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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…
Anything can have "value" if someone is willing to pay for it. The US dollar is just a piece of paper if nobody is willing to exchange anything for it. Cryptocurrency has value because some speculator is willing to pay for it because they think it'll be worth more in the future.
"Price is what you pay, value is what you get." Warren Buffett
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There are projects like gridcoin, uscore dot net, that use mining to compute scientific research. It is considering using a Proof Of Research approach.
It would be game changing if blockchain mining efforts could be applied like this to other uses as well, like someone needing huge datasets analyzed and formatted into a presentable state on an ad-hoc basis, sort of like AWS Athena.
Stuff like this is a much more interesting use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in my opinion, instead of burning electricity for PoW you can do meaningful work while collecting a reward.
From the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm min…
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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> 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.
now i know where the fusion and cheap space access are to come from. Finally we've got real economic incentives for both.
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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.
What about something like folding@home?
It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it.
And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work.
Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work?
Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain?
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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.
I think you're being too harsh. Right now silicon use is of course wrapped up in a loop of value derived from the coins being mined having value, but that completely disregards the actual value of the blockchains. An excellent quote I found is: "how to recycle what will soon or later be a HUGE obsolete distributed supercomputer dedicated to SHA-256."
It doesn't. I just think the value of blockchains is near zero. I have yet to hear of any problem that isn't better solved with a normal database.