One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

Post by jandrese » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

lalaland1125 wrote: post #149

blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks). The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their…

Post by jVinc » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

mygo wrote: post #199

jiggunjer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could structure it such that a single PoW is useless, yet multiple aren't? Like pieces of a puzzle that only make sense once you collect many of them.

Like McDonald’s monopoly tokens? Won’t a market simply develop where people can buy / sell / exchange tokens?

Post by aphextron » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #77

guardiangod wrote: post #2

From the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm min…

How long do you think it takes them to amortize them?

Post by throwaway13632 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

mvindahl wrote: post #216

blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

I think that as the value of bitcoin decreases, a lot of the mining will stop for want of profitability. Right now it's still Klondyke days and everybody is out there with his pickaxe. In a few months, slightly used pickaxes, or in this case GPUs, will be cheap and plentiful. It's stupid while it lasts bit fortunately it won't. Bitcoin has no practical utility, neither as currency nor as a store of value, and you can…

Post by ric2b » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #172

lalaland1125 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks). The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their…

> The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. So you spend $x on (compute time + electricity) to mine a useful PoW worth $…