Topic: please delete - page 2. (Read 1052 times)

It's a free world, nobody can force them to use the most secure option. It's like food, for centuries we've been eating healthy food but suddenly some people decided to eat cockroaches. We can't prevent them, no matter how stupid that is.

In your opinion,
PoW is cheapest, only bitcoin supporters believe such fantasy.
No one else does.

Everyone else is moving to proof of stake or anything but PoW.

An alternative opinion : Bitcoin is a Dumpster Fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeM1VK7yyCI

* PoW in it's current energy wasting state can't survive a carbon tax.*  

Plus Bitcoin miners make lousy neighbors by raising everyone power bill and increasing blackouts.
https://www.governing.com/next/what-risks-does-crypto-mania-pose-to-texas-power-grid

i did read about a cpu that had almost 1 million cores i think 850,000 but i'm sure it's an expensive machine. but assuming each core could do 1 gigahash per second, that would be 850 terahash per second. not bad.

So, it would be "obscured" Proof of Work again, right? Because if you add the magic word "compressed" to those "large virtual drives", then you will get Proof of Work. So, you have a choice: you can execute SHA-256 many times, for example 2^32 times at difficulty one, and get one matching block hash. Or you can create 2^32 hashes on hard disk, ram disk, or just "any" disk, then we have your "large virtual drives in pure ram". And if you change SHA-256 to Shabal, and add plotting, then you will get Chia, Burstcoin, and others. As you can see, Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work. Again.

Side note, the problem with Proof of Space is not the algorithm itself,
it is the use of SSD drive, which are designed from the beginning to have a shorten lifespan of writes.
If one used the older design Sata drives with no writes limits or created large virtual drives in pure ram,
this SSD waste issue could be eliminated.   
 

What I like so much about PoW / wasting electrical energy is that you can produce this energy cleanly, so without harming the environment.

I'm not aware of anything else that can be produced and wasted in a climate-neutral fashion; for instance, proof of space requires certain materials to produce HDDs and SSDs and they end up on landfills at the end of the day. ASIC miners eventually also have a limited lifetime, but are often resold and reused for many years down the road. I can also imagine future ASIC designs to e.g. allow to upgrade hashboards without trashing the whole device. This would already reduce e-waste a good bit.

All miners who compete for a new block actually contribute to the blockchain security because the network operate in a consensus mechanism in that if the rest are completely wait for a new block to be registered by selection or declaration of interest to register it can result in an invalid UXTO. Bitcoin will remain an energy consumption crypto due to it's proof of work the only remedy is alternative source of energy generation preferably through waste

Okay, so if it's 200W, it's only 1/3 less than what I used, so it doesn't change the result much.

Sure, you would buy more of them if you have $2000+ in budget or just get something with better hash / $ ratio like an S17 ASIC. These are definitely overpriced if you want to get a lot of hashrate and really make some money. Even the little Apollo BTC has a better hash / $ ratio than the Compac, though it consumes more power (per hash).

Sure, there always is. The CPU you mentioned will surely be great for something like Monero or other CPU-targeted coins, however I'm not sure if there won't be ASICs for those eventually, too (or already exist but nobody knows about it). But this is another topic.

Well if what they saying is true that it power consumption is 10 times less than what exist now, if you assume 15 watts per core for standard hardware, then this thing 1.5 watts per core. so under 200 watts total at full load. $2000 for that cpu is probably about in the right ballpark. they said the cost is 3x lower than other things.


the problem with doing that is, it can't mine anything else except sha-256 coins and even at 300GH/s I don't think it makes any money. which is why i later said that the only way this cpu could make sense in mining is to mine some other algo. where it could probably make some money.

but there is an upfront cost kind of like there is for asic mining. no getting around that. but i realize now that asics are way more advanced in bitcoin for cpus to be competitive.

Not at all! I first thought you were trolling, but it's good. We're all here to learn. First of all, 64-core CPUs are widespread in server applications for years, and a 2x improvement in core count is just O(1) difference, so those would compete with ASICs just as well as 128-core CPUs (just use 2 of them, right).
Secondly, no general-purpose chip can compete with ASICs per definition. Realistically, even a very old ASIC will beat such a CPU.

Little back of the envelope calculation:
Let's assume the CPU was able to do one SHA per clock cycle (absolute maximum, with specialized instruction that doesn't exist). Let's assume a constant all-core (usually only 1 core can boost, but let's assume so) boost clock of the highest boosting CPU of roughly 5GHz (high core count CPUs clock lower, but let's give it its best shot). 128 cores x 5GHz x 1 hash/s = 640GH/s.
At a power draw of probably 300-500W and probably costing around $2,000 USD.

You can get a Compac F [1] for around $200 and 15W of power draw that pushes 300GH/s, so two of those would match this hypothetical CPU at a price of $400 and 30W. That's 5 times cheaper and at least 10 times more power efficient, so you could say 50 times better.

However I gave very very optimistic numbers; a CPU needs way more than 1 cycle per hash; I believe 100-1000 cycles if memory serves correct, which would be 6.4GH/s or 0.64GH/s - much lower than even an old stick miner which just pulls 5W like NewPac [2].

[1] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/gekkoscience-has-a-new-stickminer-that-does-300gh-5355470
[2] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announcing-gekkosciences-new-usb-stick-miner-the-aptly-named-newpac-5053711

When you are calculating total computing power, you should keep in mind that usually when the number of cores in a CPU increases their individual clock speed decreases. That's because high CPU clock produces a lot more heat than a low CPU clock, with more cores you get more heat and at some point it would take a lot to cool the CPU down.
For example core i9-10980XE has 18 cores but speed is 3 GHz while core i7-7740X has 4 cores with the speed of 4.3 GHz each.

No chance. An S19 Pro is 5 million times faster than a CPU core. You would need 40,000 128-core CPUs to match a single S19 Pro.

yeah you might be right. i checked and i think all it would be able to do is a half a gigahash per second. that wouldn't be enough to make any cash. so it won't help with mining bitcoin but maybe some other altcoin it could.

ASIC is like a specialized hardware designed to run at maximum speed to perform a certain computation, in this case SHA256 hashes. Not to mention that they are very efficient when it comes to energy consumption. CPUs can not compete with that.

Apparently some company is going to be selling a 128 core cpu next year. i bet that will put asics out of business. plus it won't make any noise.

This answers the OP's question. OP seems to have misconceptions about mining and energy use and so therefore is trying to come up with solutions (that would be much worse than PoW) to a problem that doesn't exist.

The 'energy waste' of bitcoin mining is something you read about in articles written by people who aren't educated on Bitcoin mining. There is no energy waste because it is all used productively to secure the network. In fact, instead of wasting energy, it actually productively uses a lot of wasted energy, which is obviously a positive thing - society wastes tons of energy, Bitcoin allows us to take some of that wasted energy and direct it to something productive, specifically, the securing of the world's best form of money.

So yeah odolvlobo is right in saying the real obstacles are misconceptions about bitcoin mining energy usage. There is no problem in PoW to solve. PoW solved a set of problems extremely well, and as a huge side benefit it allows humanity to make productive use of the vast amounts of wasted and stranded energy in our society/planet. Furthermore, there is never excess energy used for mining Bitcoin because miners are held to economic incentives - if mining outstrips adoption (aka price) some miners most exposed to a price drop will stop mining and then difficulty drops to keep the economic incentives for everyone left mining.

It is a self-correcting system. PoW mining naturally gravitates toward stranded or wasted energy because that is cheap energy, and the energy usage of mining always stays in line with what the economic value of Bitcoin can sustain. People who think that PoW is some problem that needs a solution don't have a firm grasp on how mining works and the benefits it provides.

I can definitely imagine this happening, yes. Especially since it's not very easy to set up without a lot of knowledge not only about Bitcoin mining, but also about fields like solar energy and house installations. What we have today are specialists in specific areas, but an integrated solution doesn't exist yet, so I believe there's a market for it. I've seen a bunch of DIY projects that use excess solar energy to run miners and the heat of the miners to heat their home, as well as people doing just one of the two.

Here's one I could quickly find again, who 'reduced natural gas use by 64% in March and reduced his effective electrical residential rate to $0.073/kWh': https://twitter.com/DaddyBTC_pleb/status/1516118484375293957

The creativity of some people is commendable! This guy runs the hot air from the miner into his drier to run it without gas: https://twitter.com/missaghi/status/1515371115664846848

And this one here heats his whole house with seven S19's (not cheap, I agree, but if you can afford it, they will pay back quicker this way, since he doesn't have to pay for heating anymore): https://twitter.com/ResetEconomic/status/1506428719778435073



I'm not 100% familiar with the control circuitry of a modern boiler, since what I have is very old. I think it actually keeps the water relatively warm at all times, since it would need a lot of time to heat up the whole volume if it only kicked in the moment I open the hot water tap. I mean, worst-case, you're heating the water 'more than needed'; so the boiler may be hot the whole day, while you don't need hot water around the clock. But if the alternative is dumping the heat outside the window, that's still better, right?
Sure, you can add in a battery; the whole system just gets more and more complex.
One option I can envision, with modern solar installations often including a battery anyway, is that the miner starts up once the battery is full and you still have excess power.
It would be financially infeasible to go this route with an S19 or so that is very expensive (+10 grand) to buy and already takes ~2 years to ROI when running all the time, but since this is excess power, you can use an old S9 that just costs $500 used.

Honestly, I believe the public perception could shift if people understand two things:
(1) The current monetary system they know and (maybe) love consumes not only much more energy, but also emits more carbon dioxide and costs real human lives.
(2) Bitcoin mining creates an incentive to build new wind and solar installations which will long-term kill coal and gas power, which they must surely be big proponents of if they're really environmentalists.

By that, do you think it'll ever be a possibility that energy solutions might be sold or supplied with the purchase of mining equipment, or is that a little bit too expensive, and bulky to justify?

I do agree, that a lot of miners will be looking to repurpose that lost energy, and heating water might the method of choice. Although, I haven't looked at the practicalities of that or how much water you'd be able to actually heat up. Since, most water is heated up on demand, i.e if you want a bath, that's when your boiler kicks in, and heats up the water. I'm not sure if a miner will have enough to be able to do that on demand? The energy could be banked potentially, and then used?

I'm not a miner, I'm just interested in combatting this movement of Bitcoin vs Energy. While, I do think it's blown out of portion from what I can gather, its still an issue that ideally we need to overcome. Public perception means everything when it comes to adoption.

Thermodynamically, it hardly makes a difference whether the security budget of a given monetary network is spent directly on proof of work or on return on capital securing this network, for energy consumption will inevitably occur as the owners of capital begin to consume the profits.
So switching to PoS does not reduce energy consumption if at least a similar level of security is to be maintained (secure PoS is just obfuscated PoW).

Do you want to really save energy?
Work and earn less, in order to be able to spend less.

Otherwise you only contribute to shifting energy consumption between industries, depending on what you prefer to spend your income on.

Even though 'off-shoring' is often cheaper, as I say you run the risk of losing (access to) very expensive hardware which should be seen as a cost (with a probability attached to it). Also if you use a miner as a 'stacking device', how I've seen it called, it's profitable even in very expensive countries; you're essentially buying Bitcoin at a discount, with a one-time investment of the mining hardware. If you try to break even, it's a lot harder, I agree.

However, it's important that people do it, and every little bit of hashpower helps, so if someone is willing to splurge $200 on a Compac F or $600 on a 3TH/s Apollo, they can aid the network without a lot of noise and without spending too much money.

Honestly, many people today are already creating their own energy by putting solar cells on their roofs. Especially in expensive energy countries like in Europe, it is very interesting to get such an installation instead of buying power from the grid. I wouldn't be very surprised if we see completely integrated 'green' mining solutions for homeowners in the near future (hobbyists are already working on them as we speak), consisting of solar panels on the roof, using the miner's heat output to heat water for the house (needed winter & summer) and a way to put it outside or submerged to make it silent. The miner(s) could even help repay the solar installation faster, as you don't usually pull the whole power that it can theoretically provide, so part of the generated energy is lost if you're not mining. With a good OS, the power draw can be dynamically adjusted depending on the output of the solar array.