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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

#121

Post by mrep »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #117
mrep wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Then can you explain the economic utility that bitcoin provides because it is more innificient way to store and exchange "value" than what banks provide?

> 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.

I have taken many econ classes and I have read dozens of econ textbooks. You are handwaving about "ripple effects" and that if I knew econ it would all make sense.

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

#122

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

What of value has bitcoin mining (or for that matter, anything relating to bitcoin) produced?

DRM makes it harder to pirate, which is something of value in my opinion.

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

#123

Post by School-Cotton »

kerng wrote: post #118
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.

What's to stop you from just sending the same money back and forth between addresses you control?

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

#124

Post by School-Cotton »

wyager wrote: post #93
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…

> we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. I wish people would dedicate a few minutes to reading about theoretical limits on consensus mechanisms.

Got any links?

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

#125

Post by Forbo »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50
gigatexal wrote: post #22

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…

> It’s a shame PoW is based on arbitrary hashing instead of, say, “Proof-of-Folding@Home” - that would do some good at least, methinks.

It already exists, it is called Gridcoin and is based on Proof-of-Research. Coins are awarded based on contributions to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). There are many scientific computing projects you can contribute processing power to that utilize the network.

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

#126

Post by mrep »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #101
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…

This means you're an "engineer" but not yet an economist. Try to study economics if you're really serious about your career in cryptocurrency area, you'll find yourself thinking completely differently. At least you'll get to a point where you don't make a wholesale criticism like this but can say "I know it would be better to have a tech that consumes less energy, but I also understand why it's not a trivial issue, b…

As I am reading your comments more, it seems like you just don't understand this trifecta of software engineering, security, and economics. All blockchains that run code on untrusted nodes have the extremely difficult problem of securely verifying other nodes transactions which usually devolve into solutions that solve O(constant) problems on O(N) nodes with N/2 majority consensus governing the network. That is literally the worst solution you can come up with in computer science because it does not scale whatsoever.

Contrast this with running code on nodes you trust which scales linearly and you should be able to see why everyone says blockchains are a solution in search of a problem.

> "I know it would be better to have a tech that consumes less energy, but I also understand why it's not a trivial issue, because physics and economics."

So thus I ask, what "physics and economic" problems do blockchains solve better than current solutions bar illegal markets?

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

#128

Post by undersuit »

School-Cotton wrote: post #122
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.

What of value has bitcoin mining (or for that matter, anything relating to bitcoin) produced? DRM makes it harder to pirate, which is something of value in my opinion.

I think it's highly disingenuous to feign that bitcoin has no value.

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

#129

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

goldenkey wrote: post #119
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

suit yourself :)

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

#130

Post by nradov »

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.

Can you quantify the energy wasted on HDCP? My understanding is that it's typically handled by efficient custom circuits.
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