61–70 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if by the time you factor in all the costs of banking (including bail-outs) bitcoin is still ludicrously expensive. And one block will include a whole slew of transactions, that's fixed overhead with economies of scale built in.
Quid Pro Quo: Bank bailouts had positive returns. Mt. Gox collapsing was a worse wealth loss than bank bail outs, by far.
Compared to what? You can't compare it to the results of not having done bailouts, so the comparison is largely a matter of economic prediction, and economic prediction is obviously very controversial. The only non-controversial part is that the bailouts were certainly very good for the banks receiving them.
> They keep the machines cool with an evaporative cooling system. Its basically a durable paper product that looks like the wavy corrugated part on the inside of cardboard. Water is pumped to the top and flows down, and the fans blowing outwards on the other side create negative air pressure, drawing fresh air through the holes and cooling it. The cardboard cooling system looks pretty interesting, but I wonder how du…
This just strikes me as a colossal waste of energy & time. I understand that there may be good profit in doing it, but that doesn't shirk off any of my feelings.
https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estim...
tl;dr:
"This means that we can expect our current industry best efficiency of 0.733 W/GH to reach 0.0000000873804 W/GH – so even the most ignorant, arrogant, narrow-minded and pseudo-intellectual critics and arm-chair academics should note that in the event that Bitcoin scales to a million times its current size and market cap over the next 30 years, it’s environmental impact will still be insignificant compared to existing systems."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes? Going either by volume or number of transaction, Bitcoin transactions are currently ludicrously expensive, though this is somewhat hidden by subsidizing the miners. I don't know why you mention paper currencies and gold when most money today is transferred electronically, in a far more efficient way than Bitcoins.
I'm not sure if by the time you factor in all the costs of banking (including bail-outs) bitcoin is still ludicrously expensive. And one block will include a whole slew of transactions, that's fixed overhead with economies of scale built in.
You've chosen a particularly odd phrase here, since BitCoin mining was fundamentally designed to get computationally more expensive over time.
So, no, an economy of THE OPPOSITE OF SCALING was built in.
The scale of this is impressive regardless of whether or not you're a bitcoin believer (I'm neutral, if it works long term, great, if not something better will come along). This bit in particular is impressive: "The mine operators told me that each warehouse took fifteen days to construct, and an additional ten days to fill up with hardware and get it all hashing away. The concrete was still drying on some of the bui…
> I wonder who supplied the chips that do the mining and how much energy that facility uses. Probably part of the reason this is in china - close to the factories where the majority are produced. The owner could walk into a chip manufacturer and make a much better offer than the cost of exporting and packing them to ship internationally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not so sure that "transaction security auditing" would be accurate though. That makes it sound like this company is doing something altruistic. The truth is that this facility was created for one simple reason: to earn Bitcoin.
If I go out and hire (say) tptacek (and the rest of Matasano) to perform a software security audit, aren't they're doing it to earn dollars? When a corporate board hires external financial auditor to look over their records, same thing. I don't see where your inference of altruism comes in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this is that mining isn't just about reporting hash rates, it's a critical part of the Byzantine failure tolerant consensus algorithm that was bitcoin's key contribution. If miners had a lower duty cycle as you suggest, any dishonest miner could execute a majority attack with little resistance, absent some other kind of mitigation. While proofs of work are wasteful, the only alternative I know of is…
You could keep the blockchain and run with vastly reduced difficulty, but with one alteration: the next block needs to include a specific magic secret number. This magic key is unknowable in advance of a specific time, preventing workers from doing the hash work until the key is 'published'. This forces the miners to pause and not do any hashing for a set time. Now, this gets to the real issue: We need a source for t…
> They keep the machines cool with an evaporative cooling system. Its basically a durable paper product that looks like the wavy corrugated part on the inside of cardboard. Water is pumped to the top and flows down, and the fans blowing outwards on the other side create negative air pressure, drawing fresh air through the holes and cooling it. The cardboard cooling system looks pretty interesting, but I wonder how du…