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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

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Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#141
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the racism baked into that comment, smart people in China probably have more job opportunities than ever, with greater opportunity for wealth creation. China has one of the hottest tech industries in the world: Tencent and Alibaba each have market caps above $450B USD, and Baidu, JD, and NetEase are all in the $50-80B range. All these companies are rapidly growing. Not to mention the booming startup ecosyste…

Labor is cheap in China. It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature.

This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't be racist". No, technically they can't be, but if your conclusion you're drawing is that certain ethnicities are just genetically more criminal, you're handling the facts in a racist (and very incorrect) way (not implying in any way that you think like that).

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.

All it takes is a single trade at a $100M valuation and, for that nanosecond, that's the value of Bitcoin.

Yes but no one really considers that to be the market price.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#144
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is cheap in China. It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations. That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature. This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't…

Interesting discussion. So when is it in your opinion allowed to draw conclusions based on personal attributes, e.g. when is something not discriminating.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#145
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 1 BTC but I lost the wallet. So that's one less BTC in circulation. (Literally, it is impossible for that BTC to circulate).

I'm in the same boat. CPU-mined somewhere between 1.5 and 2 BTC back in 2010 or 2011, and lost the wallet years ago. I wonder how much BTC has been lost to similar mistakes, but I guess there's no way to know or even estimate, right?

I managed to loose ~53 BTC too. I'm pretty sure a large percentage of bitcoin is gone forever.

https://www.google.no/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/11/25...

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#146
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is cheap in China. It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations. That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature. This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't…

If we consider stating facts without context needed to truly understand them as being equal on level of wrongness with something like discrimination, I think we should consider exactly how many people use such poorly informed facts. Gun crime facts, wage gap facts, just about any psychology paper cited ignores the limitations of the study (which likely has very few if any replications with different populations). Even medical research if filled with poorly stated facts that drop a lot of the details needed to understand the actual study done.

Given that stating facts without full context is the norm, attributing one specific case to racism seems hard to justify.

For a red delicious apples to granny smith apples comparison, look at the treatment of, framing of, and treatment of framing of crime facts based on race verses crime stats based on sex.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#147
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is cheap in China. It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.

>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations. That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature. This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't…

> That is not as true as it sounds at first glance.

No. It is exactly as true as it sounds.

The conclusions one draws from facts are whatever they are. But the facts themselves are not racist, and it is not racist to say things that are factually correct. Ever. Full stop.

Also it’s ok to be white. Saying that it’s ok to be white is not racist.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#148
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the most theoretical sense. Since there is no underlying asset, you are going to run out of buyers real fast at that amount.

If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying. Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.

To support your argument, according to this[0] the largest recent transaction about 3 hours ago was almost 25 million USD. 5 other transactions also exceeded 1 million USD in the last hour or so.

[0]: https://blockchain.info/largest-recent-transactions

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#149

I think this solves our problem: Ban hardware/software based mining. Reduce the number of 0's we're looking for. UBI is born.

Someone should ICO with a paper-only crypto currency. The confirmations wait is gonna be a killer though. Maybe UPS should be launching this?

Well, assuming we can somehow prevent someone from cheating and writing code to solve the problems, the confirmation wait shouldn't be any worse if people are working in pools to solve the problems and submitting found answers in an online form. If 4000 people are working for their UBI in pools the confirmations should be roughly as fast as they are today.

Again the problem would be to create challenges that "can't be computed" but can be verified with a software.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as shown in the second image in the article where the successful hash starts with sixteen hexadecimal zeros.

I'm still not following can you break it down?

The hash is a cryptographically random number. For it to be successful, it must start with seventeen zeros (base 16). The chance of a random number starting like that is 1 in 16^17, which is about equal to 1 in 3 x 10^20.

I can't reproduce the calculation from the article that got 1.4 x 10^20. But it does say "approximately 17 zeros" so maybe it really meant "the first 16 hex digits must be zero and the 17th must be either zero or one". That would give close to the right numbers, if I haven't messed up.

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