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Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'
- neals 9y agoBut think of how in awe the Aliens are of the freedoms we have created for our selves.
- BoorishBears 9y agoWe’ve allowed people to be venture capitalists in the system [crypto] that will replace our current finance system -Actual rational behind letting people investing their savings in crypto be from an article I read
- nukeop 9y agoThe greatest thing is that nobody's "letting" invest anyone anywhere here, because nobody has any authority over the system. Rather than being "allowed"to invest in crypto, you are _free_ to invest in crypto.
- BoorishBears 9y agoIt’s clear the implication is crypto is “letting” you invest in itself by its nature, where as some government trying to invent a new monetary system probably wouldn’t let individuals invest for a stake in future circulation But realistically, the government can stop you from investing. Or more specifically, the government can derail investment in the system by removing the aspect of speculation that’s driving this “investment”, by limiting people’s ability to liquidate. The government moves slow. Yesterday hundreds, if not thousands of people here in CT got letters requesting taxes on out of state online purchases from Newegg from up to 3 years ago. Everyone knew the law was that you should report your own purchases and pay taxes on them, but they ignored it and thought “buying out of state will let me not pay taxes!”. Now the taxman is coming for its due. Stories like this on current transactions could start to hamper the speculation on crypto drastically.
- lawlessone 9y agoThey might benefit later when the price of the hardware plummets after a bigger crash... who am i kidding, this is ruining everything. The whole crypto craze is starting to remind me of "The Shoe Event Horizon " from the Hitch Hikers Guide.
- carbocation 9y agoReminds me of the paperclip optimizer. The singularity is us.
- lawlessone 9y agooh god that too.
- booleandilemma 9y agoAre cryptocurrencies the Great Filter?
- notahacker 9y agoOr Bostrom's Paperclip Maximiser (edit: someone else got there before me) Ironically if you draw a Venn diagram of "people who are worried about a dystopian future in which badly-designed AI reallocates enormous portions of the world's resources to an utterly useless end" and "people really into promoting and mining crypto" you might not need a second circle
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoSublimely ironic this future is turning out to be.
- jacquesm 9y agoClick at your peril: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- freeflight 9y ago
- flipp3r 9y agoI think the solution here is very very easy... Aliencoin when?
- AznHisoka 9y agoI predict a huge spike soon. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aliencoin/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aliencoin/
- jameskegel 9y agoNo active markets.
- tehlike 9y agoGridcoin i think supports seti
- trisimix 9y agoYep
- nukeop 9y agoSearching for alien life is an irrational waste of energy and resources. In thousands of years of mankind's history we have seen zero compelling evidence of alien life existing in any form anywhere. The energy spent on cryptocurrencies is the cost of the unstoppable financial freedom they are creating for us. Obviously, we all wish it were smaller, but to ensure that nobody can have total control of the system, it has to be computationally heavy and expensive in terms of energy required per transaction.
- adrianN 9y agoWe haven't been able to detect radio signals from outer space for almost the entirety of mankind's history. So that's not a very compelling argument.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ekianjo 9y agoI agree that probabilities are against us when looking for Alien life. There is probably beyond doubt some kInd of life in our galaxy, but there is no reason it would be occuring in the neighborhood. And we have no clear model that would Explain that all intelligent life would emit radio waves. Most species on Earth dont and they are certainly in the realm of what we define as intelligence.
- notheguyouthink 9y agoI also think there's definitely something to be said for the human spirit. Searching for something greater, aspiring for the impossible, we've lost this over the last X years. Only with Spacex does it feel like we're starting to gain some wonder back. I'm of the opinion that wonder and leaps of faith are central to the human spirit. Without it, I fear we're fast tracked for a dystopian future full of listlessness.
- scandox 9y ago> unstoppable financial freedom By the time we find out this isn't true, they will have successfully taken cash away...while we were all distracted. Can't wait for total financial surveillance. So excited. It's going to make the Big Dildo Refund joke completely non-understandable.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoMy brother has been able to sell his graphics cards that he has had for six months at MSRP or better even while being slightly used a few months ago. Graphic cards are hard to come by and they can't even make them fast enough. Even for gamers who need only one card.
- crypt1d 9y agoProof of stake on Ethereum is right around the corner. As soon as that happens there will be plenty of cheap GPUs back on the market.
- raverbashing 9y agoThe funny thing about the bitcoin fans is how they don't realize (or think it's good) that the BTC network does not become faster or scales as more hardware is added, quite the contrary
- nkrebs13 9y agoI don't think many people think that. They think more hardware means more money in their pockets.
- clarkmoody 9y agoIt does, however, become exponentially more difficult to double-spend, which is the whole reason we have proof-of-work security in the first place.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWhich is why cryptocurrencies won't convert into more energy-efficient schemes - after all, they see the exponential waste as feature - and we'll be stuck with this energetic disaster until some authority finally puts a stop to this charade.
- clarkmoody 9y ago"Some authority" will use violence to stop mining locally, and it will immediately move elsewhere. This is a nearly pure market system, driven by economic incentives. Cryptocurrency mining is the best and highest use for the scarce resource of energy. Once it becomes unprofitable to mine, then the hash rate will stabilize and the energy will be used for better purposes. Marginal producers of hash rate will be priced out of the market.
- 9y ago
- callmedavetoo 9y agoIsn't it ironic that he is so short-sighted? The demand for GPUs increases research in that area and will drive down costs soon. There will be a huge amount of cards that use too much energy for mining but that are perfect for research.
- omgtehlion 9y agoThese guys should contact nvidia directly, and ask to reserve some of the cards nvidia sells via their site. It releases small batches weekly. Anecdote: last week it was 300 cards. Most of them are snatched by miners and scalpers (who resell them on ebay). I managed to get one card I need (to complete my pc) only by using monitoring script and automating chrome to purchase. 300 cards were gone in 4 minutes. The next day 12 more were available (possibly cancelled/failed orders of those 300).
- toomuchtodo 9y agoNah, SETI should be crowdfunding to build ASIC boards tuned solely to do the necessary Fast Fourier Transform [1] operations to identify what they consider interesting signals from extraterrestrial sources. When the EFF commissioned the DES ASIC system for bruteforcing DES encryption in 1998, it only cost $210k [2]. I can only imagine design and fabrication costs have declined over 20 years. "The whole project was budgeted at about US $210,000. Of this, $80,000 was used to design, integrate, and test the EFF DES Cracker. The other $130,000 was for materials including chips, boards and all other components on the boards, card cages, power supplies, cooling, and a PC. The software for controlling the EFF DES Cracker was written separately as a volunteer project that took 4-5 weeks. The entire project was completed within about eighteen months, with much of that time being used for preliminary research. The core team contained fewer than ten people, none of whom worked full-time on the project. The final cost came in at well under $250,000." [1] https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_glossary/fft.php https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_glossary/fft.php [2] https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTM... [+] Entire book on the subject the EFF published for the intellectually curious: https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec https://archive.org/details/crackingdessecre00elec EDIT: @fundemental: Would love to hear more about this if you're willing to share and have the time. Contact info is in my profile.
- omgtehlion 9y agoOr maybe start a coin which uses those operations as PoW? Then miners will sort this out themselves ))
- spoiledtechie 9y agoI think nVidia is only getting more research and development dollars because of the bitcoin craze. Its gotta be taking some of that cash and making things faster and better. Prices and hardware in short supply will quickly come down.
- omgtehlion 9y agoUnfortunately, nvidia (or amd) does not get extra cash from this craze. Not even partners and oems. Most profits are reaped by retailers and resellers
- lykr0n 9y agoThey don't get the benefit of markup, but they do have the benefit of inventory flying off the shelves. I'm not going to guess at nVidia or AMD's margins, but I'm sure they are quite happy with the additional income from GPU sales. This turns into more R&D, which AMD needs.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoNvidia's profit margin seems to be swelling. https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/NVDA/profit_margin I would kind of expect that to be the case as each card they issue has a very high initial cost to design, test, promote, etc. and now cards that were getting "old" have suddenly shot up in demand.
- vthallam 9y agoSo Cryptocurrencies was all along the plan of Aliens to limit our quest to find them /s That said, the demand for GPU's didn't decrease even during the recent market crash and I personally believe it will be like this until Nvidia comes up with their custom chips for miners
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> So Cryptocurrencies was all along the plan of Aliens to limit our quest to find them /s That's just a side effect that prevents us from discovering them. The true purpose is to accelerate the process of making Earth more habitable to alien life (and less habitable to us). Apparently aliens like CO₂ and hot climate (makes me wonder why they don't just settle Venus, but maybe it's too warm for them there).
- perseusprime11 9y agoAre we not more likely to find alien life through SpaceX rockets that can launch telescopes deep into space?
- roywiggins 9y agoThe expensive part is building the telescopes. James Webb is going to cost something like $8.8 billion. Compared to that, launching it is easy.
- arisAlexis 9y agocryptocurrencies will radically change our societies so it's well wotth it. Alien life would probably destroy it.
- Ygg2 9y agoIf by radically change our societies, you mean waste billions of watts on overly complex Get Rich Quick schemes, then yes, yes they will.
- arisAlexis 9y agoI mean about permanent proof of government spending, ultra secure voting systems, decentralized government and direct democracy. bonus tip: many coins do not need watt burning. p.s you were probably an internet naysayer too
- dogma1138 9y agoSounds like an opportunity for an ICO called SETIcoin. They can both raise funds and if they figure out how to run their algorithms via smart contracts also get access to much more hardware ala BOINC.
- trisimix 9y agoGridcoin
- Artst3in 9y agoOh, but there is a great group of people who crunch projects for them all the time through BOINC. It's called Gridcoin. (credit to: going_full_turbo)
- trisimix 9y agoCheck out gridcoin. Its a cryptocurrency that rewards you for using boinc.
- root_axis 9y agoTo those offering up suggestions of "seticoin" and similar ideas, the reason why this hasn't been done is because its prohibitively difficult to build a PoW system using useful work because useful work usually cannot be verified as correct without redoing all of the work. Another problem is that the inherent nature of useful work generally precludes it from being delivered in units of controllable and predictable difficulty.
- hrasyid 9y agoI feel it's probably the least of my worries about crypto-currency craze