Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity.
Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the grid – spin down some machines if there is high demand, spin up machines if there is low demand.
There are so many benefits. It is unfortunate that there is a serious lack of understanding on this website.
Breaking windows incentivizes the plentiful production of new windows. This will make it so that there is no such thing as window shortages in the future.
In a way, yes. If windows didn't break, that hurts profits of window-making companies, and makes them all go out of business, leaving people without jobs, etc. Once everyone has a Forever Window there will be no one to sell new windows to, and there's hardly much innovation left in the field of windows. Planned obsolescence is a thing.
Bitcoin mining uses up all of the efficiency gains from energy saving over the past decade, and more. Bitcoin incentivizes carbon production by keeping electricity demand artificially high, even dedicating entire coal power plants to a single mining location. Therefore, cryptocurrency has already guaranteed we will never have time to advance on the Kardashev scale.
That's preposterous, Bitcoin incentivizes production of whatever energy is cheapest. That does not necessarily mean fossil fuels, though it is often that those are cheaper.
Hydro is a perfect example. A sizeable percentage of all Bitcoin mining is done with cheap hydro.
Bitcoin will do the same for nuclear, making it cheap and plentiful.
How does Bitcoin incentivize cheap energy? It only incentivizes energy that has a marginal cost less than the Bitcoin it can produce. As long as human speculation outpaces finite resources, it makes economic sense to burn the most expensive, dijon fuels. This is true even if externalities are factored into energy prices, which they aren’t.
You think the current global financial system is energy efficient? How about the raw materials used by global militarizes financed by unending money printing? If you fast forward a couple decades, and Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, mining will be far more efficient than the amount of enormous military spending and middle-eastern oil production financed by fiat currencies and the petrodollar standard.
You people are advocating for shutting down one of the most important human advancements of all time – money that is directly linked to energy.
It is not efficient, I agree. But the cryptocurrencies should be of low priority right now, there are much more significant topics and problems, plus - how do you expect people to use cryptocurrencies if they won't even have any computers due to various shortages caused by the miners?
If you're honestly looking for the best solution to plentiful, on-demand, cheap electricity, energy storage via batteries is a much better solution. Why burn up excess energy from a wind farm, rather than storing it to be reused during peak periods?
You don't usually need to store energy for a significant period of time, just until the daily peak. Last I checked, the efficiency for charge + discharge was something like 70%, which, in any case, is much better than the 0% energy savings from using that energy to mine crypto.
However bad batteries are at storing energy long-term, I guarantee that bitcoin mining rigs are worse. It's hard for a battery to do worse than losing 100% of "stored" energy immediately to heat.
Skynet is built on top of the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform (https://sia.tech). Sia uses a blockchain to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions and store file contracts (which are like cryptographic SLAs between users), and is very similar to Bitcoin in architecture.
Anyone can operate a Skynet Webportal (the server), and Webportals can choose how they'd like to monetize – for example, they can run ads.
You can also run your own Skynet Portal by downloading Sia v1.4.3, released today. It costs about $10/mo to run a Portal because you have to form file contracts with a few hundred storage providers on the network. But then you do not have to go through a Webportal middleman.
Wholeheartedly agree, especially when demoing the ability to film simultaneously on multiple cameras, and the 4K front-facing camera. The 64 GB is really a slap in the face.
Most buyers of these phones will not film simultaneously on multiple cameras. 64GB is for them. If you're going to use that particular feature, you're buying the largest capacity phone you can.
Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will foster competition between hosts on the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.
Pretty arrogant to say you're going to make cloud storage providers obsolete when you haven't even built a competing solution. You can't even share data yet...
And what about all the other features that cloud providers offer? You say "[the] Sia software is exponentially improving, and performance and featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3", but I see absolutely no evidence of even the most basic features of cloud storage providers.
Authorization? Regulatory compliance? High-performance bandwidth? High-reliability public API/URLs? Customer support? Private cloud peering? Zero effort integration with many (most?) major data-related open source projects? Versioning? One-click, no-knowledge reliability?
How much do you need to grow to hit cloud scale? 1,000,000x? More? And you're already claiming that you're going to make S3 obsolete?
Your blog would hold more weight if you weren't so over-the-top, bullshit-level optimistic.
I often enjoy the cynicism of HN as a counterpoint to the typical breathless media coverage of new technology. However that now famous comment on dropbox is a good demonstration that cynicism isn't a short cut to truth.
I'm not saying it won't work (I have no idea - there's no reason someone can't replicate all of s3's features eventually). I'm just saying that this "we're going to replace run s3 out of business" optimism is pretty unfounded right now. And on a factual level, "featureset is quickly approaching Amazon S3" is pure bullshit.
Only took me a couple of minutes to get a file uploaded using the aws-cli. It’s the only decentralized object storage solution I’ve ever seen that seems to actually work.
Filebase uses a decentralized service on the backend, but the service itself is centralized. If Filebase shuts off their servers, you lose all your data.
As an analogy, email is decentralized but Gmail is not.
Interfacing with these decentralized storage networks requires cumbersome client side software, that handles things like the smart contracts and utility coin transactions.
All of the projects I’ve seen appear to be quite far away from being easily accessible by ordinary users.
Based on where the technology is currently at, if you want to compete with traditional could services, you need a service provider like this to build a platform on top of the underlying network.
My point is that this service seems to have achieved that. People talk about storj a lot in this space, but go and try upload a file to storj right now. You can’t because they don’t actually have a product in the market. This is the first time I’ve seen a press release like this, gone to a web page, signed up for a service, and uploaded a file immediately. Which is a refreshing change from an industry that tends to talk big about the impact they’re going to have for months or years on end, without ever releasing a functional product to the market.
Fair enough. I agree about there being huge value in services providing abstracting away the complexities of Sia and making it accessible to more casual users. I'm just bothered by the fact that Filebase seems to be deliberately implying that they're a decentralized service, when they're, in fact, just as centralized as Google or Amazon.
The player that I prefer in this space is Goobox.[1] I think their goal is to build a Sia-based service similar to Mega, but they have an S3 API as well. They've been around longer than Filebase, and their marketing comes across to me as more honest.
Gotta say, the fact that the installation instructions consist primarily of getting around the "unknown / unidentified developer" restriction doesn't inspire confidence.
Thanks for checking out our service! Filebase[1] offers an S3-compatible API and we are happy to confirm that we have tested basic use cases with restic.
Using Sia on our backend enables us to offer cloud storage at very competitive rates. Currently, Backblaze charges egress fees (we don't) and Wasabi has a 90-day minimum charge for all objects. (we have no minimums)
Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfamiliar with the high costs of S3 storage and egress.
The issue I take is that the comparison is truly not meaningful. Yes, storage is cheap, but you are comparing the cost of a refurbished disk to a managed service.
This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, which I personally think is untrue (though Sia certainly may be able to do it for cheaper than cloud storage, too. Both things can be true.) While the cost to us is certainly more than the cost to the provider, the cost for us to replicate what a cloud provider offers is certainly greater at small scales where we benefit less from amortization and volume pricing.
A good point may be that we don’t actually need to replicate what a cloud provider does to offer a compelling alternative for various use cases. This I would probably agree with. It is certainly cheaper for me to have my own NAS and offsite backups than it would be to pay for cloud storage, though it is still surprisingly expensive (at least to the uninitialized. Check out what a fully loaded Synology 8 bay would cost! Multiply by number of backup sites. A lot of storage, but definitely not cheap.)
The comparison wasn't complete, but I think it was still meaningful. It's like comparing the cost of sand to glass; it should be obvious that sand is not glass, but it begs the question: how much proprietary value is there in glassmaking?
> This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, [...]
But that is exactly the argument being made -- that a trustless distributed system can substitute and obsolete cloud storage.
Then I respectfully disagree. I don't think cloud storage is always the best use case, but I do believe it is a good value for what it actually offers you. Backblaze B2 is my ideal marker for what a 'good value' in cloud storage should look like. At $5/mo per TB[1] it easily crushes the metric of monthly cost being less than equivalent non-redundant refurbished storage media.
> that a trustless distributed system can substitute and obsolete cloud storage.
OK, I have literally no qualifications to say that this isn't true. After all, what I am NOT claiming is that it can't be done for cheaper. What I AM claiming, is that without a service like Sia, it is certainly not going to be cheaper for common use cases of end users. I'm talking about comparing harddrives to services.
> Buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the hard drives used to store their data
I still think though, that a compelling case could be made without bad comparisons or hyperbole. Which makes this more frustrating than it needs to be imo.
Well, the actual comparison is between the cost (for ownership) of a 1 TB (refurbished) drive vs. 1 month of 1 TB of cloud storage.
The Author could have done it as the cost (for ownership) of a brand new NAS with 2x2 TB disk (which can be - just checked on tiger direct) around 350+65+65=480 US$ vs 6 months of 4 TB cloud storage 6x4x20=480, but the overall message would have been the same.
Imagine that you rent a car for 6 months and during the 6 months you pay rates equating the price of the car brand new.
We do not yet have the ability to share the same set of contracts across multiple machines, but it is on the roadmap. This would include using the same set of contracts on desktop and mobile devices, which will open up some intriguing use-cases.
This guy is only worth $3B, he may be spending half of his entire net worth to make this happen. I hope he inspires the richest billionaires of the world to fund such lofty ventures.
$10M-$20M is more than sufficient for a few generations (in a 100-200 years, our current understanding of the concept of money might not even be relevant, so it's pointless to plan for anything more than that). Anything more is just throwaway cash IMO. If you had the opportunity to become the first private citizen to go to the moon, you'd be stupid to not cement your legacy like that.
He hinted during QA it was 5% of BFR development costs, and Elon said a "material" percentage, which for expense reporting usually means >= 5%. Dev costs were said to be $5billion, so that would be $250,000,000.
The questioner asked "is it more or less than 5%" -- I don't think they were confirming 5%, just repeating the number back (and Musk refused to say anything about the percentage at all).
Besides the fact that he isn't spending $1.5B on it, really, what can you do with $3B that you can't do with $1.5B? There's really not that many more things that you can do. So spending it on a (hopefully not) once in a lifetime opportunity doesn't sound like that bad of an idea.
Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity.
Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the grid – spin down some machines if there is high demand, spin up machines if there is low demand.
There are so many benefits. It is unfortunate that there is a serious lack of understanding on this website.