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Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

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Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#41

Post by CodeCube »

trophycase wrote: post #38
nosuchthing wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-Stake statistically equates to "Give the rich more money". Consider Ethereum's stats (and other similar PoS minting methods): Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018) = 97,800,000 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Now imagine a financial system where all the wealthy have to do simply own money (spawned from software or premine) to get…

This is basically how it is now. There is a non-zero risk to staking as well as the stock market/bonds

I'm having a hard time understanding the risk to staking ... is it just an opportunity cost risk ?

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#42

Post by shepardrtc »

kenneth wrote: post #9

As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…

Ripple, one of the top three cryptocurrencies uses a consensus algorithm. There are some others, further down the rankings, too.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#43

Post by KitDuncan »

gigatexal wrote: post #22

I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

Cool so now miners are buying commodity hardware in bulk instead and I can't build a proper workstation because GPU prices are through the roof.

Mining in general can't be the solution to consensus issue. It's just horrible for the environment.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#44

Post by jacobr »

nosuchthing wrote: post #33
vernon99 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a one-sided comment. There’s a lot of research going into different variations of proof-of-stake. 4 out of 10 largest crypto (by market cap) are PoS. There’s a lot of work Ethereum community (Casper), Cardano folks, Tendermint etc are doing to create better consensus models.

Proof-of-Stake statistically equates to "Give the rich more money". Consider Ethereum's stats (and other similar PoS minting methods): Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018) = 97,800,000 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Now imagine a financial system where all the wealthy have to do simply own money (spawned from software or premine) to get…

With PoW you use your money to buy mining equipment and you will get more money, and voting power. With PoS you buy more of the currency with that money instead.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#45

Post by bcohn91 »

CodeCube wrote: post #41
trophycase wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically how it is now. There is a non-zero risk to staking as well as the stock market/bonds

I'm having a hard time understanding the risk to staking ... is it just an opportunity cost risk ?

Yes, combined with the risk that the currency could go down in terms of the currency you care about.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#47

Post by twic »

adventured wrote: post #16
oldcynic wrote: post #2

Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there. It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers). It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker. Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or t…

Those companies at at the top all still have competition who need to buy the same supplies, so they aren't monopsonies, but they're close enough that this is an opportunity to use the word 'monopsony'.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#48

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

nosuchthing wrote: post #40
bogomipz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms." Can you elaborate on what the shortcomings of the current consensus algorithms are?

Immense waste, and lack of egalitarianism. Proof-of-Work consensus algorithms (so far) work by wasting more and more energy. Max efficiency peaks in the network with a very basic CPU PoW algorithm merely sets a lottery number granting write access for a single computer Every additional increase in processing power reduces efficiency by increasing the size of the number to be guessed All PoW does is increase the capit…

I like that analogy: “setting a lottery number” - that feels more accurate than the typical way the lay media explains mining, usually a variation of “solving lots of puzzles”.

“Puzzle” implies some cognition is required to come to a solution - not that effort is being wasted by brute-forcing something.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#50

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

gigatexal wrote: post #22

I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

“ASIC-resistance” just means “needs lots of RAM”. Eventually someone will figure out how to make oodles of RAM sufficient for a many-core custom processor. Heck, modern SSDs (e.g. Intel Optane) might be fast enough to replace DRAM for these kinds of applications.

Another kind of ASIC-resistance might be using dynamically-generated algorithms employing self-modifying code. You’d have to own a Xeon Phi to get good figures for that, methinks.

It’s a shame PoW is based on arbitrary hashing instead of, say, “Proof-of-Folding@Home” - that would do some good at least, methinks.

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