51–60 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The gold that is mined has useful industrial application. Not so sure about Cryptocurrency..
I mean, yes 20k is a big order, but to put that in perspective, it's at most the output of one small production line for one month, and more likely they're balancing it with other orders (and doing a ramp to verify the process before going full bore). It's still a tiny fraction of the foundry industry overall.
http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/f...
Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.
This approach gives them the latest, most energy efficient chips at a low cost since they then get sold.
Obviously, they could optimize the mine-to-sale ratio dynamically as mining-profits and chip-prices change.
Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.
I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The gold that is mined has useful industrial application. Not so sure about Cryptocurrency..
In the case of PoW cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, the token is the reward for the useful application: verifying a series of transactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.
I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?
Plus if they have significant BTC reserves (I believe they do) then selling mining equipment strengthens the BTC network and improves the value, maybe, of their current holdings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
And the point of blockchain is to set a minimum difficulty level of work, which translates to a minimum energy use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?
The % of the network they would control would be too high maybe? Fundamentally the value of their product is based on the price of bitcoin. A single miner that gets close to 50% might be seen a a huge risk and drive down the price.
Just 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. This is all specialized silicon which is totally worthless for anything except mining Bitcoin. It's all going in the dumpster when the price crashes. It has no social value and never will.