Live data from Hacker News

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

righto.com

11–20 of 405 posts

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#11

You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?

Edit: I misread the GP, as explained below. Sorry!

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#12
post #10

You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?

I feel like either I'm misunderstanding your comment, or you've whooshed everyone else commenting on it so far.

lol, clearly wooshed.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#14

Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.

Likewise. Once in a while I force myself to do backprop by hand to make sure I still understand all the concepts and can walk myself through the calculus.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#15
post #9

Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.

Totally agree. I had a hard time trying to comprehend how parity works until I sat down and did some parity computations on paper.

[deleted]

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#16

Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.

I agree. For some reason, I didn't get the lambda calculus when I first encountered it but it became entirely obvious after doing just a couple of exercises by hand.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#17

Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.

True, I understood how pointer works when I drew them on paper. I was struggling for a week, then I tried on paper and in 10 minutes I got it.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#18
post #11

You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?

Edit: I misread the GP, as explained below. Sorry! " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree - instead you just shallowly dismissed their comment by saying it was shallow.

Also maybe I’m crazy but their comment seemed to be a joke/commentary on the environmental resources used by Bitcoin. That isn’t a shallow dismissal.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#20

Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.

True, I understood how pointer works when I drew them on paper. I was struggling for a week, then I tried on paper and in 10 minutes I got it.

So much screen-staring time can be saved with just pen and paper. We need to learn to do it more often.
Post reply on HN