One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month • Hacker News Board

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#181

Post by banachtarski » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:45 AM UTC

Neeek wrote: post #166

banachtarski wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's one, people want to use bitcoin for transactions, as these blocks of transactions fill up, new hashes are needed for each block. The miners are finding these hashes and facilitating the continued use of the blockchain. I'm hazier on this one, but I believe transaction fees go to the finder of the hash? Anyway, wouldn't the value be is the protocol/platform itself, that's what people are buying in to, they want…

I think what confuses me is that the distributed ledger is nice and all, but will never be faster or even necessarily more secure than a central one (yes yes, some trust in government regulation like the SEC is required but if we put our antiestablishment pitchforks aside and consider that random actors MAY be more malicious than the people that regulate the financial markets).

So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#182

Post by Hextinium » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:47 AM UTC

alphydan wrote: post #158

blackrock wrote: post #129

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…

A few years ago I read a comment on HK which addressed that very point. The argument said that if PoW was useful, the security could be compromised unpredictably. 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 imagi…

On the topic of video games being useless, the computers that run top of the line games also end up being almost exactly what you need to run most scientific computing projects. So what a non-negligible amount of gamers do is when they are not playing run programs like BOINC. EVGA has a program that actually incentives this. https://forums.evga.com/m/tt.aspx?f=79&p=1

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#183

Post by usaphp » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

erentz wrote: post #174

blackrock wrote: post #129

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…

People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? Do you know how much electricity Facebook burns running computers to serve fake images and shitty news? Or Youtube serving Logan Paul videos? If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another…

> People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are?

It’s like saying that actors are wasting food and energy by doing what they do. Facebook YouTube and others are here for our entertainment, meanwhile bitcoin right now is mostly used by people with a final goal of selling it and making money. Most of the miners I know don’t ever use it to purchase something or send money to someone. That’s the problem in my opinion

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#184

Post by earenndil » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

kjullien wrote: post #125

guardiangod wrote: post #2

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…

Pretty sure quantum tunneling starts to come into play under ~6 nm (hard limit of usual consumer processor) Do these do anything different to be able to aim for 7nm so fast ?

I thought it was 4 or 5?

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#185

Post by earenndil » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

yitchelle wrote: post #3

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?

Folding@home.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#186

Post by medius » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

My wife and I were just talking about Bitcoin and I had this wild theory. This is obviously BS, but I had fun exploring this idea. Here it goes:

What if Bitcoin/blockchain is a actually a strong AI? The AI manipulated humans via lucrative mining to spend ever increasing amount of electricity and other resources on running it. It's distributed and hence cannot be shut down easily.

If there was an application taking up so much power and we didn't know what it did, it would be pretty suspicious. So instead of trying to be secret, the AI went public and promised wealth, no-regulations, etc. to humans to do its bidding.

How else would you do it if you were a strong AI?

Maybe the things we know about blockchain is just the surface level. What if all the hashes that are generated are part of code+data that runs and trains this AI?

And hey, we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and if that person is even human.

Disclaimer: I don't have any background in encryption, crypto currency, blockchain, have no stake in any *coin, etc. But I do love science fiction.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#187

Post by erentz » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #183

erentz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? Do you know how much electricity Facebook burns running computers to serve fake images and shitty news? Or Youtube serving Logan Paul videos? If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another…

> People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? It’s like saying that actors are wasting food and energy by doing what they do. Facebook YouTube and others are here for our entertainment, meanwhile bitcoin right now is mostly used by people with a final goal of selling it and making money. Most of the miners I know don’t ever use it to purchase some…

See here you've gone straight into making a value judgement that you don't believe Bitcoin is useful, therefore we should permit Logan Paul videos but we shouldn't permit Bitcoin. But other people are happy to spend their money to buy electricity to burn it to mine Bitcoin. Just as you're okay with people spending money to watch ads and download videos. And without installing monitoring in everyone's home to make sure they don't decide to mine bitcoin on their laptops, or contravine whatever other new things we want to outlaw, then we can never shut it down so it's all moot. And if it's all moot then perpetuating this pointless "bitcoin burning electricity bad, youtube burning electricity okay" fad that is going on for some reason is a waste and a distraction from real problems and real solutions. The solution is to make sure whoever is burning electricity doing anything is paying the true cost of that electricity. Because there is literally nothing else you can do here if you really care about the environment.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#188

Post by comcastic123 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:11 AM UTC

blackrock wrote: post #129

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…

Do you have heat in your house? If so, you're literally wasting a ton of electricity. At least bitcoin miners and folding@home folks are doing something besides productive along with making heat.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#189

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:16 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #127

PKop wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen.

>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.

[deleted]

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#190

Post by erentz » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:16 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #178

erentz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? Do you know how much electricity Facebook burns running computers to serve fake images and shitty news? Or Youtube serving Logan Paul videos? If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another…

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all buy renewable energy for their computing operations through the use of power purchase agreements.

True, they're all about 50% renewable this year, aiming to be 100% at some time.

I'm a bit skeptical of this argument though. If we go down this path we have to answer what percentage of bitcoin mining is from renewable sources too. As I understood it (correct me if I'm wrong) a very large amount of Bitcoin mining is located around hydro sources to get cheap hydro electricity. That would mean the same argument that Youtube is green would apply equally to Bitcoin. But then I suspect someone would say something like "well they're using power from a hydro dam in china but look at all of China's coal plants, now other chinese people have to buy from those coal plants" to which we'd probably have to then say "yeah, kind of like when Microsoft buys Columbia river power cuz it's cheap and green or Facebook buys solar and wind power because its green that means that someone else in America can't buy that green power and is "using" power from one of our coal plants too". It's all one grid at the end of the day.