Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
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Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
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Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#2That’s a very thorough overview
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#3If an article is written in English for an English speaking audience, I wish it would include translations of non-English quotations.
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#4'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance'
I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rate is only so high because the ROI is there, but without it, people would still be mining.
Case in point, there are plenty of long forgotten altcoins out there that people are mining just for fun. At the end of the day your computer is no different from an expensive space heater. Might as well mine some crypto with it.
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#5If an article is written in English for an English speaking audience, I wish it would include translations of non-English quotations.
The header quote is:
"The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked. But the farther you looked, the more mysterious it became." ——Liu Cixin "Three Body Problem"
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#6'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…
> At the end of the day your computer is no different from an expensive space heater. Might as well mine some crypto with it.
Or, you know, you could just turn the computer off while you're not actively using it. It saves you money and does a small little good thing for the environment too.
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#7'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…
I haven't read the article, but I believe it will say something like, the continual investment is necessary in order for the transactions to be irreversible (settlement assurance). I'm sure there are some forgotten altcoins out there still chugging along, but it probably does not take much money to hire sufficient hash power to double-spend those alts, or even re-write their history.
For as long as bitcoin miners fight, tooth and nail, to hash incrementally more efficiently than their competitors, it will be prohibitively expensive for most actors to reverse transactions.
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#8'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…
> At the end of the day your computer is no different from an expensive space heater. Might as well mine some crypto with it.
i mean... it wouldn't be a space heater if it wasn't crunching pointless numbers...
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#9'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…
> At the end of the day your computer is no different from an expensive space heater. Might as well mine some crypto with it. Or, you know, you could just turn the computer off while you're not actively using it. It saves you money and does a small little good thing for the environment too.
That is why I made the analogy to a space heater - because mining would be a free side benefit of something you actively use to keep warm.
The environmental impact is also negligible if the power you're using is coming from solar or wind.
Re: Bitcoin Mining’s Three Body Problem
#10'Bitcoin is the product of hashpower. The industry wouldn’t exist without incentivizing miners to continuously invest in hardware and burning electricity to augment Bitcoin network’s settlement assurance' I think this is a common misconception. People don't need to continually invest in mining hardware to keep it going. The entire Bitcoin network could technically be run off a single Rasberry Pi. The network hash rat…
I think you're missing the point.
For Bitcoin to continue to act as a decentralized currency ledger (with "settlement assurance"), then the network hash rate must remain high.
Nobody is arguing that the code couldn't run on one processor, only that cryptocurrencies conceptually depend on this high hash rate