Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

righto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 405 posts

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

#201

Post by seibelj »

simias wrote: post #181
bookmarkable wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sickening? Really? Don't you find it interesting that currency free of nation-state regulators would be attacked as anti-environmental? These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious. Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting - they are…

Bitcoin is barely a currency. Its deflationary nature is the main reason it's been somewhat successful so far (because it rewards early adopters) but it's also be its demise (because nobody wants to spend a "currency" today that's by design going to be more valuable tomorrow). Cryptocurrencies is what happens when libertarian techbros try do "disrupt" basic financial systems without taking the time to figure out how…

MakerDAO, Synthetix, Cosmos, Polkadot... all of these are working and did ICOs. Ethereum itself was an ICO. Crypto is wildly successful by any metric.

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

#202

Post by Helloworldboy »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

This environmental concern trolling is so blatantly astroturfed.

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

#203

Post by qeternity »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #192
qeternity wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin. The classic false dichotomy by people peddling crypto. Nobody is keeping their money in a savings account. There are productive investments that aren't crypto.

What asset class has returned value like crypto for the past 10 years? None.

Ok, is Bitcoin a super speculative investment, or a savings account? Now you're just moving goal posts.

Ironically, crypto's returns are all due to Tether...which is purely inflationary printing. USDT is what you'd get with the USD if the Fed were run by actual criminals.

Let's chat in a year.

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

#204

Post by undersuit »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #33

This is somewhat off-topic but I'm going to ask here because it's really hard to find "trusted" information regarding BitCoin and Ethereum mining online - it seems everyone's trying to make a commission or running a scam: Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining? If that's…

A few years back I was mining Monero on 4 pieced together computers in my little 400sqft apartment with electric wall heaters. It's a bad investment to do that in my house with a gas furnace.

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

#205

Post by solosoyokaze »

qeternity wrote: post #203
solosoyokaze wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What asset class has returned value like crypto for the past 10 years? None.

Ok, is Bitcoin a super speculative investment, or a savings account? Now you're just moving goal posts. Ironically, crypto's returns are all due to Tether...which is purely inflationary printing. USDT is what you'd get with the USD if the Fed were run by actual criminals. Let's chat in a year.

It's not that it's a speculative investment, it's that the dollar is continuously plunging in value and taking everything tied to it down too.

BTC (and several other cryptos) are the only safe place to store money in the long term.

> Let's chat in a year.

Indeed. No one who's bet against crypto has come out looking prescient.

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

#206

Post by tomxor »

undersuit wrote: post #187
tomxor wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority. Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there a…

How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and it's not even to protect the users nor would it be effective in the current form as such.

Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)...

It's got to be on a similar playing field right? i wouldn't be surprised if it was a little more than 0.56% globally. But look at how much _billions_ of people get out of it all over the world: entertainment, art, education, something to connect to people with... it has a huge and invaluable impact on society - i dare anyone to try compare that to Bitcoin (not blockchain, not the utopian crypto dream, but Bitcoin).

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

#207

Post by rkagerer »

kens wrote: post #53

Author here; I was surprised to see this on HN today. Let me know if you have any questions!

I remember this article - thanks for sharing, it was fun!

Did you do any practice ones before you recorded it? How many mistakes did you make along the way? :-)

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

#208

Post by nietzsch3 »

K0nserv wrote: post #184
nietzsch3 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global banking system uses and its energy use doesn't scale with adoption

Does that follow? Surely as Bitcoin becomes more and more valuable there's more and more incentive to mine and the more entranched it becomes more important to defend against 51% attacks become. It seems to me that what has happened historically i.e. ever more people starting to mine will continue as long as Bitcoin remains valuable.

Yeah and I simply don't see 51% attacks working or going on for long periods of time due to adoption and game theory. Nation states simply can't afford gain 51% because it would mean they're already losing legitimacy of their currency IMO.

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

#209

Post by fuf7ru44yyruf »

edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Are we done pretending people like you are anything more than the new anti-industrialists yet? If it were up to the green crowd we'd be back to using candles and carrier pigeons.

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

#210

Post by Helloworldboy »

yesenadam wrote: post #191
nietzsch3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again - bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system - bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the blockchain https://www…

> This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again Hi, welcome to HN. Please read the guidelines. Talking like that is nowhere near acceptable here. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fuck you
Post reply on HN