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Distribute porn. Play video games. Or some other thing that has subjective value that you might not agree with.
Not OP but that seems more useful. Even after digging for examples to prove a point, it's telling that this is all you can come up with.
Its not though is it. He was making a point about the subjectivity of it.
As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…
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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.
Let’s say some party/group gets 51%. Now they “own” the blockchain. Doesn’t its value drop to 0, thereby making the whole effort pointless? I’m not going to buy BTC (or whatever) from that system, therefore the owners take no cash from it. Yeah they have all the BTC, but so what? Everyone loses. What am I missing?
On top of that, Etherium mining is eating the graphics board market. The price of NVidia's higher end boards has doubled in the last six months.[1] Etherium was supposed to require a general purpose CPU to mine, but now it's done on GPUs with large RAM. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-b...
Now I don't know what to do: sell it since Volta will be a game-changer for ML anyway, but what if when I will want to do ML again it will be impossible to buy any card?
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.
Another crazy thing that pops in mind now is now long forgotten rumor that Chiang is Satoshi.
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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?
As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…
Why are banknotes worth anything? They are just pieces of paper with some ink on them, after all. They are "worth" something, because people are willing to do work or trade you stuff for them. The same with mining bitcoin - instead of printing banknotes, you make a "thing" that you can then trade for services and objects, because people want to have that "thing"(this part is crucial). Most importantly, people are wil…
Until 1971 dollars were worth something because they could be converted into one of the thousands of tons of gold bars the US stores at Fort Knox (and elsewhere).
Then a magic wand was waved over the printing presses at the US Treasury and they began to attain value for no reason. This magic has now spread to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even cryptocoins like Dogecoin, whose creator has stated that the coin was created as a joke.
If the dollar never needed gold convertibility, why did they ever have convertibility in the first place? Why does the government spend a lot of money to store thousands of tons of unneeded gold at Fort Knox etc.?
There is a magic to the dollar - because if a panic ever causes its power to wane too much, Trump only has to utter six magical words to let it regain its power - "the convertibility window is open again".
How many thousands of tons of gold, governments, armies etc. stand behind Bitcoin?
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To repeat a comment from elsewhere, supposedly Bitmain's approach is to "burn in" their chips by mining and then sell them. 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.
So Bitmain is ordering 16 nm ASICs from TSMC but what they're selling you is last-generation... 16 nm ASICs.
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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?
You're thinking from the perspective of the miners. From the perspective of the hardware manufacturers that's an advantage. If you're making the hardware and you come up with a 10% energy savings, everyone must now replace their old hardware or be left in the dust. Hardware manufacturers will make a killing. The prisoner's dilemma you are thinking of only applies to the miners, it's a benefit for the parties selling…
Something something shovels in a gold rush...