It is subtle, but PoW mining itself doesn't generate coins. It isn't like someone is digging a hole in the ground and extracting gold.
PoW miners are rewarded for correctly validating transactions, with newly minted coins.
The whole proof of work thing is that you proved that you validated a transaction by expending energy, and the network pays you for that security service.
Miners then need to sell those coins on the open market in order to pay for their capex/opex, which creates the market.
The open question is that if you have a fixed supply of coins that eventually runs out, what will carry the miners?
It'll be increased fees or the network will switch to another solution.
I believe transactions are quite optional though? A miner could choose to mine empty blocks if they truly wanted, which transactions to include if any is up to them.
Correct, one can mine empty blocks, but in practice, dumb idea. Most people mine with a pool. The pool decides what goes into a block. Even at scale. The point is that it smoothes out the reward cycle. For ETH, we mined with a pool that dual mined ETH+ZIL, which increased our overall rewards.
Proof of work allows for what Keynes called "Bancor". BTC is succesful because unlike fiat central banks, the money supply isn't dictated by interest rates (and thus loans) but by the effort of participants. The price of BTC is almost irrelevant, BTC itself is a paradigm shift.
Regarding the fixed supply, it's only fixed because participants agree to the consensus algorithm that fixes it. Many cryptocurrencies have different tokenomics, such as ETH's rules under PoS. BTC miners could vote onchain for a hard fork to change the 21M cap - or another solution.
My favorite Vercel pricing was the one where their AI token offering is just a wrapper around OpenRouter, and where OpenRouter has a few models for free, Vercel was charging for them.
Looking now, Arcee is no longer free, but the exact same tokens/model costs more on Vercel.
A "reasonable" answer is probably a primary self-hosted Forgejo instance as the canonical forge, while using GitHub as a mirror solely to take advantage of its free CI, while that lasts, while hosting secrets with a dedicated secret-hosting provider (I don't know what the provider du jour for this is these days).
If the primary forge's only job is to host the actual Git infrastructure (the code, the MRs, the issues, maybe a wiki), it's a lot more simple than GitHub, and probably more within the scope of what people can reasonably administer themselves.
I hosted the first "java.apache.org". I was an early employee at CollabNet, and in the first discussions around starting subversion. I worked on Cloud Foundry.
This stuff isn't easy and I'm more than happy letting someone else do it at the expense of some downtime.
Will I have to patch machines, keep packages updated, deal with SSL certs, maintain action runner infra, deal with billing for the machines, add monitoring, alerts, logging, etc
No, I don't want to be in the business of running my own Github clone. That's what I pay Github for.
Why do you pay salary to employees to buy food when you can just run a farm next to the office and save money by operating the farm and giving the employees food directly? You'd save money by not having to pay as high of salaries, and farms don't even need 24/7 devops teams.
Don't you think the farm example was a bit too extreme for it to make sense? A tech company probably does not have expertise in farming but devOps is something they already know how to do and can easily manage it in-house. Also how fast do you think farms produce food that you can drip feed it to employees constantly
> solely to take advantage of its free CI, while that lasts
Eh, if you want to be able to continue working, deploy and what not as normal during weekdays, I'd suggest also moving to Forgejo Actions if you're moving anyways. Not 100% compatible, but more or less the same, and even paying the same but with dedicated hardware you'd get way faster runners.
For companies with resources for infrastructure, sure.
For OSS, the unlimited free minutes of multiplatform CI offered by GitHub are literally impossible to replace. Maintaining runners yourself to do the same things would be somewhere between a part- and full-time job.
"Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo), Pages, CI/CD and a Weblate instance."
Never say impossible.
Github is still "new" to a lot of us. OSS existed well before it, and will continue to exist well after.
If Codeberg starts offering Mac and Windows runners alongside their Linux ones for free (or at an achievable price point) for a modest OSS project I'll certainly look at it very closely. If all I needed was a Linux runner, I'd probably be on there already.
And yes, if we make OSS just about hosting the code, things are much simpler. If you're a piece of desktop software though, and you have users, they'll typically (and reasonably) want auditable signed binaries on all the platforms you support, which requires multiplatform CI.
I am personally now drawing a clear delineation between projects for my internal consumption (e.g. ansible scripts) and projects that have potential use for the general populace. For the prior, I now host a private Forgejo instance. For the latter, I'll put it on GitHub but mirror it to my Forgejo instance.
I was pleasantly shocked that Forgejo is literally a single binary with a relatively easy config. All my internal services reference my Forgejo instance so, if I need to bail on GitHub, it's low friction for me.
We moved from github to a self-hosted forgejo instance about 6 months ago, works like a charm. Still can't belive how snappy forgejo is / laggy github has become
The all-in-docker image and a couple of gitlab runners is all small to medium sized teams need. (Don't overcomplicate it with the kubernetes version unless you really need it)
If you could only choose from github, gitlab and atlassan then I suppose.. But really anything newer that stays in existance has to be focused on quality from early enough to not be defined by path dependence problems and bad choices like those 3.
Because I don't trust someone else to not train or steal our source code, or, even legally, introduce some silly cause after we are invested/locked into their infra, that allows them to do whatever with our property.
And on equal footing, I trust our security more than theirs. Case in point.
AMD support is on the roadmap, but we mentioned it for now to highlight that AMD calculates their utilization metric the same way -- it's not just NVIDIA.
I've been working on improving an open source menubar that wraps restic. Right now it is a bit rough around the edges, but my plan is to have a simple onboarding experience for various backend services like B2.
Over the weekend, I added a "Smart backups" feature that uses all the same directories that the backblaze menubar app and timemachine excludes. This was the primary missing feature for me. It even generates and backups your Brewfile...
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