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

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241–250 of 405 posts

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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dollar has absolutely been destroyed. Housing, health care... true inflation is rampant. > The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and which is currently enjoying a high price (just as tulips once did), but which was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon. People have been saying this at their own expense for a decade.

Housing costs are not high because the dollar has been debased. They're high because of high demand and lack of supply in many urban locations, primarily because of local zoning and permitting processes. If housing were expensive because the dollar had lost value, then you would expect it to be cheap to buy a house in SF in some other form of currency. But it's not, no matter what medium of exchange you want to use,…

0% interest is definitely inflating the cost of housing.

> Whether you pay in USD, or anything else, it's still expensive.

> no matter what medium of exchange you want to use, it's still expensive.

Not if you hold BTC. It's unfortunate that people are self-sabotaging by keeping USD based assets when there's actually an alternative that's not in a inflationary spiral.

I think the BTC hate on this site is unique though. In the "real" world people are pretty excited about crypto and acting in their own best interest by acquiring it.

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

#242

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.

Wait till Satoshi is revealed to be Jensen Huang.

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

#243
post #98

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...

this is painful VC virtue signaling, Celo is an AOL blockchain.

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

#244

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.

> Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold How would one measure that? The price of one bitcoin compared to the price of a kilogram of gold? That seems arbitrary. Total market value? Transaction volume?

Total market value.

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

#245
post #53

Author here; I was surprised to see this on HN today. Let me know if you have any questions!

I remember this article - thanks for sharing, it was fun! Did you do any practice ones before you recorded it? How many mistakes did you make along the way? :-)

I did a couple of practices before recording this. The main thing was figuring out the best way to fit everything on a page so it made sense and I didn't run out of space.

I had one of the completed practice sheets next to me so I could check against it while I was recording and not mess up. I also verified the data against computer output before recording.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that. Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (…

Bitcoin is probably the most important social/technological innovation since the internet (which uses how much energy?). Most people realize that moving humanity forward requires energy. There's loud neo-luddite contingent that missed the boat on crypto (it's actually not too late), but I wouldn't take angry anti-crypto HN comments as public sentiment. The public is in desperate need of a finance system not tied to t…

That’s such a laughable thing to say.

Edit: You just compared crypto to the invention of the internet. If that’s not a laughable hyperbole I don’t know what is. Thanks for the flag.

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

#247

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.

Are we done pretending people like you are anything more than the new anti-industrialists yet? If it were up to the green crowd we'd be back to using candles and carrier pigeons.

We might have no choice at some point (like the choice will be made for us, by the planet), at the rate we're going.

But that being said, I think there are bigger fish to fry than bitcoin in that department right now.

And besides, if Proof-of-Stake becomes viable and desirable enough, they'll adopt it into Bitcoin's protocol, or some other Proof-of-Stake coin will eventually take over. Maybe it'll be Ethereum once it switches. Or something else. And then this will be a non-issue.

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

#249

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.

Lol, it is probably one of the least unethical uses of electricity that i can think of while not being net positive. If you care about this, realign onto cloud computing or industrial equipment for deforestation. It's disingenuous to care more about btc mining.

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

#250
post #140

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.

Bitcoin is deflationary, isn’t it? How could it ever replace fiat if just by merely holding it you are guaranteed in the long run to increase value? You need mild inflation to get people to actually spend and not hoard. Bitcoin’s supply is fix so there is no point in ever spending it unless you want to cash out.
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