoin, like you've probably never paid with gold, which is still useful for governments and big investors as store of value.
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm mining chip Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research.
Apply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen.
I don't think it's possible to be energy efficient in a proof-of-work blockchain? Whatever energy saving you come up with will be negated by having to match competing miners' increasing throughput. If you are not running on 100% you are losing out?
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#15Has it ever happened before that a consumer of chips is among the largest customers of what appears to be the biggest foundry in the world?
(defining "consumer" as "we actually use & run that chip, we don't embed it or sell it"?)
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#16Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?
Two tabs at the same time.
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#17Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?
Unfortunately, these chips are designed explicitly for the SHA algorithm BTC uses. I wonder if there would be a way to make an algorithm based around protein folding that could be verified like a hash?
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#18It seems these large players will do everything in their power to make sure this bubble does not pop. I do not know the size of such investment, but it seems to me that these players have the ability to keep the price from crashing and keep the bubble from popping.
Wouldn't that hasten and worsen the inevitable pop?
Yes
But as the saying goes "The Market Can Remain Insane Longer Than Investors Can Remain Solvent"
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen.
I don't think it's possible to be energy efficient in a proof-of-work blockchain? Whatever energy saving you come up with will be negated by having to match competing miners' increasing throughput. If you are not running on 100% you are losing out?
There are projects like gridcoin, uscore dot net, that use mining to compute scientific research. It is considering using a Proof Of Research approach.
Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
#20Has it ever happened before that a consumer of chips is among the largest customers of what appears to be the biggest foundry in the world? (defining "consumer" as "we actually use & run that chip, we don't embed it or sell it"?)
I've heard that Google has a decent amount of custom silicon too.