Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

coinsocial.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 165 posts

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

#151

Post by redka »

nosuchthing wrote: post #108
Anderkent wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they get paid for putting that capital at risk and for keeping it locked into the system to provide consensus. It's a kind of a service.

Except only the top few largest "stakers" are paid, others are either disqualified entirely for being too poor to stake, or will not recieve block rewards for being statistically irrelevant. PoS is a lottery with reusable tickets. Winners get more tickets.

PoS is an idea. There are implementation that reward everyone equally for the amount they put it (like semux)

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

#152

Post by aianus »

mrep wrote: post #147
aianus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I used limit orders to add liquidity in both countries and so paid no trading fees. There was a 1% “cash withdrawal fee” at the Indonesian exchange which is all I paid in total.

I don’t know how temporary it will be; I’ve been using crypto to transfer money internationally since 2013 when BTC was $800 and it’s always been the cheapest method (although I sometimes had to write bots and wait a few days to get a good deal). I imagine the spreads will continue to trend towards zero so I’ll be paying 0-1.5% total instead of earning 2% which is still much better than banks for three-figure to low four-figure amounts.

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

#153

Post by bogomipz »

nosuchthing wrote: post #40
bogomipz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms." Can you elaborate on what the shortcomings of the current consensus algorithms are?

Immense waste, and lack of egalitarianism. Proof-of-Work consensus algorithms (so far) work by wasting more and more energy. Max efficiency peaks in the network with a very basic CPU PoW algorithm merely sets a lottery number granting write access for a single computer Every additional increase in processing power reduces efficiency by increasing the size of the number to be guessed All PoW does is increase the capit…

Thanks for elaborating, these are interesting points and observations.

I am curious are there any proposals floating about for achieving greater efficiency or more egalitarianism?

It seems like a great area of research.

Might you or someone else have any resources you could share if this is an active area of research? Cheers.

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

#154

Post by GhostVII »

nosuchthing wrote: post #33
vernon99 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Proof of work is the same, except instead of rich people buying more Etherium to get rich faster, they buy more mining hardware.

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

#155

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]

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

#156

Post by burkemw3 »

function_seven wrote: post #106
reificator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If triple dipping is the norm for ISPs, why not let hardware manufacturers double dip?

Triple dipping? Is that 1. End user, 2. Content provider (e.g. “fast lanes” for Netflix), and 3. Government subsidies?

Another possibility is selling data, primarily to advertisers

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

#157

Post by aoeusnth1 »

nosuchthing wrote: post #36
twiceaday wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't PoS generate money out of thin air? It's just a matter of putting your dollars into stake vs hardware and electricity.

Only for the largest account holders, whom statistically will receive most of the newly generated money (and even more as they continue to accumulate newly printed PoS tokens).

I'm confused - what's your objection? Should capital put into PoS not provide a constant reward?

Or are you under the impression that larger pools of capital provide disproportionate rewards?

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

#158

Post by aoeusnth1 »

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…

The capital comes out of thin air - it's created when ETH goes up in value, or destroyed when ETH goes down in value.

Also, unlike electricity, PoS has no negative externalities. PoW kills people with air pollution.

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

#159

Post by aoeusnth1 »

curyous wrote: post #76
zodiac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

Proof of work, it requires continual investment if you want to get the rewards, not just sitting there watching the cash roll in.

How is that more egalitarian? It's still a conversion between capital and income.

It's like saying stocks that give dividends are more "egalitarian" because you have to reinvest them in order to gain the same return on investment.

Absurd.

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

#160

Post by nosuchthing »

redka wrote: post #151
nosuchthing wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except only the top few largest "stakers" are paid, others are either disqualified entirely for being too poor to stake, or will not recieve block rewards for being statistically irrelevant. PoS is a lottery with reusable tickets. Winners get more tickets.

PoS is an idea. There are implementation that reward everyone equally for the amount they put it (like semux)

interesting, thanks for sharing
Post reply on HN