Topic: The negative impact of mining farms (Read 10799 times)

Stop crying and wait for the halving!

Why don't people go in for load balance and use a quota rotation, that eases the variance and increase luck factor as well as dependence on a large mining farm.

BTCguild is shutting down/being sold although not because of government regulations but because large farms are not using their pool.

I would say that the larger cloud mining services are likely not running a ponzi as it can be shown that their equipment is actually finding new blocks and their payouts can be traced back to the coinbase transactions of these founds blocks

God damn bro, no I am not Paul Grignon. Watch money as debt. You dont know how stupid you sound and yes I support decentralized systems bitcoin isnt one.     

To be honest I do not care what you think about bitcoin or what solutions you advocate for an ideal form of money (http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/MAD2014/solution.htm , this is you right?)
Bitcoin is not forced onto you and you probably do not see the advantages of an open, decentralized system where ownership of abstract units is recorded.
It is an algorithmic construct and not some monetary policy.

Muse all you want on how to create an ideal form of money, in the meantime technology will advance and do its own thing.
It is kind of like the legal system trying to figure out how to deal with intellectual property in the digital age while p2p filesharing as a technology already exists and evolves.

Rumors are circulating that some of the large pools are planning to shut down due to the impending government regulations.

There's also rumors that certain cloud mining services are not actually mining with investor btc, but running a ponzi scheme.

Yeah you're not telling me anything.

Just because its decentralized doesn't mean it can't have price stability.

 Two Kinds of Money

1.The Scarcity Model: A single uniform quantity in limited supply made valuable by its own scarcity.
In other words, the value of this type of money depends on the supply of, and demand for, the money commodity itself. Conventional definitions of money define money only in terms of this model, a "medium of exchange". Examples are: cowries, gold and silver, fiat cash and coins, bank credit, and now, in the model's purest and most spectacularly speculative form, Bitcoin.

2. The Abundance Model. A promise of something specific from someone specific made valuable by its redemption in real production. The value of this type of money is defined by the promised redemption in goods and/or services. As such, this type of money is promises of an indefinite number of non-uniform commodities in indefinite supply and, unlike the limited quantity "coin" concept of money, the total quantity of these credits in circulation does not affect their value, because the value of a credit is defined by what its issuer will redeem it for in real goods and/or services. Examples are: business-to-business barter credits, customer rewards, travel points, discount coupons, mutual credit systems.

Everything I have read and watched about what they are doing and the people involved leads me to believe the are 100% legit.  I think their goals are ambitious and complex.  Time will tell if they produce a viable decentralized crypto currency.  Just calling them "one of the biggest scams in the history of alt-coins" with no basis is pointless FUD.

If you are going to chime in, by all means enlighten us.

Your analogy makes no sense to me. If you compare bitcoin to a government backed currency whose use they enforce then yes, it is probably harder to convince someone why they should use it.
Either you want massive external control and intervention (then you might get your stability and possibly adoption) or you want something decentralized and have to accept that your control options are limited.

Value always lies in the eye of the beholder so although you may think your precious paper bill of legal tender from country a is worth x, it is only because the current circumstances make you (and others) believe so.
Just look at extreme situations such as natural disasters etc. Suddenly your currency might be nothing more than a piece of paper, a collectible, yet that bottle of fresh water becomes a desirable trade good.

Bitcoin is not currency its a digital collectible. It is the equivalent of a digital baseball card. A lot of people around here dont see that as a problem, but if your goal is mass adoption or price stability it's a massive problem.    

Completely agree.

So you agree that Bitcoin is good enough right now and all the other alternatives are still only "in theory"

I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a good solution.  Ethereum has a couple approaches that have merit and one will go in to practice soon.
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/mining-faq-live-updates
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/

 

do you believe all that shit you are writing

please tell me about the "original" mining monopoly  

please tell me about how KnC is a mining monopoly right now  

But in reality it is almost impossible to create a proof-of-work mining algorythm that will forever remain ASIC-resistant so that point is moot

Absolutely. It was always a monopoly, first, the mining monopoly, then, the lucky investors monolopy. So we have KnC being the monolopy of the mining, and retards that have no idea what they are doing but found themselves on wealth by pure chance (basically all early investors, if somebody tells you when they invested bitcoin would hit 1K dollars, they are lying to you). Of course they will never accept it was luck, they will ramble from "skill" to "god wanted it to be like that" and so on. These guys usually become sort of gurus around here and tell other people to keep believing because they will be millonaires too if they wait enough (remember all these dumb failed predictions by rpietila?). It's a classic pyramidal scheme.
Sure, Bitcoin's technology is great, but greed of these that become very wealthy and the desperation of the 99% to become wealthy as well to scape the rat race, ruin everything as always. The system is fucked and no kind of currency can save it. We need a Resource Based Economy and worldwide education on science.

I do believe that many ASIC/rig makers adopted a variant of A.  There is a discount that should be given to lock in 80% of what you think its worth up front and remove the uncertainty.  They don't have perfect insight in to where the price is going either.  They have lots of capital in play and I'm sure spend a tremendous amount of time obsessing about their profitability projections and trying to stay competitive with other makers.

As mining has evolved over the past year or so you can see it shifting much more to C and then to D:

D.  Not for sale.  We have enough capital now to grow on our own.  We didn't expect the price was going to fall so much and leave our customers so far under water.  Sorry.  We decided we can do better on our own.  The real production costs are not that high now that we are up and running.  Having customers or limited share holders does not provide enough benefit to outweigh the issues associated with them.

I'm sure some manufacturers are good and some are evil greedy bastards.  In the end it doesn't matter and they are all competing as businesses do.  The normal evolution of business is consolidation to get scale.  Capitalism is a great motivator and makes things move very fast.  But, its eventual outcome often is monopoly which is a horrible end result.  If market forces don't change the fundamentals to knock out monopolies then enter government and regulation to break it up and restart the cycle.  At least that is what should happen.  More and more you see business subvert the government to prevent the regulation and break up of their monopoly.  History shows that will lead to public uprising and revolt.  A horrible prospect to envision happening in modern times.

Bitcoin was intended to be more egalitarian, liberating, and peer-to-peer. More like bittorrent, seti@home, folding@home, etc.  It sprung out of those those ideas.  Satoshi wasn't trying to launch a get rich quick scheme for himself or others.  Quite the opposite.

It's too bad that bitcoin allowed dedicated silicon (FPGA/ASIC) to participate.  If they had adapted to prevent it there still would be large farms of CPU/GPU miners.  But it would be a more level playing field and there would be more use of having that much computational power in play that could also be solving real problems and not just generating a lot of heat and having an overabundance of SHA256 brute force engines lying around.

Well you are not going to find a very balanced discussion on here. Most people to migrate to this forum are going to be pro-bitcoin as they would not come here if they were not. Granted there are some bears, but they are vastly outnumbered.

I would argue that KnC would want to get out of the retail business because of the risks associated with selling via retail. People can claim they received defective miners and request a refund, and can claim that that they did not receive their machine, or could claim that the shipping times were excessive. The psedo anon nature of bitcoin would make it very difficult prove these claims either way and the number of bitcoin related scams are high enough that this probably happens often to them. This will result in a lot of regulatory risk

What's wrong with option A?  As the manuf. you sell for $8,000 today or try to mine the $10,000 over the next five months, but really you have to mine more than $10,000 because you have to pay for power and somewhere to put the machine.  That's not evem considering the possibility that the exchange rate may go to shit. While you might actually earn more BTC than it would have net you if you had just sold the unit outright, the shit exch. rate means you actually lost money relative to the $8,00 you could have made from the get go.  Further that's not even considering the opportunity cost by having your return tied up in a miner which has to earn it back over time.

But, yes. C