441–450 of 762 posts
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You can argue whatever you want, it's distributing coins to the people who secure the network.
So, PoW then.
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> skeuomorphism of gold mining I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D
Don't, it's not accurate at all. "Mining" in the context of Ethereum is what powers it, not some abstract useless calculations.
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Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).
You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity. If a billionaire hoarded manufactur…
It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so.
The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage. This gives people real incentive to build the tools we need to harness the energy on our planet.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol...
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I agree that use cases may be limited with crypto, but some are pretty valid. E.g. international transfers are faster and cheper with crypto.
If you stay in crypto (e.g. usdt). Buying in is easy. Cashing it out in viable amounts is very problematic even for individuals, at least where I live. Transferring a usd-crypto-usd million would take a couple of weeks and unclear risks. In US, can you accept usdt from an exchange and grab the cash right away?
Releasing dedicated hardware for mining cryptocurrencies is the only way to go forward. Miners that use gaming hardware to mine must just be priced out of the market by more efficient dedicated hardware. This happened for bitcoin. If you don't have latest ASIC you can't even dream of mining bitcoin unless your electricity costs nothing. And even then you are still better off investing in ASIC as opposed to gaming har…
Mining crazes appear quickly and dissappear quickly leaving little opportunity for the much slower silicon pipeline to catch up. The demand for cryptocurrency ASICs in the last mining boom was much higher than the production. Thus even if they could meet demand that would just result in less allocation to gaming hardware.
The reason it has been successful for bitcoin is becuase sha256 utilises only half of the gpu whereas memory hard algorithms like ethash utilise almost all of it. Designing a specialised, power efficient ASIC only matters when the return isn't ludicrous.
During mining bubbles it makes a lot more sense for miners to purchase general hardware to use during the craze and sell afterwards. Until these bubbles aren't as crazy that's not going to dissappear.
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The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…
How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other…
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This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.
Wait, haven’t they been moving since 2018?
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The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…
How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other…