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yet another case of not reading and understanding the original paper or econ more generally. Energy, labor, ingenuity, and resources are used to pull gold from
by nazgulnarsil 4y ago
yet another case of not reading and understanding the original paper or econ more generally. Energy, labor, ingenuity, and resources are used to pull gold from the ground. After which it serves as a reusable proof of work. Is gold leaky?
- cowtools 4y agoI think you are misunderstanding the article. Perhaps re-read it. The point is that bitcoin does not spend enough energy to protect the network. Bitcoin mining is not comparable to gold mining because the purpose of bitcoin mining is to secure the network's transactions, the fact that bitcoin mining produces bitcoin is merely a side-effect of this. If gold mining ceases to exist, or if a single company dominates the world's gold mines, that doesn't prevent people from moving gold ingots around. It doesn't allow the gold mining monopoly to double spend. But this is true of bitcoin. So it's unwise to make such a comparison.
- jevgeni 4y agoThat's not even remotely coherent. Value of gold is not in the fact that it was pulled out of the ground.
- nazgulnarsil 4y agoyou don't understand reusable proof of work. If it didn't take energy to get more gold what do you imagine would happen to the price?
- jevgeni 4y agoSo the value of gold should be exactly the same as the value of silver or coal then?
- voat 4y agoI'm not sure how that follows?
- jevgeni 4y agoIf the value of gold is defined ONLY by the cost/effort/energy of mining it and the cost of mining silver is similar, then the prices should be similar and not orders of magnitude different per troy ounce.
- nazgulnarsil 4y agohow do you imagine that the cost of gold on the open market and the cost of mining the marginal ounce*risk diverges? The cost of mining gold and silver is obviously not the same.
- jevgeni 4y agoSo it's not a pure energy cost of mining now?
- nazgulnarsil 4y agodo you imagine the energy cost of mining gold and silver to be the same? in this world, do you imagine that silver is unprofitable to mine or that gold is wildly profitable to mine? Maybe you should be buying gold mining stocks.
- jevgeni 4y agoI'm fine on my investments, thank you. Since silver is often the byproduct of mining gold, the energy price should be pretty close, I'd think... Crypto-bros reinventing the (train-wreck of) labour theory of value is my favorite genre of HN comments.