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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)

#51

Post by kens »

csomar wrote: post #22

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...

Umm, no. This is not an advertisement and I'm kind of offended that you say so. First, that's not even my book. The book author asked if he could put my bitcoin mining by hand process in his book; it's a small part of the book. Second, I wrote the post three years before the book. I know HN watches out for submarine advertisements, but really!

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

#52

Post by TameAntelope »

alisonkisk wrote: post #36
ComputerGuru wrote: post #33

This is somewhat off-topic but I'm going to ask here because it's really hard to find "trusted" information regarding BitCoin and Ethereum mining online - it seems everyone's trying to make a commission or running a scam: Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining? If that's…

I think the Universe is telling you something, and you know what it is. Why do you want to be in a mining pool, instead of buying bitcoin?

Because I've got this 3080 sitting around since I don't game as much as I thought I would, and I feel bad about it.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by mFixman »

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.

The rate of information transmission was much higher in 2010 than in 2000.

If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. Since it was invented in 2010 it easily spread through Facebook, Reddit and other universal social media before making the jump via mainstream news to non-technical people.

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

#56

Post by vmception »

kortilla wrote: post #29
vmception wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The network emission adjusts to the amount of computational power on the network, every 2016 blocks. So if there was 1/1000th of the computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in the same time span, 10 minutes. If there was 1000x more computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in 10 minutes.

If you understood that already then I'm not sure what you or the prior person is referring to exactly.

If you mean that all the halvings would happen a decade earlier because bitcoin started a decade earlier, I'm not sure what the point of mentioning that is.

If you mean the exchange rate would have been lower, the same scarcity drivers would exist, who knows who cares.

The "big miners" would be bound by market forces of what's anything worth to them, and would likely be 100% proportional to today's reality.

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

#57

Post by mkaic »

JamilD wrote: post #14
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.

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.

I just learned backprop for the first time a week ago and doing exactly what you described, working it out by hand, was absolutely invaluable. There's something about being able to visualize what my code is doing on a sheet of paper that just helped everything click.

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

#58

Post by infogulch »

alisonkisk wrote: post #42
infogulch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love whiteboards, they are much better than paper: more space, nice colors, easy to see, very easy to collaborate on, simple redos. That's actually the biggest thing I miss from going into the office: nice huge whiteboards that cover the whole wall, not the little dinky ones that office depot sells for exorbitant prices. I found a solution though: Lowe's sells a 4'x8' sheet of whiteboard for fifteen bucks, now I ha…

I like pencil and paper. Colored pencils are plentiful, and paper is easier to image and share than a whiteboard. You can write smaller on paper and don't get gorrila arms.

Hey, you can have preferences, even if they are wrong. ;)

Colored pencils are usually very difficult to erase. I've found whiteboards are great for sharing. Get a set of small tip dry erase pens, much better than the standard ones, and helps both writing small and gorilla arm (though I've never really had issues with the latter).

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

#59

Post by edgefield0 »

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

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

#60

Post by jhoechtl »

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.

Both. And another aspect you missed: Doing things by hand stimulates regions of the brain which are directly tied to regions of creativity and to improve the ability to relate a new concept to existing concepts.
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