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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

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Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#311

Post by h1d »

dx034 wrote: post #28
superkuh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance. And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive g…

Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? Bitcoin already used as much energy as medium-sized countries (I believe it was as much as Ireland last year or the year before) and nearly no one uses it for daily payments. Compared to that, I'm not aware that the Swift Network or Visa/Mastercard would run whole power plants to support their energy needs. They just need a medium sized data center t…

Running fiat involves more than just electricity.

People, offices and everything related requires power and physical location too.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#312

Post by village-idiot »

keymone wrote: post #310
village-idiot wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can change the definition of B all you want, it's still a formal fallacy, meaning the argument is literally worthless. You have to structure a very different argument from what you've shown to assert that bitcoin would reduce national military expenditures, not just tweak the details.

it's not about definition of A and B, it's about structure of the sentence. if maintaining fiat value requires spending resources then not having to maintain fiat value means there is no need to spend resources to maintain fiat value. it's really a truism, there is no need to do this dance of yours with logic and fallacies unless you are trying to confuse people and/or push some agenda.

> it's not about definition of A and B, it's about structure of the sentence

I agree! And the structure of the argument is fundamentally invalid.

> there is no need to do this dance of yours with logic and fallacies

... Oh, I guess we don't agree.

> it's really a truism

"I don't have an argument, but I believe it very strongly".

> you are trying to confuse people and/or push some agenda

Accusing those who disagree with you of pushing an "agenda" is both a bad argument and bad etiquette. Stop.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#313

Post by village-idiot »

johnisgood wrote: post #308
village-idiot wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how quoting you is a “manipulative tactic”.

I think he implied that quoting him in correctly is a manipulative tactic.

https://imgur.com/a/bcAlwmo

He wasn't quoted incorrectly, the part within quotation marks is verbatim from keymone.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#314

Post by AgentME »

nnq wrote: post #134
ForHackernews wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value ele…

> the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") It would be good if it were actually and deliberately properly designed this way to create an arms race of "who can get more general-purpose computing power for less" because it would accelerate technology development with this Red Queen effect... Unfortunately they've missed the "general purpose part" - most mining todays is done by special-purpose hardware made…

There is a downside to designing a mining algorithm tuned for general purpose CPUs: anyone with access to a lot of general purpose CPUs (such as botnet operators, or government groups) can easily aim their existing resources to try to do 51% attacks against the cryptocurrency.

If the mining algorithm requires specialized hardware, then no group starts out with an existing advantage. If the NSA decided it wanted to 51% attack a cryptocurrency, they'd have to make a massive investment in their own hardware, and then that hardware can't be repurposed after the attack. A 51% attack is likely to devastate the value of a cryptocurrency, which also de-values any mining hardware built for it, which naturally discourages anyone who invested in mining hardware from attacking the cryptocurrency.

Though mining algorithms that require specialized hardware also come with their own downsides: the companies that invest in making the mining hardware early on could decide to keep the most advanced mining hardware for themselves and gain a lot of control over the network.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#315

Post by andirk »

village-idiot wrote: post #224
keymone wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, feel free to only include partial cost. how does that change my point?

The premise of “no fiat, less war” is just asserted without any proof, and is actually quite ahistorical.

I love the idea of "no fiat, less war". I also love the idea of "less war". I don't believe war is a natural human occurrence but instead usually done for gaining fiat. However, I do believe that trading is quite natural and our current fiat implementation often simplifies trade. So maybe a borderless fiat simplifies it even more.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#316

Post by keymone »

village-idiot wrote: post #312
keymone wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not about definition of A and B, it's about structure of the sentence. if maintaining fiat value requires spending resources then not having to maintain fiat value means there is no need to spend resources to maintain fiat value. it's really a truism, there is no need to do this dance of yours with logic and fallacies unless you are trying to confuse people and/or push some agenda.

> it's not about definition of A and B, it's about structure of the sentence I agree! And the structure of the argument is fundamentally invalid. > there is no need to do this dance of yours with logic and fallacies ... Oh, I guess we don't agree. > it's really a truism "I don't have an argument, but I believe it very strongly". > you are trying to confuse people and/or push some agenda Accusing those who disagree wi…

> Accusing those who disagree with you

but you don't just disagree, you make convoluted invalid arguments. there is no logical fallacy in

> if maintaining fiat value requires spending resources then not having to maintain fiat value means there is no need to spend resources to maintain fiat value

it's indeed a case of:

> "I don't have an argument, but I believe it very strongly".

but on your part.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#318

Post by crimsonalucard »

trickstra wrote: post #302
crimsonalucard wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not rational beings. They do not always purchase things they need. Fentanyl and Heroin are obvious examples. Obesity is a problem in the united states and represents the over purchasing of food. - Let's say you go to such place with cheap electricity, start your own business, use that cheap electricity and produce something. If you cannot generate the same profit with your product as the bitcoin miners, th…

> Mining a bitcoin without doing "work" yeah, that's why miners do work. They validate transactions, for which they are rewarded. Those who want their transactions validated see value in that, so they pay them. Therefore it's not like printing money. Therefore it's not a form of theft. Your simple logic breaks there.

The logic doesn't break down. They facilitate the growth and transactions of money being created out of thin air. Sort of like a bank loaning out and storing counterfeit dollars. Yes the facilitates transaction, but in the end they are facilitating the transaction of a dollar created out of thin air.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#319

Post by mrb »

thisisit wrote: post #210
mrb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…

I am really curious about the points you make in your post. > This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. Who are these other researcher? Care to link to their research on this? > when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9 How do we know that? > It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today. Again…

"Who are these other researcher? Care to link to their research on this?"

It takes months to write, peer-review, and publish research papers, so given that this Nature Climate Change article is quite recent at the moment there exists absolutely zero peer-reviewed studies or counterstudies following up on it. However here are some researchers who have criticized it in their own informal analysis or press interviews: see links in https://is.gd/ksyKyv — shortened URL for https://thinkprogress-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/thinkprogre...

The researchers in question are:

Dr. Jon Koomey, who was a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) scientist for more than two decades.

Professor Eric Masanet, who leads the Energy and Resource Systems Analysis Lab at Northwestern University.

Arman Shehabi, research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

And myself who has criticized it here on HN (my work's been cited in Nature Sustainability and the NYT: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ so I guess this makes me a researcher now)

"How do we know that?"

It's common knowledge to anyone in the industry that the Antminer S9 is by far the most popular Bitcoin mining machine. For some official reports on that, see market research reports and IPO filings from multiple mining hardware manufacturers. For example this has been neatly researched and presented by the team lead by Christian Stoll in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3335781 Read their Supplementary Data, tab "3.4 IPO filing analysis"

"Again, how do we know that?"

As I said elsewhere in this thread, according to https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=801297 CO2 emissions per kWh have already decreased -25% over 11 years. Therefore -80% in 100 years seems easily achievable (the trend only has to continue for 60 years, then there can be 40 years of technological stagnation.)

In fact we don't even need any technological breakthrough to achieve -80%. France already emits 90% less CO2 per kWh than the average country, thanks to nuclear power.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#320

Post by mrb »

arcticbull wrote: post #307
mrb wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Forbes reports as mostly fakes are exchange trades , not on-chain transactions . These are two completely different things...

Yes and no. They’re not on-chain but so what? Exchanges are the sole fiat gateways, which in turn determines the exchange rate between BTC and fiat, which in turn determined the exchange rate between BTC and goods and services. These off-chain transactions determine how many apples a bitcoin gets you. The net is then settled onto the blockchain. They’re relevant. As relevant as any Lightning transaction, or is LN not…

You tried to claim we knew nothing about Bitcoin's adoption because 95% of exchange trades are fake. I'm telling you this is irrelevant. Exchange trades tell us nothing about Bitcoin's adoption. They are just noise from wash traders, crooked exchanges, arbitragers, etc.

To gauge Bitcoin's adoption you need to look at on-chain transactions, not exchange trades. Makes sense?

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