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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

#71

Post by zodiac »

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…

What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

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

#72

Post by Gatsky »

Bitcoin mining is a real world version of Keynes' quote about labour productivity[1].

The important difference is that the money doesn't belong to any country, and is transformed purely into personal wealth. This will lead to wealth inequality the likes of which we have never seen. Governments should charge miners a lot more for just existing, and using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out of thin air which will never help pay for that infrastructure or contribute to any of the economic activity which keeps a country going.

Why we let people dealing in financial instruments acquire so much wealth and power continues to baffle me.

[1]https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:John_Maynard_Keynes#%22...

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

#73

Post by wyldfire »

nosuchthing wrote: post #63
wyldfire wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nano uses dPOS and does not mint any new coins with PoS nor does not charge any tx fees. Instead of "Give the rich more money" it's more like "preserve the value of my money by fulfilling the promise of this coin".

Nano (aka Raiblocks) is basically a scam. How was the supply produced and distrubited? https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100 Nano/Raiblocks were created from software, a reproducable distributed database protocol. Except in the case of Nano, the vast majority of the tokens are in control of the owners with a few being given away to the public for clicking captchas. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_…

I don't agree, but I do think it's very wise to be suspicious of coins and their distribution mechanism.

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

#74

Post by nosuchthing »

zodiac wrote: post #71
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…

What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

Equal payment for the same work/processing power.

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

#75

Post by curyous »

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…

Bitcoin mining seems inefficient now, but when the network is carrying 100x more or 10,000x more transactions, won't it be extremely efficient? (On a per-transaction basis)

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

#76

Post by curyous »

zodiac wrote: post #71
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…

What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

Proof of work, it requires continual investment if you want to get the rewards, not just sitting there watching the cash roll in.

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

#77

Post by tlrobinson »

kolinko wrote: post #65
tlrobinson wrote: post #17

Is that $4B worth of USD/CNY, or BTC? If it’s BTC then a) the real figure is much lower because they can’t sell $4B of BTC without drastically moving the market, b) what portion of that is due to their BTC holdings increasing in value by more than 1000% in the past year? Either way it’s still a lot of money, though.

You can't sell it all at once, but I'd assume they are selling it as it comes, just putting a stable downward pressure on the market.

Right, that’s my question: are they selling it as it comes in, thus have actually made $4B in USD (despite the downward pressure of selling), or have they been hodling BTC and now have $4B of BTC at the current market price (which is not actually worth $4B)?

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

#78

Post by snitko »

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…

Have a sense of proportion. Think about how much electricity, paper, waste and money is spent to keep up the banking industry, anti-fraud departments, AML/KYC compliance teams, clerks and all that show. Bitcoin is actually an improvement.

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

#79

Post by DINKDINK »

Gatsky wrote: post #72

Bitcoin mining is a real world version of Keynes' quote about labour productivity[1]. The important difference is that the money doesn't belong to any country, and is transformed purely into personal wealth. This will lead to wealth inequality the likes of which we have never seen. Governments should charge miners a lot more for just existing, and using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out o…

"using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out of thin air"

In what jurisdiction[1] is electric-grid transmission and distribution publicly funded? You're charged for the cost of your electric service.

[1] other than maybe communist or socialist governments

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

#80

Post by tlrobinson »

wyldfire wrote: post #68
IncRnd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're mistaken. $4B per annum is unlikely to move the markets much. It sure will if you try to sell it. Holding it certainly isn't the issue.

The daily volume at the beginning of 2017 was $200M USD. The daily volume at the end was $8T USD. $4B over 365 market days is somewhere between 1-4% of the daily market. If liquidating their bitcoin tanked the market in 2017, it wasn't too noticable.

I don’t think you can extrapolate liquidity from volume, especially when there are exchanges with very low or zero fees.
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