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

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

#291

Post by willbudd »

vinger wrote: post #197
jki275 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.

They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.

Whether or not you can pay/receive currency anonymously has nothing to do with whether or not you can contribute source code and/or whitepapers anonymously.

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

#292

Post by hulahoof »

Nition wrote: post #273
willbudd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin? We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much pow…

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been.

Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

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

#293

Post by BillinghamJ »

Natfan wrote: post #271
bobviolier wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

To clarify, that's fifty one thousand, correct? Some countries use a period (.) as their "digit group separator"[0], and others use a comma (,). [0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/110693

I generally work on the assumption that if it's being used to separate three digit separation, it's a thousand separator. If only two digits and it's a currency with cents, probably a decimal separator.

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

#294

Post by vokep »

SamBam wrote: post #165
nietzsch3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have us use the bad system that uses more energy or the better system that uses less energy?

...which is which? Since the global financial system clearly uses much, much less energy per person, I'm guessing that you're also calling it the "better system?" Or are you pretending that if BitCoin were used by every person on Earth that it would still be using the exact same energy?

Bitcoin's energy usage is not correlated with volume of use. The energy usage is correlated with the expected value of newly minted coins. When you think you can get $2 of "mined" currency for every $1 of power, you wont think twice about wasting lots of power on it. When you only expect $1.01 for every $1 spent mining, you'll give up. It self regulates. The current wild case of so much energy being spent on it is due to the value rising quickly over time and expected to rise further. When the overall expectation for the future of bitcoin is that it will plateau or only very slowly climb further, lots of miners will drop out and the energy usage will plummet to an easily justifiable level.

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

#295

Post by akra »

willbudd wrote: post #92
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.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

As one of the clueless novices on this topic what I fail to understand is that proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms have been available for alt-coins now for a little while - yet BTC is still dominant. Is it just because of popularity of BTC? If so I struggle to understand how the market is rational here (not saying it has to be). And do other coins/forks issued with similar rules/characteristics cause a price decrease in BTC due to fungibility? The confusion you speak of may come because people see BTC as the successful coin and see other alternatives may have weaknesses that "are priced in". As a novice, because I assume there's no free lunch, other currencies not using PoW could have weaknesses that BTC does not have hence the price. For better or worse the most successful coin determines what people see as the successful approach to crypto at the time.

To your point I've also seen that some coins may still prefer PoW, and may have mitigated many of the disadvantages of it (e.g. made it harder to centralise mining).

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

#296

Post by Nition »

hulahoof wrote: post #292
Nition wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin? We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much pow…

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been. Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like:

* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.

* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.

And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

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

#297

Post by intotheabyss »

Nition wrote: post #296
hulahoof wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been. Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like: * User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity. * User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity. And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum attack exploits. I'm bullish on cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) but bearish long-term on Bitcoin. However, one thing Bitcoin is used for currently is as a decentralized collateral. You can wrap Bitcoin and deposit it on Ethereum and lend it out for interest. This is a fairly good use case in the short term, but Bitcoin the blockchain is not sustainable longterm.

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

#298

Post by rzz3 »

tomxor wrote: post #108
ssss11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

> 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…

> than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority

That’s a bit simplistic and completely lacking in big picture perspective. You even underline “only” as if you’re very confident in what you’re saying. Please do some research.

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

#299

Post by intotheabyss »

wmf wrote: post #222
kevingadd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency? Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof o…

Avalanche isn't that big yet but it's in production and running DeFi.

They also recently had network issues for three days

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

#300

Post by trident5000 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #250
tomxor wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

Bitcoin is deflationary, isn’t it? How could it ever replace fiat if just by merely holding it you are guaranteed in the long run to increase value? You need mild inflation to get people to actually spend and not hoard. Bitcoin’s supply is fix so there is no point in ever spending it unless you want to cash out.

Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.
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