
Into the Bitcoin Mines - RougeFemme
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mines/?ref=technology
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StringyBob
Whenever I see advances in mining rigs I just hope that someone invents a
cryptocurrency where the mining actually does some useful work, like protein
folding.

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sktrdie
Mining does some useful work: it keeps the network secure. So it's not
entirely useless. I agree that the proof-of-work could be built on a more
useful algorithm rather then simply finding hashes smaller than a certain
value.

Remember though that the proof-of-work calculation needs to be hard to
generate and also easy to verify. If protein folding isn't easy to verify, it
won't work as the basis of a decentralized consensus network such as Bitcoin.

~~~
malandrew
Exactly. The cost of all the energy used to mine bitcoins and process
transactions needs to be compared to all the financial infrastructure we have
in place today. Think of how many much of the financial infrastructure today
would disappear if the world operated mostly on Bitcoins. If an when that
happens we'll reap enormous savings and it should end up being more
environmentally friendly because mining operations do not require locality.
It's very easy to put a mining operation in a region/country with access to
cheap, renewable energy, whereas lots of our current financial infrastructure
is located in places where the energy consumed is dirty and expensive.

I would love to see someone compare the energy costs of our current
infrastructure and externalities vs how thing would be if Bitcoin or other
compute intensive crypto-currency replaced all that.

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joshz
Couple weeks ago these photos from a Hong Kong based mining facility floated
up, pretty crazy setup.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#msg3709913)

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throwaway_yy2Di
_" Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing
power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s
mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by
Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego."_

This is obviously wrong. Where did it come from?

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Eclyps
I would guess from Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of
California, San Diego.

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gojomo
And UCSD is home of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), a major site
for National Science Foundation computing research. So rather than 'obviously
wrong' I'd weigh this assessment as 'presumptively right' unless/until other
better evidence or testimony is presented.

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yetanotherphd
I used to hold the opinion that all proof-of-work systems were inherently
flawed, because in order to protect against an attacker, you have to waste
more resources than the attacker would have gained.

Now I think that in practice, the amount that the attacker could gain might be
quite small compared with the total value of the system.

~~~
betterunix
It's not that the attacker does _less_ work than the honest parties. Rather,
it is that the honest parties must work _at least as hard_ as the attacker. If
the attacker devotes a gigawatt, the honest parties must devote a gigawatt to
defense.

What I like to say is this: Would you use TLS if that was how it worked?

~~~
yetanotherphd
I'm not saying proof-of-work is appropriate in all cases.

To use a more extreme value, a vault containing gold that was protected by
proof of work would be useless, since the work required to open it would have
to equal the value of the contents in order to discourage thieves.

My point was that in some cases, like bitcoin, it might be possible that the
value to the attacker of a successful attack on bitcoin was significant, but
still much less than the total worth of bitcoin.

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applecore
Not a bad place for a Bitcoin miner. There's cold Arctic air for cooling and
cheap geothermal energy for power.

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mmanfrin
Question: If BTC were to disappear overnight, could all these machines be
retooled to do something else? Or are they so specifically made that their
only possible purpose is coin mining?

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sktrdie
They can be used to power another decentralized consensus system. Currency is
only one application being used on the bitcoin network. If bitcoin dies for
whatever reason (political or technical) the hashing power could still be used
to secure and build another decentralized consensus network that could have
many other functions other than being a currency: such as ways to send stocks,
bonds, smart property and so on... in an entirely decentralized manner.

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vajorie
We seem to keep finding ways to fuck up the earth for pretty useless and
unnecessary reasons. I lol'd at our obvious dumbassness.

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drcode
Bitcoins require mining as a security measure, which is a lot more energy
efficient than the security measures for traditional currencies.

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betterunix
Here's the difference: banks have every incentive to try to reduce their power
consumption, Bitcoin miners have every incentive to increase their power
consumption.

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yafujifide
Not true. Since using more electricity costs more money, bitcoin miners have
an incentive to use less electricity. Their incentives are to maximize
hashes/s/watt.

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maxerickson
This is true, but the reward is currently far larger than the electrical
consumption, so mining is currently mostly a contest to bring more hardware
online.

(kicking CPUs and GPUs out of the contest probably did a lot to lower power
consumption, but I wonder if the growth of the network has overshadowed that)

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asselinpaul
GPU or ASIC based mining?

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wmf
Bitcoin mining is all ASICs now.

