Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 465. (Read 2032286 times)

A $100 million funding round does not mean they are spending $100 million on mining ASICs, even assuming they are making mining ASICs. That may be just one thing they are investing in, or the valuation numbers for whatever they have proposed may work out that for investors to get the sort of meaningful stake they want $100 million has to go in. In the latter case the company may have no idea whatsoever what they want to do with the $100 million to her than treat it as a war chest.

Plunge patrol is missing because they are at alltime highs

At this point we have several designs already developed on modern sub 30nm nodes that are approximately close to the maximum efficiency we can expect (an SHA core is not complicated) and offer granularity down to 1, 2 or 3 Watts per chip.

If you are planning to build products to decentralize mining (think space heaters, etc that mine) starting with the current chips available is a good starting place, and using your money towards the other productization aspects makes the most sense.

The economics of the ASICS and the semicon industry are such that it only makes sense to develop a new chip it is significantly better than any other alternatives in terms of features/specs, or it is only marginally better but you have very high 100 million unit volumes to support the investment.

Otherwise it always makes more sense to save the several 10s of millions of NRE and use an existing off the shelf part. People that ignore this have gotten burned again and again, it's why the ASIC industry today is much smaller than it was before. Source: I have many many years of experience in the ASIC and semicon industry, have seen countless designs that never came close to a positive return, and have seen numerous businesses that ignore this fail and exit the industry....

I'm not saying there isn't an ASIC development gold rush still going on, I just personally would stay far away from the investment rounds, very far away.

Volatility increasing...  when was the last time there was a -333 or more?  Biggest (closing) drop I recall in a while.   

Requiring anything can be done with a soft fork. If >50% (preferably well over 50%) of miners require it then all blocks will have it.

Gold price is rising currently, along with US$. Not uncommon, just an unholy alliance, albeit temporary, I assume.

more deflation, bad for gold.....until US doesn't raise rates.

If the protocol was changed to require a valid UTXO set hash for a block to be considered valid, and if enough entities kept enough history to catch any cheating before its too late it should probably work.

Tricky part is finding the right values of "enough."

I hadn't thought about this...

If a wrong UTXO hash would invalidate the block it should work, no? But then there's also incentive to omit it due to the risk of the block being rejected. Requiring it would be a hard fork? Is that the problem?

EDIT: found a good "in a nutshell" description: https://rustyrussell.github.io/pettycoin/2014/11/29/Pettycoin-Revisted-Part-I:-UTXO-Commitments.html

Committed means mined into a block (not the whole set literally, just a hash of it)

what does "committed" mean in this sense?

The real trick will be figuring out a secure way of letting the entire network do it.

I don't think committed UTXO sets by themselves are sufficient.

another ramp in dollar starting right now.  look out risk assets...

screw that, i want direct access to a copy of the entire blockchain at all times. 

Dow -333 smackdown:

embedding the hash of UTXO in the block headers and retaining only the last few hundred blocks is being experimented with as a client option.

Well said.

This is exactly right. The ledger aspect is overblown.

Haha, good point!  Although I would still argue it's extremely rare to see any stealth startup in any space raise that kind of funding.

There's also the issue that what the blockchain records is not records of transactions, but rather proofs of ledger integrity.

The blockchain is a statement that, "no matter how many lattes were purchased or Satoshi Dice bets were placed, the number of bitcoins available for spending, is and always has been, exactly correct"

Recording all transactions that have happened is done because that's the easiest way to generate the proof, not because storing that kind of history is the purpose of Bitcoin.