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Isn't AI the new hot thing, why are the miners still going after Bitcoin, when they can probably just use the same infra for AI and make more money, stay profit
by suryajena 7mo ago
Isn't AI the new hot thing, why are the miners still going after Bitcoin, when they can probably just use the same infra for AI and make more money, stay profitable.
- vscode-rest 7mo agoHash mining asics don’t work well for AI
- OJFord 7mo ago"don't work well for AI" is a hell of an understatement, the Application they are Specific to is literally just sha256(sha256(x)), what AI are you going to do with that? GP probably didn't mean that hardware though, but rather the facility, electricity supply, cooling, etc.
- oblio 7mo agoWhy double sha256?
- vscode-rest 7mo agoa that’s the botcoin hashing algorithm.
- oblio 7mo agoI figured that part out, I wonder why it's being doubled.
- vscode-rest 7mo agoThat was the way satoshi wanted it. No other explanation is known.
- haakon 7mo agoThe disappointing truth is that we simply don't know. Satoshi never explained it. For SHA-2 it can be used as a mitigation against length-extension attacks¹, and this seems like the most likely explanation, but it's just speculation. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack
- vscode-rest 7mo agoWould length extension impact bitcoin? The messages aren’t secret afaik.
- haakon 7mo agoThis is true, but large miners also have beneficial electricity contracts and data center capacity, both suitable for AI workloads.
- alex43578 7mo agoTotally different infra: bitcoin these days is all dedicated ASICs that have basically no other use, unlike GPUs.
- mathgeek 7mo agoArticle covers that briefly.
- suryajena 7mo ago> The publicly traded miners have been adapting by diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, which offer more predictable revenue than mining bitcoin at a loss. Marathon Digital, Cipher Mining, and others have been building out data center capacity alongside their mining operations. Yes, it does but lacks depth, the problem here is they are diversifying not pivoting and by virtue of game theory for each miner they stand to win on others exit, as the mining difficulty goes down, but this is creating a loss-loss situation.
- groundzeros2015 7mo agothe market is made up of many goods and services. Different people want different things at different times.