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Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

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Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#61

I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

“ASIC-resistance” just means “needs lots of RAM”. Eventually someone will figure out how to make oodles of RAM sufficient for a many-core custom processor. Heck, modern SSDs (e.g. Intel Optane) might be fast enough to replace DRAM for these kinds of applications. Another kind of ASIC-resistance might be using dynamically-generated algorithms employing self-modifying code. You’d have to own a Xeon Phi to get good figu…

> Eventually someone will figure out how to make oodles of RAM sufficient for a many-core custom processor.

It's already been figured out. The issue is that ASIC manufacturers don't see the need to switch from BTC, when they are already making money. Hint, it's the type of ram.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-Stake statistically equates to "Give the rich more money". Consider Ethereum's stats (and other similar PoS minting methods): Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018) = 97,800,000 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Now imagine a financial system where all the wealthy have to do simply own money (spawned from software or premine) to get…

Nano uses dPOS and does not mint any new coins with PoS nor does not charge any tx fees. Instead of "Give the rich more money" it's more like "preserve the value of my money by fulfilling the promise of this coin".

Nano (aka Raiblocks) is basically a scam.

How was the supply produced and distrubited? https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100

Nano/Raiblocks were created from software, a reproducable distributed database protocol. Except in the case of Nano, the vast majority of the tokens are in control of the owners with a few being given away to the public for clicking captchas.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...

Consider, anytime you buy a cryptocurrency it means someone else is trying to cash out...

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#65

Is that $4B worth of USD/CNY, or BTC? 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.

You can't sell it all at once, but I'd assume they are selling it as it comes, just putting a stable downward pressure on the market.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#66
> The increased demand for special hardware like GPU’s and ASIC based systems has created a black market where hoarders buy the hardware in the market and sell for exorbitant prices on websites like E-Bay.

Since when is ebay considered the black market?

I always thought "buy low, sell high" was the ebay motto...

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#67
post #2

Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there. 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 t…

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Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter much what the denomination is. Most sane businesses would convert to the currency of whatever their expenses are anchored in. a) I think you're mistaken. $4B per annum is unlikely to move the markets much.

> I think you're mistaken. $4B per annum is unlikely to move the markets much. It sure will if you try to sell it. Holding it certainly isn't the issue.

The daily volume at the beginning of 2017 was $200M USD. The daily volume at the end was $8T USD. $4B over 365 market days is somewhere between 1-4% of the daily market.

If liquidating their bitcoin tanked the market in 2017, it wasn't too noticable.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#69
post #9

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…

I'm more concerned that it takes something "wasteful" like mining to make people wake up. What about DRM techniques like HDCP? Even with hardware acceleration we've been wasting power for at least a decade to encrypt every single video stream so that we can stop piracy. Piracy still exists. Mining most definitely uses more power than video encryption but only one of them has really produced anything of value.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#70

Why not create a coin awarded for proof of AI-modeling and open-up the network to researchers? Seems like it would be a lot more productive if all that processing power went to neural networks.

Its called motocoin and it has kinda failed. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1365986.0 One person made a very good bot and took over and no one has made a better one.
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