3 ms·

I don't think this is particularly surprising or even a very useful metric, besides I don't understand why for instance "mining pools disbursing coins to member

by simias 8y ago

I don't think this is particularly surprising or even a very useful metric, besides I don't understand why for instance "mining pools disbursing coins to members" is considered to have no economic value (the article mentions that "Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio" shares this sentiment but doesn't justify their choice). Maybe one could expect that trading and speculation would be higher but I suspect that the average bitcoiner just trades directly on the exchanges without ever owning a wallet, or maybe just for "cold storage" if they're wealthy enough. As such I expect most of it is done off-chain. What I would be curious to know is what portion of the remaining third is actually used to buy goods and services vs. speculation. And for those who actually use it as a currency, how much is for buying legal things. My gut tells me that the number must be ridiculously low.

derefr 8y ago
My understanding is that mining pools could just as well have been implemented as a feature of the protocol itself. In Bitcoin, for example, this would be a coinbase transaction with multiple recipients. If that change changes your reckoning of the accounting, then the difference between more and less trading volume in the network has come down to how you represent the ledger format. At which point you need to choose how to resolve that discrepancy—for example, by always choosing the most compact ledger format possible. (Analogy: figuring out how many cycles a series of CPU instructions takes to execute. If some of those instructions are hints or pragmas that the CPU consumes without a full cycle, then representing this CPU’s instructions in a RISC encoding will give you a different cycle-count estimate than encoding the instructions as CISC, where the hints/pragmas just become part of the CISC instruction they’re associated with.)

by simias 8y ago

derefr 8y ago

My understanding is that mining pools could just as well have been implemented as a feature of the protocol itself. In Bitcoin, for example, this would be a coinbase transaction with multiple recipients. If that change changes your reckoning of the accounting, then the difference between more and less trading volume in the network has come down to how you represent the ledger format. At which point you need to choose how to resolve that discrepancy—for example, by always choosing the most compact ledger format possible. (Analogy: figuring out how many cycles a series of CPU instructions takes to execute. If some of those instructions are hints or pragmas that the CPU consumes without a full cycle, then representing this CPU’s instructions in a RISC encoding will give you a different cycle-count estimate than encoding the instructions as CISC, where the hints/pragmas just become part of the CISC instruction they’re associated with.)