9 ms·

Bitcoin has computed 2^83.9 hashes

52 points by mrb 11y ago

fapjacks 11y ago
Bitcoin is not in a good spot.
- kbenzle 11y ago
  What, why?
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    Please be sure to read the links posted in this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.yafcp4f31 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...
kushti 11y ago
This is definitely the waste of resources. A lottery to choose a block generator could be useful, e.g. PrimeCoin or PermaCoin(http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf). We are working to launch Scorex(https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki) w. Permacoin testnet in coming days.
- ghayes 11y ago
  From the referenced document where OP says "No, this is not wasteful" [0]: "Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% .. [and] economic modelling predicts miners will not account for more than 0.74% of the energy consumed by the world". Expending nearly 1% of all energy consumed by the world is an insanely large figure. How much hubris does it take to call this "not wasteful" on its face? [0] Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012%
  - dustingetz 11y ago
    Well to make any reasonable comparison we need to see it at a human scale number like dollars per person per day or something otherwise it's just posturing and politics... Big numbers are always manipulated to serve one interest or another
    - placeybordeaux 11y ago
      To make a reasonable comparison you would actually need to look at the opportunity costs. This gets even harder as bitcoin mining operations frequently locate at locations which have extremely cheap power. Power which would have huge transmission loss when moving to individual's homes.
  - mrb 11y ago
    The model I used to calculate 0.74% assumes Bitcoin's market cap is $1 trillion(!). We can all agree that IF the market cap gets this large, it will mean Bitcoin will have had a huge positive impact on society. Therefore it will have been worth it to spend 0.74% of the world's energy. Edit: I am puzzled by the downvotes. I would like to hear (and respond to) counterpoints if what I am saying is incredibly silly.
    - kansface 11y ago
      > We can all agree that IF the market cap gets this large, it will mean Bitcoin will have had a huge positive impact on society. What, why?! Even if that were the case, it doesn't follow that the good it does outweighs using 1% of all energy.
      - mrb 11y ago
        I will explain. Firstly, I think you are underestimating the societal impact that would have led a cryptocurrency to be worth $1 trillion. It would mean it has succeeded on a massive scale: foreign trade made more fluid thanks to Bitcoin's disregard of political borders, hundreds of millions of people using it to escape inflation/financial restrictions/etc (vs. today's few million users), millions of merchants accepting it (vs. today's 130 000 merchants). All Bitcoin would have to accomplish to justify using 0.X% of the world's energy is to increase the world GDP by 0.X%. Secondly, 0.74% is an upper bound. It assumes power costs of $0.01 per kWh (read section 2 at http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82) when actually the average power cost worldwide is 10x higher ($0.10/kWh). Maybe it will be 0.3% of the total energy. Maybe 0.1%. How low is low enough that you would consider it worthwhile?
- mrb 11y ago
  "Definitively"? Have you read my counter-arguments here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 ?
- wyager 11y ago
  There is a difference between wasting and spending. It is impossible to get the security guarantees that Bitcoin affords without spending energy. That expense is the end goal of proof of work, not a side effect.
- blencdr 11y ago
  You are right on this one, bitcoin is a large an noneffective resource waste. Our world need to have ideas to make an energy transition, and bitcoin is based on energy waste, mainly produced by carbon resources. Our future world need energy, and we cannot afford burning real material to create a virtual money with no practical value, this is a nonsense.
  - mrb 11y ago
    "mainly produced by carbon resources" No, many/most miners use hydropower. See next-to-last paragraph in section 1.
    - mikeyouse 11y ago
      As hydropower is clearly the cleanest and cheapest source of electricity and would be used first in any location, bitcoin miners are essentially shifting other power consumers to carbon-based sources.
      - mrb 11y ago
        I don't think they are shifting other consumers. More and more often we have seen that large miners either build their own mini-power plant[1] or use excess hydro power in remote areas that would otherwise be unused[2]. [1] http://thenodepole.com/2015/06/04/kncminer-to-build-new-20mw-greenfield-datacenter-in-the-node-pole/ http://thenodepole.com/2015/06/04/kncminer-to-build-new-20mw... [2] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-first-look-inside-bw-one-of-china-s-oldest-and-largest-miners-1444675310 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-fir...
yuhong 11y ago
Unrelated to hashes, but from https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kaduk-afs3-rxkad-k5-kdf-00.txt https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kaduk-afs3-rxkad-k5-kd... : "Although administrative access to the cell still uses single-DES for encryption of network traffic, that single-DES key is time limited and may be resistant to brute-force key recovery prior to its expiration." This wasn't created until after CloudCracker can break DES, but to be honest OpenAFS is not the only one either. DOCSIS I think do something similar too. I wonder if anyone has created ASICs to break DES.
- jeff_marshall 11y ago
  Yes, ASICs to break DES were done back in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
- DanBC 11y ago
  See, for example, COPACOBANA which uses FPGAs to crack some crypto, including DES. That was in 2008. http://www.copacobana.org/ http://www.copacobana.org/ > COPACOBANA, the Cost-Optimized Parallel COde Breaker, is an FPGA-based machine which is optimized for running cryptanalytical algorithms. COPACOBANA is suitable for parallel computation problems which have low communication requirements. DES cracking is such a parallelizable problem: an exhaustive key search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) takes no longer than a week on average with COPACOBANA. Other ciphers can be attacked too, and COPACOBANA can also be used for parallel computing problem outside cryptography.
- jaltman 11y ago
  Even with afs3-rxkad-k5 the wire encryption is a watered down variant of DES called fcrypt and the use of encryption is the choice of the client. There is nothing that an administrator can do to prevent AFS3 clients communicating with AFS3 servers from leaking sensitive information onto the wire. The AuriStor File System solves these problems with the yfs-rxgk security class, volume and file server security policies, combined identities, perfect forward secrecy, and much more .... https://www.auristor.com/openafs/migrate-to-auristor/ https://www.auristor.com/openafs/migrate-to-auristor/
SatoshiRoberts 11y ago
Guys, Bitcoin died last week, you didn't hear?
Pharaoh2 11y ago
Well this image proves that the bitcoin network is not only alive and well but it is growing at an impressive rate and anyone saying that bitcoin is dying is lying to you and possibly pushing his own agenda. http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png
kls 11y ago
I will admit I am not up on block chain tech or the process it uses, but it does seem like a lot of wasted resources to just compute hashes. It seems like someone could make a system where real work units count as credit in an issuing lottery. Kind of like SETI @ Home, medical or genome work where you distribute a problem and then people get tickets for accomplishing some form of work. Seems to me that this would be a better use of such vast computing power and would help with discovery at the same time. Again it's not my area of expertise so I don't understand the details or issues that would arise in ordering the work units around distributed computation to solve large problems. It would be nice if researchers had open and free access to such a system.
- aback 11y ago
  The problem with basing a money on something that has value, is that changes in perception of the value of the thing, result in changes in prices across the economy. Say gold is the currency base. Now we discover Alzheimer's can be cured with a medicine that requires a lot of gold in the processing, and the price of gold skyrockets. That causes the price of everything else (priced in gold) to plummet. However, I think a compelling case can be made that the amount of hashpower being used to secure Bitcoin is overkill for the measly 3tps that the network is currently capable of. If the same hashpower was used to secure 100X more transactions, it wouldn't seem like such a waste of resources.
- hatsunearu 11y ago
  Check this out: http://filecoin.io/ http://filecoin.io/ It's a cryptocurrency where you have to prove that you are retaining a copy of a file. Whitepaper included. These people are also behind IPFS, the distributed alternative to HTTP (ambitious, huh?)
- ultramancool 11y ago
  The detail you're missing is that these hashes bitcoin computes are designed to be something easy to verify but hard to compute. Relatively few productive problems have this property, and there are some which are doing this already, trying to crack proof RSA keys and such... but that's about it.
tveita 11y ago
That's about 2^58 hashes and 50.000.000 joules (14 kWh) per transaction when operating at the theoretical peak of around 3 transactions per second.
orasis 11y ago
How many watts and tons of CO2 is that?
- mrb 11y ago
  "the bottom line is that investing a hundred+ megawatt in a system that so far created thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste." Plus many other good arguments in http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 please read it.
winter45 11y ago
I'm not a math type, but it looks to me that mrb is saying that the number of computed bitcoin hashes outnumber an estimated number of all of the grains of sand on the world's beaches, and in the world's deserts, by a factor of 10^6th http://tinyurl.com/hf9aybm http://tinyurl.com/hf9aybm http://tinyurl.com/qc59ora http://tinyurl.com/qc59ora

52 points by mrb 11y ago

fapjacks 11y ago

Bitcoin is not in a good spot.

kbenzle 11y ago
What, why?
- fapjacks 11y ago
  Please be sure to read the links posted in this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.yafcp4f31 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...

kushti 11y ago

This is definitely the waste of resources. A lottery to choose a block generator could be useful, e.g. PrimeCoin or PermaCoin(http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf). We are working to launch Scorex(https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki) w. Permacoin testnet in coming days.

ghayes 11y ago
From the referenced document where OP says "No, this is not wasteful" [0]: "Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% .. [and] economic modelling predicts miners will not account for more than 0.74% of the energy consumed by the world". Expending nearly 1% of all energy consumed by the world is an insanely large figure. How much hubris does it take to call this "not wasteful" on its face? [0] Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012%
- dustingetz 11y ago
  Well to make any reasonable comparison we need to see it at a human scale number like dollars per person per day or something otherwise it's just posturing and politics... Big numbers are always manipulated to serve one interest or another
  - placeybordeaux 11y ago
    To make a reasonable comparison you would actually need to look at the opportunity costs. This gets even harder as bitcoin mining operations frequently locate at locations which have extremely cheap power. Power which would have huge transmission loss when moving to individual's homes.
- mrb 11y ago
  The model I used to calculate 0.74% assumes Bitcoin's market cap is $1 trillion(!). We can all agree that IF the market cap gets this large, it will mean Bitcoin will have had a huge positive impact on society. Therefore it will have been worth it to spend 0.74% of the world's energy. Edit: I am puzzled by the downvotes. I would like to hear (and respond to) counterpoints if what I am saying is incredibly silly.
  - kansface 11y ago
    > We can all agree that IF the market cap gets this large, it will mean Bitcoin will have had a huge positive impact on society. What, why?! Even if that were the case, it doesn't follow that the good it does outweighs using 1% of all energy.
    - mrb 11y ago
      I will explain. Firstly, I think you are underestimating the societal impact that would have led a cryptocurrency to be worth $1 trillion. It would mean it has succeeded on a massive scale: foreign trade made more fluid thanks to Bitcoin's disregard of political borders, hundreds of millions of people using it to escape inflation/financial restrictions/etc (vs. today's few million users), millions of merchants accepting it (vs. today's 130 000 merchants). All Bitcoin would have to accomplish to justify using 0.X% of the world's energy is to increase the world GDP by 0.X%. Secondly, 0.74% is an upper bound. It assumes power costs of $0.01 per kWh (read section 2 at http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82) when actually the average power cost worldwide is 10x higher ($0.10/kWh). Maybe it will be 0.3% of the total energy. Maybe 0.1%. How low is low enough that you would consider it worthwhile?
mrb 11y ago
"Definitively"? Have you read my counter-arguments here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 ?
wyager 11y ago
There is a difference between wasting and spending. It is impossible to get the security guarantees that Bitcoin affords without spending energy. That expense is the end goal of proof of work, not a side effect.
blencdr 11y ago
You are right on this one, bitcoin is a large an noneffective resource waste. Our world need to have ideas to make an energy transition, and bitcoin is based on energy waste, mainly produced by carbon resources. Our future world need energy, and we cannot afford burning real material to create a virtual money with no practical value, this is a nonsense.
- mrb 11y ago
  "mainly produced by carbon resources" No, many/most miners use hydropower. See next-to-last paragraph in section 1.
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    As hydropower is clearly the cleanest and cheapest source of electricity and would be used first in any location, bitcoin miners are essentially shifting other power consumers to carbon-based sources.
    - mrb 11y ago
      I don't think they are shifting other consumers. More and more often we have seen that large miners either build their own mini-power plant[1] or use excess hydro power in remote areas that would otherwise be unused[2]. [1] http://thenodepole.com/2015/06/04/kncminer-to-build-new-20mw-greenfield-datacenter-in-the-node-pole/ http://thenodepole.com/2015/06/04/kncminer-to-build-new-20mw... [2] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-first-look-inside-bw-one-of-china-s-oldest-and-largest-miners-1444675310 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-fir...

yuhong 11y ago

Unrelated to hashes, but from https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kaduk-afs3-rxkad-k5-kdf-00.txt https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kaduk-afs3-rxkad-k5-kd... : "Although administrative access to the cell still uses single-DES for encryption of network traffic, that single-DES key is time limited and may be resistant to brute-force key recovery prior to its expiration." This wasn't created until after CloudCracker can break DES, but to be honest OpenAFS is not the only one either. DOCSIS I think do something similar too. I wonder if anyone has created ASICs to break DES.

jeff_marshall 11y ago
Yes, ASICs to break DES were done back in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
DanBC 11y ago
See, for example, COPACOBANA which uses FPGAs to crack some crypto, including DES. That was in 2008. http://www.copacobana.org/ http://www.copacobana.org/ > COPACOBANA, the Cost-Optimized Parallel COde Breaker, is an FPGA-based machine which is optimized for running cryptanalytical algorithms. COPACOBANA is suitable for parallel computation problems which have low communication requirements. DES cracking is such a parallelizable problem: an exhaustive key search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) takes no longer than a week on average with COPACOBANA. Other ciphers can be attacked too, and COPACOBANA can also be used for parallel computing problem outside cryptography.
jaltman 11y ago
Even with afs3-rxkad-k5 the wire encryption is a watered down variant of DES called fcrypt and the use of encryption is the choice of the client. There is nothing that an administrator can do to prevent AFS3 clients communicating with AFS3 servers from leaking sensitive information onto the wire. The AuriStor File System solves these problems with the yfs-rxgk security class, volume and file server security policies, combined identities, perfect forward secrecy, and much more .... https://www.auristor.com/openafs/migrate-to-auristor/ https://www.auristor.com/openafs/migrate-to-auristor/

SatoshiRoberts 11y ago

Guys, Bitcoin died last week, you didn't hear?

Pharaoh2 11y ago

Well this image proves that the bitcoin network is not only alive and well but it is growing at an impressive rate and anyone saying that bitcoin is dying is lying to you and possibly pushing his own agenda. http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png

kls 11y ago

I will admit I am not up on block chain tech or the process it uses, but it does seem like a lot of wasted resources to just compute hashes. It seems like someone could make a system where real work units count as credit in an issuing lottery. Kind of like SETI @ Home, medical or genome work where you distribute a problem and then people get tickets for accomplishing some form of work. Seems to me that this would be a better use of such vast computing power and would help with discovery at the same time. Again it's not my area of expertise so I don't understand the details or issues that would arise in ordering the work units around distributed computation to solve large problems. It would be nice if researchers had open and free access to such a system.

aback 11y ago
The problem with basing a money on something that has value, is that changes in perception of the value of the thing, result in changes in prices across the economy. Say gold is the currency base. Now we discover Alzheimer's can be cured with a medicine that requires a lot of gold in the processing, and the price of gold skyrockets. That causes the price of everything else (priced in gold) to plummet. However, I think a compelling case can be made that the amount of hashpower being used to secure Bitcoin is overkill for the measly 3tps that the network is currently capable of. If the same hashpower was used to secure 100X more transactions, it wouldn't seem like such a waste of resources.
hatsunearu 11y ago
Check this out: http://filecoin.io/ http://filecoin.io/ It's a cryptocurrency where you have to prove that you are retaining a copy of a file. Whitepaper included. These people are also behind IPFS, the distributed alternative to HTTP (ambitious, huh?)
ultramancool 11y ago
The detail you're missing is that these hashes bitcoin computes are designed to be something easy to verify but hard to compute. Relatively few productive problems have this property, and there are some which are doing this already, trying to crack proof RSA keys and such... but that's about it.

tveita 11y ago

That's about 2^58 hashes and 50.000.000 joules (14 kWh) per transaction when operating at the theoretical peak of around 3 transactions per second.

orasis 11y ago

How many watts and tons of CO2 is that?

mrb 11y ago
"the bottom line is that investing a hundred+ megawatt in a system that so far created thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste." Plus many other good arguments in http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=82 please read it.

winter45 11y ago

I'm not a math type, but it looks to me that mrb is saying that the number of computed bitcoin hashes outnumber an estimated number of all of the grains of sand on the world's beaches, and in the world's deserts, by a factor of 10^6th http://tinyurl.com/hf9aybm http://tinyurl.com/hf9aybm http://tinyurl.com/qc59ora http://tinyurl.com/qc59ora