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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

#111

Post by goldenkey »

undersuit wrote: post #69
kenneth wrote: 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.

The encryption doubles as compression. Its not wasting power..

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

#112

Post by goldenkey »

chii wrote: post #107
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a war the group that profits the most is arms dealers.

In a situation where there's a demand for a certain type of goods, those who create those goods are going to profit. Comparing crypto mining to a war is unnecessarily evokative and manipulative.

Not when most of it is a cheap trick to rob you of your money and life...exactly like pointless wars

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

#114

Post by atomical »

Taniwha wrote: post #104
atomical wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning is DOA. Who has ever heard of opening a payment channel to buy a cup of coffee?

happens every time I wave my credit card in front of a payment terminal

How much money did you put in escrow last time?

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

#115

Post by mrep »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #105
slewis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean “the same in the grand scheme of things”? By what metric?

Newton's 3rd law: Proof of Work and Proof of Stake both waste tons of energy, and of course, the entire economic system both of them are trying to replace also waste tons of energy. The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure. But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective m…

> The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure.

> But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective measures, which is why it's hard to compare them.

Bitcoin is estimated to cost $2.5 Billion dollars per year [0] to validate about 77 million transactions per year.

Visa processed about 100 billion transactions in 2015 at the cost of 12 billion dollars (revenue - net income [1]).

That makes Visa 270 times more economically efficient for cost per transaction [2]. Also, I get many other benefits using Visa like fraud detection whereas bitcoins 1 way transactions make them extremely susceptible to hacks.

The economics seem pretty obvious to me.

[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc

[2]: (100/12)/(.077/2.5)

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

#116

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

goldenkey wrote: post #110
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's 3rd law: Proof of Work and Proof of Stake both waste tons of energy, and of course, the entire economic system both of them are trying to replace also waste tons of energy. The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure. But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective m…

PoW requires brute force. PoS requires tied up capital. Do you really think the energy usage is the same...physically? Sounds like nonsense with no backing.

Where do you think "capital" comes from?

Also, I didn't say they ARE the same. It COULD be the same, or maybe PoS could come up with a tradeoff scheme that's just good enough to work but essentially conserves energy much more than PoW. But the thing about energy is when it is destroyed somewhere, it gets created elsewhere. That's how it simply works.

The most important fallacy in economics is that people can only observe what they can observe, not because they're idiots, but because it is spacially or temporally impossible. For example a huge global inflation can happen as a result of a very small stupid decision made by a government, but this may happen 10 years after the original decision.

This is why humans make bad decisions because they make decisions based on what is possible to observe, but historically these ALWAYS came back to haunt them. 100% of the time.

It MAY be the case that "this time it's different", but the more you study economics the more you become really humble. Trust me. Try it. Just need to read a couple of books.

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

#117

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

mrep wrote: post #115
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's 3rd law: Proof of Work and Proof of Stake both waste tons of energy, and of course, the entire economic system both of them are trying to replace also waste tons of energy. The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure. But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective m…

> The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure. > But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective measures, which is why it's hard to compare them. Bitcoin is estimated to cost $2.5 Billion dollars per year [0] to validate about 77 million transactions per year. Visa processed…

There needs to be a HN bot that just copy and pastes the same old stuff to comments like mine so people don't have to waste energy doing it over and over again.

The fact that you're comparing Visa with Bitcoin is exactly my point: Humans make decisions based on the things they can immediately see and neglect things they can't see. That's what you're doing when you're comparing visa to bitcoin.

I can't really explain this in a single HN comment, which is why I recommended studying economics. If this was so easy that I could explain it in a page nobody would need to read books or take classes.

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

#118

Post by kerng »

kenneth wrote: 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 have been wondering if an algorithm of Proof of Spending could somehow be in the mix. People should be rewarded for spending their money to enable a healthy economy. Of course something like this couldn't be the main part of an algorithm, but maybe somehow be considered. Not sure if there has been any research in that area.

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

#119

Post by goldenkey »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #116
goldenkey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW requires brute force. PoS requires tied up capital. Do you really think the energy usage is the same...physically? Sounds like nonsense with no backing.

Where do you think "capital" comes from? Also, I didn't say they ARE the same. It COULD be the same, or maybe PoS could come up with a tradeoff scheme that's just good enough to work but essentially conserves energy much more than PoW. But the thing about energy is when it is destroyed somewhere, it gets created elsewhere. That's how it simply works. The most important fallacy in economics is that people can only obs…

"need to read a couple of books." No. Just no. You are wrong about energy. Power plants do not just burn a steady state amount of fuel. You are also wrong about capital if that is the "energy" you misnamed - capital is created all the time, not debt but actual prosperity through innovation. Please refrain from your "read a book to be like me" humdrum. I am a mathematician - I know enough economics to be quizzically annoyed by the falsities spoken

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

#120

Post by undersuit »

goldenkey wrote: post #111
undersuit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The encryption doubles as compression. Its not wasting power..

No, the HDMI and HDCP specs support encryption and compression on video streams. Encryption is not compression.
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