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Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#321

Post by beiller »

8note wrote: post #311
mschuster91 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

Inefficiently though. Electric heaters are only 100% efficient at turning electricity to heat. We can do a lot better than that

I know that in theory a heat pump can do better, but in cold enough climate it can't because one side collects condensation and freezes making it less than 100% efficient. So no, we can't do better.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#322

Post by nscalf »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #85
oefrha wrote: post #72

A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

To call out one I heard about recently, Chia is doing proof of space and time. Computationally heavy to set up a “plot”, like 6-8 hours of work. Then virtually zero overhead unless you’re chosen as a “winner”.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#323

Post by foepys »

herbst wrote: post #192
NicoJuicy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reminder that bitcoin is mined by 51% chinese miners and that it's not that decentralized, obviously.

A reminder that blockchain is public and 51% attacks would be visible.

Assuming there is a detected 51% attack, what would be done against this? Spinning up more nodes to counter attack is not an incentive for other "good" (whatever this means) miners because keeping unused mining capacity at hand is equal to losing money.

Detection is worthless without applying counter measures.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#324

Post by lofi_lory »

wyager wrote: post #314
lofi_lory wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you?

Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut.

Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitcoin works against our future?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#325

Post by danans »

jcranmer wrote: post #282
arthurcolle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share your sources? Naturally, a summation of the energy expenditure of all of the related components of the existing fiat system must be included, from the totality of all people operating the various functions that facilitate the existing fiat system; i.e. their commutes, aggregate expenditures due to needing to operate physical banks, power usage at these physical banks, etc. are all factored into this cal…

I've done this before. No, I'm not going to share my sources because a) I haven't saved the exact ones I found before and b) whatever I include, you're always going to criticize me for not including yet more calculations in my side of the ledger. But the answer is going to come out the same anyways: Bitcoin uses orders of magnitude energy more than traditional currency. Take a simple thought experiment. Someone makes…

> The loan shark driving to bust someone's kneecaps for not paying back loans on time would still be doing exactly the same thing.

Tangential thought...

I might be mistaken, but how can one even collect on defaulted debt denominated in BTC? I thought that the BTC owner still has to transfer BTC themselves, since only they would know the private keys.

Wouldn't the collector literally have to physically threaten the individual to transfer the BTC back, since it's not like they can get a court to order the bank to do it.

I know that ETH supports smart contracts that could in theory automate the terms of the loan, but then what happens if the debtor goes bankrupt?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#326

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

New_California wrote: post #290
tomxor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are fiat currencies cheaper, they are also useful... Bitcoin is no longer a practical currency, so comparisons to fiat currencies are pointless.

Bitcoin is very practical for me. I use it primarily to protect my savings, but also to send anonymous donations to causes I support.

>I use it primarily to protect my savings

You must be living under a rock then, because bitcoin just had a sizable correction last night. Sounds too volitile to protect any savings.

>also to send anonymous donations to causes I support.

Nope. The ledger is public and your transactions can be seen on it basically forever and, with some sleuthing of the ledger by interested parties, you could be deanonymized.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#327

Post by exdsq »

New_California wrote: post #315
exdsq wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other blockchains using proof-of-stake over proof-of-work are not ‘relatively easy to mutate’ for any definition of easy. Can you point a single occurrence of this happening on a top 30 market cap PoS crypto, such as Cardano, Tezos, or Algorand?

Very many examples. EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi... Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu... Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork. So…

I said that PoS isn't much easier to mutate than PoW. EOS isn't really decentralised so it's not a fair comparison to other PoS chains and the other two are PoW just like Bitcoin.

On a side note my colleagues are working on improving ETC against 51% attacks at the moment so hopefully that works out. Definitely wouldn't refer to Ethereum as a 'shitcoin'.

https://static.iohk.io/docs/etc/ecip-comparison-for-51-attac...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#328

Post by dehrmann »

derefr wrote: post #259
papito wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments that are actually tech savvy will realize that the cons of an uncontrollable, non-taxable currency are absolutely epic.

But it is individuals, not governments, who mine Bitcoin. In fact, the people who mine Bitcoin don’t like governments very much, and wouldn’t cooperate with a government-imposed Sybil attack that would devalue their state-independent store of wealth, any more than they would cooperate with said government going to war with a country they’ve exported all their investments to. Such people would actively seek to use the…

> But it is individuals, not governments, who mine Bitcoin.

Bitcoin mining has outgrown this stage. It's more like companies, now.

> the people who mine Bitcoin don’t like governments very much, and wouldn’t cooperate with a government-imposed Sybil attack...

Early Bitcoin proponents don't like governments much. Chinese miners are another story. They see a business opportunity and have no interest in losing social credit points or, worse, going to a labor camp.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#329

Post by argvargc »

runeks wrote: post #200
argvargc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XRP and Stellar were the pioneers in this regard. Since about 2013 and 2014 respectively (or thereabouts). Such systems have negligible energy usage. In general, anything using some flavour of Byzantine Fault Tolerance - of which there are a few - as a method of consensus, consumes very little energy for the payback. If appropriately deployed (similar issue to PoW, decentralisation needs to be maintained) BFT-type co…

XRP is not an alternative to Bitcoin; it's a proposed alternative to SWIFT.

XRP is whatever any holder wants it to be. If users hold it as a store of value instead of Bitcoin, your strange opinions have absolutely no dominion over that.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#330

Post by nostromo »

jabbany wrote: post #94
dehrmann wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking too small on the impact--China doesn't need to double spend bitcoins. What they could do is cause a loss of confidence in Bitcoin overnight and collapse the price.

How is that even remotely strategically good for China......? These miners are probably making USD or some other foreign fiat at the end of the day which adds to the supply of foreign reserves without needing to use trade... And if they're siphoning power to get around currency exchange limits moving wealth abroad then a traditional crackdown to confiscate their equipment would be much more effective (you can't exact…

China still has capital controls.

Bitcoin gets around those - which is why it’s popular there, and also why I think it’s likely China will ban Bitcoin at some point.

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