291–300 of 397 posts
This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple 24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.
I wonder why they are submerging these instead of just making them a floating barge. I can't imagine submersion is significantly better for cooling, the energy density very likely already requires a circulating water system, and the added issues dealing with the pressure at depth seem risky. Possibly there is a benefit not related to cooling. Perhaps weather/waves? Things are probably alot calmer 30ft below the surfa…
HDD spindles????
Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive on a boat or barge in the open water would experience.
I can imagine that would create additional wear and tear and contribute to an increased failure rate.
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Until it IS in a block. Then, like the storage cost of gold or any "real" material, the energy expenditure for maintenance is negligible. In fact, considering the storage requirements of something like bullion I'd argue the maintenance costs are considerably lower.
Yes any given transaction is valid once it is in a block but without continuous mining it's still worthless because it cannot be spent without a new block being mined. And since mining has to be pretty continuous or the whole thing becomes unusable because of loooong processing times the maintenance of the whole network kind of becomes maintenance of the transactions. Even lightning would only last for a while withou…
Also mining doesn't have to be continuious, it's reward varies with volume to adjust the rate mined so you only wait a looong time if suddenly transaction volume spikes.
> It will not be possible to repair the computers if they fail This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple 24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.
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Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.
Physical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each oz. of gold.
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They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?
Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.
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At this point, we know that Bitcoin doesn't scale to handle the volume of transactions needed for a global digital currency. Ultimately, if you own Bitcoin in hopes of the value going up, it will only go up if someone is willing to pay more for it. There's no other utilitarian use of it. This means that Bitcoin is a 0-sum game*, and a tremendous waste of resources. At least with gold mining we end up with a material…
> we know Bitcoin doesn’t scale to handle the volume of transactions needed No longer true. I used to believe this as well, but I’ve been blown away by the work from Lightning Network [1]. Subsecond transactions that happen off the Bitcoin blockchain, scales beautifully. [1] http://lightning.network
What happens in a large body of water (ocean etc) when an electric shock accidentally slips out or a live electric cable is cut? Is it similar to an underwater grenade going off, affecting a large area, or is it not a worry?
If that power cable would be completely cut, the electricity would spark from one of the pole of the cable to the other, until some breaker shuts the thing off.
Even at great energy, the impact would be minimal.
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> "Having easy access to energy" Life needs an energy gradient . In this case, direct access to colder water. No organism (or machine) can use the heat energy of its environment if it has no access to a colder medium. Edit: I just saw that Retric explained it better ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245948 ).
Where is this confusion coming from? Are you suggesting there won't be colder water around the data centre? Or just nitpicking for the sake of it? It looks like my original comment hit some HN ideological hot spot (unintentionally), but it's entirely uncontroversial scientifically.
If a fish is swimming in 24°C water, it can't simultaneously be swimming in 19°C water. Maybe its friend 10 meters away is swimming in 19°C water, but that doesn't help the first fish.
Maybe that fish feels more comfortable in 24°C water, because it needs a certain body temperature to keep its internal processes running (i.e., to not freeze to death), but it cannot harvest energy from the 24°C water, which is what you claimed above. I'm not nitpicking, this is one of the most fundamental and important laws of physics.
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Yes any given transaction is valid once it is in a block but without continuous mining it's still worthless because it cannot be spent without a new block being mined. And since mining has to be pretty continuous or the whole thing becomes unusable because of loooong processing times the maintenance of the whole network kind of becomes maintenance of the transactions. Even lightning would only last for a while withou…
You're assuming gold / physicalvaluestores can be spent without shipping cost and exchange fees and that the volume traded reaches 0 in your comparison. Is the volume of any valuestore ever 0? Also mining doesn't have to be continuious, it's reward varies with volume to adjust the rate mined so you only wait a looong time if suddenly transaction volume spikes.
That's why gold isn't a currency there are definite transaction costs but the whole of the costs of transporting gold spent isn't required for my gold to be spent. With BTC the whole network supports all transactions and all transactions require the mining network for validation.
> mining doesn't have to be continuious, it's reward varies with volume to adjust the rate mined so you only wait a looong time if suddenly transaction volume spikes.
Mining has to continue as a whole though is what I'm meaning. Because it has not physical value and no ability to transfer without active mining the utility and value of BTC is inherently tied to the act of mining. There's also a hard minimum of active mining where the network remains secure against 51%/double spending attacks.