Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014) • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by yesenadam » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

nietzsch3 wrote: post #147

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.

This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again - bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system - bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the blockchain https://www…

> This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again

Hi, welcome to HN. Please read the guidelines. Talking like that is nowhere near acceptable here. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#192

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #183

solosoyokaze wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin. One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment. Bitcoin has already changed humanity for the better and it's only getting started.

> For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin. The classic false dichotomy by people peddling crypto. Nobody is keeping their money in a savings account. There are productive investments that aren't crypto.

What asset class has returned value like crypto for the past 10 years? None.

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

#193

Post by xtian » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

You could say the same thing about the US military, which is the world's single largest producer of CO2 emissions.

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

#194

Post by saltyfamiliar » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

Moodles wrote: post #78

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.

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

I'd argue it doesn't actually matter. People only buying it as an investment vehicle is still enough to push into mainstream awareness and increase it's level of adoption and usefulness, and at its core, the reason it's an attractive investment in the first place is because it's deflationary, digital and decentralized.

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

#195

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

Hiopl wrote: post #189

solosoyokaze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.

But that high value (and the volatile prices) is entirely the problem (coupled with other issues like the extremely low potential number of transactions per second). As it stands, Bitcoin will never be anything other than an investment vehicle. Maybe another cryptocurrency will be a suitable replacement for fiat, but right now and for the foreseeable future, crypto is still too niche, too complex and volatile. At mos…

Bitcoin plays a role in the crypto ecosystem. It's like gold. Ethereum is like the finance industry and things like DOGE are like currency. The value will be pegged to BTC, making it the foundation for the ecosystem.

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

#196

Post by thamer » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

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.

It really is terrible, and many enthusiasts don't seem to understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it. For so many it's just a way to make a quick buck when Elon tweets about it.

To put in in numbers, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index[1] (they link to other research that arrive at similar conclusions, if not worse): the total footprint is almost 37 million tons of CO2, a single transaction accounting for over 300 kg. A single transaction requires the same amount of energy as an average household over 22 days, or emits the same amount of CO2 as a 2020 Civic driving 1,000 miles.

The comparison with the visa network is just as wild: a single bitcoin transaction takes more energy than 432,000 visa transactions.

At this point it's highly irresponsible to continue using and supporting Bitcoin.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

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

#197

Post by vinger » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

jki275 wrote: post #93

iamricks wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.

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

#198

Post by undersuit » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #132

tomxor wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority. Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there a…

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

The first government to move their money onto a crypto us going to have massive control over their economy. Roll their own crypto, keep the keys that allow more money to be printed, have the ability to lock people out of their wallets on a whim? They could even extract taxation by running all the nodes and taking the transaction fees.

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

#199

Post by mockingbirdy » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #154

tomxor wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.

This. I've realized years ago that the current fiat system can be unsustainable because it's very hard for regulators to avoid the temptation of applying QE and other monstrosities. But I realized way too late that BTC is the vehicle to flee from that (in a simple way compared to moving physical assets across borders).

It already succeeded in helping rich people in China to bring their wealth out of control. This has maximum utility for a lot of people. I'm not sure what will come after the current financial system (and it most probably won't go anywhere and will co-exist for some years before crypto will be banned everywhere), but this new type of wealth transfer mechanism already gets used a lot. Everyone who distrusts the current financial system or is oppressed by their regime is interested in it.

I don't know how the world will look like (it'll probably be very hard to continue the current path because capital has found a new way to move across borders and avoid taxes, again) and I don't know if it's generally good for global society, but Pandora's box is open.

I agree with the energy discussion and that it's wasteful, but the utility of it (transacting without governmental permission) seems to be higher for the participants. And they don't care about its socioeconomic impact, they care about its utility for them (money for miners and speculators who keep BTC's value high and the network functional, permissionless transaction for the actual target audience / users of BTC). BTC was built for permissionless money transactions, the speculation is just a byproduct and everyone is focusing on it instead of looking at its actual value for its users.

edit for the sibling comments: You need BTC only to move your assets from one country/wallet to another. You can then move it to a stable coin like USDC and slowly and safely get it out of the crypto system without having to deal with the volatility. This takes you half an hour and you're done. It's currently an investment vehicle, but its utility comes from being able to get money from A to B regardless of government intervention. Even if BTC drops to $3k, it still has this value. Looking at the price of BTC is missing the point: it's more than $0 and you can do a transaction in 10 minutes and that is all that matters to move assets.

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

#200

Post by Consultant32452 » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #140

Consultant32452 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

The computationally wasteful bit is a temporary problem for which solutions are already being created. The Lightning Network is one such effort.

Governments are already taking efforts to fight against crypto. The fact that bitcoin is classified as an "asset" is the government adding friction to using it. Every time you transact in bitcoin you have to put that on your taxes because there's some capital gains/loss. Of course, they don't talk about it as if that is an attack, but it is. And they wouldn't be attacking it if they weren't scared. It's surely not guaranteed, maybe not even likely, but it's still possible that we will win.