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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

#141

Post by aianus »

mrep wrote: post #136
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Let me ask you back. Can you prove with 100% certainty that banks are more "efficient" than bitcoin? What does "efficient" even mean? Did you take into account all the jobs required to run the banks? Did you take into account all the energy these bank employees co…

> Let me ask you back. Can you prove with 100% certainty that banks are more "efficient" than bitcoin? What does "efficient" even mean? Did you take into account all the jobs required to run the banks? Did you take into account all the energy these bank employees consume? Did you take into account all the side industries that arise around banking system? What? I thought you said you were well versed in economics. Thi…

> Just give me one good economic use case outside of illegal markets for cryptocurrencies that is better than current technological solutions.

Transfer $1000 from your Coinbase (or other electronic) account in the US to cash in Indonesia, in less than 20 minutes, at a better rate than spot. I did it yesterday with ETH and even made $20 on the spread after all the fees.

The cheapest conventional alternative would have been a Visa or Plus ATM card which would have cost around $14-$47 depending on how good your card is.

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

#142

Post by goldenkey »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #129
goldenkey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 :)

The human races net work output might be fixed - but through the spawned creations and mechanics - the work one does and thus the spawn they create, can be vastly consequential. Energy consumption is not fixed. Human work is fixed but when augmented by technokogy it is wildly divergent. There is a difference between using millions of watt hours for mining versus using it to create things that have a far longer shelf life..things like crops or PCs which will continue to provide further value. Bitcoin mining is short sighted.

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

#143

Post by wz1000 »

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.

If bitcoin has zero value, DRM has negative value.

DRM doesn't make it harder to pirate. DRM makes it infinitely more attractive to pirate.

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

#144

Post by downrightmike »

Gatsky wrote: post #72

Bitcoin mining is a real world version of Keynes' quote about labour productivity[1]. The important difference is that the money doesn't belong to any country, and is transformed purely into personal wealth. This will lead to wealth inequality the likes of which we have never seen. Governments should charge miners a lot more for just existing, and using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out o…

This is also a good argument for the wealthy to pay their taxes. The roads people use to get to the store cost real money. But that doesn't really happen either.

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

#146

Post by mrep »

aianus wrote: post #140
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…

Visa may well spend only $0.10 on a $1000 transaction but given that the total cost to me is $30 (either directly, in the case of a foreign ATM withdrawal, or indirectly through merchant fees), there are many use cases where crypto is currently more economical from the consumer's point of view. If banks and payment processors were more competent (like maybe processing transactions on Sunday) and less greedy, crypto w…

Most of those merchant fees are passed backed to the consumer through credit card incentive programs.

Granted, Visa still makes a nice 33% profit margin but they also offer tons of other benefits which cryptocurrencies provide none of.

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

#147

Post by mrep »

aianus wrote: post #141
mrep wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me ask you back. Can you prove with 100% certainty that banks are more "efficient" than bitcoin? What does "efficient" even mean? Did you take into account all the jobs required to run the banks? Did you take into account all the energy these bank employees consume? Did you take into account all the side industries that arise around banking system? What? I thought you said you were well versed in economics. Thi…

> Just give me one good economic use case outside of illegal markets for cryptocurrencies that is better than current technological solutions. Transfer $1000 from your Coinbase (or other electronic) account in the US to cash in Indonesia, in less than 20 minutes, at a better rate than spot. I did it yesterday with ETH and even made $20 on the spread after all the fees. The cheapest conventional alternative would have…

You may have found one temporary use case but I don't expect that to last if cryptocurrencies gain in value.

How much did it cost to exchange USD -> crypto -> Indonesia money?

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

#148

Post by Nursie »

goldenkey wrote: post #134
undersuit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, most encryption includes compression. Google it.

No, it doesn't. If anything, with the use of padding schemes, IVs and MACs, most encryption schemes make the data grow a little.

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

#149

Post by Nursie »

snitko wrote: post #78
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…

Have a sense of proportion. Think about how much electricity, paper, waste and money is spent to keep up the banking industry, anti-fraud departments, AML/KYC compliance teams, clerks and all that show. Bitcoin is actually an improvement.

Nope, Bitcoin is much worse than that.

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

doots wrote: post #92
seanwilson wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except in the case of Nano, the vast majority of the tokens are in control of the owners Do you have evidence of this?

What evidence is there 90% of Nano distribution isn't owned by a single person? This is a major aspect of transparency in decenteralized p2p protocols, and the issue with Nano is there's no paper trail or proof that the devs didn't take all the supply. We do know 13% of all Nano in circulation was stolen in the Bitgrail hack.

[deleted]
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