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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

#61

Post by zamalek »

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…

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

That may be true, however, every time we've replaced one currency with another there have been unforeseen consequences decades or centuries later.

One dead-simple example: A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and there is a limited supply. It is deflationary. No, that isn't a good thing (ignoring short-term greed). What happens when we either mine all the bitcoins, or mining more becomes computationally impossible? How do you run a business when the minimum possible amount of currency increases by $1 every day? You have a piece of bread worth $3, but the minimum amount someone can give you is $5 (then $6, then $7). Suddenly this deflationary currency that was supposed to fix everything has resulted in global hyperinflation.

"So we'll just switch to a new system at that point." We can't get countries to drive on the same side of the road, use the same measurement system or even upgrade to IPv6. How on earth are you going to roll out a global currency change overnight? Bitcoin stakeholders can't even agree on much smaller changes at the moment.

Call it a commodity, sure. It is not a viable long-term currency.

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

#62

Post by ikeboy »

schmichael wrote: post #5
andreygrehov wrote: post #2

Sorry for a silly question, but can someone explain for does it mean?

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…

Hash rate going up doesn't directly imply more electricity has been used. If it's because more efficient miners have been deployed, they could be using the same amount of electricity for doing more work.

The relevant number is bitcoin's price*the block reward. That's exactly how much one block is worth, and so that's how much it should cost to mine one block. If it diverges from that number then either miners will turn off or new miners will turn on.

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

#63

Post by icebraining »

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…

Bitcoin is basically a giant scheme to extract as much value for the miners by dumping a bunch of externalities on everyone else in the form of fossil fuel subsidies and greenhouse gas production. Not a fan.

How is that different from any other of thousands of energy-intensive services?

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

#64

Post by ikeboy »

zamalek wrote: post #61
ethanbond wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though. That may be true, however, every time we've replaced one currency with another there have been unforeseen consequences decades or centuries later. One dead-simple example: A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and there is a limited supply. It is deflationary. No, that isn't a good thing (ignoring short-term greed). What happens…

You can easily add more decimals with a soft fork, or with a sidechain.

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

#65

Post by gnaritas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #19
gnaritas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that point is just silly, far more energy is burned on the old system making paper bills than on bitcoin; don't hear you complaining about that. If energy is such a big concern to you, why aren't you screaming to replace the old energy inefficient system with the new more energy efficient bitcoin?

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.

> There is no limit to the energy burned to create bitcoins

Nonsense. No one will burn more energy to create bitcoins than those bitcoins are worth, the limit is market price. And if you think bitcoin is burning more energy than the existing banking system, well then you're just not in touch with reality my friend.

> And, other digital currency implementation don't require 'mining' at all; just the paranoid ones.

Which is why all of those other coins are little more than failed experiments; lacking proof of work, you lose the main feature of bitcoin, trust-less transactions. None of the other ideas work to achieve the actual goal of a digital currency, trust-less transactions.

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

#66

Post by EdHominem »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #43
EdHominem wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know how many resources we "waste" making non-copyable bills, staffing the Secret Service, running payment networks, etc?

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

#67

Post by huherto »

VMG wrote: post #48
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Again, how should the initial units be distributed fairly?

Same amount for everybody. One weekly/monthly payment for everybody. Like basic income. I am just guessing, I haven't thought about it deeply.

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

#69

Post by ikeboy »

cloudjacker wrote: post #68
ikeboy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

tl;dr

"Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money.

The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money."

The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.

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

#70

Post by zamalek »

ikeboy wrote: post #64
zamalek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though. That may be true, however, every time we've replaced one currency with another there have been unforeseen consequences decades or centuries later. One dead-simple example: A bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimal places and there is a limited supply. It is deflationary. No, that isn't a good thing (ignoring short-term greed). What happens…

You can easily add more decimals with a soft fork, or with a sidechain.

See: second-to-last paragraph.
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