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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)

#61

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.

[deleted]

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

#63

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.

Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?

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

#64

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.

Maybe we should blame the defenders of constant inflation and government overreach. You mentioned Argentina, which is a prime example of these problems.

If we didn't have those problems in the first place, Bitcoin wouldn't be as attractive.

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

#65
post #51
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!

Don't be offended by a no name on the internet, some people just don't know what they are talking about.

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

#66

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…

Correct, mining in a pool you are guaranteed your fair share of the mining (minus admin fee from the pool operators). Even if you never mine a single block, you get your fair share of the mined blocks by the pool. If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery. DYOR on pools, but I can recommend f2pool ( http…

>If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery.

It's slightly better than that. A single 5700 xt mining ethereum can expect a block once every 43 months at current difficulty. That's still insanely high variance, but still far better than the lottery.

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

#67

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.

The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.

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

#68

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.

[deleted]

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

#69
post #63

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.

Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?

Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour.

Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.

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