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Bitcoin mining is so odd.. BitFury's going to add a power plant's worth of mining to secure the blockchain and nothing will change at all -- blocks will come at

Bitcoin mining is so odd.. BitFury's going to add a power plant's worth of mining to secure the blockchain and nothing will change at all -- blocks will come at the same pace, the transaction limit won't increase, the network won't be appreciably more secure... what a waste of energy. 40MW of super clean power that could be manufacturing solar panels or smelting aluminum or any of a million better options is instead performing useless calculations to pay back the cost of building this silly infrastructure.

ghshephard 11y ago
"what a waste of energy" The energy will go towards securing $6B+ of electronic currency. The more players like BitFury that work to secure the blockchain, the harder it is for a single player to attack the chain with a 51% attack.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  $6B this week.. $3B a few months ago.. Anyway, they're going to spend some $10M to build this data center.. High end cards can do something like 0.6GH/W, so this place will add 24M gigahash/S to the network. The current hashrate is something like 650M GH/S, so we can use a literal powerplant worth of energy to increase the hashrate / security of the blockchain by something like 3.5% -- And the hamster wheel keeps on turning.
  - gibybo 11y ago
    >0.6GH/W 3.65 GH/W: https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201511170341298180m44675v0613 https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020151117034... There are some others at ~1.6 GH/W, which is the inverse of 0.6 W/GH, so I'm assuming you just got the units backwards. This is a next generation facility so it's probably closer to 3.65 than 1.6 (if not >4), but even 1.6 would put it at 64 M GH/s, which would be a ~10% increase. 3.65 is 22%
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  What is a bitcoin if not a certificate that you've increased entropy? ie: a bitcoin is proof that you converted a bunch of energy into heat via meaningless calculations. It's the opposite of a carbon tax.
  - brighton36 11y ago
    It's censorship resistant data persistence. It's not that hard to understand ...

ghshephard 11y ago

"what a waste of energy" The energy will go towards securing $6B+ of electronic currency. The more players like BitFury that work to secure the blockchain, the harder it is for a single player to attack the chain with a 51% attack.

mikeyouse 11y ago
$6B this week.. $3B a few months ago.. Anyway, they're going to spend some $10M to build this data center.. High end cards can do something like 0.6GH/W, so this place will add 24M gigahash/S to the network. The current hashrate is something like 650M GH/S, so we can use a literal powerplant worth of energy to increase the hashrate / security of the blockchain by something like 3.5% -- And the hamster wheel keeps on turning.
- gibybo 11y ago
  >0.6GH/W 3.65 GH/W: https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201511170341298180m44675v0613 https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020151117034... There are some others at ~1.6 GH/W, which is the inverse of 0.6 W/GH, so I'm assuming you just got the units backwards. This is a next generation facility so it's probably closer to 3.65 than 1.6 (if not >4), but even 1.6 would put it at 64 M GH/s, which would be a ~10% increase. 3.65 is 22%
Scoundreller 11y ago
What is a bitcoin if not a certificate that you've increased entropy? ie: a bitcoin is proof that you converted a bunch of energy into heat via meaningless calculations. It's the opposite of a carbon tax.
- brighton36 11y ago
  It's censorship resistant data persistence. It's not that hard to understand ...