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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)

#311

Post by ben-schaaf »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #172
jboog wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing for almost a decade how Bitcoin was going to change the world and help humanity and yet...nothing. Other than some speculators and early adopters getting rich. I've yet to hear of anything "world-changing" BTC could do that isn't already done better by traditional systems.

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.

You can make the same claim for putting all your money in TSLA. Just because it has had good return in hinesight doesn't mean it wasn't an extremely high-risk investment.

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

#312

Post by Solvitieg »

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.

To everyone complaining about energy: We will almost certainly use more energy in the future than we use today.

The proper response to climate change is not necessarily to consume less energy.

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

#313

Post by trident5000 »

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.

Sure, just as Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Paypal and several of the largest major banks just accepted its use and facilitation. And while companies such as Tesla, PornHub, etc accept it as payment. Its totally not going anywhere and will never make that transition.

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

#314

Post by sudosysgen »

bluescrn wrote: post #264
sudosysgen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.

Or they generate dollars by trading and speculating but not actually creating anything. How much power is used worldwide by stock trading, HFT, etc?

I agree that this is an issue, but I don't think that's anywhere near what Bitcoin uses.

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

#315

Post by trident5000 »

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 theres hundreds of things in the world that use more energy than BTC like gaming, gold mining, existing banking infrastructure, social media servers, etc - and the comparison is stupid in the first place. People just want to virtue signal because they dont like other people getting ahead of them and they didnt invest. Thats the crux of the outrage just like people get into stock investment wars.

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

#316

Post by hulahoof »

galangalalgol wrote: post #211
cardanome wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap. If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake. Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.

I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in contraband switching from btc to monero among others for that reason.

No, anonymity for the users is generally separate from the consensus algorithm. XMR, at least when I was mining it many years ago, was more about preventing leakage of wallet, funds info to every person you transacted with - and is probably the gold standard in anonymous transactions - which is why it's price is so stable.

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

#317

Post by Consultant32452 »

dTal wrote: post #226
Consultant32452 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The computationally wasteful bit is the proof-of-work, which is an inherent part of bitcoin. The Lightning Network is just about scaling transactions. Your government rant is a non-sequitor - bitcoin doesn't become any more efficient just because The Man doesn't like it.

The computationally wasteful bit will go away with things like the visa network where they will only have to persist back to the blockchain when you transact with a wallet that isn't on their network. Otherwise it'll just be records in a database not unlike regular currency.

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

#318

Post by IgorPartola »

trident5000 wrote: post #300
IgorPartola wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.

You see a lot of people buying groceries with BTC currently? What I see most people do is buy BTC and hold it, living off their regular paychecks, waiting for the BTC portfolio to hit some goal. They then trade it to the next investor who does the same. It’s not a currency so much as a store of value. It’s a stock, not money.

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

#319

Post by SamBam »

nietzsch3 wrote: post #175
SamBam wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is which? Since the global financial system clearly uses much, much less energy per person, I'm guessing that you're also calling it the "better system?" Or are you pretending that if BitCoin were used by every person on Earth that it would still be using the exact same energy?

Did you read my initial comment? Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global financial system uses and its energy usage does not scale with adoption. Transactions are meant to be run on the Lightning Network which consumes next to nothing compared to Visa, and long term savings are meant to be stored on the blockchain. This argument that Bitcoin uses too much energy has been around since its whitepaper and has been coun…

> its energy usage does not scale with adoption

And yet it has scaled, drastically, hundreds-fold over the past few years.

You could say that it scales with the price, which is true, but tell me with a straight face that if seven billion people started buying BitCoin that wouldn't affect its price to an extraordinary degree.

> Lightning Network

The magic words that have said every time energy is mentioned for the past six year, supposedly making us ignore the energy BitCoin is actually using.

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

#320

Post by Consultant32452 »

trident5000 wrote: post #300
IgorPartola wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.

If we imagine a deflationary currency encourages savings over consumerism... That doesn't sound so bad.
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