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

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

#191

Post by beaner »

yorwba wrote: post #172
lalaland1125 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. So you spend $x on (compute time + electricity) to mine a useful PoW worth $…

$y + $z must be greater than $x. If $y is money and $z is scientific contributions... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for. So in an open market its value is at or near $0. So $z by itself must exceed $x.

To not care about the $z, $y must exceed $x by itself and that seems really unlikely for the types of things that OP suggested instead of proof-of-work.

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

#192

Post by Neeek »

banachtarski wrote: post #181
Neeek wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ce…

Yeah, I can't really answer that one for you, I don't own any coins and I don't really have a need to (apart from maybe needing to be rich if I had bought some 2 years ago). We're right back where we started, just because we don't find any value in it, doesn't mean other people also don't. Sure, the market might be inflated at the moment and over valued but there's gotta be some truth somewhere in it otherwise people wouldn't have been using it for the whole time coins were cheap.

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

#193

Post by mike4921 »

medius wrote: post #186

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…

I love it! For all the bad things bitcoin has brought, I have to say it makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk novel! Snow Crash...Neuromancer.... I think people are focusing on all the negatives and overlooking all the fascinating aspects of whats going on. The internet has basically spontaneously created an interesting and suspicious technology. I think it's really only been possible thanks to the increasingly effective and available means of energy production, such that almost a consumer commodity.

Neal Stephenson, if you're reading this, this would make an amazing sci-fi novel.

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

#194

Post by hellbanner »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #149
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…

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…

How about folding @ home? https://curecoin.net/

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

#195

Post by pbw »

medius wrote: post #186

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…

The end of George Dyson's classic article on Google goes:

  For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its 
  existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not 
  any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to 
  pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of 
  wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw 
  information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a 
  concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous 
  power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a 
  circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and 
  physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There 
  wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the 
  downloading of human brains or anything sinister like 
  that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually 
  beneficial contact between us and a growing something 
  else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The 
  best description comes from science fiction writer Simon 
  Ings:

  When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient 
  for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and 
  so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared 
  complain."
https://www.edge.org/conversation/turing-39s-cathedral

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

#196

Post by pbw »

mike4921 wrote: post #193
medius wrote: post #186

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…

I love it! For all the bad things bitcoin has brought, I have to say it makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk novel! Snow Crash...Neuromancer.... I think people are focusing on all the negatives and overlooking all the fascinating aspects of whats going on. The internet has basically spontaneously created an interesting and suspicious technology. I think it's really only been possible thanks to the increasingl…

I think I've heard various sci-fi authors grousing it's hard to write these days because reality is so sci-fi and outlandish (Trump).

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

#197

Post by sallyfour »

baybal2 wrote: post #116

With each year, I think more and more that the whole bitcoin thingy was devised as an elaborate scheme to prop hash bruteforcing research. Another crazy thing that pops in mind now is now long forgotten rumor that Chiang is Satoshi.

There's no results on Google for Satoshi Nakamoto Chiang?

What's the rumor?

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

#198

Post by mygo »

beaner wrote: post #191
yorwba wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. So you spend $x on (compute time + electricity) to mine a useful PoW worth $…

$y + $z must be greater than $x. If $y is money and $z is scientific contributions... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for. So in an open market its value is at or near $0. So $z by itself must exceed $x. To not care about the $z, $y must exceed $x by itself and that seems really unlikely for the types of things that OP suggested instead of proof-of-work.

>If $y is money ... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for.

scrathes head

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

#199

Post by mygo »

jiggunjer wrote: post #179
lalaland1125 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One could structure it such that a single PoW is useless, yet multiple aren't? Like pieces of a puzzle that only make sense once you collect many of them.

Like McDonald’s monopoly tokens?

Won’t a market simply develop where people can buy / sell / exchange tokens?

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

#200

Post by mygo »

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…

If only video game creators did something like... while your noob character wears this free special hat, he gets +1 XP and your machine folds proteins in the background
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