71–80 of 127 posts
Slightly off topic but would it be an advantage to use a low energy miner such as a Raspberry Pi as a bitcoin miner, or would that just be a waste of time and yield fractions of a cent / a cent per day? Admittedly little knowledge on bitcoin mining
Slightly off topic but would it be an advantage to use a low energy miner such as a Raspberry Pi as a bitcoin miner, or would that just be a waste of time and yield fractions of a cent / a cent per day? Admittedly little knowledge on bitcoin mining
Bitcoin's electricity consumption is unfortunate, it's difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world. If blockchains and distributed computing does present…
Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit? Yes.
Bitcoin's electricity consumption is unfortunate, it's difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world. If blockchains and distributed computing does present…
Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit? Yes.
Cryptocurrencies might be able to serve as a stop-gap before we figure out how to get there. It keeps everyone honest. In the future, it might even replace the entire tax code. There would be no more fines or punishments, and companies would no longer be able to hide their profits offshore. Taxes could just be automatically collected from each transaction, and managed by some global organization (maybe the UN). The world could even agree on a "basic income" contract that solves inequality.
These are all hypothetical examples, but I think this would be a worthwhile use of electricity. Especially if it's all cheap and renewable energy.
Bitcoin's electricity consumption is unfortunate, it's difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world. If blockchains and distributed computing does present…
Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit? Yes.
Which isn't, you'll notice, necessarily a counter argument to yours.
Is this not the price paid for the trust, security, and utility that bitcoin brings? I don’t hear alternatives being suggested.
Most people are quite happy with trust-based currencies which don't have the proof of work overhead. Cryptocurrencies have their utility, but not for the whole population.
One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it's meant to be decentralised but it doesn't look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs. Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this pre…
> Was this predicted at the inception of Bitcoin? At inception? No. But Satoshi was made aware of this problem. Here's a long passage from Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold: Laszlo’s CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17…
Not sure if I entirely agree with/understand this. Even if they do want Bitcoin to succeed, how different is it from the current capitalist system if 40% of the bitcoins are owned by 1% of the population?
Doesn't the (economic) power that Bitcoin takes away from governments end up in the hands of a select few? We are then back to square one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading that a key weakness to bitcoin was its susceptibility to fraud if a group of nefarious miners control a significant portion of compute power on chain, because verification is based on consensus. As such, a properly motivated bad actor can produce fraudulent results that can only be disproven by exorbitant compute resources. Obviously this would destroy the value of btc but they only need to keep it…
What we are learning is that there are far easier ways to steal bitcoin than the so-called 51% attack. Miner collusion would be so expensive to pull off and the amount of money you can steal this way is not that great - you still need the elliptic curve signatures to verify, so the only thing you can really do is "double spend" the bitcoin that you need to have in the first place.
Denial of service. Should the +51% choose, they can simply ignore certain transactions and those will never end up on the chain.
Our fiat private finance system does concentrate weatlh, but DOS attacks are only possible by subverting the legal regime.
Bitcoin's electricity consumption is unfortunate, it's difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world. If blockchains and distributed computing does present…
Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit? Yes.
Also yes.
Is this not the price paid for the trust, security, and utility that bitcoin brings? I don’t hear alternatives being suggested.
How about not bitcoin, where a transaction doesn't consume 9 day's worth of an average family's energy budget? Utility: a transaction costs $10, right? It's useless. Security: Have you followed this? The actual recommendation is to print your private keys and stick them in a vault. Trust: It's funny that, fundamentally, people started doubting the Federal Reserve when the gold standard was abolished, because suddenly…