[HN Gopher] Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes pe...
___________________________________________________________________
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
Author : tusharchoudhary
Score : 226 points
Date : 2021-02-15 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| abdo2023 wrote:
| The 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers
|
| https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
| Amin3456 wrote:
| https://bit.ly/2Zqahul
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| 2.7 Quadrillion hashes calculated to generate a 1 BTC.
|
| 0.67 hashes per day
|
| so only = 11,040,687,000,000 years for one BTC...
|
| nice
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| This is somewhat off-topic but I'm going to ask here because it's
| really hard to find "trusted" information regarding BitCoin and
| Ethereum mining online - it seems everyone's trying to make a
| commission or running a scam:
|
| Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best
| interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless
| one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to
| mining? If that's true, is there a legitimate, low-fee pool a
| fellow HNer can recommend? All the ones I have run into are
| either on Google's list of "malware domains" or are else
| blacklisted by my pfSense DNS blacklist because they're on the
| list of malicious DNS names used by crytojacker plugins and
| malware. I understand false positives and work around these
| blacklists all the time, but each of these sites feels scammier
| and sleazier than the next...
|
| (Edit: It's minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm mainly
| curious to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's
| taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can
| generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a
| more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly
| inefficient natural gas furnace.)
| alisonkisk wrote:
| I think the Universe is telling you something, and you know
| what it is.
|
| Why do you want to be in a mining pool, instead of buying
| bitcoin?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Because I've got this 3080 sitting around since I don't game
| as much as I thought I would, and I feel bad about it.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Hahaha, point taken. Mainly as an experiment to see if
| heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break
| from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough
| heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-
| effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly
| inefficient natural gas furnace.
| wmf wrote:
| For that purpose probably just use NiceHash. Sure, there's
| a probability that you won't get paid but it's basically
| free money anyway.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| The only point in mining pools is to lower variance
|
| If I have enough hardware to mine $10btc/day it would take on
| average ~70 years to mine a block (worth $300000), whereas with
| a pool I'd get my $10/day consistently
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| A quick google search for "biggest bitcoin pools" is helpful-
| https://btc.com/stats/pool
|
| Most of the pools listed there are easy enough to sign up and
| start contributing to.
| patriksvensson wrote:
| Correct, mining in a pool you are guaranteed your fair share of
| the mining (minus admin fee from the pool operators). Even if
| you never mine a single block, you get your fair share of the
| mined blocks by the pool.
|
| If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless
| you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on
| par with winning the lottery.
|
| DYOR on pools, but I can recommend f2pool
| (https://www.f2pool.com/) for Ethereum mining.
| gruez wrote:
| >If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs
| unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the
| odds are on par with winning the lottery.
|
| It's slightly better than that. A single 5700 xt mining
| ethereum can expect a block once every 43 months at current
| difficulty. That's still insanely high variance, but still
| far better than the lottery.
| patriksvensson wrote:
| Interesting, that IS slightly better than I expected, at
| least for Ethereum. So if we treat each block being found
| as a lottery "ticket" and that solo miner with a 5700xt on
| average can expect to mine a block ("win the lottery") once
| every 43 months....
|
| For Ethereum:
|
| 1 block every 15 seconds
|
| 5760 blocks in a day
|
| 172800 in a month (30day avg)
|
| 7430400 blocks in a 43 month period.
|
| So about 1 in 7 430 400 odds when solo mining. Pool highly
| recommended specially because Ethereum is moving away from
| the current system of mining long before 43 months from
| now!
| MayeulC wrote:
| > Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best
| interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless
| one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to
| mining?
|
| This is false. But you'd have to be incredibly lucky to find
| the right hash by yourself, so profit are split, luck is shared
| when pooling.
|
| Edit:. Already answered, didn't refresh before replying.
| wmf wrote:
| You could solo mine for a long time without finding a block.
| The math is fairly straightforward: your probability of winning
| each block is (your hashrate)/(total hashrate). Let's say you
| have one S19 Pro; that means you have roughly a 1 in 1.6
| million chance of winning each block. There are only ~53,000
| Bitcoin blocks per year so your chance of getting a block is
| basically zero.
|
| In theory p2pool is trustless so you don't have to worry about
| sketchy operators but I don't know if anyone has used it in
| years.
|
| Slush is the only old-school Bitcoin pool that still seems to
| be decent sized.
|
| Being used by criminals doesn't mean anything; they want
| reliable and honest pools just as much as you do.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Definitely a case of "if you have to ask, it's not for you"
| undersuit wrote:
| A few years back I was mining Monero on 4 pieced together
| computers in my little 400sqft apartment with electric wall
| heaters. It's a bad investment to do that in my house with a
| gas furnace.
| kens wrote:
| Author here; I was surprised to see this on HN today. Let me know
| if you have any questions!
| rkagerer wrote:
| I remember this article - thanks for sharing, it was fun!
|
| Did you do any practice ones before you recorded it? How many
| mistakes did you make along the way? :-)
| xiphias2 wrote:
| A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there's no reason it
| couldn't have been invented 10 years earlier (after having
| practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then
| never.
| mlcrypto wrote:
| It took a true genius & visionary to see that the whole is
| better than the sum of its parts. A masterclass of engineering,
| economics, & philosophy. Very few still understand the
| importance
| mFixman wrote:
| The rate of information transmission was much higher in 2010
| than in 2000.
|
| If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been
| more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-
| nerds in very niche internet forums. Since it was invented in
| 2010 it easily spread through Facebook, Reddit and other
| universal social media before making the jump via mainstream
| news to non-technical people.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been
| more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-
| nerds in very niche internet forums.
|
| It most certainly was this for at least 2 years. 2-4 years
| more if you count the time Satoshi was working on it before
| the public release
| mFixman wrote:
| I remember hearing about Bitcoin in HN in 2011. I'm sure
| that same post convinced a lot of people with better
| hindsight than me to start mining.
| thatcat wrote:
| Green energy and small scale nuclear coming online will make
| the transition to self sustained mining easier after rewards
| run out.
| varjag wrote:
| A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined
| volume, so it's probably for the better.
| vmception wrote:
| the same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did
| _you_ mean?
| varjag wrote:
| Performance per watt energy was a lot worse a decade prior.
| kortilla wrote:
| If it still didn't become popular until around the same
| time, all of the rewards would have been halved much
| earlier. The big miners would be fighting over even smaller
| rewards.
| vmception wrote:
| The network emission adjusts to the amount of
| computational power on the network, every 2016 blocks. So
| if there was 1/1000th of the computational power on the
| bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in the
| same time span, 10 minutes. If there was 1000x more
| computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would
| still be generated in 10 minutes.
|
| If you understood that already then I'm not sure what you
| or the prior person is referring to exactly.
|
| If you mean that all the halvings would happen a decade
| earlier because bitcoin started a decade earlier, I'm not
| sure what the point of mentioning that is.
|
| If you mean the exchange rate would have been lower, the
| same scarcity drivers would exist, who knows who cares.
|
| The "big miners" would be bound by market forces of
| what's anything worth to them, and would likely be 100%
| proportional to today's reality.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Does the mined volume practically matter? As a relative
| factor, yes, it needs to be big enough to be too expensive to
| compute, but, as computation grows more expensive the volume
| necessary is actually reduced.
| [deleted]
| GiftCard2021 wrote:
| The 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers
|
| https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
| tromp wrote:
| I suspect one lifetime would not suffice to mine Grin with pencil
| and paper. Its Cuckatoo32 PoW puzzle is to find a 42-cycle in a
| random bipartite graph with 2^32 edges. each defined by 2
| siphashes.
|
| https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
| edgefield0 wrote:
| The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much
| electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as
| we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening.
| Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything
| but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the
| expense of humanity and our planet.
| [deleted]
| rcstank wrote:
| How much energy is consumed by online banking? Big Tech in
| general? These are sincere questions.
| kevingadd wrote:
| If you google search "how much power is used by online
| banking" there are multiple analyses answering this question
| for you along with consumption estimates for Bitcoin. One
| pro-bitcoin one from my first 4 results attempts to estimate
| _all the power consumption_ for every bank server, branch
| office, and ATM 24 /7 around the entire globe and produces an
| estimate of 140TWh/yr vs bitcoin's (at the time) 32.56 TWh/yr
| estimate. You can compare their average transaction values
| for yourself to decide how favorable this comparison actually
| is for bitcoin.
|
| An article I read today provides a comparison point for
| realtime transaction processing, Fedwire, along with its
| transaction volumes and server count. It's interesting to
| compare that with Bitcoin's volumes. The article also makes
| claims about the energy consumption (suggesting FAANG's
| energy consumption is already dwarfed by Bitcoin) but I can't
| manually verify those myself:
| https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-
| pow-c...
|
| The above article estimates a best case total of 55.1
| TWh/year for the major Proof of Work chains, and also
| provides estimates for various types of mining equipment,
| etc.
| philjohn wrote:
| A single bitcoin transaction uses ~ 600,000x as much energy
| as a single transaction on the Visa network.
| shawnz wrote:
| Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction
| count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of
| transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the
| energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).
| kevingadd wrote:
| Aren't there significant technological obstacles to
| raising the transaction limit, not to mention the fact
| that large miners have actively obstructed attempts to
| raise it in the past? My understanding is that we only
| finally got a block size increase with segwit in 2017 and
| that only happened after people worked around miner
| sabotage.
| shawnz wrote:
| There are no technological obstacles per se, but it will
| increase the rate which the size of the blockchain grows.
|
| It's true miners have obstructed attempts to make these
| kind of changes but they don't control the price of
| Bitcoin. If market demand for a higher transaction rate
| becomes great enough and they don't adapt, then another
| coin with bigger blocks will simply outcompete Bitcoin.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Do you have a source to cite here?
| hggh wrote:
| The goal of cryptocurrency is not to substitute online
| banking but the entire banking system. How much energy does
| that consume?
| ssss11 wrote:
| To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle
| devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as
| much as you'd think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing
| nothing. I'd argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin!
|
| Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your
| response. I'd expect theres heaps of things more wasteful..
| office building services running 24/7 comes to mind
| smeyer wrote:
| Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of
| people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great
| and everyone else should idle more devices.
|
| Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle
| devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.
| jazzabeanie wrote:
| Certainly not on a per gram basis...
| rcstank wrote:
| GP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is
| bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing?
|
| Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value
| by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for
| their work.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| It's unclear how much value is being created by Bitcoin
| vs how much is being captured/transferred from elsewhere.
|
| Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin
| doesn't create any value.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations'
| economies while generating so little value that I suspect
| my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on
| a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major
| city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly
| 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to
| generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as
| the entire Bitcoin network supports.)
|
| Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but
| uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the
| users using Bitcoin at volume?
|
| It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining
| (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a
| mechanism of currency.
| lallysingh wrote:
| They're moving money out of their countries past currency
| export controls.
| shawnz wrote:
| Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge
| the value a monetary system.
|
| Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could
| be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the
| electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-
| offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard
| to establish a consensus on the issue).
| kfrzcode wrote:
| The BTC market cap is around $650 billion. I don't
| understand your logic.
| airstrike wrote:
| Companies are generating value, not dollars.
| Closi wrote:
| No, companies do not create new money. They create goods
| and services in order to generate value/profit.
| jld wrote:
| Banks are companies and their service is to create new
| money.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Companies generate dollars by first generating things
| that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by
| themselves should be done with the smallest possible
| amount of electricity.
| shawnz wrote:
| Bitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market
| value so you might say it always uses the smallest
| possible amount of energy (given the current valuation).
|
| We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-
| stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work
| while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm
| hopeful though.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Creating currency by itself does not create any value.
| shawnz wrote:
| Right, the creation of Bitcoins only redistributes the
| value. The value mining provides is actually in
| outcompeting potential attackers who might want to change
| the consensus of the network.
| cortesoft wrote:
| No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at
| the fed, basically.
|
| There are no companies that generate dollars. That would
| be counterfeiting.
| jki275 wrote:
| The fed certainly generates new dollars.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, and they aren't a 'company'
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > There are no companies that generate dollars
|
| Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through
| fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy
| them.
| grifball wrote:
| Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that
| soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology
| called: "proof of space" which would require systems with
| large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe.
|
| EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space
| btczeus wrote:
| It's called Proof of Capacity, and it's been running
| since 2015: https://www.burst-coin.org/
| kevingadd wrote:
| Hey, at least that way all those empty apartments and
| houses being held as investments will get filled up with
| proof of space mining nodes
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Bitcoin consumes electricity and creates a store of value,
| fungible, and with easy global transaction methods.
|
| Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just
| hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.
| christophilus wrote:
| Streetlights/ night time lights which (besides often
| consuming fossil fuels) have the additional feature of
| ruining the night sky for stargazers, insects, nocturnal
| animals, etc.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Rate of growth. For bitcoin to be useful as currency, it
| needs to be used by many more people, while idle devices may
| not grow much more.
|
| However idle devices power consumption also needs to be
| addressed.
| tomxor wrote:
| > It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the
| US
|
| I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing
| far more utility by being ready and available to do ...
| anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a
| vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a
| tiny minority.
|
| Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin
| uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there are a maximum of
| 178 ways to divide up the rest... it's simply not on that
| scale of usefulness, _and_ it is not comparable to fucking
| visa because it doesn't serve the worlds transactions. No one
| buys coffee with bitcoin. Everything you compare it to will
| be of more material value to the world and almost always
| consume less energy, even if it's icecream. </rant>
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it
| would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting
| humanity off centrally planned currencies that are
| manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of
| wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
|
| Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the
| other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are
| our best chance at the moment.
| tomxor wrote:
| > I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in
| getting humanity off centrally planned currencies
|
| That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed
| at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies
| necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The
| only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people
| using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The computationally wasteful bit is a temporary problem
| for which solutions are already being created. The
| Lightning Network is one such effort.
|
| Governments are already taking efforts to fight against
| crypto. The fact that bitcoin is classified as an "asset"
| is the government adding friction to using it. Every time
| you transact in bitcoin you have to put that on your
| taxes because there's some capital gains/loss. Of course,
| they don't talk about it as if that is an attack, but it
| is. And they wouldn't be attacking it if they weren't
| scared. It's surely not guaranteed, maybe not even
| likely, but it's still _possible_ that we will win.
| dTal wrote:
| The computationally wasteful bit is the proof-of-work,
| which is an inherent part of bitcoin. The Lightning
| Network is just about scaling transactions.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't
| failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of
| gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.
| tomxor wrote:
| > It hasn't failed at anything.
|
| It has failed at being a usable currency, and not merely
| for socioeconomic reasons. A currency is more than just
| intrinsic value.
| Hiopl wrote:
| But that high value (and the volatile prices) is entirely
| the problem (coupled with other issues like the extremely
| low potential number of transactions per second). As it
| stands, Bitcoin will never be anything other than an
| investment vehicle. Maybe another cryptocurrency will be
| a suitable replacement for fiat, but right now and for
| the foreseeable future, crypto is still too niche, too
| complex and volatile. At most we're seeing banks extend
| their offerings with cryptocurrency, but none of it
| points to widespread replacement of fiat outright. There
| are too many institutional, technical and social
| barriers.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Bitcoin plays a role in the crypto ecosystem. It's like
| gold. Ethereum is like the finance industry and things
| like DOGE are like currency. The value will be pegged to
| BTC, making it the foundation for the ecosystem.
| mockingbirdy wrote:
| This. I've realized years ago that the current fiat
| system can be unsustainable because it's very hard for
| regulators to avoid the temptation of applying QE and
| other monstrosities. But I realized way too late that BTC
| is the vehicle to flee from that (in a simple way
| compared to moving physical assets across borders).
|
| It already succeeded in helping rich people in China to
| bring their wealth out of control. This has maximum
| utility for a lot of people. I'm not sure what will come
| after the current financial system (and it most probably
| won't go anywhere and will co-exist for some years before
| crypto will be banned everywhere), but this new type of
| wealth transfer mechanism already gets used a lot.
| Everyone who distrusts the current financial system or is
| oppressed by their regime is interested in it.
|
| I don't know how the world will look like (it'll probably
| be very hard to continue the current path because capital
| has found a new way to move across borders and avoid
| taxes, again) and I don't know if it's generally good for
| the global society, but Pandora's box is open.
|
| edit: For the sibling comments - the volatility is not
| that problematic when your alternative is a
| hyperinflationary currency and you don't have access to
| other currencies because they are banned in your
| oppressive country or some other reasons. You also need
| BTC only to move your assets from one country/wallet to
| another. You can then move it to a stable coin like USDC
| and slowly get it out of the crypto system. This takes
| you under an hour and you're done. It's currently an
| investment vehicle, but its utility comes from being able
| to get money from A to B regardless of government
| intervention. Even if BTC drops to $3k, it still has this
| value. Looking at the price of BTC is missing the point,
| it's over $0, you can do a transaction in 10 minutes and
| that is all that matters to move assets.
| undersuit wrote:
| The first government to move their money onto a crypto us
| going to have massive control over their economy. Roll
| their own crypto, keep the keys that allow more money to
| be printed, have the ability to lock people out of their
| wallets on a whim? They could even extract taxation by
| running all the nodes and taking the transaction fees.
| undersuit wrote:
| How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions
| cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP
| is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and
| it's not even to protect the users nor would it be
| effective in the current form as such.
| tomxor wrote:
| Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but
| lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is
| neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the
| transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-
| end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission,
| the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all
| those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by
| copyright protection crap)...
|
| It's got to be on a similar playing field right? i
| wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot more than 0.56%
| global. But look at how much _billions_ of people get
| from it all over the world, entertainment, art,
| education, something to connect to people with... it has
| an invaluable impact on society - i dare anyone to try
| compare that to bitcoin (not blockchain, not the utopian
| crypto dream, but Bitcoin).
| bobviolier wrote:
| The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with
| a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics
| and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the
| same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube:
|
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| HDCP's energy usage is marginal, but yes, it's pointless
| and I'd also like to kill it. I'd also like all mobile
| phones to receive software support for three times as
| long as what Apple currently provides. And I'd like to
| build more wind farms and stop shutting down nuclear
| plants.
|
| None of this excuses Bitcoin.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in
| the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less
| important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be
| used for much much better purposes. Another good example,
| albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses
| 1% of the world's electricity output.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| Ah yes the good old "but something worse already exists
| therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| Sickening? Really? Don't you find it interesting that currency
| free of nation-state regulators would be attacked as anti-
| environmental?
|
| These same regulators would love to steer policy and public
| opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad
| for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy,
| solar, etc. That seems suspicious.
|
| Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting - they
| are very likely aligned with other -isms you would not support,
| or are a root cause of the issue you care about in the first
| place. Environmentalism is no exception.
|
| Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity.
| If that requires more power, well, so does everything. I'd
| focus on how to generate that power renewably, not to argue
| against a technology that millions in the unbanked world could
| use to better their situation. I'd suggest you learn more about
| the problems that present cryptocurrency as a potential
| solution before just listing new problems.
| jboog wrote:
| I've been hearing for almost a decade how Bitcoin was going
| to change the world and help humanity and yet...nothing.
| Other than some speculators and early adopters getting rich.
|
| I've yet to hear of anything "world-changing" BTC could do
| that isn't already done better by traditional systems.
| wtfrmyinitials wrote:
| If people can print money, they will.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a
| savings account or Bitcoin. One of those has been decimated
| by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great
| investment.
|
| Bitcoin has already changed humanity for the better and
| it's only getting started.
| jlmorton wrote:
| > One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing
| press, the other has been a great investment
|
| How has the US dollar been destroyed? It has enjoyed
| remarkable price stability, very close to the target
| rate, which is what everyone expects and can plan for.
|
| The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which
| no one could plan for, and while it's currently enjoying
| a high value (just as tulips once did), it was worth 95%
| less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again
| soon.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| The dollar has absolutely been destroyed. Housing, health
| care... true inflation is rampant.
|
| > The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings,
| which no one could plan for, and which is currently
| enjoying a high price (just as tulips once did), but
| which was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and
| probably will be again soon.
|
| People have been saying this at their own expense for a
| decade.
| fchu wrote:
| Having great returns and improving humanity are very
| different things. I'm pretty sure a lot of scams are
| benefiting their creators very well, and yet...
| qeternity wrote:
| > For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in
| a savings account or Bitcoin.
|
| The classic false dichotomy by people peddling crypto.
| Nobody is keeping their money in a savings account. There
| are productive investments that aren't crypto.
| [deleted]
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| What asset class has returned value like crypto for the
| past 10 years? None.
| adriancr wrote:
| Stock market... derivatives...
| [deleted]
| qeternity wrote:
| Ok, is Bitcoin a super speculative investment, or a
| savings account? Now you're just moving goal posts.
|
| Ironically, crypto's returns are all due to
| Tether...which is purely inflationary printing. USDT is
| what you'd get with the USD if the Fed were run by actual
| criminals.
|
| Let's chat in a year.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| It's not that it's a speculative investment, it's that
| the dollar is continuously plunging in value and taking
| everything tied to it down too.
|
| BTC (and several other cryptos) are the only safe place
| to store money in the long term.
|
| > Let's chat in a year.
|
| Indeed. No one who's bet against crypto has come out
| looking prescient.
| DeRock wrote:
| While not world changing, it did allow for the paying for
| of illicit drugs over the internet. Silkroad was the peak
| of bitcoin usability IMO (regardless of my moral
| perspective on the matter). Ever since, its slowly
| transitioned into a Ponzi scheme built on the back of
| future "decentralized finance" promises.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting
|
| > Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help
| humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does
| everything.
|
| You jump immediately into whataboutism: what about all the
| other things that require power.
|
| Bitcoin is not beyond criticism. It is currently 99.99% used
| for speculation. Does it have potential? Absolutely. Do a
| number of competing non-PoW/non-blockchain based solutions
| also have potential? Yes. Do those competitors potentially
| use far less energy? Also yes.
|
| In the best case, Bitcoin is using a metric shit-ton of
| energy before actually hitting critical mass for its social
| use-cases. In its worst case, its a Tether-backed ponzi that
| is siphoning a tremendous amount of energy from more
| productive uses.
| simias wrote:
| Bitcoin is barely a currency. Its deflationary nature is the
| main reason it's been somewhat successful so far (because it
| rewards early adopters) but it's also be its demise (because
| nobody wants to spend a "currency" today that's by design
| going to be more valuable tomorrow).
|
| Cryptocurrencies is what happens when libertarian techbros
| try do "disrupt" basic financial systems without taking the
| time to figure out how it's really working.
|
| Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
| Peaple saying that embracing bitcoin is going to create a
| fairest world for all are either deluded or trying to sell
| you something.
|
| In 2017 hundreds of projects (be it premined coins or "ICOs")
| got literally billions of dollars for all sorts of
| revolutionary projects. What are the results? Where's the
| revolution? Why am I know posting on HN through the
| blockchain?
|
| 11 years on and still no use case besides pyramid schemes and
| buying drugs online. Great job folks.
| seibelj wrote:
| MakerDAO, Synthetix, Cosmos, Polkadot... all of these are
| working and did ICOs. Ethereum itself was an ICO. Crypto is
| wildly successful by any metric.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| How is this a rebuttal to being accused of using more power
| than a substantially-sized country and offering little in
| return for it?
|
| Like, at least the current fiat model actually works for most
| people.
| justblaze23 wrote:
| https://nano.org/ - That's the reply
| mareko wrote:
| Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Many newer ones run PoS
| which doesn't 'waste' energy. The Celo network goes even
| further and is carbon negative. It sends a portion of block
| rewards to Project Wren, which uses them to buy carbon credits
| to offset more carbon than the network emits to run.
|
| https://medium.com/celoorg/celo-to-go-carbon-neutral-with-pr...
| jki275 wrote:
| Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't
| use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't
| consume any significant amount of electricity.
|
| Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for
| bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with
| climate change.
|
| Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all.
| There are hundreds of others.
| samsonradu wrote:
| > the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for
| bitcoin mining is hydro in China
|
| Side concern but isn't this concentration a red flag? Likely
| many miners are in China or Russia due to the electricity
| prices. Can't they collude to execute a 51% attack?
| fuf7ru44yyruf wrote:
| Are we done pretending people like you are anything more than
| the new anti-industrialists yet? If it were up to the green
| crowd we'd be back to using candles and carrier pigeons.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Kind of a weird buy-in from Tesla on that basis isn't it.
| base698 wrote:
| Yeah it's definitely more sickening than fiat that allows
| endless wars and death all over the globe.
| ericflo wrote:
| Electricity consumption doesn't equal climate change per se -
| not all electricity is created equally. I see PoW
| cryptocurrencies as one of the most promising incentives to
| move to a sustainable energy future. Given the lack of
| political will for policy-based incentives for this goal, a
| market-based incentive is welcomed.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Power consumption is irrelevant if we're using green
| technologies for mining. The fact that the green lobby is
| staunchly anti-nuclear makes it very hard for me to care,
| though.
| hddu wrote:
| Every time I hear someone talk about the electricity
| consumption of argentinia I laugh and think of the soy wojak
| gif.
| macawfish wrote:
| It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency
| people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR
| disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking
| for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in
| an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a
| perfect reason to do just that.
|
| _Where_ is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes
| cryptocurrency projects ' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste
| footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how
| efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without
| that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those
| few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people
| and the planet?
| macawfish wrote:
| It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency
| people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR
| disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking
| for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in
| an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a
| perfect reason to do just that.
|
| _Where_ is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes
| cryptocurrency projects ' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste
| footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how
| efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without
| that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those
| few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people
| and the planet.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Bitcoin is probably the most important social/technological
| innovation since the internet (which uses how much energy?).
| Most people realize that moving humanity forward requires
| energy. There's loud neo-luddite contingent that missed the
| boat on crypto (it's actually not too late), but I wouldn't
| take angry anti-crypto HN comments as public sentiment. The
| public is in desperate need of a finance system not tied to
| the existing oppressive establishment.
| nietzsch3 wrote:
| Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global banking system uses
| and its energy use doesn't scale with adoption
| K0nserv wrote:
| Does that follow? Surely as Bitcoin becomes more and more
| valuable there's more and more incentive to mine and the
| more entranched it becomes more important to defend against
| 51% attacks become.
|
| It seems to me that what has happened historically i.e.
| ever more people starting to mine will continue as long as
| Bitcoin remains valuable.
| nietzsch3 wrote:
| Yeah and I simply don't see 51% attacks working or going
| on for long periods of time due to adoption and game
| theory. Nation states simply can't afford gain 51%
| because it would mean they're already losing legitimacy
| of their currency IMO.
| mrb wrote:
| Please realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a
| single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103
| TWh/year).
|
| A single dam.
|
| So, really the comparison is more a testament of how little
| electricity Argentina uses.
| fifilura wrote:
| That is not just any "single" dam, but the world's second
| largest.
|
| The largest dam in Sweden, which is my reference, a country
| where hydro is the biggest source of electricity, produces
| 2TWh/y.
|
| (And sadly much of that energy now goes to heavily subsidized
| Facebook and Google servers because it is cool to have those
| companies in your town, and collect income tax from the
| 10-ish people that work there)
| Symbiote wrote:
| That is the second largest hydroelectric dam is the world.
|
| Pick the Netherlands instead for the comparison, which has
| similar consumption to Argentina.
| mrb wrote:
| That is still a single dam.
|
| A whole country could be powered by a single dam.
| fifilura wrote:
| The number of places where you can build a dam is
| limited, and when you find one it is not unlikely that
| you have to relocate > 1 million people to build it
| (Three Gorges Dam). That is on the other side of the
| scale you are talking about.
| [deleted]
| IntFee588 wrote:
| This is precisely why Ethereum and its new proof-of-stake
| mechanism will take over as the dominant currency in the next
| few years.
|
| I wouldn't expect crypto to disappear. The market is currently
| worth $1.5 trillion, people will fight for its adoption to keep
| their investment.
| nietzsch3 wrote:
| This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an
| aneurysm if it gets brought up again
|
| - bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining
|
| - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking
| system
|
| - bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual
| payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster
| and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the
| blockchain
|
| https://www.danheld.com/blog/2019/1/5/pow-is-efficent
| SamBam wrote:
| > bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining -
| bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking
| system
|
| Those are both gigantic energy expenditures, and to say that
| BitCoin uses _only_ a third of the energy that another
| despicable planet-destroying industry does doesn 't speak
| much in the favor of BitCoin.
|
| Nor does saying that something ~50 million people own (0.5%
| of the Earth's population) is "only" 15% of the entire global
| financial system used by 7.3 billion people.
| nietzsch3 wrote:
| Would you rather have us use the bad system that uses more
| energy or the better system that uses less energy?
| SamBam wrote:
| ...which is which? Since the global financial system
| clearly uses much, much less energy per person, I'm
| guessing that you're also calling it the "better system?"
|
| Or are you pretending that if BitCoin were used by every
| person on Earth that it would still be using the exact
| same energy?
| nietzsch3 wrote:
| Did you read my initial comment? Bitcoin uses 7% of the
| energy the global financial system uses and its energy
| usage does not scale with adoption. Transactions are
| meant to be run on the Lightning Network which consumes
| next to nothing compared to Visa, and long term savings
| are meant to be stored on the blockchain. This argument
| that Bitcoin uses too much energy has been around since
| its whitepaper and has been countered multiple times.
|
| *edit, not debunked but countered with practical
| solutions
| yesenadam wrote:
| > This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have
| an aneurysm if it gets brought up again
|
| Hi, welcome to HN. Please read the guidelines. Talking like
| that is nowhere near acceptable here. Thanks.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| Fuck you
| DennisP wrote:
| Some cryptocurrencies are trying to fix that by moving to
| proof-of-stake, which does away with the mining effort
| entirely.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Some cryptocurrencies also use PoS natively, and have been
| for years
| xtian wrote:
| > Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as
| anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few
| dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
|
| You could say the same thing about the US military, which is
| the world's single largest producer of CO2 emissions.
| ptd wrote:
| Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so
| sickening?
| pushrax wrote:
| Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low
| compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the
| allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to
| this inefficient endeavour.
|
| Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption
| within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would
| not be sickening.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That's the question that I never see answered. Presumably if
| someone is using electricity to mine bitcoins, it's because
| they couldn't use that electricity for something more
| valuable (including things this commenter would probably
| consider more wholesome? or "valuable to society"?) like
| producing food.
| dTal wrote:
| Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make"
| using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite
| resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a
| primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| Sure, but if you want it to be _sound_ money, it has to
| backed by some kind of inherent scarcity or guarantee which
| implies work and energy expenditure. If you want to be able
| to store it on a flash drive and transfer it to a different
| continent with no intermediaries, that too will cost
| something. If it were 'fictional' enough to be free, it
| wouldn't be useful.
| lottin wrote:
| Thank you. This is exactly it.
| simonw wrote:
| Because if there's a direct connection between the amount of
| electricity used and the amount of money generated, the only
| logical conclusion is for human society to burn up every
| possible available ounce of energy as quickly as possible.
| young_unixer wrote:
| Maybe we should blame the defenders of constant inflation and
| government overreach. You mentioned Argentina, which is a prime
| example of these problems.
|
| If we didn't have those problems in the first place, Bitcoin
| wouldn't be as attractive.
| Moodles wrote:
| What % of bitcoin owners own it for political reasons along
| your lines, compared to people just using it as an
| investment?
| iamricks wrote:
| Well, since you can own bitcoin anonymously, any answer to
| this question other than "i don't know" will have a huge
| margin of error
| jki275 wrote:
| Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best
| pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break.
| There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis
| services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.
| vinger wrote:
| They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While
| working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a
| person. The ability to do this at scale or find any
| person from any account isn't real.
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| I'd argue it doesn't actually matter. People only buying it
| as an investment vehicle is still enough to push into
| mainstream awareness and increase it's level of adoption
| and usefulness, and at its core, the reason it's an
| attractive investment in the first place is because it's
| deflationary, digital and decentralized.
| Antipode wrote:
| How would a completely unregulated currency be better in that
| regard? Aren't the wild swings in bitcoin price essentially
| hyperinflation/deflation?
| gruez wrote:
| It depends entirely on your time horizon. USD might be more
| stable day-to-day, but has lost 32.3% of its value in the
| past 20 years. This is just with CPI, if you're comparing
| to asset prices this is probably much worse.
| Antipode wrote:
| I was talking more about hyperinflation specifically,
| rather than the normal ~2% annual inflation targets. I
| don't understand how lack of monetary policy would
| prevent hyperinflation.
| thamer wrote:
| It really is terrible, and many enthusiasts don't seem to
| understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it. For so many
| it's just a way to make a quick buck when Elon tweets about it.
|
| To put in in numbers, according to the Bitcoin Energy
| Consumption Index[1] (they link to other research that arrive
| at similar conclusions, if not worse): the total footprint is
| almost 37 million tons of CO2, a single transaction accounting
| for over 300 kg. A single transaction requires the same amount
| of energy as an average household over 22 days, or emits the
| same amount of CO2 as a 2020 Civic driving 1,000 miles.
|
| The comparison with the visa network is just as wild: a single
| bitcoin transaction takes more energy than 432,000 visa
| transactions.
|
| At this point it's highly irresponsible to continue using and
| supporting Bitcoin.
|
| [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
| willbudd wrote:
| Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies
| that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively
| rely on it to a far lesser degree.
|
| Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN
| commenters are on this topic.
| coolestguy wrote:
| It really is pretty bewildering how many top comments here
| show almost 0 understanding of the technology.
|
| How many other topics that get posted here have the same
| thing happening??
| notjtrig wrote:
| That's a very good point. It is sort of demonised in the
| media but tech people understand encryption and cracking,
| phreaking, p2p networks, finge topics are our speciality.
| An intrested mind does not sit in front of a powerful
| research platform to claim ignorance year after year.
| People in tech disporportantly ignore crypto and it's a
| shame.
|
| Why would we want to create another currency system when we
| feel enslaved to the first one but at the same time aware
| we are the minority of people, and hold an incredible
| privilege.
|
| It's easier to pretend you don't understand, or just don't
| think about it, look the other way and suck on those
| corporate titties to the tune of 250k USD/year because
| that's the attitude that got us to the top.
| hddu wrote:
| Wow it's almost like the media is all propaganda and lies,
| people on the internet claim to be smart while they don't
| really understand what they are talking about, wow who
| knew. (Yes I include myself in the pulling shit out my ass
| on the internet group)
| philjohn wrote:
| That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is _the_ de facto
| cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the
| most popular.
| macawfish wrote:
| It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential
| cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc
| into those other projects before righteous public sentiment
| gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency
| projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in
| vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human
| impacts of what they're investing in.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The cause and effect you describe hasn't applied to
| significant investors in oil or coal up to this point
| that I'm aware of, despite the disastrous effect those
| two revenue sources have had on the environment. I'm not
| sure why Bitcoin would be significantly different when
| its negative externalities are effectively invisible and
| a bunch of the mining occurs in mystery data-centers
| overseas, outside of the reach of central banks.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-
| stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and
| we're what, over a decade in to the history of
| cryptocurrency?
|
| Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or
| Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating
| cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've
| come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof
| of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't
| do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and
| resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.
| djamrozik wrote:
| Eth 2.0 will be fully PoS (released fully in the next year
| or two, but staking is possible now).
|
| Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS
| but are still very early in their development.
|
| > "we're what, over a decade in to the history of
| cryptocurrency"
|
| I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was
| technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went
| global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get
| to where we are now.
| willbudd wrote:
| Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or
| earlier. Ancient technology, basically.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Wasn't aware of those ones, thanks. It's a shame they're
| not even in the top 100 by volume.
| cardanome wrote:
| Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap.
|
| If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap
| (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three
| of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and
| Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of
| stake.
|
| Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest
| market.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to
| anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in
| contraband switching from btc to monero among others for
| that reason.
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of
| any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural
| level because it's basically centralized.
| kevingadd wrote:
| That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple
| charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them.
| Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed
| as not a blockchain due to being centralized?
| ROARosen wrote:
| Ripple (aka XRP) is number 5
| wmf wrote:
| Avalanche isn't that big yet but it's in production and
| running DeFi.
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| This environmental concern trolling is so blatantly
| astroturfed.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The real solution here is not complaining about individual use
| cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade
| on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there
| seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any
| time soon.
| vinger wrote:
| The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and
| geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some
| interesting side effects.
| kevingadd wrote:
| In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other
| resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios
| like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding
| error... At the point where miners are willing to do things
| like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way
| beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV.
| If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from
| bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and
| skip the carbon tax?
|
| [1] https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/russ
| ian...
| wmf wrote:
| _what 's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right
| people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon
| tax?_
|
| International sanctions. Civilize or die.
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950599
|
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110
| dint wrote:
| Discussed with Ken on the most recent episode of Oxide Computer
| Company's (very good) On The Metal podcast:
|
| https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-13-ken-shirriff/
| waynesonfire wrote:
| You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources.
|
| EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends
| their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking
| about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?
| mckirk wrote:
| I feel like either I'm misunderstanding your comment, or you've
| whooshed everyone else commenting on it so far.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| lol, clearly wooshed.
| dang wrote:
| Edit: I misread the GP, as explained below. Sorry!
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jjcon wrote:
| Isn't that kind of what you are doing by posting that
| comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree -
| instead you just shallowly dismissed their comment by saying
| it was shallow.
|
| Also maybe I'm crazy but their comment seemed to be a
| joke/commentary on the environmental resources used by
| Bitcoin. That isn't a shallow dismissal.
| dang wrote:
| Moderation comments are certainly bad HN comments--they're
| off-topic, they're meta, they're repetitive as hell [1].
| And you're right that they sometimes break the rules
| they're trying to enforce. They're also even more tedious
| to write than to read [2]. But, alas, they're a necessary
| out-of-band feedback mechanism to try to nudge the system
| out of its failure modes.
|
| I take your point about the GP being a joke, though--the
| edit makes that clear. The problem with one-liners that
| don't disambiguate intent [3] is that they pattern-match to
| the most common category they look like.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang
|
| [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&so...
|
| [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&so...
| TheDong wrote:
| It's a shallow joke. One of the rules of HN is to attempt
| to have thoughtful and substantive discussions.
|
| An entire comment that is just a joke is not how you end up
| with substantive discussion, which I think has been well
| proven by reddit long since.
|
| It's fine to have a joke to lead into a well articulated
| point, but an entire comment shouldn't _just_ be a joke,
| unless it's the rare case of a joke that is insightful, not
| just a shared cultural reference (in this case to a common
| other argument on HN).
|
| > Isn't that kind of what you are doing by posting that
| comment?
|
| I think this is akin to the paradox of tolerance.
|
| There's the saying "that with is presented without evidence
| may be dismissed without evidence".
|
| I think the HN analogue would be "that which is posted
| without an attempt to have a substantive discussion can be
| dismissed out of hand".
|
| Similar to how a gish gallop works, it's absolutely not
| plausible for dang to respond to every comment that
| violates HN guidelines with a full breakdown of why he
| believes so. The volume of poor comments simply is so high
| that he would need to spend far more hours than he can
| spare for that.
| jjcon wrote:
| It really wasn't 'just a joke' though. There is a whole
| range of discussion to be had on the resources used by
| crypto - and if you can make a quip and also commentary I
| see that as valuable. Is it the pinnacle of HN comments?
| Not at all. But does it deserve to be moderated? Not in
| my book because it does bring up a valuable point of
| discussion.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Dozens of redundant meme comments aclrss the btc threads
| aren't helpful.
| gruez wrote:
| > You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of
| resources.
|
| It's for entertainment, and it looks like OP learned something.
| It's better use of resources than staring at a TV all day,
| which presumably you won't have an issue with.
|
| >Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how
| bad BTC is for the environment recently?
|
| At this point it's beating a dead horse.
| danhak wrote:
| His goal was to answer the interesting question: "how many
| hashes could I manually generate per day," not to generate
| hashes in the most efficient manner possible.
| shabda wrote:
| Also, the author did not spend two days. he spent 17 minutes
| and then did the math to calculate the block hash rate.
|
| > Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45
| seconds. At this rate, hashing a full Bitcoin block (128
| rounds)[3] would take 1.49 days, for a hash rate of 0.67
| hashes per day
| swagonomixxx wrote:
| It's a lockdown. I could see myself spending the weekend doing
| this.
| trophycase wrote:
| Some of the comments are from 2014. Looks like this was from
| well before the lockdown XD
| reaperducer wrote:
| His resources. Not yours.
|
| You don't get to judge, unless you want to detail what you did
| over the weekend and let the rest of us strangers decide if
| what you did was a waste or not.
| lifty wrote:
| Unless (s)he used a lot of electricity over the weekend. Then
| HN gets to judge.
| agumonkey wrote:
| How many hands to equate one average 2021 ASIC ?
| petethepig wrote:
| Reminds me of IP over Avian Carriers thing [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
| jacklolo wrote:
| The 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers
|
| https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
| yters wrote:
| When doing it manually can people find shortcuts that would elude
| brute force computation?
| gruez wrote:
| AFAIK hashing algorithms are specifically designed so that you
| can't take shortcuts. That said, there was a technique that
| allowed you do do just that[1], but it has been patched.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf
| yters wrote:
| In general that is true, but is that true for all specific
| instances?
| gruez wrote:
| Are you talking about whether you can skip steps for
| certain inputs to the hashing function? No not really. If
| you look at the reference implementation[1] the control
| flow is the same regardless of what the input is.
|
| [1] scroll to the bottom of https://www.movable-
| type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html
| dualvectorfoil wrote:
| Unrelated to the algorithm, I've found that doing things "by
| hand" is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for
| otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it's a function of doing
| work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include
| writing code written by others and working through math on paper.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| I think this is due to some kind of muscle memory.
|
| You only start hearing certain patterns in complex music, e.g.
| Mahler symphonies, if you listen often enough to it. At some
| point you recognize stuff unconsciously.
| pontifier wrote:
| I've noticed something similar in dance and language. I think
| it has something to do with mirror neurons feeding back into
| meaning making.
|
| When you hear a word in a language you know, mirror neurons
| probably fire the patterns that would be required to make
| those sounds yourself. If you don't have experience making a
| sound, you're less likely to be able to detect subtle nuance
| in it, and those patterns tie into your memory of the times
| you have used that word.
|
| The same with dance. While taking dance classes, I found that
| watching very good dancers gave a visceral thrill that wasn't
| there before... Like I could FEEL what they were doing.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Totally agree. I had a hard time trying to comprehend how
| parity works until I sat down and did some parity computations
| on paper.
| [deleted]
| JamilD wrote:
| Likewise. Once in a while I force myself to do backprop by hand
| to make sure I still understand all the concepts and can walk
| myself through the calculus.
| mkaic wrote:
| I just learned backprop for the first time a week ago and
| doing exactly what you described, working it out by hand, was
| absolutely invaluable. There's something about being able to
| visualize what my code is doing on a sheet of paper that just
| helped everything click.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I agree. For some reason, I didn't get the lambda calculus when
| I first encountered it but it became entirely obvious after
| doing just a couple of exercises by hand.
| rullopat wrote:
| True, I understood how pointer works when I drew them on paper.
| I was struggling for a week, then I tried on paper and in 10
| minutes I got it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| So much screen-staring time can be saved with just pen and
| paper. We need to learn to do it more often.
| infogulch wrote:
| I love whiteboards, they are much better than paper: more
| space, nice colors, easy to see, very easy to collaborate
| on, simple redos. That's actually the biggest thing I miss
| from going into the office: nice huge whiteboards that
| cover the whole wall, not the little dinky ones that office
| depot sells for exorbitant prices.
|
| I found a solution though: Lowe's sells a 4'x8' sheet of
| whiteboard for fifteen bucks, now I have my whiteboard
| covered wall in my home office so I'm happy again.
| jjuel wrote:
| Do you have a link to that Lowe's whiteboard sheet?
| infogulch wrote:
| It's called "Smooth White Wall Panel", but honestly just
| go with a truck and ask an employee, apparently they're
| popular. The guy I asked said they even use them in the
| employee areas in the back.
| https://www.lowes.com/pd/47-75-in-x-7-98-ft-Smooth-White-
| Wal...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| I like pencil and paper. Colored pencils are plentiful,
| and paper is easier to image and share than a whiteboard.
| You can write smaller on paper and don't get gorrila
| arms.
| infogulch wrote:
| Hey, you can have preferences, even if they are wrong. ;)
|
| Colored pencils are usually very difficult to erase. I've
| found whiteboards are great for sharing. Get a set of
| small tip dry erase pens, much better than the standard
| ones, and helps both writing small and gorilla arm
| (though I've never really had issues with the latter).
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Both. And another aspect you missed: Doing things by hand
| stimulates regions of the brain which are directly tied to
| regions of creativity and to improve the ability to relate a
| new concept to existing concepts.
| lmkg wrote:
| I think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things
| which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But
| its idea of what's not important is not well-tuned to many
| contexts. I think a lot of "secret tricks" are just ways of
| trying to bypass that heuristic and force yourself to do all
| the steps. E.g. rubber-duck debugging: putting the situation
| into words means putting it into concrete terms, which catches
| the parts that your brain let sit unexamined.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Not exactly the same, but that's why I think the best
| requirements document is a working Excel spreadsheet.
| bredren wrote:
| If I'm unfamiliar with a project I force slow work by first
| looking for existing process improvements, like organized
| GitHub milestones and well-described and meta'd issues.
|
| I'll commonly explore new tech by generating my own summarized
| documentation and through light tooling of initial
| configuration.
|
| I am in the midst of this now where an existing operational
| "algorithm" needs better software support.
|
| A lot of the discovery for that is starting with very general
| issues describing "problem" areas and then drilling them down
| to specific issues that might require action.
|
| It can be tedious to go this "slow," but it's how I get to
| fast.
| csomar wrote:
| Most people seem to have missed the fact that this is an
| advertisement for his book [1]. The person who is going to go
| through the whole article is a very likely to make a purchase.
| It's unfortunate that the book doesn't seem to have many sales
| and apparently, it's not practically available anymore.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Quartz-Objects-Power-Global-
| Economy/d...
| kens wrote:
| Umm, no. This is not an advertisement and I'm kind of offended
| that you say so. First, that's not even my book. The book
| author asked if he could put my bitcoin mining by hand process
| in his book; it's a small part of the book. Second, I wrote the
| post three years before the book. I know HN watches out for
| submarine advertisements, but really!
| mym1990 wrote:
| Don't be offended by a no name on the internet, some people
| just don't know what they are talking about.
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