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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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

#53

Post by 27182818284 »

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.

I've never mined, but the serious miners I did know because energy is expensive, sought other means to power it like sheds with solar etc.

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

#54

Post by icebraining »

VMG wrote: post #13
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.

These "imaginary points" have very useful properties that cannot be achieved any other way. Bitcoin mining is still vastly more efficient and sustainable than gold mining. Edit: dear downvoters, rebuttals are welcome

I think the belief that they're useful is not widely shared.

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

#55

Post by VMG »

icebraining wrote: post #54
VMG wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "imaginary points" have very useful properties that cannot be achieved any other way. Bitcoin mining is still vastly more efficient and sustainable than gold mining. Edit: dear downvoters, rebuttals are welcome

I think the belief that they're useful is not widely shared.

Do you know any other "imaginary points" that are scarce and can be transacted in an open system?

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

#56

Post by cloudjacker »

ucha wrote: post #3

What's newsworthy about this? First of all, 28% could almost entirely be attributed to noise. Second, the fastest hash rate increase recently observed occurred between Nov 2015 and Feb 2016, not during the last month.

It isn't newsworthy.

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

#57

Post by icebraining »

VMG wrote: post #55
icebraining wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the belief that they're useful is not widely shared.

Do you know any other "imaginary points" that are scarce and can be transacted in an open system?

There are many things that I believe not to exist, which doesn't mean they've be useful if they were, in fact, to exist.

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

#58

Post by icebraining »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #31
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.

This is so misguided I can barely think of a place to start. Do you think the current financial system is optimal? The financial industry currently makes up 8% of the entire US economy. Do you realize that bitcoin mining hashes and the number of transactions they can process are not linked?

One may believe that the current system is not optimal, yet not believe that Bitcoin is improvement.

As for the transactions vs hashes correlation, while technically true, in practice the two are inevitably linked, as the currency must be protected proportionally to the sums it manages. As more value is stored and transacted, so the incentive to attack it increases, and so an increase in the cost of attacking it is required. Though it might trail off at some point, Bitcoin's history has shown this relation to exist.

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

#59

Post by ikeboy »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #45
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...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...

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

#60

Post by jacalata »

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…

Also a ton of people who want to get rich.
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