Not all the worlds computers, all the worlds personal computers. That's a big difference.
I got a bit confused think of the set of all the world's computers that didn't include the computers doing bitcoin stuff.
Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only required because of the decentralisation fetish of coiners. Perfectly secure systems exist that don't require this lunacy.
They aren't perfectly secured. They seem secure for two reasons: Try to hack a bank, or exploit credit cards, or even break in a vault, and you'll see what kind of external measures governments and private agencies put into protecting the system (hint: you'll get locked forever, or shot, or worse) Now imagine you succeed, and somehow don't leave any exploitable trail, do you think a story will pop somewhere? I don't.…
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Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#43Now if they would all have been mapping cancer markers and analyzing gravitational wave fluctuations through BOINC ... :( You can only wish..
A huge proportion of the current hashing power is asic miners that are only suitable for coin mining for sha256 type coins.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
ASIC's consume very little power compared to a PC. One watt per gigahash is a rough value, although most promise quite a bit less. You'd need about 100 PC's, at 300W each, to produce a gigahash, using the assumptions in this article.
Ah but that's the unfortunate twist. If you can get a gigahash for 30000W with PCs, you would have no incentive to go down to consuming only 1W with an ASIC. You would consume 30000W with ASICs and get 30000 gigahashes. [EDIT: Corrected the numbers to match what you wrote. It is irrelevant, though -- if you get a gigahash for X watts with PCs, you'll use X watts to get X gigahashes with a 1W/gigahash ASIC.]
...assuming that you have the resources to purchase 30KW worth of ASICs. A 1W ASIC does not cost 1/300th of a 300W PC.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah but that's the unfortunate twist. If you can get a gigahash for 30000W with PCs, you would have no incentive to go down to consuming only 1W with an ASIC. You would consume 30000W with ASICs and get 30000 gigahashes. [EDIT: Corrected the numbers to match what you wrote. It is irrelevant, though -- if you get a gigahash for X watts with PCs, you'll use X watts to get X gigahashes with a 1W/gigahash ASIC.]
...assuming that you have the resources to purchase 30KW worth of ASICs. A 1W ASIC does not cost 1/300th of a 300W PC.
All you are saying is that the transition to 30kW of ASICs will not happen overnight. If you stopped at 1W, you would quickly find that you are making less money than you were before -- your competitors will also switch to ASICs, and will consume more than 1W because they want to make more money.
To put it another way, not going to 30kW of ASICs is equivalent to taking 30kW of PC mining hardware and turning some of it off (in a pre-ASIC world where PCs are the most efficient mining hardware available).
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mining is what makes the bitcoin network secure. The higher the hashrate, the more secure the bitcoin network. As I mentioned in another comment, if you compare the resources required to secure the bitcoin network vs the resources required to secure any other financial networks, it's miniscule.
It's only required because of the decentralisation fetish of coiners. Perfectly secure systems exist that don't require this lunacy.
I would add to that that the only part that requires this proof of work when decentralized is the timestamping. We can have a system where everything is decentralized with a timestamping subsystem (that can also be composed of many computers for a balance of power) that blindly timestamps transaction hashes without even knowing what it is timestamping so that it cannot censor it. This would be a perfectly reasonable system for me and one that would spare that huge cost of electricity burned on proof of work.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Decentralization is needed if you want bitcoin to be censorship-resistant.
Wrong. You can have a central authority that issues money and still have a censorship resistant system -- this is what paper cash is, and this is what is possible with the digital cash systems academic cryptographers have been studying since the 1980s.
Really? So what happens if I shut down the central authority?
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#48What frame rate can I get playing Portal on a bitcoin mining ASIC?
Oh.
Well, I am not impressed then.
Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't perfectly secured. They seem secure for two reasons: Try to hack a bank, or exploit credit cards, or even break in a vault, and you'll see what kind of external measures governments and private agencies put into protecting the system (hint: you'll get locked forever, or shot, or worse) Now imagine you succeed, and somehow don't leave any exploitable trail, do you think a story will pop somewhere? I don't.…
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Re: Bitcoin hash-rate exceeds total computing power of all the world’s computers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to the power Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin mining pools, and Bitcoin developers have over Bitcoin? The supposed decentralization in Bitcoin is theoretical at best; in practice, power is concentrated in a few key places. So really, we could make a better system, one that uses far less power, by just accepting that some things cannot be decentralized and designing a system accordingly.
Right, so because there are emergent power structures of some sort, it's all equivalent and there's nothing actually decentralized about it. I mean, Linux might be "open source", but really Linus is calling the shots, so it's really no different than Windows at the end of the day.
You had said that we should criticize decentralization at our own peril because power in the current finance system is being concentrated on a small set of corporations. The only difference between that and Bitcoin is the scale -- the amount of money involved with Bitcoin is nowhere close to the amount of money that multinational banks are dealing with.
The difference is that with Bitcoin, we are also pouring otherwise useful energy down the drain as part of the security model. The is purely because of a fantasy about an ideal kind of money that requires no central authority. If we were to drop that fantasy and accept the existence of authorities in the system, we could create a digital cash system that:
* Has the same kind of payment security properties as Bitcoin
* Actually allows for anonymous payments
* Supports offline transactions
* Requires many orders of magnitude less power than Bitcoin
Of course, as soon as you say "central authority," the Bitcoin crowd dismisses the idea entirely, regardless of its merits and regardless of the existence of concentrated authority in Bitcoin.