101–110 of 209 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the free market isn't great at finding solutions that incorporate externalities, especially not quickly.
externalities in this case are caused by energy producers, not consumers.
Bitcoin is so inefficient that it is hilarious that people complaining about the environment also buy bitcoin. If you want to buy into crypto at least go for ethereal
Ethereum also uses Proof Of Work mining....
I'm going to address one large difference between ETH PoW and Bitcoin PoW that people rarely talk about, which is the hardware differences.
ETH did something relatively smart and tried to peg the hardware to GPUs. This had the effect of ensuring that there would not be the same speed race wars that (imho) plague Bitcoin. Every new generation of hardware obsoletes the last. You don't need the fastest/latest GPUs to be ROI efficient.
The system isn't perfect, people have made ASICs, but it turns out (for now) that they aren't much more cost/speed efficient than just using GPUs due to the memory hardness of the ethash PoW algo.
As a result, the limited number of GPUs also limits the size of the growth of the network. They are also more difficult to setup and run at scale than Bitcoin ASICs. Finally, GPUs can go back to doing other things (gaming/ai/ml/rendering/...) and generally won't become e-waste.
Idea to solve the crypto energy problem - sell space heaters as dual purpose crypto miners. People need space heaters. They buy them, but they also mine crypto (as a free byproduct of the space heating). The number of crypto mining space heaters out there dilute the value of dedicated mining so much that people don't bother with it anymore. Even buying the space heater to make money from mining crypto doesn't make th…
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I've been there during my urbex days. Frozen conflict zone, not unlike Transnistria, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh. The border is militarized, except the Georgian side which doesn't seem to consider Abkhazia a threat. Lots of abandoned infrastructure because the native Georgian population was killed and/or fleed, and hasn't been harnessed for some reason. Abkhaz cross the border daily to buy basic stuff from Geor…
It's worth noting that the Georgian majority population was ethnically cleansed (with >5000 civilians killed) from Abkhazia by separatists, with full support and encouragement of Russia[0]. The preeminent Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, later responsible for Beslan school siege and other attacks, took part in this war on the Abkhaz side, after being trained for the purpose by the GRU (Russian military intelligence…
How does the network protocol of bitcoin work? Would governments be able to block it? Can it be DDoS-ed?
Governments can regulate at the edge: - regulate electricity consumption - regulate bank accepting crypto-related money - regulate exchanges listing Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies, etc
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I'm in no way supporter of Putins regime and I totally agree that he'll do everything to keep all countries around poor and unstable, but come on. Original war in Abkhazia happened when USSR crashed and it was your usual ethnic conflict. Not some orchestrated hybrid war like in Ukraine, but real civil war. I've been in both Abkhazia and Georgia and people of both countries relise that and count themself the righteous…
Yeah no, that's not quite the full story. Abkhasian regime persists largely due to continued presence of Russian troops. Much of the residual economy in the break-off region revolves around the Russian bases as well. The rest of it is the lowest tier Russian "visa free" tourism, also guaranteed by Russian military presence. Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Ru…
You mean "history" in a sense that the local population would be ethnically cleansed from the Georgian majority and the ones that survive relocated to Russia? And then they would be marked as aggressors because they dared to try protecting themselves with arms, and refused to just disappear from the territory where they have been living for centuries.
Yeah, we saw that many times, and the only criteria that leads to the "correct" conclusion who is right and who is wrong, who is aggressor and who defends himself, who is the victim and who is villain is whether US/NATO or Russian/Other troops are involved on one of the sides.
This is awesome. I just wish more governments would wake up to the fact that crypto does nothing beyond suck resources and warm the planet. If you want to bet on things that go up & down, there is the stock market where things go up and down 20%+ every single day.
We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale" . A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1]. Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT…
This is basically what all life does. Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.
I've thought mining wasn't profitable anymore.
1- https://www.coindesk.com/inside-irans-onslaught-on-bitcoin-m...