China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining • Hacker News Board

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#91

Post by Calms » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 12:00 PM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #32

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #2

I am personally of the opinion that China swiftly killing off its cryptocurrency mining industry overnight would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity it wastes is an environmental disaster.

I don't get winging about mining crypto currency and "wasting power", it's not really a waste, it's proof of work. Besides, we humans waste energy on way worse things than mining Bitcoin. What about running Facebook, the tens of thousands of high end servers running globally just to figure out what useless junk to feed people, in a way that is detrimental to their health. I don't hear many people complaining about th…

Other entities burning energy isn't a good argument for "wasting power" mining cryptocurrency as it boils down to whataboutism [0].

The proof of work is a potentially valid argument but wouldn't it be better if the work was useful in some way?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#92

Post by miscreanity » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

dullgiulio wrote: post #74

miscreanity wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of security staff at a bank or military installation? If things are slow, just send guards home. We'd be able to save millions.

You might be aware that, outside of the world of cryptocurrencies, people have been exchanging money and other assets totally fine without proof-of-work since we stopped living on trees.

A better argument would be to point toward proof of stake or other consensus systems like that used in Ripple. Until there is a more effective method, Proof of work is a highly effective alternative to physical security.

Trying to pass off counterfeit government currency has consequences that involve work by numerous individuals and organizations - and they don't always succeed. Proof of work in a crypto system is effectively successful all of the time, instantly.

The same applies to any form of money and fraudulent activity since the beginning of history. There is always work involved, and the effectiveness of that work has never been greater than with crypto... the consequences of which must be kept in mind - just like existing governments and systems, crypto can be used to control its participants.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#93

Post by miscreanity » Wed, Jan 10, 2018, 3:45 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #90

miscreanity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who invented the internal combustion engine? Does it matter?

Did the inventor of the internal combustion engine limit the number of engines that could be produced, then locked away 20% of those for himself?

While valid, that argument focuses on a different issue. It is not the identity that matters for success of a technology.

Satoshi specified 1MB block size temporarily, and advocated increasing that limit to accommodate higher volumes of transactions on the network. The current Bitcoin Core developers, for whatever reason, have refused to compromise on any scaling issue - the blame lies with them.

As for locking away funds, there are a few things to consider: 1. If any of Satoshi's keys were to be used, intense attention would be attracted. 2. The identity and location of such use would likely be discovered by government intelligence agencies. 3. Even if all of that were to be dumped on the open market, the effect would be temporary with the eventual result bring increased availability of unit supply. It will be effectively impossible to transition away from Bitcoin without an overwhelmingly improved alternative once it is embedded in global systems, even if there's a serious shock.

I posit that the actual use of Bitcoin will not be as a transactional currency; it will be a reserve similar to the IMF's SDR. Therefore, only big money will be able to access it - institutions, governments, billionaires... normal people will have to make use of a transactional currency, perhaps Litecoin.

In conclusion: we cannot look for what we intend the usage to be; we have to observe that the the market may decide on a different purpose.

Re: China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining

#94

Post by FabHK » Thu, Jan 11, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #62

bandrami wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. The only sense in which it "solves" the Two Generals Problem is the sense in which it will, over the course of decades, create a rainbow table for it. None of the work being done is in any way socially useful (a crypto coin based on, say, folding proteins actually produces a social good and so could be equity based). Decentralized proof of a transaction having occurred is in principle valuable, but the token it…

Do you have any idea how rainbow tables actually work and what it would take to "create" one for the SHA-256 hash used by Bitcoin mining? In order to create such a rainbow table, you would have to do about 2^256 SHA-256 computations. All of the Bitcoin mining ever done so far has carried out somewhere in the order of 2^87. To put this in perspective, the most power-efficient miners available right now require 0.1 J/G…

Isn't 2^210/2^256 = 1/2^46 ~= 1/10^14 or so? (1/10^74 is approx 1/2^245)