361–370 of 463 posts
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Monero Javascript miners are common to this day.
They're an easy way to donate to people in places where it is hard to transfer money. What exactly is the argument you are making here? Presumably the people running those things are definitely paying for their power one way or the other.
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It does, because it competes with decarbonizations of things our civilization actually needs. Once that's done, it'll still be ridiculous to try and base the economy on bitcoins, because proof of work scales so badly it'll happily eat any and all energy that's made available. Thousands of years from now, when humanity builds its first Dyson sphere, I would like to believe the collected energy will be used for purpose…
And you're just going to ignore that we can do layer 2 technologies like lightning network?
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They're an easy way to donate to people in places where it is hard to transfer money. What exactly is the argument you are making here? Presumably the people running those things are definitely paying for their power one way or the other.
They get delivered through ads and sites directly in order to steal further resources from unsuspecting site visitors.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering. And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch h…
So many times this argument comes up and every time I am amazed at how ignorant it seems to me. But it is very hard to discuss... Can't we all just agree that what is a valuable use of someones watts or petahashes per second is a subjective choice? That people are free to value their resources as they see fit? You personally might not value securing Bitcoin network, but many other people find it valueable and it is p…
The problem is the impact these things have on the rest of us when we ourselves have no interest in bitcoin.
If bitcoin existed purely inside a virtual world — say, if coin miners were a virtual good that WoW players could buy which made WoW money appear in their inventory according to similar rules but without the actual hard work of computing anything beyond a lightweight O(num_players) random number generator on the server, then it stops being anyone else’s problem.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering. And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch h…
It's incredible that people on HN, a technical readership, still don't understand why the energetic or computational "waste" of proof-of-work is needed. There is simply no other known way of implementing a decentralized, censorship-resistant, robust digital currency. Without PoW you lose one of these properties. Proof-of-stake doesn't work. It isn't robust. Eg. PoS cryptocurrencies can't resolved which chain is corre…
They are not.
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Fraud is absolutely a big deal in banking.
Thankfully many types of fraud can be reversed in our modern financial system. With bitcoin, virtually any form of fraud leaves you completely fucked with absolutely no recourse. Which makes bitcoin an even bigger joke because on a per transaction basis (one that includes miner subsidies) bitcoin costs several orders of magnitude more and cannot even deliver the same basic features that mainstream fiat offers.
It's not like it is free to have a system like that!
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You've made this comment twice yet haven't enlightened me. I have no ideological bias - what is the value of the energy use?
Proof of work is the only objective datapoint that can’t be faked. It has value in itself proportional to how much energy went into the proof, so it’s wrong to say something was wasted - all the energy went into producing something of value. With proof of stake if you get out of the bunker and are presented with multiple competing chains - you can’t decide which one is genuine and which is a malicious fork. With proo…
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> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.
Miners more or less entirely pay the cost with the blockreward which means the users pay way way less fees for their Tx than it would actually cost in energy. If we assume max 7Tx/s 1 block can hold 4200 Tx One block gets the miner 12.5 BTCs that's a 0.003 BTC "subvention" per Tx that would otherwise have to be pais as fee. In other words the cost is paid by inflation which hurts most who holds and not who uses it. P…
I haven't checked the math, but this article says the block reward is ~$45 per transaction, vs ~$0.70 in fees:
https://cryptoslate.com/each-transaction-costs-the-bitcoin-n...
If that is the case, it seems likely there will be a devastating crash next time the reward halves.
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How much energy to mine an ounce of gold?
Since gold bullion isn't legal currency anywhere, I'm not sure it's the most relevant comparison. From the US Mint's financial statement [1]: 2017 cost $13.5 million dollars in "Communications, utilities, and misc charges", which presumably is the bucket that electricity bills falls under. There's no breakdown of overhead between currency coinage production and bullion/numismatic production, but the manufacturing obl…
Neither is Bitcoin, so it should be a perfectly valid comparison?
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So many times this argument comes up and every time I am amazed at how ignorant it seems to me. But it is very hard to discuss... Can't we all just agree that what is a valuable use of someones watts or petahashes per second is a subjective choice? That people are free to value their resources as they see fit? You personally might not value securing Bitcoin network, but many other people find it valueable and it is p…
No, we can’t agree on that. The problem is the impact these things have on the rest of us when we ourselves have no interest in bitcoin. If bitcoin existed purely inside a virtual world — say, if coin miners were a virtual good that WoW players could buy which made WoW money appear in their inventory according to similar rules but without the actual hard work of computing anything beyond a lightweight O(num_players)…
I am pretty sure that the best consensus the western world has come up with is that if there are any externalities, they can simply be taxed in like for example a carbon tax. But telling other people what they should and should not find valueable as if you have some sort of ultimate authority on knowing what is valueable, well, I hope you can already see what is wrong with that. Value is subjective. As in, other people have a right to decide for themselves.