591–600 of 762 posts
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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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> and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide. As I've said elsewhere: doing one transaction on bitcoin uses approximately the amount of electrical power that an average US household uses in 2 weeks.
I'm not buying that for a second, unless that calculation includes the power it took to mine the coin in the first place (which is not consumed by the transaction any more than cash changing hands consumes cloth and ink).
About 700 KwH, far as I can tell. (Based on 76.87 terawatt hours annually in 2020, as an estimate for bitcoin). A house uses ~1000/month, ballpark.
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You do realize there is a global chip shortage right now? It’s not as easy as clicking a button in ec2 to suddenly make more gpus.
Sounds like a good opportunity for the US to significantly expand its domestic chap manufacturing industry. I don't care if the lag time is 5 years or more before the first chip rolls off the production lines - because I don't anticipate demand for chips will significantly reduce in the future.
Development of domestic chip manufacturing might even start to become a national security concern, leading to even more money flowing in on top of the money coming from crypto miners.
I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…
Besides, a Syrian refugees who can manage to get their liquid assets into a digital store like bitcoin could probably alsoamage to get them into a commodities account and buy gold. Bitcoin isn't the only way, or even most convenient way, of moving assets across borders.
Anyway, seems easier for them to obtain crypto than getting a commodities account and buying gold, since presumably one would have to deal with KYC/AML in that case, and one can continue to use crypto as a currency within the country (though I doubt Bitcoin, since the transaction fees probably amount to more than a typical Venezuelan earns in a month).
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It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for double the price I originally bought it from the same retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.
When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700 plus shipping. It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trou…
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Okay, does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Then it's an apples to oranges comparison isn't it...? By the same logic, trucks are useless and inefficient because my moped burns 1/100th of the fuel per km. > This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to r…
> does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Ok, I’ll bite. No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for? The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies. Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits. Any regime with a banking sys…
Ownership. It's the difference between "I own 20 quatloos because the Bank of Endor says so" vs. "I own 20 quatloos". It supports actual ownership instead of representative or proxy ownership.
In the same way that you can have $20 in the bank or $20 in your wallet. When it's in your wallet, it's actually yours and you own it. When it's in your bank account, then you don't actually own it, you must trust that your bank will do the right thing and give it back to you when you ask for it. That level of trust has been wavering for decades.
Remember that Bitcoin was started as a rebellion against the "second bailout for banks".
I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…
Not yet, but don't presume current economical status quo is working flawlessly. The current monetary system is kind of a joke, it no longer is backed by gold, in fact it's not backed by anything. So if you think about it for more than a minute why should it be that currency in the US should have any value? Creating an alternate store of value that is not just printed or made up and can be proven to exist at the very least provides something not too dissimilar to a database backup in case of a complete meltdown of fiat currency. It, however, does need to be allowed to get sufficiently big for a future restore to work. That is worth a bit of electricity. Yes, a bit, as a percentage of the GDP.
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If you can't see the practical utility of cryptocurrency in 2021, you're being willfully ignorant. If you actually believe what you're saying, then short it[1]. If you really think that the practical value is non-existent, then put your money where your mouth is, and take out a short. This isn't some academic theory where the best you can do is throw tomatoes at it, and ridicule it from a distance. This is an economi…
Nothing you said addresses the core and critical issue that Bitcoin and most blockchain currencies have terrible limitations on transaction-per-second, and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide. And thinking that bitcoin is a terrible idea is not the same as thinking you can predict its market value. When something is as volatile as bitcoin, shorting it is almost as bad as go…
PoW is also the most efficient way to do what Bitcoin is doing. Attempts to displace PoW have all failed, because the required trade-offs are always too high, and detract from the value of the network.
If you can figure out a fair way to seed value on a network that doesn't require burning energy, then please let the people know, and your new magic cryptocurrency will dominate the crypto-ecosystem overnight. No one would love that more than me. I could talk for hours about the various ideas people have had in the past, and why they failed, but I don't think this is the right place for that rant.
It's also important to recognize that there isn't a single watt of PoW power that's wasted. The power utilized reflects exactly amount of value that Bitcoin is providing to the world. Satoshi also made the mining rewards get cut in half every 4 years, so the value to power usage ratio gets better and better over time.
I could also go on about how mining facilities overwhelmingly are using excess power produced almost entirely from clean power sources. If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, there are so many serious offenders that are massively more wasteful.
Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…
Because it makes so much sense to dedicate equal or if not vastly greater resources to playing games?
I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…
The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…