4 ms·

Doing some back of the envelope calculations.. Hash rate is about 1,200 PH now. The most efficient ASIC miner today is the AntMiner S7 [1], which does 4.86 TH

by geertj 11y ago

Doing some back of the envelope calculations.. Hash rate is about 1,200 PH now. The most efficient ASIC miner today is the AntMiner S7 [1], which does 4.86 TH at 1.21 KW. This gives us a power consumption of the entire Bitcoin network of at least 300 MW. Actual power will easily be double that, given that not everybody is using the latest miner. So let's say total power consumption is about 600 MW. This is the output of a small power plant. [1] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/ https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/

InclinedPlane 11y ago
https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/440629519192305665 https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/44062951919230566...
- ikeboy 11y ago
  http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...
  - cloudjacker 11y ago
    tl;dr
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      "Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money. The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money." The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.
      - shalmanese 11y ago
        "In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
  - infinity0 11y ago
    > Behind the user-friendly façade of chip and pin are cryptographic techniques of industrial strength. oh dear... the rest of the article was good, though.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      They also claimed that all crypto is based on prime numbers, while bitcoin is actually not, and called hashes "encryption". They sound like they sort of know what they're talking about, but jump to conclusions and assume their educated guesses are correct without looking them up.
Synaesthesia 11y ago
Every hour 25 bitcoins are mined, at a current value of $450, that's $11250. So if the total power expenditure of bitcoin hashing is 600MW, it would have to cost less than $11250/600 = $18.75/MWH for electricity to not mine at a loss, which is insanely cheap. Therefore the hashing chips must be considerably more efficient than the latest commercially available products. I think the major players get hashing chips manufactured at scale on smaller nodes for significant power savings.
- cdumler 11y ago
  Actually, the present value is the consideration of the future value of the return: PV = FV / (1+r)^n. Anyone who is bit mining now is willing to do it at discount on the assumption the coins will have greater value in the future. I'm not surprised at all that it's being mined below cost.

by geertj 11y ago

InclinedPlane 11y ago

https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/440629519192305665 https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/44062951919230566...

ikeboy 11y ago
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...
- cloudjacker 11y ago
  tl;dr
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    "Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money. The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money." The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.
    - shalmanese 11y ago
      "In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
- infinity0 11y ago
  > Behind the user-friendly façade of chip and pin are cryptographic techniques of industrial strength. oh dear... the rest of the article was good, though.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    They also claimed that all crypto is based on prime numbers, while bitcoin is actually not, and called hashes "encryption". They sound like they sort of know what they're talking about, but jump to conclusions and assume their educated guesses are correct without looking them up.

Synaesthesia 11y ago

Every hour 25 bitcoins are mined, at a current value of $450, that's $11250. So if the total power expenditure of bitcoin hashing is 600MW, it would have to cost less than $11250/600 = $18.75/MWH for electricity to not mine at a loss, which is insanely cheap. Therefore the hashing chips must be considerably more efficient than the latest commercially available products. I think the major players get hashing chips manufactured at scale on smaller nodes for significant power savings.

cdumler 11y ago
Actually, the present value is the consideration of the future value of the return: PV = FV / (1+r)^n. Anyone who is bit mining now is willing to do it at discount on the assumption the coins will have greater value in the future. I'm not surprised at all that it's being mined below cost.