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ok, now i see the ASIC story in the comments, that kinda helps this have some sense, provided we skip over the part of the text that says "if we estimate"...
but, i guess since i clicked, i loose.
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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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20k buys you 40t of rice a year on the current marker. How many people do you need on an exploitation to produce 40t/year? 3? 5? 10?
There's your number. With a year's work (doing the exact same thing), you can buy several people's yearly production. The reason for that are currencies.
Without them things would equalize over time (it's happening in EU right now, though only internally). It's a long and bumpy process, but eventually it removes the ability from a country to drain another for next to nothing.
Edit: deleted post said there was evidence a uniform supply pricing was actually bad for poor countries
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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?
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.105...
In other words, you can set things up so that no single authority can fail in a way that would cause the entire system to fail. You can have N authorities such that a minimum of K are needed to keep the system working.
Breaking news : a single caterpillar excavator has more excavating power than all the toy shovels in the world together. I still find the approach of the article interesting, but what would be relevant is to compare the power consumption of the bitcoins miners compared to the power consumption of all the personal computers in the world.
but this is ridiculous. Personal computers are 3 ghz * 2-4 cores * a billion devices.[1] It is huge!
That's why we can work at layers that are 10 layers above what we're actually doing. Such as a style sheet interpreted by a browser.
Try dropping down to C sometime. These machines are not toys.
[1] random lazy link: http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-computers-are-there-in-...
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Seeing as lots of that hashing power probably comes from ASICs and FPGAs, if anything it's more of a waste of Silicon that computing power, as without Bitcoin there probably isn't much use for all that hashing power...
It is a waste of electrical power.
This is not at all surprising. A lot of the machines on the Bitcoin network are ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Chip), which are extremely good at doing one thing: calculating SHA256(SHA256(x)). You can't use them for anything else, so it's a little unfair to compare them to personal computers. Nitpicks aside, though, the Bitcoin network's hashrate is mindblowing.
Very worrying. The environmental impacts of Bitcoin are absolutely horrendous.
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.
I don't think we'll get to a point where BTC has a significant footprint anytime soon.
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How much energy, resources, etc are required to sustain cash and credit card transactions? Think of all those banks, skyscrapers, ATMs, computers, money printing machines. All of those things exist to power the security of the modern financial industry. If bitcoin powers the post-modern financial industry, the resource savings will be enormous.
And yet the actual functionality of Bitcoin - a simple ledger - could be implemented using much less resources than are used to maintain the Bitcoin network. It's curious, isn't it?
how very scientific
What frame rate can I get playing Portal on a bitcoin mining ASIC? Oh. Well, I am not impressed then.