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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#391

Post by Siira »

berdario wrote: post #375
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.

The nonce used as input of the mining hash function IS random (or rather, arbitrary). Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet

You’re just deflecting. Your argument is as invalid as “mutations are random so evolution is false.” Randomness in an algorithm does not mean the algorithm is non-converging.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#393

Post by Siira »

UncleMeat wrote: post #370
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.

What if we had 1000x the power being used to confirm transactions? 1,000,000x the power? At some point we aren't achieving anything. The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.

Yes, alternatives that work for rich, powerful people.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#394

Post by mountainriver »

roenxi wrote: post #359
arcticbull wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 1…

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…

Bitcoins wild fluctuations based on speculation would say it’s not a safe place to store value over time

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#395

Post by ekianjo »

bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

> I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere.

Then by all means lets ban video games which are an extreme waste of electricity polluting the atmosphere for no good reason.

You see how this reasonning can go?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#396

Post by Siira »

ziml77 wrote: post #386
jstanley wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if energy were priced correctly ... would BTC become higher in value? ... If energy were to become more expensive, the growth in supply would slow. It doesn't work like that. The consensus algorithm targets 1 block mined every 10 minutes. If the amount of energy expended goes up (i.e. blocks are mined more frequently) then the difficulty increases to counteract it. If the rate of block production decreases, then th…

And this is exactly the problem with Bitcoin. Adding more computational power to the network changes absolutely nothing in terms of the amount of mining completed per unit time. Instead it just shuffles around the chances of being the one to succeed at a block. This is something that I'm not sure many people actually understand. Because in the physical world, increasing your energy input into mining will result in mo…

It directly increases the difficulty of doing a 51% attack.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#397

Post by certifiedloud »

idnefju wrote: post #325
utf_8x wrote: post #324

I'm starting to hope that crypto is a bubble and will burst soon... Massive environmental issues aside, I'd like to be able to buy a GPU at MSRP sometime in the next 5 years...

Isn’t just miners, car industry fucked it as well

What car companies are buying GPUs in large quantities?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#398

Post by throwaway939321 »

ekianjo wrote: post #395
bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

> I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Then by all means lets ban video games which are an extreme waste of electricity polluting the atmosphere for no good reason. You see how this reasonning can go?

Video games don't produce any electricity. The idea is to disincentive electricity production.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#399

Post by sunsipples »

I enjoy the "bitcoin is a fuck you to the rich" but mining/management/use of bitcoin/crypto are not for poor people or even poor countries, they use both as a resource and as a get rich quick scheme, deliver a lot interest but have no actual value beyond a half billion dollar pizza.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#400

Post by webinvest »

malka wrote: post #381
roenxi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…

"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.

One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation.

It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).

It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap.

Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.

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