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The irony is strong here - the most productive computer computer in the world, the one that's taken us to the moon, has been tasked with the most un-productive
by DenisM 7y ago
The irony is strong here - the most productive computer computer in the world, the one that's taken us to the moon, has been tasked with the most un-productive activity, that is burning energy for the sake of maintaining a ledger of fictional possessions.
- kinghajj 7y agoThey're not fictional possessions--millions of people have them, in the real world. They can be transacted, and exchanged for real-world goods and services.
- astrodust 7y agoIt's not 2014 any more.
- kinghajj 7y agoNo, it's 2019: XBT is around $11.8k, more financial instruments like futures, trusts, and ETFs are coming online, and LN adoption keeps growing (Bitstamp just launched their first LN node!)
- astrodust 7y agoI'm sure Tether and 100:1 margin trading has nothing to do with the price spike.
- fredfoobar 7y agoYup, I'm sure of it too. I don't get these guys who keep claiming this Tether fakenews.
- astrodust 7y agoNothing another dozen indictments and the resulting discovery can't prove yet again.
- diminoten 7y agoIf they're not fictional, show me a Bitcoin.
- dragonwriter 7y agoThere's a difference between fictional and intangible. A Waterdhavian gold dragon is a fictional possession (though, in concept, tangible). A Bitcoin is intangible, but nonfictional.
- diminoten 7y agoThat's why context matters, and realizing that in this context "fictional" means "intangible" (kind of, in this case "fictional" more than just digital) would be important if we were having this conversation honestly. This isn't an honest conversation though, because people are getting overly defensive about BTC.
- fastball 7y agoI like how you've decided that people are being overly defensive about BTC, rather than the other side of the proverbial coin: people are being over-critical. Person A saying "this thing is totally a waste" and Person B responding "actually, no it's not, for these reasons" is not an example of Person B being "overly defensive". Especially when B provides rationalizations of their position and A does not. And in no context I've ever seen does "fictional" mean "intangible". Even if it did, this would not be one of those times, as the context of the OC clearly indicates being dismissive of the currency as a whole, not just pointing out that it is intangible.
- DenisM 7y agoHow would you classify "stocks" in a Ponzi scheme? They too can be transacted, up to a point. Is that sufficient to make them non-fictional?
- fastball 7y agoSomething can be real (and not fictional) without having the value people imagine it to have. For example, I don't know if you own any old jewelry with diamonds in it, but if you do, you can probably assume that it is worth less than you paid for it, given that diamonds can now be artificially produced with clarity / hardness / etc that parallels "natural" diamonds, and a big part of a diamond's price has historically been it's relative scarcity in nature.
- Sschellbach 7y agomaybe maintaining that ledger is more productive than you suggest
- josu 7y agoThe irony is only there if you look at the tree instead of the whole forest. That's like looking at one human in a deserted island and criticizing humanity for being useless. That same human, working in cooperation with other humans could be capable of walking on the moon. But even then, there would be some snarky comment on HN criticizing the un-productiveness of humans walking on the moon. This is a cool project that shows how far we've come. The Bitcoin network (wasteful or not) is currently capable of calculating 74.5 exahashes per second. You would need 10x74.5x10^18 Apollo Guidance Computers for that, you would probably need to build the equivalent of the Death Star to fit them all in the same place.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoThe worst aspect of ecoins is mining, followed closely by scamming and speculation. I think the ecoin concept by itself is a step forward for the progress of humanity, and without mining, the blockchain needs a lot less resources. How would you fairly distribute ecoins if mining is excised? No idea.
- javert 7y ago> How would you fairly distribute ecoins if mining is excised? No idea. Without mining, you would have an even bigger problem than distributing coins, which is making the system secure. People are working on solutions to that (I have no idea if they will prove fruitful).
- grubles 7y agoMining is arguably the best aspect since it incentivizes using cheap renewable energy, which is why you'll find many large industrial mining farms using hydroelectric dam-produced electricity.
- perl4ever 7y agoPrinting a dollar bill doesn't require dissipating a dollar's worth of energy. It only costs a few cents. "Printing" a dollar's worth of Bitcoin inherently requires a dollar's worth of energy to be used with no other purpose. That seems like a stark difference to me and the basis for thinking Bitcoin is like a virus. It's the closest thing to the "gray goo" scenario we've seen yet.
- dclowd9901 7y agoI wouldn't mind if the work of mining was going toward fulfilling ledgers that are doing meaningful things, like ensuring accountability, rather than trying to find vapor money.
- fredfoobar 7y agoI don't understand this "unproductive activity" sentiment at all. It's as if we're taking away compute from "productive" processes that are in a dire need of compute! If there are productive processes that desperately need compute, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from getting it. I can argue that every form of money is fictional, it's only in the minds of people, it's a social construct. In fact, I can go further and say that there is absolutely nothing "physical" in this world, what is physical? just some sensations you're perceiving in your brain? Your brain is making up all the meaning. There's another (weak) argument: somehow, building all that crazy tech and going to the moon is more important than taking care of humans who're suffering here on Earth. Why is going to the moon more productive?? who benefited from it? I suspect this is just an intellectual circle jerk.
- DenisM 7y ago> It's as if we're taking away compute from "productive" processes that are in a dire need of compute! Compute? No. Energy? Yes, because today energy comes at the expense of environment which is running thin on the ground. > I suspect this is just an intellectual circle jerk. Come on, was that really necessary?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoJust seems like a weird hill to die on that's convenient because HN doesn't like bitcoin and gets to grandstand on saving the environment. Someone just as judgemental could criticize HNers for all the energy they waste using high powered devices to sit on HN. Or air conditioning their entire house when they could simply sweat a little bit or use a fan in the one room they are in. Or driving to the movies when they could twiddle their thumbs at home for entertainment. This is why it seems like such a belabored circlejerk.
- perl4ever 7y agoBut is it a minor waste of energy, like a lot of things people worry about? A $100 bill costs around 10 cents to print. The value of bitcoin is defined by the cost of the energy dissipated to mine it, so that means it's a thousand times more expensive than conventional money. Do you disagree with that logic?
- imhoguy 7y agoThe irony is that we now keep almost 5 teraflops phones[1] in pockets but the last manned mission to the Moon happened 46 years ago. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/9fax9c/the_new_iphonexs_is_capable_of_5_tflops_what_can/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/9fax9...
- nexuist 7y agoI don't like this philosophy because it assumes that with more computing power, we can unlock even greater feats in space travel. Computing only gets you so far. The AGC was able to be so slow and still get the job done because what it needed to do was not "hard": it calculated orbital equations and monitored sensors. It didn't use AI, it didn't need to hash anything, it didn't work with databases or networks, it didn't render graphics in 3D 4K - all of these, we expect from modern phones. If we want to advance space travel, the problem is not with computing. The problem is with chemistry (mostly), physics (to a lesser degree), and politics (let's be real, this is 99% of the battle).
- imhoguy 7y agoYou are right, technology is much ahead but politics back in 1930s.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoRemember when computer nerds the world over pooled their spare compute resources for Folding@Home and Seti@Home, in exchange for nothing but leaderboard positions and bragging rights? The real tragedy of the cryptocurrency gold rush is that by providing a profit motive it decimated these kinds of collaborative computing projects.
- fastball 7y agoThere are initiatives to perform useful computations with cryptocurrency.
- jolmg 7y agoI remember Folding@Home on the PS3. The visualizations were pretty cool looking. I didn't know there was a leaderboard.
- nyolfen 7y agothese were mostly done on PCs, right? i don't think that many people are mining on their desktops these days
- dclowd9901 7y agoHe should make it an art installation.
- DenisM 7y agoRight? Right? I'm no fan of modern art, but this I would make an exception for. It's just such a perfect metaphor for how we acquired enormous power but only used it for {insert your favorite rant subject}.
- ChainOfFools 7y agosort of a meta question: would you consider your (or anyone's) past a fictional posession, or a real one? Though I'm highly skeptical of blockchainism (see username) I don't know if I'd be able to buy into this particular criticism of it. Essentially a blockchain is a database of time and energy booked to a contrived measurable $particularActivity. This activity correlates to some past opportunity cost expense (and presumably a counterpart defensive loss aversion behavior expected in the future) on the part of the person burning time and resources to support that activity. A kind of rube goldberg electricity meter with a public log, that functions as a record of someone's ante in a super simple long running casino game. The more you spend on/invest in this activity, the less inclined you are to forfeit your recorded proof of doing it for less than whatever you consider a fair return on that sunk cost. This mechanism is fairly universal and applies to everything from hobbies to friendships to careers. What bitcoin (any blockchain really) does is just strip the commitment-payoff mechanic present in almost all human endeavors down to a cartoonishly simplified model and tie a bunch of charts and metrics to it, and use these to collectively goose our animal chase instincts into overdrive.
- TomMckenny 7y agoIndeed, the author found a project both hilarious and difficult. Also funny is the implication that the astronauts would have had to be careful of malware in addition to the occasional unaccounted for floating bolt.