11–20 of 165 posts
As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…
As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…
Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.
I remember reading somewhere they also use the shovel for a while before sending it off.
Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.
It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers).
It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker.
Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or the natural gas equipment makers.
It's better to be Glencore, BHP Biliton or Rio Tinto than the company that makes the mining equipment.
It's better to be DeBeers than a diamond jewelry equipment maker.
It's better to be Pfizer or Merck than a company making various equipment for big pharma.
It's better to be Intel than Applied Materials.
It's better to be Apple or Samsung than Foxconn or most any component maker.
It's better to be BMW, Toyota or Telsa than a parts supplier.
If it’s BTC then a) the real figure is much lower because they can’t sell $4B of BTC without drastically moving the market, b) what portion of that is due to their BTC holdings increasing in value by more than 1000% in the past year?
Either way it’s still a lot of money, though.
As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…
Can you elaborate on what the shortcomings of the current consensus algorithms are?
As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…
This is a one-sided comment. There’s a lot of research going into different variations of proof-of-stake. 4 out of 10 largest crypto (by market cap) are PoS. There’s a lot of work Ethereum community (Casper), Cardano folks, Tendermint etc are doing to create better consensus models.