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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)

#301

Post by cortic »

sailingparrot wrote: post #152
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

Ah yes the good old "but something worse already exists therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.

more like; "but the amount of electricity is so insignificant to us that we use more doing absolutely nothing"

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

#302

Post by willbudd »

akra wrote: post #295
willbudd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As one of the clueless novices on this topic what I fail to understand is that proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms have been available for alt-coins now for a little while - yet BTC is still dominant. Is it just because of popularity of BTC? If so I struggle to understand how the market is rational here (not saying it has to be). And do other coins/forks issued with similar rules/characteristics cause a pri…

Imagine you have created a new social media webapp with a few innovative new features not seen elsewhere. Would that spell doom for a now suddenly inferior Facebook/Twitter/etc. Possibly, but the network effect in terms of inertia and critical mass makes that an unlikely proposition.

Moreover, the driving force behind Bitcoin keeping it ahead of the pack so far is the promise of short/medium term profit as an investment vehicle due to the artificial scarcity of its deflationary algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies are better positioned toward forming a long-term solution as a low overhead global decentralized payment platform, but what they offer is more of a collective benefit rather than a strong monetary incentive to any individual backer/investor on an individual level. (Which arguably is just an emergent property of human greed within the regime of unchecked capitalism.)

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

#303

Post by AaronFriel »

kfrzcode wrote: post #123
AaronFriel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network…

The BTC market cap is around $650 billion. I don't understand your logic.

Market cap is not a meaningful measure of a currency. A better measure is the velocity of money within a currency.

For context, just one part of the US economy is the stock market. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which came up in the news recently processed $2.15 quadrillion in securities in 2019.

The 30 day average for estimated transactions in Bitcoin is around 5-6 billion, or still around 1/1000th just one art of the US economy's transaction volume.

At 5 transactions per second, the average transaction size would have to be around $1,268,2308 to equal the velocity of just one portion of one sector of the US economy. 5 transactions per second is actually higher than the average transaction throughput over the past several years.

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

#304

Post by soared »

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.

Is there a book that teaches this by hand? My favorite book went through basic algorithms by hand in excel (data smart, john foreman)

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

#305

Post by trident5000 »

bobviolier wrote: post #216
tomxor wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)... It's…

The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Comparing BTC mining to a small country is just absurd. You could do the same with hundreds of other applications aside from YouTube like all social media servers, gaming, existing banking infrastructure, etc. Also Bitcoin arguably replaces gold which uses more energy and is more destructive to land (while using fossil fuels instead of mostly renewable energy like BTC). Lastly how much energy do we think the dollar which is backed by the US military uses per year? Id wager a lot more.

The pitchforks are out in this thread quite simply because people dont like other people outmaneuvering them in purchasing power but of course is disguised as a virtue signal.

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

#306

Post by tomxor »

rzz3 wrote: post #298
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…

> than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority That’s a bit simplistic and completely lacking in big picture perspective. You even underline “only” as if you’re very confident in what you’re saying. Please do some research.

Oh sorry, please replace "only" with 99.9%. Because of $20 transaction fees, because of the trend of companies that once accepted it shunning it due to aforementioned ridiculous transaction fees, and finally due to numerous papers presenting a statistical analysis of bitcoin transaction behaviour and coming to the same conclusion e.g DOI: 10.1016/j.intfin.2017.12

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

#307

Post by AaronFriel »

shawnz wrote: post #116
AaronFriel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network…

Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system. Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).

> Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all

If it can, why hasn't it?

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

#308

Post by briefcomment »

tomxor wrote: post #185
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.

> It hasn't failed at anything. It has failed at being a usable currency, and not merely for socioeconomic reasons. A currency is more than just intrinsic value.

We need an uninflatable store of value more than anything, which Bitcoin is.

Think of how much unnecessary transacting and consumption is going on right now to escape a constantly inflating dollar. "Investments" and consumptions will tank with a deflationary store of value.

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

#309

Post by Nition »

intotheabyss wrote: post #297
Nition wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like: * User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity. * User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity. And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum att…

Yeah, good answer. I hope Ethereum can make a full transition to Proof Of Stake. I remember they were already talking about it being close when I was looking into it in 2017.

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

#310

Post by waynesonfire »

kleer001 wrote: post #260
waynesonfire wrote: post #2

You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?

> I could care less how You couldn't care less?

Thanks, yes that's what I meant. Didn't realize I've been saying it wrong all this time. Apparently, a very common mistake.
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