101–110 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a heat pump you'd get about 3x the heat for the same amount of power
But will that heat pump mine bitcoins for me?
Does anyone have any figures on what regular banking systems use for accepted/official currencies? I feel like this has blown up so much that it makes sense to compare and contrast.
And as Bitcoins get more scarce and get adopted by more and more banks and companies as reserves, the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising, until Bitcoin will consume more electricity than the rest of the world combined. (Around the time it is worth $1.2 Million a coin.) Change my mind. Bitcoin rewards miners in Bitcoin, which is the ultimate deflationary “store of value”, and has the world mindsh…
SpaceX could probably help usher in a new age where we have mining nodes in space, big solar arrays (100 or so) powering a small 100-GPU cluster or ASIC cluster....
How much resources does the mining of gold use?
Afaik, 3000 tons of gold are mined per year. Which is worth about $150B. I would expect the mining uses resources of about $150B as well?
By my calculation, the value of bitcoins mined per year is $15B:
900 Bitoins per day = 328500 Bitcoins per Year
328500 * $45000 = $15B
So I would expect that Gold mining uses about 10x as much resources as Bitcoin mining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won't and even BTC enthusiasts have given up on that. They narrative is now that BTC is a "store of value".
Exactly. Here's VC and prominent cryptocurrency enthusiast Fred Wilson saying exactly that: https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ While I agree with him that Bitcoin is a terrible currency, I think the "store of value" thing is nonsense as well. Stores of value need to have relatively stable value. Bitcoin is hugely volatile. That's great for speculation, but nobody with any sense would use it as…
On larger timescales, this isn't really that much of an issue.
Volatility is also trending downwards. The bigger it gets, the more stable it becomes.
In the other, if the price increases faster than the mining yield drops, efficiency is decreased.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any good resources on how alternative consensus protocols work, like proof of stake and proof of importance? I either see really simplistic explanations or ones that assume a lot of domain knowledge. I also recently saw a crypto coin that claims to be energy efficient, and I don’t quite understand how that’s possible without the possibility of a 50.1% attack.
One of the problems with it is that it's difficult to bootstrap a network on a proof-of-stake system with a fair distribution. You end up with the pre-sale participants (i.e. VCs or founders) having the majority of the tokens.
I think what Ethereum is doing is a decent approach. They started as Proof of Work, so they were able to bootstrap the network for 6 years and now ETH is widely distributed and no single holder owns more than 1% of ETH, for example. So now they can migrate to Proof of Stake and they won't suffer from the centralized allocation problem.
From what I understand bitcoin currently has a $20+ transaction fee with a transaction time takes 60 minutes+ With these issues in addition to the high power consumption, how will Bitcoin become a usable currency?
It's about $7 at the moment to be included in the next block. A new block is added approximately every 10 minutes. Since bitcoin does not guarantee finality some services require you to wait for a certain amount of extra blocks after yours to reduce the chance of a change reorginaztion happening that doesn't include your transaction. Bitcoin will not function as a currency due to it's high volatility. For a more usab…
And as Bitcoins get more scarce and get adopted by more and more banks and companies as reserves, the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising, until Bitcoin will consume more electricity than the rest of the world combined. (Around the time it is worth $1.2 Million a coin.) Change my mind. Bitcoin rewards miners in Bitcoin, which is the ultimate deflationary “store of value”, and has the world mindsh…
> Change my mind. Well, personally , I'm still convinced Bitcoin is going to crash at some point. It doesn't work well as an actual currency because transfer times/fees are too high. I don't know if that will happen in one year or 20 years though.
It is the ultimate store of value.
You think people will let governments destroy their store of value so that the world can use electricity for other uses? Let’s explore that shall we.
One third of the world farmland is desertified, today.
Insects are dwindling and other species are experiencing an extinction on unprecedented scales today.
Fossil fuels are being extracted at rates that are not stopping anytime soon. We never switched to electric cars yet.
We couldn’t even switch to biodegradeable plastic and instead polluted all the bodies of water on earth.
You really think humanity will be able to stop this runaway economic effect designed to get bigger and bigger until it consumes the world’s use of electricity? Why is this any different?
PS: with exponential growth, by the time you note the electric use is one quarter of the world, it’s too late.