Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

nasdaq.com

371–380 of 431 posts

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#371
post #360
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.

how would they do that practically? would require a huge surveillance state with constant monitoring to make sure you’re not mining on non allowed power

Mining rigs already require tremendous amounts of power, and there are already laws on the books that allow the government to know what you're doing with that power (i.e. for safety and environmental reasons). You can easily determine which power sinks are mining rigs, and require them to use only excess renewable power, or off-grid renewable power (it's pretty easy to tell if you're using off-grid fossil fuels with satellite imagery -- you can't hide the CO2).

Governments can easily enforce this -- simply require all blocks to be signed by a government-issued keypair to attests to the green-ness of the power used to produce them, and require exchanges under its jurisdiction to deny, limit, or tax the sale of non-green coins.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#372
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you? Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut. Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitco…

Do you see capitalism as working for/against our future?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#373
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try googling "Byzantine Fault Tolerance" and read the original papers by Leslie Lamport. 2/3 is required to ensure liveness.

Yeah, so if you look at some commentary around that paper there is a variant of the problem with "approximate agreement" that can solve for example the 3 person variant. This fits with the theory (really just a hypothesis at this point but actively worked on) that I have w.r.t. datalisp. Edit: see for example slide 30 of this slideshow: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15712/lectures/15-bft.pdf I'm not (yet) very good at prob…

If you read the Avalanche paper, you'll see early on that all of its claims to being BFT stem from an assumption about the distribution of message arrival rates in the system. That is a very generous assumption that can easily be wrong. Also the original BFT literature makes no assumptions about the arrival times or even reliability of the network -- BFT constraints apply even if the network is 100% reliable. It only gets worse from there; 2/3 honest votes is the best you can do under ideal circumstances.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#374
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt this kind of like saying we should bring back incandescent light bulbs so people will heat their houses with them? Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even tho…

800 watts is not actually very much heat. A typical small space heater is 2000W. I have no idea what you intend by implying that 800 watts is not as many BTUs as 600 watts--watts are literally a measure of power, i.e. can be converted to BTUs per hour. And yes, all those 800 watts of power your computer draws do end up as waste heat [1]. > I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heat…

Once you understand this, you start to understand how the recent FUD about crypto is generated by people with an agenda.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#375
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with rolling back or 51% attacks. A racing attack and a 51% attack are different things.

Oh, you're probably right. It seemed related because the further back an adversary wanted to roll back to, the more hash power they'd need to get ahead. But it's a different category. I wonder if there has been an analysis of how much hash power you'd need relative to how many blocks in the past you'd want to roll back.

That analysis is actually in the original 2008 bitcoin whitepaper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

If you have 51% of the power, you can roll back everything if you spend enough time on it. If you have 30%, you have a 4% chance of being able to catch up from 10 blocks behind, even if you spend infinite time on that specific fork.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#376
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

800 watts is not actually very much heat. A typical small space heater is 2000W. I have no idea what you intend by implying that 800 watts is not as many BTUs as 600 watts--watts are literally a measure of power, i.e. can be converted to BTUs per hour. And yes, all those 800 watts of power your computer draws do end up as waste heat [1]. > I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heat…

Once you understand this, you start to understand how the recent FUD about crypto is generated by people with an agenda.

Or people who live in places that aren't cold every moment of the year

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you? Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut. Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitco…

Do you see capitalism as working for/against our future?

It can be both in different ways. You're stuck in either or thinking.

And keep in mind, capitalism (when working properly) is supposed to find minima. Not create further barriers to getting things done. The group that gets the job done at the highest output:input ratio for as long as the problem they are solving is relevant was the intended optimization point. Irrational markets being what they are, this frequently does not converge as planned.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you? Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut. Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitco…

Do you see capitalism as working for/against our future?

Do you mean "capitalism" as in the dogmatic belief an unregulated market will somehow manage human needs to their benefit?

Yeah, I think that's an extremely ignorant and outdated ideology. Which is evidently progressing towards human extinction.

Optimizing towards the metric of monetary reward/economic growth is just horribly disconnected from human welfare.

There is also the fallacy of assuming all things interchangeable for market dynamics when in reality some things running out means "down-regulating demand" by killing off most of the population, e.g. phosphate rock.

Capitalism isn't set up to get us two cookies later. There is just no incentive for the market to give a fuck about humans. It's like the "stamp making AI" thought experiment. Or the attention optimizing algorithms mindlessly destroying political culture. Oversimplified metrics spiralling out of control.

Tho, economists have realized this and most markets are recognized to fail without regulation for their inherent nature. E.g. housing, water, electricity, education, ...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see capitalism as working for/against our future?

It can be both in different ways. You're stuck in either or thinking. And keep in mind, capitalism (when working properly) is supposed to find minima. Not create further barriers to getting things done. The group that gets the job done at the highest output:input ratio for as long as the problem they are solving is relevant was the intended optimization point. Irrational markets being what they are, this frequently d…

Capitalism's search for minima isn't linked to human welfare tho. Therefore the minima may or may not align with humanity's long term interests. Right now the system seems on track to optimize for our extinction.

Without regulation, most essential markets fail humans.

And finally an ancap "free market economy" was the default state of the world and the whole of human history has been the struggle to overcome/refine that stake based hell.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#380
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you? Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut. Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitco…

Bitcoin only consumes enough energy to meet market demand for security.

You need to chill if you think the demand is high enough to literally wipe out humanity.

Post reply on HN