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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

#201

Post by maldeh »

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 the useful PoW, would that not make $y the scientific reward while $z is the (monetary) token reward by way of mining?

Edit: silly question on my part. y and z should be trivially interchangeable. Your argument appears to rest on the idea that the monetizeable scientific worth of the work would dominate the worth of the crypto token itself, since there would be limited value in an already-mined result beyond standard blockchain speculation - is that the case?

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

#202

Post by quickthrower2 »

chris_wot wrote: post #97
quickthrower2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should pay them for it!" Hard question to answer. Is it a waste? Compared to having one centralised miner plodding along at zero difficulty, yes. But it depends what new tech/ideas comes out of all this blockchain stuff. Are particle accelerators a waste?

Particle accelerators have a direct benefit. Miners, IMHO, do not provide direct benefits, only indirect ones.

True, I wasn't making the direct/indirect distinction. Maybe I should have, as I got whipped.

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

#203

Post by snuxoll »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #154
snuxoll wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FileCoin and Upfiring both claim to have this PoW, but their Github repos are empty and their Reddit channels are drowning in shilling.

Unfortunate, I like the concept - I wouldn’t mind giving up a couple TB of space on my FreeNAS rig that’s currently going unused.

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

#204

Post by bb88 »

cortic wrote: post #75
yitchelle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gold that is mined has useful industrial application. Not so sure about Cryptocurrency..

I think you are looking at it wrong; its like saying a bank teller or stockbroker or even a cash machine has no 'useful industrial application'. They are necessary for the currency to work, and they must be paid to do a job. I suspect paying a cryptocurrency miner their 'fee' is a lot cheaper (per transaction).

There's a non-zero cost with making stock trades, keeping money secure, and transporting money into an ATM machine.

There is a practical (as close as we can get) non-zero cost for moving bits around the internet. It seems like there should be a similar mechanism for building trust in the blockchain.

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

#205

Post by mygo »

mygo wrote: post #198
beaner wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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

Seriously though, I would gladly offer to give anyone $100 in exchange for $1000.

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

#206

Post by ConcernedCoder »

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…

I've done all sorts of "mining" since 2010, bitcoin, ethereum ( eth really ), monero, etc... and I've come to the same conclusion as you ( as far as proof-of-work being wasted electricity/time/and effort ), recently I've switched to "mergefolding", folding@home and curecoin, see: https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and... it makes me feel good that there's some possibility my proof-of-work could actually help someone someday.

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

#207

Post by diimdeep »

21 wrote: post #114
Animats wrote: post #43

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...

I've bought a 1070 last year for machine learning and used it for a few days. 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?

You could have run miner on it 24/7 when not doing other work, by this time you could get price you paid more than 2x, maybe 3x

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

#208

Post by usaphp »

erentz wrote: post #187
usaphp wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sur…

Fair enough, I misunderstood your original comment at first, now I got it. You make a valid point.

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

#209

Post by sethgecko »

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…

How many resources are being "wasted" to protect world's wealth? From buildings to vaults to security teams to computer systems? If I had to guess I would say considerably more than what bitcoin wastes.

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

#210

Post by tzakrajs »

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…

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