Excessive power consumption by bitcoin miners is an indication that either power is undervalued, bitcoin is overvalued, or both.
> On Mar 21, 2018, at 3:48 PM, KRT Listmaster <listmas...@beauxbead.com> wrote: > > Now the discussion is starting to get interesting.... > > On 03/21/2018 07:11 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > > [...] > >> >> *if* people agree - world-wide - to slow down on the mining *then* >> the hashrate - world-wide - will slow down. however the only way >> that's actually realistically likely to happen is when the "reward" >> drops sufficiently (halves every 18 months) for the financial >> incentive to lower. >> >> *then* when the financial incentive lowers, the number of people >> mining will also lower (non-financially-viable equipment switched off) >> and the hashrate will correspondingly drop. >> >> the problem with that assumption is that the people mining will only >> be motivated by profit. if they're genuinely interested in going over >> the 50% share in order to corrupt / control the blocks then that >> doesn't happen, and bitcoin goes to hell in a handbasket. >> > > > Exactly, this is something most people fail to understand about mining. > There's nothing inherent to the algorithm or the protocol that makes > Bitcoin so power-hungry. If the entire network agreed to all shut off > the ASICs and run everything on low-powered SBCs running on photovoltaic > cells only (for example), the network *itself* would continue to > function just fine. The difficulty would adjust itself (eventually, up > to two weeks for BTC) to match the processing power available to it. > That's the design. > > When I first came across Bitcoin, the idea was to let your wallet > solo-mine all the time in the background. Pools didn't even exist yet > when I first tried mining (on an ASUS netbook in rural Peru, no less), > or at least I wasn't aware of them. At the time, I compared it to > something like SETI@home, which looks for signals from space-brothers as > a screen-saver, basically. Everyone mines a little bit, and everyone > gets a little bit of the reward. One CPU, one vote. That was the > original intent. > > The problem is greed. Some clever bastard decided "Why limit myself to > just a single background process?" That's when dedicated mining rigs > started, and the arms race began, even before GPUs came into the picture. > >> >> i've been thinking about this, beyond what monero does (which plans >> to hard-fork to increase the random-access memory usage). monero is >> not possible to do on a custom ASIC because it deliberately requires >> large amounts of memory (6gb, 8gb). if you were to make a custom ASIC >> it would *be* a GPU... therefore you might as well buy... >> off-the-shelf GPU Cards. >> >> beyond that i think you need to specify and agree hard limits about >> mining capabilities that, if exceeded, result in PENALTIES not >> REWARDS. such mining contracts would need to be stored *in the >> blockchain* rather than being hard-coded. miners would be required to >> sign up to the mining contract (in the blockchain) in order to >> participate, along-side a declaration of running some CPU benchmark >> tests which indicate the computing capacity that they are declaring >> that they intend to use. >> >> if they go OUTSIDE of those parameters, by responding too fast on a >> block (which can be verified by other miners re-running the same >> algorithms that they did), they get PENALISED *not* REWARDED. >> > > Yep, the Monero devs are very much dedicated to "egalitarian mining", > which I think gets closer to Satoshi's original intent,[1][2] and makes > something like javascript browser-based mining possible, which then > opens up an entire new set of ethical concerns, even if it's a tiny step > towards fair hashrate distribution. [3][4] > > > What are the other options? POS coins take very little energy, but "the > rich get richer", and the more coin you have, the more you stake, etc. > Not very egalitarian either. Or some insta-premine like Ripple, where I > just make a bajillion tokens out of thin air and then start selling them > for a tenth of a cent each? Neither of those seem like better > distribution schemes to me. So, how do we get newly mined coins into as > many hands as possible? > > Definitely an interesting conundrum. > > - krt > > --- > > [1] https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html > [2] > https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitmain-announces-new-monero-mining-antminer-x3-cryptos-devs-say-will-not-work > [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.02887.pdf > [4] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/27/ethical_coinhive/ > > > -- > This email account is used for list management only. > https://strangetimes.observer/ > > _______________________________________________ > arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk > http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook > Send large attachments to arm-netb...@files.phcomp.co.uk _______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netb...@files.phcomp.co.uk
