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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#181

Post by owlmirror »

codemac wrote: post #170
alexasmyths wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour exerceted in its production" This is one of the most problematic statements ever made in Econ. The 'value' of a product is different for everyone, and it's what you (or anyone else) will pay for it. The idea that 'work = value' is one of the most distortionary ideas in business, even today. Just had a discussion today about pricing a product, and it was de…

Exactly, which is why Marx uses the concept of a labor value, use value, and exchange value. Labor is what's gone in, use is the inherent/intrinsic value in the object, and exchange value is what people will trade in exchange for it. That's a bad summary, and there's a lot more to the dialectic examination of them. Reading Capital (along with David Harvey's lectures) is worth it if you find these things interesting,…

It still ignores scarcity and arbitrarily picks one specific limiting resource in the production process as essential. Labor theory of value might be interesting from a philosophical standpoint but really has no practical application when it comes to understanding the market. And it introduces a major can of worms when it presumes stuff like intrinsic value.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#182

Post by rspeer »

simplify wrote: post #72
txcwpalpha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin's total value being 2 trillion dollars is not the same thing whatsoever as bitcoin being responsible for 2 trillion dollars of GDP. There is no "merit" here. We can have $2 trillion in GDP with paper money, too, and that uses 0% of the world's power.

To be fair, paper money requires banks & bank employees, bullet-proof transportation trucks, government regulation, anti-counterfeit research & technology, and perhaps more.

Whataboutism is a form of propaganda, not of fairness.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#183

Post by awch »

craigc wrote: post #80
mandelliant wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage based blockchains don't use storage space as a means of verification- they're storage product focused (you buy/rent/use/sell storage space on the platform as a commodity). That's not what Chia does; it seems like its primary use will be store of value/transactions like Bitcoin. It's the "green" alternative to BTC- I wouldn't call Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc. competitors to Bitcoin (and I don't thi…

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense. When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens. Curious to read about and see how that works

See the 'how it works' section for a brief description of Burstcoin's proof-of-capacity mechanism [1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#184

Post by krageon »

carussell wrote: post #172
colordrops wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

straw man. I was responding to the statement that the computation is doing nothing, and not arguing one way or another that the energy used is reasonable for the benefits gained.

Try responding to the most charitable interpretation of others' comments. It's clear that nerdponx is referring to the same thing that jsmthrowaway went into greater detail about. Try this as a habit: If in response to something someone else has said, you find yourself thinking, "That would be ridiculous! Who would think that?", then follow up by answering your own question: "That would be ridiculous, so the person I…

While I grant that you may be correct in this case, this isn't a tenable position to take in general. An overwhelming amount of people do believe patently ridiculous things, and frequently talks about them as if they make sense.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#185

Post by alkonaut »

durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

> how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure?

Something approaching zero joules per transaction seems like the number to try to achieve.

There is also a chicken and egg problem: if Bitcoin was actually to be used for normal day to day financial activities then it could be more excused (as you say, financial transactoins don't come for free today). But as long as it's basically a ponzi scheme of processor farms and the transactions used are basically either illegal or speculative - then it doesn't provide the same vale that "existing financial infrastructure" does. So while I do think there may be a future for cryptocurrencies , I certainly don't hope Bitcoin (or any PoW currency) is it. And to be honest I'm not optimistic about the idea of "anonymous" money.

> We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power.

That's great. And we need to speed that up. And while we are making progress, we are suddenly eating a lot of that progress by computing hashes for a currency used mainly for speculation. I think it's a cool concept but it must be one of the stupidest things humans have done in recent years.

Once we do have cheap clean energy I'm all for using it for whatever. But right now we keep adding demand for energy (which then includes dirty energy prices also go up, which means it's economical to keep running coal plants a while longer, and so on).

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#186

Post by Grangar »

legohead wrote: post #122
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

When there are no more bitcoins to mine, will the power consumption drastically fall? There will be fees to mine, but I can't imagine everyone is going to be fighting that much on fees, but I don't really know..

As difficulty rises bitcoin payouts will decrease asymptotically. The idea is to let the market do its work and have the price make up for it.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#187

Post by tom_mellior »

xelxebar wrote: post #132
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles. AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs? I feel like China probably…

For many people it's fatalities, yes. For others like me, it's about not leaving nuclear waste around for many thousands of years. That is, "factoring in secondary and tertiary costs", including ones not necessarily expressed in today's dollars.

The world would be all over a nuclear fuel cycle that doesn't produce waste that needs very-long-term storage.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#189

Post by Marazan »

xelxebar wrote: post #132
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles. AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs? I feel like China probably…

If this was 15 years ago I'd be saying "Nuclear, hell yeah".

But in the last 15 years solar prices have come way the heck down. And are going to go down even further in the coming 15 years. Everyone will get solar panels, they will be just that cheap.

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