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

#211

Post by cesarb » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 10:05 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…

Setting aside the tu quoque argument, there's a fundamental difference between Youtube/Facebook and Bitcoin:

For Facebook/Instagram/Youtube, the incentive is to lower the power use. Google pays directly for the power used by their servers which host Youtube, so lowering their power usage immediately benefits Google. They also have indirect incentives to lower the power consumption on the client for their video/audio codecs.

For Bitcoin, however, the incentive is to use as much power as possible. If a more efficient miner is manufactured, the incentive is to use more miners. The only ceiling to the amount of power used by Bitcoin miners is when the price paid for the power gets above the expected average block reward.

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

#212

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 10:18 AM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #176

elmar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little known fact is that validating a block with 1 Bitcoin transaction or all the world 10 minute transactions in Bitcoin would spend roughly the same energy. The energy is spent on security independent of transaction volume.

But as transaction volume increases, the reward for mining increases, so miners will spend more money on electricity.

The fee reward increases, the mining reward decreases and the difficulty also increases

Until someone realizes it's cheaper to have their tokens moved by a different blockchain than the original BTC

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

#213

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 10:20 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #145

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…

Same is true of gold, diamonds, ivory, other items whose rarity makes them precious.

Yes and I don't need to spend several kWh to transact with coin or diamonds

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

#214

Post by rcharles » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:01 AM UTC

whataretensors wrote: post #71

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.

Oh I hope NVIDIA/AMD start mining themselves to end this abomination.

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

#215

Post by hjrnunes » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:18 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #88

HN15718653 wrote: post #48

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…

Why are banknotes worth anything? They are just pieces of paper with some ink on them, after all. They are "worth" something, because people are willing to do work or trade you stuff for them. The same with mining bitcoin - instead of printing banknotes, you make a "thing" that you can then trade for services and objects, because people want to have that "thing"(this part is crucial). Most importantly, people are wil…

The reason banknotes are worth anything is because you need them to pay taxes and fees to your/a sovereign.

They literally entitle you to pay the corresponding amount of taxes and/or fees (e.g. for market transactions) to the sovereign, which you cannot pay otherwise.

Hence why they are not mere pieces of paper with ink anymore a stock share or bond is: they're titles - the value is in what they entitle you to, not the physical substract they're on.

Bitcoin doesn't entitle you to anything other than creating a new ledger entry in the distributed ledger book that is the blockchain. Except unlike most ledger books, the Bitcoin blockchain does not record transfers of actual property between parties - it records the transfer of abstract numbers (which cannot be property in and of themselves).

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

#216

Post by mvindahl » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 12:31 PM 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…

I think that as the value of bitcoin decreases, a lot of the mining will stop for want of profitability. Right now it's still Klondyke days and everybody is out there with his pickaxe. In a few months, slightly used pickaxes, or in this case GPUs, will be cheap and plentiful.

It's stupid while it lasts bit fortunately it won't. Bitcoin has no practical utility, neither as currency nor as a store of value, and you can't pick the blockchain apart to extract anything of value. Bitcoin is like my dad's books of completed sudokus: Proof of hard work but not of any value to anyone.

ATM Bitcoin is approaching the $10K mark from above. The press will soon be writing stories about people who lost this-and-this-much. The stupid money which fueled the bubble will dry up.

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

#217

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 12:47 PM UTC

sallyfour wrote: post #197

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?

That Morris Chang and co. came with bitcoin thingy to prop their sales knowing that if btc takes off, they are guaranteed to get orders for hash crunching machinery

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

#218

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

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…

> here you've gone straight into making a value judgement

Much like you did when you said:

> to serve fake images and shitty news

?

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

#219

Post by unsignedinteger » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 7:26 PM 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…

The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. Other alternatives are simply to switch to a PoS style of consensus, which without a doubt has it's own set of tradeoffs. Currently Ethereum is planning to switch to PoW/PoS system where the amount of computation on the PoW is drastically reduced from the current level of difficulty i.e. There essentially having a PoW/PoS model where the PoW is just like HashCash it's purpose isn't to do consensus but stop "spam".

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

#220

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

unsignedinteger wrote: post #219

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…

The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. Other alternatives are simply to switch to a PoS style of consensus, which without a doubt has it's own set of tradeoffs. Currently Ethereum is planning to switch to PoW/PoS system where the amount of computation on the PoW is drastically reduced from the current level of difficulty i.e. Th…

> The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms.

That's been an active field of CS research for decades (it was an active field mentioned, though not explored in depth, in an introductory-level class I took in 1990), and (from Google Scholar) seems to have been hugely active starting about 4-5 years before Satoshi’s paper.

But I think the relevant point is that there has been progress since Satoshi, not that the progress is due to or solely in response to Satoshi.