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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 biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap
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There are cash settled futures there are closer to options in that they’re purely financial, but even those don’t have optionality at maturity. Generally a dangerous thing to have as synonyms regardless, otherwise you end up with a coal barge in the east river https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery
Remembering: WTF was quite popular 20 years ago! :) Regarding this story: I guess for most private participants, physical delivery is not possible/excluded
It just happened today: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1siq4m2/any...
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"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.
Why double sha256?
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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?
Sorry, I do not understand your comment. Can you clarify. What does "a lot more centralized in practice" mean? > 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 tran…
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Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.
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…
Most significantly that the increased demand due to mining will result in grid operators investing in proportional new capacity to offset it over a reasonable time scale. Instead of just driving up prices due to basic supply/demand.
Also that miners are only consuming electricity when renewables dominate the mix. Otherwise they're responsible for more CO2 emissions to do something useless.
Plus in markets like Texas, miners also manage to get subsidies intended for actually useful customers like factories to go offline at peak times. So ratepayers are essentially paying protection money so they won't over stress the grid by performing their useless work.
In a world where bitcoin miners had to install new solar capacity to entirely offset their peak usage and sell back to the grid any excess then sure, seems like that wouldn't be a big societal net negative like it is right now.
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This only works when the difficult drop rates are below miner leaving rates. Which in normal times, are something taken for granted, but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system. edit: the earlier language is not exact, the scenario is an exponential drop of value that results in exponential drop in miner willing to mine until this discrepancy can be resolved. i.e. the system is not protected aga…
> below miner leaving rates. What does this mean, sorry? > the edge case collapse the entire system. If you mean that if it reaches a certain point, the entire system will collapse, it means you don't understand the difficulty adjustment. If it's too expensive to mine, then some miners leave, which makes blocktimes be longer, but not to worry because the consequence of that it just that difficulty will go down, which…
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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.
Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.
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It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel of oil, find the next ounce of gold, or harvest the next acre of a certain crop; exceed the reward. When that happens, wells are shut down, mining operations suspended, and differ…
The difference is that the quantity of what is being supplied is a factor with supply of oil/gold/grain/etc. For mining it is just necessary that it happens. The amount of work in mining is way higher than is required to prevent another party from being able to overwhelm the Blockchain. It is that high because of the subsidy of the mining reward means if Bitcoin has a high value the reward is worth a lot. This is fac…
Isn’t that exactly the point? Bitcoin incentivized wasting resources. It is, according to your own comment, unnecessary to use so much computing to keep bitcoin going. But it’s being used.