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

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

#21

Post by varjag »

xiphias2 wrote: post #13

A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.

A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.

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

#22

Post by csomar »

Most people seem to have missed the fact that this is an advertisement for his book [1]. The person who is going to go through the whole article is a very likely to make a purchase. It's unfortunate that the book doesn't seem to have many sales and apparently, it's not practically available anymore.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Quartz-Objects-Power-Global-Economy/d...

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

#23

Post by vmception »

varjag wrote: post #21
xiphias2 wrote: post #13

A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.

A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.

the same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did you mean?

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

#24

Post by Gehinnn »

dualvectorfoil wrote: post #5

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 think this is due to some kind of muscle memory.

You only start hearing certain patterns in complex music, e.g. Mahler symphonies, if you listen often enough to it. At some point you recognize stuff unconsciously.

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

#25

Post by freeone3000 »

varjag wrote: post #21
xiphias2 wrote: post #13

A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.

A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.

Does the mined volume practically matter? As a relative factor, yes, it needs to be big enough to be too expensive to compute, but, as computation grows more expensive the volume necessary is actually reduced.

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

#28

Post by lmkg »

dualvectorfoil wrote: post #5

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 think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But its idea of what's not important is not well-tuned to many contexts. I think a lot of "secret tricks" are just ways of trying to bypass that heuristic and force yourself to do all the steps. E.g. rubber-duck debugging: putting the situation into words means putting it into concrete terms, which catches the parts that your brain let sit unexamined.

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

#29

Post by kortilla »

vmception wrote: post #23
varjag wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.

the same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did you mean?

If it still didn’t become popular until around the same time, all of the rewards would have been halved much earlier. The big miners would be fighting over even smaller rewards.
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