7 ms·

Side note: "Minting" sounds so much nicer than "mining". Minting evokes connotations of gold and kings and craftsmen doing skilled work. Mining on the other ha

Side note: "Minting" sounds so much nicer than "mining". Minting evokes connotations of gold and kings and craftsmen doing skilled work. Mining on the other hand is dirty. I associate digging, holes in the ground, mining waste, depths and darkness with that. Maybe crypto [0] currencies would have had it a tiny bit easier to not look like an environmentally bad idea (this is purely about the looks of it, not reality) if they had not picked such a bad word to begin with? [0] Another bad choice of words, imo

werds 6y ago
with your definitions in mind, i think mining is a lot more appropriate, haha
- _Microft 6y ago
  It is! I meant that they could have whitewashed the concept by using "minting" instead of "mining".
  - politician 6y ago
    Or recycling. "We recycle electrons into coins!"
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Believe it or not but there are people who think that "Bitcoin is a battery" because it can turn energy into money (and "money is easily converted to energy again", Umm... STEM education, we need to have a word because it looks like you are not doing your job properly...). Here is an example: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351214402167578626 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351214402167578626
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Balaji's take is easily the worst, least coherent take on proof of work to date. An absolute carnival of ignorance motivated by self-interest. The lengths people will do to defend the indefensible because it'll make them rich continues to disappoint.
        heed 6y ago
        I agree it’s a bad take, but the idea in the article he shared is, in my opinion, reasonable and doesn’t talk about BTC being a battery. It talks about crypto mining as a last resort to utilizing excess energy produced by “green” sources (wind turbine), ie energy that cannot be sold to the grid or stored in batteries.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        That's not, however, what the system incentivizes. It incentivizes using the cheapest energy period. Miners are not incentivized to care even the tiniest little bit about where the energy comes from - as evidenced by them re-opening coal plants. [1] It's literally un-doing the progress we've made towards a renewable energy market. It's a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in the wild that can't be stored in some way or transported in some way and (b) that co-locating miners there is more economical than throwing some coal onto the fire. [1] https://qz.com/1250980/an-australian-coal-power-plant-will-reopen-to-help-mine-bitcoins/ https://qz.com/1250980/an-australian-coal-power-plant-will-r...
        billytetrud 6y ago
        It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good. > It's a fantasy that It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas. Ontario wind production for example curtails 25% of it's energy on average. Please do your research before speaking with so much authority. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/more-of-a-good-thing-is-surplus-renewable-electricity-an-opportunity-for-early-decarbonisation https://www.iea.org/commentaries/more-of-a-good-thing-is-sur...
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Not exactly an education issue, people can make up anything they want and education alone cannot stop them doing it; only shame and consequences can.
      - ziml77 6y ago
        These people will justify bitcoin in such insane ways. I see one guy doesn't agree that it's a battery but still thinks mining is a good thing > Bitcoin let’s anyone with excess energy manufacture sound money. This is a better option than wasting the energy. There are times where the grid is producing more energy than is being demanded but it's not like it's that difference that's being used to mine. I also don't get why that energy would need to be turned into money. Simply creating new coins isn't useful work (validating transactions is, but it's a horribly inefficient way to do that)
        shawnz 6y ago
        > it's a horribly inefficient way to do that It's not "inefficient", relatively speaking, if there's no more efficient way to do it while still achieving the same risk profile.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        So visa is a few hundred thousand times more efficient. Are we not able to pay people without Bitcoin? The trustlessness and decentralization isn't a value in and of itself, it's value must be measured in its utility.
        shawnz 6y ago
        The efficiency of Visa isn't comparable because it solves a completely different problem than Bitcoin. And yes, in most cases we can pay each other just fine without Bitcoin. That doesn't negate its specific usefulness. It's already well documented that you don't see the trustlessness and decentralization to be a value for you personally. If that's the case then simply don't buy any. Those who do get value from those properties will use it, as is the case now.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        Sorry its no longer that simple. It's wasting as much power as all of Switzerland and all of Austria combined. 52MT of CO2 emitted annually. 10kT of e-waste. And growing like grey goo. [1] Dormant coal facilities are now being re-activated to hash noise as fast as they can. [2] This is literally everyone's problem now and we should all do everything we can, tell everyone we can, to shut this down before it's too late. Your game of pass-the-spreadsheet-cell is now actively threatening the lives of people on the planet at probably the most critical time in human history re: global warming. I have general distaste for the MLM nature of most coins in this frothy climate - but those $SAFEMOON and $CUMMIES folks are just going to lose money, not ruin Earth. I mostly do everything I can to end Bitcoin by raising awareness. You should too. I'd be just as vocal if your coin was based on proof-of-killing-elephants or proof-of-having-a-tire-fire-on-your-lawn. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/australian-power-company-reopen-coal-power-plant-mine-bitcoin/ https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/australian-power-compan...
madars 6y ago
Minting implies exercising seigniorage authority, whereas mining physical commodities is naturally distributed (no central authority). The latter term is much more appropriate to describe issuance-via-PoW.
- Jiocus 6y ago
  Before you mint a coin, you have to mine the metal ore :)
- bsamuels 6y ago
  Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. Miner's de facto control of the network is a huge problem. It's why Bitcoin will never solve its energy use issue, and why Ethereum set up a "delayed difficulty bomb" to force miners to accept changes to the network.
  - kinghajj 6y ago
    > Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. The failure of the Bitcoin2x proposal and adoption of Segwit in 2017 demonstrated that miners do not have as much control as they might like to think. If node operators don't accept their blocks, they lose money.
    - rspeele 6y ago
      I agree that miners don't have control if the social consensus goes against them I think the exchanges have the most power, given the current state of the network where very, very few businesses will directly exchange goods and services for coins and most use of Bitcoin is done by converting to fiat through an exchange. Looking back to 2017, there was the Bitcoin Cash fork. As I recall, Coinbase handled this in a fairly neutral way: if you held 1.0 BTC on the exchange, after the fork you held 1.0 BTC and 1.0 BCH, and trading was supported for both, so the market found a price for each. The only bias here is letting Bitcoin Core keep the "BTC" ticker symbol. Suppose the top 3 exchanges had done the same thing, but treated Bitcoin Cash as the "real" one that trades under the BTC symbol (and is referred to on the exchange as just "Bitcoin"), and Bitcoin Core as the "fork" with a new symbol like BCC. Maybe even call it something lame like "Bitcoin Classic". Would that have affected which one won? Maybe a bit... but enough to make a difference, I'm not sure. What if they really wanted Bitcoin Cash to win, and went a step further? What if they gave Bitcoin Cash the BTC ticker and didn't implement trading pairs for "Bitcoin Classic"? They'd still let you withdraw your forked "Bitcoin Classic" to your self-custody wallet, and you could send it from there to some other small-time exchange to try to dump it... but you couldn't trade it on Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance. What would have happened then? There's no way of knowing, but if you asked me to guess, I'd say that what we call Bitcoin Cash today would've won. Bear in mind, for those who have strong opinions about BCH vs BTC... I have no opinion about which one is better or which one should be the "real bitcoin". I'm just speculating that, if they had wanted to, two or three big exchanges could have swayed that decision the other way.
ElvisTrout 6y ago
I think given that one of the key aims of crypto was moving away from an inflationary model where new money can easily be created using a term other than minting was a conscious and considered move. Mining sounds harder and it is!
wavefunction 6y ago
Minting has been throughout its long history associated with fraud. There's a reason people used to have to weigh the minted coins they received from transactions to make sure the minter was delivering the amount of gold or silver or other backing metal in the coin's alloy. Just another perspective on minting...
TacticalCoder 6y ago
I'm not so sure "cryptocurrencies" is a bad word: it's basically cryptography everywhere. But transforming "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is bad I agree. Ethereum seems to be very serious about moving to proof-of-stake. It is a big project and they don't seem very concerned about the papers saying that "proof of stake cannot possibly work". I don't know if PoS can work or not but it's going to be costly for attackers to try to find out (as they'll get they staked deposit slashed if they try to attack the blockchain).
- operator-name 6y ago
  These days the phrase cryptocurrency is a misnomer, very few blockchain projects are designed to be just a currency. Ethereum is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain but Ethereum is not only a currency but a smart contact platform. Tokens on these platforms are rarely currencies too, as an example they can represent voting power, a stake in a software project or virtual goods. Even blockchain is becoming a misnomer as most base player platforms are using more intersting techniques.
whytaka 6y ago
Maybe the transition to Proof of Stake is the time to change terminology. Proof of Work is really a lot like mining, digging around to see if a nugget is there, while Proof of Stake is a community of self-interested institutions sharing the same signature.

werds 6y ago

with your definitions in mind, i think mining is a lot more appropriate, haha

_Microft 6y ago
It is! I meant that they could have whitewashed the concept by using "minting" instead of "mining".
- politician 6y ago
  Or recycling. "We recycle electrons into coins!"
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Believe it or not but there are people who think that "Bitcoin is a battery" because it can turn energy into money (and "money is easily converted to energy again", Umm... STEM education, we need to have a word because it looks like you are not doing your job properly...). Here is an example: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351214402167578626 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1351214402167578626
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Balaji's take is easily the worst, least coherent take on proof of work to date. An absolute carnival of ignorance motivated by self-interest. The lengths people will do to defend the indefensible because it'll make them rich continues to disappoint.
      - heed 6y ago
        I agree it’s a bad take, but the idea in the article he shared is, in my opinion, reasonable and doesn’t talk about BTC being a battery. It talks about crypto mining as a last resort to utilizing excess energy produced by “green” sources (wind turbine), ie energy that cannot be sold to the grid or stored in batteries.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        That's not, however, what the system incentivizes. It incentivizes using the cheapest energy period. Miners are not incentivized to care even the tiniest little bit about where the energy comes from - as evidenced by them re-opening coal plants. [1] It's literally un-doing the progress we've made towards a renewable energy market. It's a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in the wild that can't be stored in some way or transported in some way and (b) that co-locating miners there is more economical than throwing some coal onto the fire. [1] https://qz.com/1250980/an-australian-coal-power-plant-will-reopen-to-help-mine-bitcoins/ https://qz.com/1250980/an-australian-coal-power-plant-will-r...
        billytetrud 6y ago
        It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good. > It's a fantasy that It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas. Ontario wind production for example curtails 25% of it's energy on average. Please do your research before speaking with so much authority. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/more-of-a-good-thing-is-surplus-renewable-electricity-an-opportunity-for-early-decarbonisation https://www.iea.org/commentaries/more-of-a-good-thing-is-sur...
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Not exactly an education issue, people can make up anything they want and education alone cannot stop them doing it; only shame and consequences can.
    - ziml77 6y ago
      These people will justify bitcoin in such insane ways. I see one guy doesn't agree that it's a battery but still thinks mining is a good thing > Bitcoin let’s anyone with excess energy manufacture sound money. This is a better option than wasting the energy. There are times where the grid is producing more energy than is being demanded but it's not like it's that difference that's being used to mine. I also don't get why that energy would need to be turned into money. Simply creating new coins isn't useful work (validating transactions is, but it's a horribly inefficient way to do that)
      - shawnz 6y ago
        > it's a horribly inefficient way to do that It's not "inefficient", relatively speaking, if there's no more efficient way to do it while still achieving the same risk profile.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        So visa is a few hundred thousand times more efficient. Are we not able to pay people without Bitcoin? The trustlessness and decentralization isn't a value in and of itself, it's value must be measured in its utility.
        shawnz 6y ago
        The efficiency of Visa isn't comparable because it solves a completely different problem than Bitcoin. And yes, in most cases we can pay each other just fine without Bitcoin. That doesn't negate its specific usefulness. It's already well documented that you don't see the trustlessness and decentralization to be a value for you personally. If that's the case then simply don't buy any. Those who do get value from those properties will use it, as is the case now.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        Sorry its no longer that simple. It's wasting as much power as all of Switzerland and all of Austria combined. 52MT of CO2 emitted annually. 10kT of e-waste. And growing like grey goo. [1] Dormant coal facilities are now being re-activated to hash noise as fast as they can. [2] This is literally everyone's problem now and we should all do everything we can, tell everyone we can, to shut this down before it's too late. Your game of pass-the-spreadsheet-cell is now actively threatening the lives of people on the planet at probably the most critical time in human history re: global warming. I have general distaste for the MLM nature of most coins in this frothy climate - but those $SAFEMOON and $CUMMIES folks are just going to lose money, not ruin Earth. I mostly do everything I can to end Bitcoin by raising awareness. You should too. I'd be just as vocal if your coin was based on proof-of-killing-elephants or proof-of-having-a-tire-fire-on-your-lawn. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/australian-power-company-reopen-coal-power-plant-mine-bitcoin/ https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/australian-power-compan...

madars 6y ago

Minting implies exercising seigniorage authority, whereas mining physical commodities is naturally distributed (no central authority). The latter term is much more appropriate to describe issuance-via-PoW.

Jiocus 6y ago
Before you mint a coin, you have to mine the metal ore :)
bsamuels 6y ago
Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. Miner's de facto control of the network is a huge problem. It's why Bitcoin will never solve its energy use issue, and why Ethereum set up a "delayed difficulty bomb" to force miners to accept changes to the network.
- kinghajj 6y ago
  > Miners technically do have seigniorage authority since they can collectively decide to change the underlying cryptocurrency. The failure of the Bitcoin2x proposal and adoption of Segwit in 2017 demonstrated that miners do not have as much control as they might like to think. If node operators don't accept their blocks, they lose money.
  - rspeele 6y ago
    I agree that miners don't have control if the social consensus goes against them I think the exchanges have the most power, given the current state of the network where very, very few businesses will directly exchange goods and services for coins and most use of Bitcoin is done by converting to fiat through an exchange. Looking back to 2017, there was the Bitcoin Cash fork. As I recall, Coinbase handled this in a fairly neutral way: if you held 1.0 BTC on the exchange, after the fork you held 1.0 BTC and 1.0 BCH, and trading was supported for both, so the market found a price for each. The only bias here is letting Bitcoin Core keep the "BTC" ticker symbol. Suppose the top 3 exchanges had done the same thing, but treated Bitcoin Cash as the "real" one that trades under the BTC symbol (and is referred to on the exchange as just "Bitcoin"), and Bitcoin Core as the "fork" with a new symbol like BCC. Maybe even call it something lame like "Bitcoin Classic". Would that have affected which one won? Maybe a bit... but enough to make a difference, I'm not sure. What if they really wanted Bitcoin Cash to win, and went a step further? What if they gave Bitcoin Cash the BTC ticker and didn't implement trading pairs for "Bitcoin Classic"? They'd still let you withdraw your forked "Bitcoin Classic" to your self-custody wallet, and you could send it from there to some other small-time exchange to try to dump it... but you couldn't trade it on Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance. What would have happened then? There's no way of knowing, but if you asked me to guess, I'd say that what we call Bitcoin Cash today would've won. Bear in mind, for those who have strong opinions about BCH vs BTC... I have no opinion about which one is better or which one should be the "real bitcoin". I'm just speculating that, if they had wanted to, two or three big exchanges could have swayed that decision the other way.

ElvisTrout 6y ago

I think given that one of the key aims of crypto was moving away from an inflationary model where new money can easily be created using a term other than minting was a conscious and considered move. Mining sounds harder and it is!

wavefunction 6y ago

Minting has been throughout its long history associated with fraud. There's a reason people used to have to weigh the minted coins they received from transactions to make sure the minter was delivering the amount of gold or silver or other backing metal in the coin's alloy. Just another perspective on minting...

TacticalCoder 6y ago

I'm not so sure "cryptocurrencies" is a bad word: it's basically cryptography everywhere. But transforming "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" is bad I agree. Ethereum seems to be very serious about moving to proof-of-stake. It is a big project and they don't seem very concerned about the papers saying that "proof of stake cannot possibly work". I don't know if PoS can work or not but it's going to be costly for attackers to try to find out (as they'll get they staked deposit slashed if they try to attack the blockchain).

operator-name 6y ago
These days the phrase cryptocurrency is a misnomer, very few blockchain projects are designed to be just a currency. Ethereum is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain but Ethereum is not only a currency but a smart contact platform. Tokens on these platforms are rarely currencies too, as an example they can represent voting power, a stake in a software project or virtual goods. Even blockchain is becoming a misnomer as most base player platforms are using more intersting techniques.

whytaka 6y ago

Maybe the transition to Proof of Stake is the time to change terminology. Proof of Work is really a lot like mining, digging around to see if a nugget is there, while Proof of Stake is a community of self-interested institutions sharing the same signature.