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The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

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Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#41

Post by martindevans »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
martindevans wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's special about 255K (0F) in relation to heat pumps?

Just a number I picked from domain knowledge. Almost all newer heat pumps can still efficiently pull heat out of that temperature, although some more expensive ones can go all the way down to -20 - -30F ambient air temp. EDIT: If you're in a colder climate, in-ground coolant loops are preferred over an air transfer heat pump.

Ah I see. So it's nothing fundamental, just a limit on our current heat pump technology.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#42

Post by this_user »

ethanbond wrote: post #14
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still no discussion on the value of pissing away our planets energy reserves, just to create imaginary points in a paranoid game. In one view, all the electricity burned to make bitcoins is a crime against the planet.

I think it's a worse crime to say that because you have access to a stable, relatively apolitical currency, that no one else needs one. Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people. Our energy crisis was not created by, and will not be solved by, Bitcoin. Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by i…

> Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people.

The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though.

How? It would have not prevented the Dotcom Bubble. It would have not prevented the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. It would have not kept Argentina or Greece from borrowing way too much money. It's a libertarian pipe dream that Bitcoin will magically solve all of the world's economic problems. In fact, it would make matters worse due to unpredictable volatility and its lack of scalability. It would only drag any country trying to adopt it into a deflationary death spiral. There is a reason why the gold standard has been abolished.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#43

Post by JoeAltmaier »

EdHominem wrote: post #26
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

citation needed. There is no limit to the energy burned to create bitcoins; it is increasing by design. And, other digital currency implementation don't require 'mining' at all; just the paranoid ones.

The ones that don't involve a small list of nodes that you are required to trust to get anything done.

Exactly. Its a matter of trust (i.e. the paranoid part), and we're burning the planet's limited resources so that we feel better about that.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#44

Post by codehalo »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8
schmichael wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More electricity is being burned to do the same amount of work. I know that sounds snarky, but it's how proof-of-work systems like bitcoin work: "miners" all attempt to generate a specific hash which just means lots and lots of computation. The number of transactions per second the bitcoin protocol can handle is essentially capped and completely unrelated to hash rate as the difficulty of producing a correct hash is…

And still no discussion on the value of pissing away our planets energy reserves, just to create imaginary points in a paranoid game. In one view, all the electricity burned to make bitcoins is a crime against the planet.

Somewhere out there some God is cursing another God for pissing away an entire sun just for some puny humans.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#45

Post by InclinedPlane »

geertj wrote: post #36

Doing some back of the envelope calculations.. Hash rate is about 1,200 PH now. The most efficient ASIC miner today is the AntMiner S7 [1], which does 4.86 TH at 1.21 KW. This gives us a power consumption of the entire Bitcoin network of at least 300 MW. Actual power will easily be double that, given that not everybody is using the latest miner. So let's say total power consumption is about 600 MW. This is the output…

https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/44062951919230566...

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#46

Post by JoeAltmaier »

VMG wrote: post #34
brighton36 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. The problem is that bitcoin exists due to holes in the regulatory structure. People mine because people need anonymous value transfers. If you allow people to purchase drugs/gamble/capital-flight/etc with credit cards, then this externality cost will go away :)

Even then, you'd still need a fair way of distributing the initial value. Mining provides censorship-resistance and transparent issuance.

But the 'transparent issuance' is 'give value to those that piss away the most resources'. That's got to be the worst solution for the planet we could imagine.

Other solutions: issue more value to those already holding more value. Issue more value to those holding less value. Issue more value in the form of credit transactions within the community.

In fact, since imaginary value points are real numbers, just revalue what's there? Its not like we'll run out of fractions. Imagine if you will that only 1 bitcoin was ever issued. Folks trade around ever-decreasing fractional numbers (milli-coins? nano-coins?).

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#47

Post by codyb »

wlesieutre wrote: post #35
eganist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you replace furnaces with bitcoin mining hardware. But then again, I'd rather replace a furnace with a more productive set of hardware anyway.

A couple of things: 1) With electric heat you have to account for the energy production and grid transmission being around 30% efficient. Even though an electric heater or bitcoin miner is converting electricity to heat 100% efficiently, a majority of the thermal energy released in the power plant was already thrown out as waste. 2) Even using electricity, a heat pump beats the electric heaters. They're 2-3x as "effi…

I totally agree, but I'm also curious how expensive in terms of resources distributing paper and metal currency is?

Presumably mining zinc, copper, aluminum, etc must have pretty big costs to the environment? Paper is mostly paper but isn't it also some special silk? At least here in the US.

Those seem slightly more renewable for paper. But yea, creating an extra power plants worth of fumes is pretty shitty over time.

I believe there's one currency which at the very least does some sorts of scientific calculations with the processing power? Maybe we should at least encourage those types of coins.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#48

Post by VMG »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #46
VMG wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then, you'd still need a fair way of distributing the initial value. Mining provides censorship-resistance and transparent issuance.

But the 'transparent issuance' is 'give value to those that piss away the most resources'. That's got to be the worst solution for the planet we could imagine. Other solutions: issue more value to those already holding more value. Issue more value to those holding less value. Issue more value in the form of credit transactions within the community. In fact, since imaginary value points are real numbers, just revalue…

Believe it or not, people have thought about these things. Mining wasn't chosen because the developers love destroying the environment, but because it's the only way to bootstrap the system and keep it going.

It's a system to distribute scarce tokens as fairly as possible. At the beginning, you could just do it on your own computer device. Now the space is much more specialized, the barriers to entry is much higher, but anyone can still participate.

> issue more value to those already holding more value

Again, how should the initial units be distributed fairly? Besides, this system is not attractive to latecomers and will end even more centralized that the current system.

> Issue more value to those holding less value.

So I just create free new identities out to get the scarce tokens? Then the tokens are not that scarce, are they?

> Issue more value in the form of credit transactions within the community.

Not sure what you even mean here.

> Imagine if you will that only 1 bitcoin was ever issued.

A Bitcoin already is divisible into 100 million Satoshis. Mining is a solution to the question who gets the tokens.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#49

Post by VMG »

a_humean wrote: post #40
VMG wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's political in the same was as encryption is. Encryption makes it difficult for the government to make certain kinds of decisions as well.

Yes, but in the case of encryption we have competing issues relating to commerce, privacy, crime, and national security that have to be considered and weighed - which is a political process. In the case of gold buggery all we have is a political ideology of unrelenting suspicion of government trying to enforce through law or technology ideas about monetary policy that fall well outside of the economic mainstream all…

Would you say the suspicion is justified in, say, Venezuela or Zimbabwe?

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#50

Post by riprowan »

schmichael wrote: post #7
arnauddri wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hash rate represents the total computational power used by the miners to secure the Bitcoin Network. The more miner, the more secure it is but the less it is profitable for them to mine. For more information about mining, you can refer to this description: https://kaiko.com/learn/mining-blockchain

> The more miner, the more secure This isn't totally accurate. You need a lot of different miners and a high hash rate for security. The least secure place bitcoin can be is when a single miner controls most of the hash rate.

This is exactly correct. All the hashpower in the world provides zero security if 51%+ of it is not "honest".

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

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