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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)

#91

Post by grifball »

smeyer wrote: post #77
ssss11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices. Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.

Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe.

EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space

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

#92

Post by willbudd »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

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.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree.

Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

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

#93

Post by jki275 »

iamricks wrote: post #82
Moodles wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of bitcoin owners own it for political reasons along your lines, compared to people just using it as an investment?

Well, since you can own bitcoin anonymously, any answer to this question other than “i don’t know” will have a huge margin of error

Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.

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

#95

Post by pcthrowaway »

DennisP wrote: post #87
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

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.

Some cryptocurrencies are trying to fix that by moving to proof-of-stake, which does away with the mining effort entirely.

Some cryptocurrencies also use PoS natively, and have been for years

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

#96

Post by gruez »

Antipode wrote: post #89
young_unixer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would a completely unregulated currency be better in that regard? Aren't the wild swings in bitcoin price essentially hyperinflation/deflation?

It depends entirely on your time horizon. USD might be more stable day-to-day, but has lost 32.3% of its value in the past 20 years. This is just with CPI, if you're comparing to asset prices this is probably much worse.

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

#97

Post by justblaze23 »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

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.

https://nano.org/ - That's the reply

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

#98

Post by mareko »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

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.

Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Many newer ones run PoS which doesn't 'waste' energy. The Celo network goes even further and is carbon negative. It sends a portion of block rewards to Project Wren, which uses them to buy carbon credits to offset more carbon than the network emits to run.

https://medium.com/celoorg/celo-to-go-carbon-neutral-with-pr...

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

#99

Post by jki275 »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

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.

Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't consume any significant amount of electricity.

Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with climate change.

Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all. There are hundreds of others.

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

#100

Post by jki275 »

cortesoft wrote: post #90
rcstank wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing? Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.

No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically. There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.

The fed certainly generates new dollars.
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