151–160 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same is true of gold, diamonds, ivory, other items whose rarity makes them precious.
Unlike Gold, bitcoin's rarity is artificial, comparison of Bitcoin to high-end artworks might be a more proper one.
Choosing a particular starting block or blockchain algorithm is arbitrary. Just as choosing a particular metal is arbitrary.
Its scarcity is 100% natural.
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.
Definitely a tiny fraction of the industry but also a tiny fraction of just TSMC. For reference, they claim they did 10 million wafers in 2016. http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/f...
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…
Keep in mind, though, that the constraints for Bitcoin mining are a lot different. The Bitmain chips are far smaller than the NVIDIA ones to increase yield, so the absolute chip counts will be higher but NVIDIA is probably still ahead in terms of area shipped (latency is totally unimportant so no reason to have gigantic chips).
> the S9, which had 189 of the company’s BM1387 chips [1]
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-bitcoin-miner-might-be-tryi...
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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.
Just found out about Filecoin which is an interesting concept, you "mine" by storing and serving files people save to the network. 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.
The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. 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…
It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks). The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their…
Eventually we may be able to buy cloud compute by inventing a new coin with a proof of work useful only to us, buying some Etherium to back it with (so that there's some initial value to mining it), and then letting speculators put it in there currency baskets to give it long-term value.
Anything that mentions bitcoin mining gets people worked up and negative for some reason. More demand for compute is a good thing long-term. More demand for video cards is great for all parallel computing long-term, hopefully someone besides NVIDIA seriously moves into the space.
I suppose that at some point it's going to become economically feasible to make integrated BPUs (...Bitcoin Processing Units...) and obviate the ASICs.
The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. 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…
It goes something like this: Imagine that you are mining Bitcoin and protein folding for a drug. Let's also imagine that if your mining rig finds the protein, it's worth $15m (as a company could commercialise a new drug with that information).
You can imagine a point where you can make more money from the results than from the mining (if they are useful, they will be worth some money after all). But the security of the Bitcoin network lies precisely in the game-theoretical aspect that it's more profitable to mine than it is to cheat. But if you can mine and make some money on the side (because it's useful), then cheating [double spending] might become more interesting. Or perhaps your "side-business" can bootstrap a 51% attack.
Finding a useful & relevant computational problem, whose monetary value is predictably low far into future and whose computation scales with a simple function ... well, it's a really difficult question. So the safest option is to go for "brainless" computation. That is trying random numbers.
I think it is not useless. It does the job: "Keeping the network secure by calculating random hashes". Useless, of course, is very subjective. I wish most video games did something useful like protein folding (I consider them and the machines powering them a waste of energy, matter, mining, time and intellectual power).
The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. 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…
It's not that easy. You need to be able to generate tasks that have a predictable levels of difficulty.
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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.
This is already the de facto case with Jihan. The threat is enough.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/who-jihan-wu-and-does-he-b...
Do you have any more recent numbers that tell a different story?