181–190 of 238 posts
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Hash mining asics don’t work well for AI
"don't work well for AI" is a hell of an understatement, the Application they are Specific to is literally just sha256(sha256(x)), what AI are you going to do with that? GP probably didn't mean that hardware though, but rather the facility, electricity supply, cooling, etc.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.
How does this work? I read the wikipedia article but I don't understand how Lightning enforces the transaction.
The headline is dramatic but this is literally how bitcoin is designed to work. Miners leave, difficulty drops, costs go down, mining becomes profitable again. The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market.
It is how bitcoin is designed to work, but it also shows very directly how proof-of-work systems can never scale to be the global monetary replacement its boosters push. If the opposite happened, and the price for some reason sky rocketed to, say, $1 million per bitcoin, it would necessarily mean that it would induce more miners until the difficulty and consequent electricity cost (regardless of the efficiency in ele…
Adoption doesn't necessarily correlate completely with price. Price can increase without much adoption, due to speculation. In theory, adoption could also increase without much price increase.
Electricity isn't the only requirement for mining. Hardware is also required. Miners can't simply use lots of additional electricity if the hardware isn't there. Yes, new hardware can be manufactured, but it takes time.
The block reward decreases over time. If it's using Europe levels of electricity at time X, then after a block reward decrease, it'll use Europe/2 amount of electricity. This decreasing also disincentivizes manufacturing new hardware.
Miners can have different efficiencies, due to different types of hardware, and different types of electricity generation. So while the least efficient miner will be operating at near breakeven, the most efficient miner will be making much more profit. So while the least efficient miner will use $1M of electricity to mine a $1M coin, the most efficient miner will use less dollars of electricity.
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Isn't this kind of the opposite? Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too. Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at n…
Or we could use all that "free solar energy" to benefit humanity through a million other more useful endeavors. Such as developing and deploying batteries. One thing we do not lack is demand for more energy.
Please tell me where I can get unlimited solar panels for free. I'll rent a truck and be there straight away.
> One thing we do not lack is demand for more energy.
Market demand is the willingness and ability to pay money for something. If the demand was actually unlimited then why isn't there either a Dyson sphere around the sun already or a 0% unemployment rate from everyone having a job building one?
It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.
Lightning has mostly done this by being a lot more centralized in practice and one could argue... What's the point of it all in this case? Why not just use regular currency?
The point is that it is resistant to censorship, it is pseudonymous, and so on (all the other bitcoin attributes apply)
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I think they mean serving inference workloads
How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.
The headline is dramatic but this is literally how bitcoin is designed to work. Miners leave, difficulty drops, costs go down, mining becomes profitable again. The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.
Lightning has mostly done this by being a lot more centralized in practice and one could argue... What's the point of it all in this case? Why not just use regular currency?
> What's the point of it all in this case?
Lightning is an L2 protocol, highly scalable and used for low cost payment in Bitcoin. Level 1 networks are almost never used for user transactions: your credit card payments do not go over fedwire, etc. Bitcoin protocol is not scalable to serve worldwide money transfer needs; Lightning is. And with the cost of a penny per transaction or so.
> Why not just use regular currency?
There are a lot of frictions in the current banking systems, because money laundering, because drugs, because whatever. Getting $5-$10k in regular currency while on an overseas trip can be a major quest. With Lightning I can transfer that much (or more) in a few mouse clicks.
As a side note, I think the federales are already way too nosy regarding my use of my own money, so I want to give alternative options as much business as I can. My 2c.
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Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute. Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.