Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 330. (Read 2032265 times)

One more point. The extent to which space heated mining is developed could be good for altcoins too and thus is not a lockin, because the barriers to entry are low. You have a CPU-hash focused coin, okay turn on your computer and mine to warm your room. Plug-n-play with temperature control can be Kickstarted.

The smartphone target market is the attempted lockin, but I think it not very economically compelling on a wide scale in terms of BTC micropayments. Might work a bit on subsidizing smartphone adoption without the micropayments network efforts. That isn't really a big threat of lockin then.

I know that. No mass movement.


So you are asserting that selling space heaters to individuals didn't work because no one made an integrated plug-n-play process? And the retailers of appliances can make it so resolving connectivity and operational issues  

You don't $116 million to launch that over the internet, unless the point is you need to have it in all retailers and with name brand names on the products.

The only really viable market is space heating thus limited to winter months and cold climates. The other appliance markets are not viable because too small of a ROI for the hassle of installation/maintenance and/or have superior replacements.


You are saying the manufacturer will sell the device at a lower price (taking all the mined coins) but the consumer will pay the same electric bill, then bother to keep the miner running well  

Any shell games on who pays the utility bill don't resolve the tax culpability (at least in the USA).

Some people will do it for space heating in cold enough climates. Most people won't, at least not a quick ramp up in the West and third world. China would be the largest market I bet, because of their combination of frugal mindset, engineering and math acumen, I think no income tax, authorities can get top-down things done that align with their global Technocracy goals (Smart electric meters, etc), and developing youthful demographics economy. Again these are likely sales to cash and limited network effects.

The other big target market are the smartphones in developing markets, but again the economics are not very compelling.

"According to the Bank for International Settlements,[4] the preliminary global results from the 2013 Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and OTC Derivatives Markets Activity show that trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $5.3 trillion per day in April 2013."

It has. Poke around the mining forums and you see people mentioning constantly that keeping their home warm is part of the value proposition of mining for them.

21 apparently wants to scale out appliance and device mining to the mass market. That hasn't happened yet because no one has done it yet. The mass market isn't interested in (perhaps less than optimally efficient) mining rigs as heating units, but they'll be happy with an integrated plug-in unit that costs them less because it mines for the manufacturer.

Also, there no real tax burden to the manufacturer, mining revenue is taxed essentially the same as product or service revenue, especially if converted to fiat right away. That might well be part of the value-add to a subsidized-product model of mining.

You are confusing the coin and the cash.  Zerocoin had severe scaling issues but less of a threat of unknown money supply (coins can be minted if key compromised but all coins coming out the accumulator are countable). Zerocash reduced scaling issues (but arguably not enough to scale) but added an uncountable money supply along with greater anonymity of every aspect of the transaction including the payment amounts.

Afaik, there was an attempt to fix the process of selecting the master key in Zerocash which is argued to be secure, but afaik there are still detractors who question if that process is secure. Bottom line is you can't count the money supply in Zerocash thus you can not prove whether it was secure or not in the real world.

Also I was worried about how reverted transactions would work in Zerocash with orphaned chains if there was attempt to avoid selfish mining using my math to merge blockchains and pay proportion coinbase (minted coins on) all orphaned chains.

Have there been developments since that?

Let's slap each other's wrist while we are copulating under the table with our other hands. But really can't you see we are smilingsneering (it so vigorous ya) and thus reforming.

UBS pays $545m to settle foreign exchange probe BBC - UBS FINE


Just remind me again, what's the yearly quantity of money that got manipulated in the global Forex markets???

Apparently space heating is 63% of electricity costs in cold climates compared to 17% for water heating:

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/products/categories/water-heaters/13735

Water heating cost can in many cases be reduced by 90% with a solar water heater assuming especially so in warmer climates. This is a more permanent option than Bitcoin mining, doesn't require periodic upgrading, doesn't require tax reporting.

Consider also the losses due to taxes on minted coins.

With space heating, we don't need 21 Inc. Anyone in the market for space heating with Bitcoin mining, can go buy a used miner on ebay now. Thus if that was a big mass movement market, why hasn't it happened already?

Either the economics or the market awareness are not conducive. Can 21 Inc do something to change that?

Cellular providers are not fungible every where. You are consistently attempting to erase the non-fungible characteristics in your analysis.


Can you show me any example? If we choose 10X less efficient technology, thus 10X less Bitcoins for the same wattage, thus my maximum of $50 (probably less) water portion of the electric bills gets subsidized by $5 per month. And for what additional cost and tsuris?

Work some specific numbers and I challenge you to find it to be viable. Is all the cost of BTC miners in the exclusivity (limited supply) of the latest (Intellectual Property) designs and virtually no hardware fabrication cost at all? Surely more firms would have entered to drive down prices in that case.

I do understand that if you produce a dedicated chip instead of ASIC, then costs decline significantly with volume. But efficiency also declines with age of the design.

If you don't replace your miner every 18 months, then you subsidy declines by half according to Moore's law. Are Bitcoin miners following Moore's law.

I vaguely remember the problem you mentioned and the shared secret needed in the bootstrapping step as the main causes why zerocoin wasn't merged, but I could be wrong.

Now both of them are solved in zerocash, though a merge now is highly improbable for economical, political and technical reasons.

I don't know. Depends how the device is designed. If it simply mines for the manufacturer and subsidizes the cost of the purchase, and if configuration is simple or nonexistent (perhaps a built-in cellular data chip with prepaid access), then I can see that working absolutely, and even possibly driving non-mining heaters off the market altogether. Many purchases are made without thinking past the up front cost.


I don't believe that is remotely applicable because you are paying for cutting edge power efficiency, for the case where that matters (high density deployments in data centers and mining farms), not the case where power is effectively free. If you can find them, you can buy older, less power-efficient miners for next to nothing. Underclock a bit so they run quietly and they make great room heaters!

It's also not a mass market product where chip prices can be driven down enormously. (How many microprocessors/microcontrollers would you imagine people own without even being aware of it? The number is quite high.)

Also, the mining component doesn't have to provide all the heat output, only some of it.

meh: "fool me once, shame on you.. fool me twice.. shame on me"

its pretty dull to think they'll change or that their "motivations" towards Bitcoin are "humble" in any sort.

You mean potential market. But you need to quantify what % of that market can be realistically captured.


You don't agree that some (probably most) people in the market for a water heater don't have incentive for the tsuris of figuring out all the details with getting a mining device running, connected to the internet, integrate into their tax return, operational issues with wallets, etc.?

Hey I am at the hardware store and my gf is begging me to hurry up because we need to get to her mother's birthday by 2pm. I don't have time for this Bitcoin complication. Sell me a water heater please.

Naive non-marketers think "I want a water heater", "mining device makes heat free", "thus I want water heater + mining device". This is myopic because it doesn't factor in that the + operator is not a zero cost operation in the marketing context. Upsells are lossy especially if only 0.1% of the population is in the market for your upsell.

But there was an easier way to refute this point that had escaped both of us (only because I was too sleepy last night when I signed off).

A water heater requires 4000W of power (in order to provide rapid heatup function that most consumers demand). I can't find a BTC miner with that wattage consumption for less than perhaps $20,000. I just briefly checked and only saw a 1250W one for $10,200.

Who is going to pay $10,000+ (or even $1000) extra for a water heater?

The entire energy efficiency deal is a ruse and coverup for the real goal which is to shoehorn mining into smartphones for a market segment that has no knowledge nor use for it.

If excess heat were a viable business model, the miners would have long ago adopted it as major movement. It doesn't take $116 million in capital to figure out how to retrofit mining hardware onto an insulated water tank.

This is yet another example of how the TPTB are top-down misallocating resources (because the free market always does it better) and destroying the global economy into their NWO death paradigm.

The markets are not insignificant. The water heater market is approximately 100 million units per year. The largest markets are currently Brazil and China, I guess due to rapid urbanization and development. Of current deliveries, electric-powered units are a large share, possibly >50% (Brazil appears to lack gas distribution or has some other reason to favor electric, because almost all of the market there is electric.)

I don't really understand what notion of "total efficiency" you are using other than what it is people in the market choose to buy. People seem to want to buy electric heating devices. There is little question that eventually these electric heating applications will migrate to some sort of mining-integrated solution, assuming mining continues to be a thing. I don't know if that really has anything to do with how 21 plans to make money. It doesn't seem like a terribly good business in terms of sustainable margins, even if it will eventually happen regardless.

In what way if any is my upthread argument against these being a wide-scale target market not correct?

Or are you still just arguing about (I assert irrelevant) energy efficiency without respect to (I assert relevant) overall efficiency?

Edit: I wasn't trying to make it appear you erred on the points about energy efficiency. I am concerned with what is relevant and didn't think I was attempting to make it appear you made an error. I am urging you to raise the debate to relevant factors because I am most interested in a conclusion so I can move on.

No what I suggested was that if that the typical use time of a hair dryer were say 10 minutes, it could be designed to turn off the mining chip after 9 minutes (or a smarter one -- not hard to imagine if it has a mining chip in it --  may learn it's owner's specific usage pattern). That likely reduces the (already small) residual heat to a bare minimum (only in those cases where the user turns it off early, for example if the phone rings).

Toasters and hair driers might be dumb uses for it anyway, though it depends how low the cost of the chip can be driven down. Room heaters, water heaters, etc. are much better.

Thank you. I sensed there was a good reason for me to avoid that morass, but I had never tried. I remember reading about for example how Bill Gross's ideaLab required the startup to take on this shared overhead that the ideaLab provides to its incubated companies.

Last thing I need is some bean counter or premature optimization of marketing wasting my time while innovating.

Venture capitalists make most of their money on fees (including performance fees), which they get for providing the service of investing other people's money into startup companies. That's what they're paid to do, so that's what they do.

It's debatable whether just owning BTC would be a better ROI, but that's irrelevant if you are in the business of backing companies.

Their current business models need expanding markets. The smartphone markets are becoming saturated in the West. Their need obscures their objectivity, because their main goal is to sell the growth projections to shareholders.

People like me in their company that raise our hand, are fired. Groupthink.

Western companies trying to understand developing markets from their armchairs and lack of hands on experience. I've lived in the developing world 1990, 1991, 1996 - 1999, 2003 - present. They did better being suppliers to Samsung and manufacturers in Asia than top-down dictating the paradigm.

We don't need to guess about the inexorable trend to the maximum-division-of-labor.