Resources are being utterly and completely wasted on mining Bitcoins - page 2.

MoonShadow

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Quote from: ranger on May 31, 2011, 06:51:42 AM

Would love to hear your thoughts.

My thoughts are that you are just another newbie who comes along after hearing a little bit about Bitcoin and then jumps to the conclusion that you, and you alone, have discovered the Great Bitcoin Flaw (tm).

Perhaps there needs to be a new rule, that newbies cannot post until their account is at least a week old. Of course, that wouldn't have helped out here, but still...

MoonShadow

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Quote from: barbarousrelic on May 31, 2011, 07:45:30 AM

Quote from: kwukduck on May 31, 2011, 07:05:45 AM

Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?

I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is less than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far.

Then you have no idea how much energy it takes to just refine iron.

evoorhees

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Democracy is the original 51% attack

Quote from: ranger on May 31, 2011, 06:51:42 AM

Hi all, yesterday it occurred to me that we are all wasting a lot of resources on mining bitcoins, in a way that shows more than a little similarity to the prisoner's dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma).

I wrote about it here: http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2011/05/31/resources-are-being-utterly-and-completely-wasted-on-mining-bitcoins/
Would love to hear your thoughts.

Your essay answered it's own question. Why is all this energy being "wasted?" It's not being wasted. Large energy use makes it hard to attack the network. If we all used 1% of our computing power instead of 100%, it would be substantially easier to attack the network. Simple concept, and rather than a great prisoners' dilemma example, it's a great example of Smith's "invisible hand." All us miners, in our selfishness, compete against each other to solve more hashes and earn money. By so doing, without conscious intention, we are making the network substantially more difficult to hack.

Energy use for energy use's sake would be silly. Energy use for security's sake is valuable, and thus not a "utter and complete waste" as you claim it to be.

lysol

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I imagine the same kind of waste of resources took place during traditional gold rushes. It's all meaningless though -- the bitcoin network isn't threatened by the bad decisions by miners because of the self regulation.

barbarousrelic

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Quote from: kwukduck on May 31, 2011, 07:05:45 AM

Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?

I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is more than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far.

edit: I originally said "less" when I meant to say "more." Whoops.

zaxx

newbie

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Quote from: kwukduck on May 31, 2011, 07:05:45 AM

Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?

I totally agree.. I was thinking about this issue of waste. I realised that putting energy and cpu power into a defensive system is a great idea. Once you combine the concept with a distributed system it basically turns miners into a defensive crpto army that is voluntarily paid for by the transaction fee. Almost like armies defending trade routes of a traditional trade system.

I just wrote something on it

http://servanlog.blogspot.com/2011/05/infostate-and-colour-of-money.html

kwukduck

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Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?

realnowhereman

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Since there is no way to know how many failed attacks there have been on the bitcoin block chain (i.e. rogue miners trying to out-hash the honest miners) there is no way to measure how much waste there has been in computing the hashes that secure the chain.

elewton

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DIA | Data infrastructure for DeFi

In short, it's not being wasted.

If all the miners used a mining daemon that limited itself to 1%, not only would someone come along and use the full GPU to profit themselves, but it would make it easier to attack the network.

Bitcoin is designed to operate without trust. As such, it assumes that everyone will be trying as hard as they can.

kiba

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My writer have the opposite thought: http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/the-wasted-electricity-objection-to-bitcoin-part-i

ranger

newbie

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Merit: 0

Hi all, yesterday it occurred to me that we are all wasting a lot of resources on mining bitcoins, in a way that shows more than a little similarity to the prisoner's dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma).

I wrote about it here: http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2011/05/31/resources-are-being-utterly-and-completely-wasted-on-mining-bitcoins/
Would love to hear your thoughts.

Topic: Resources are being utterly and completely wasted on mining Bitcoins - page 2. (Read 6206 times)