10 ms·
It makes me sad that all this computation can't simultaneously be used to fold proteins, or some other "externally productive" calculation.
by nakedrobot2 13y ago
It makes me sad that all this computation can't simultaneously be used to fold proteins, or some other "externally productive" calculation.
- EricDeb 13y agowouldn't that have been cool. If bitcoin mining could have been done in a way that had practical significance yet also resulted in coins?
- termain 13y agoSo is there any problem to which ASIC miners can be repurposed?
- nwh 13y agoNo. They look for low hashes by incrementing an appended nonce. That's it. Nothing else.
- joezydeco 13y agoAre these most recent machines really incrementing the nonce? Is there an advantage over randomly picking them?
- nwh 13y agoThere's no advantage in selecting them "randomly", the resulting hash is always random. If there was a benefit in some sort of incrementing method, the entire system would be broken. They do some optimisation with the way the hash is calculated in some cases, but that's about it. The current processors are so fast that they can increment through the entire 32bit nonce space in under a second.
- fluidcruft 13y agoI suppose with an incrementing system, you could doll out the search space more efficiently. I imagine the more hash power you have, the more likely any two engines could randomly try the same nonce. (Assuming they were working off identical blocks). But it could be that there's a relationship between the way difficulty ratchets that keep the chances of testing the same nonces twice somewhat constant relative to the chance of finding a block.
- nwh 13y agoEven if you're working on the same block, it's never the same work for the processor, the timestamp, order of transactions, number of transactions, and the coinbase all make the work unique.
- shawabawa3 13y agoi imagine n+1 is much faster than generating a large random number for each hash. They probably generate a guid and then append a number and increment Whats the advantage of using a new random number each time?
- wmf 13y agoFun EE fact: An LFSR is cheaper than a counter.
- ambiate 13y agoSadly, not any that I have found other than a few alternate coin systems.
- elliottcarlson 13y agoASIC - or Application Specific Integrated Circuit - is one purpose only - so unless the exact thing being accomplished is sha256(sha256(x)), then it can't be repurposed - this even limits its use as a password cracking machine unless the password is encrypted using that specific routine.
- nwh 13y agoNo, they can't crack passwords. They increment a nonce at the end of a supplied string and only return if the nonce results in a low hash. They're not a generic "fast SHA" device like you're thinking.
- elliottcarlson 13y agoYou're right - forgot about the nonce - either way, they are even more application specific and really have no other use.
- blhack 13y agoThere is an altcoin called "primeCoin" that addresses that. The minining is dedicated to finding ~~new prime numbers~~ mew prime number chains. (I don't know why this is useful, as I am not a mathematician.)
- cryptocoin 13y agoActually, no, it doesn't involve finding new primes. In fact it states clearly that it is not interested in finding large primes numbers (which is a requirement for finding new primes). Primecoin's goal is to find chains of prime numbers, like the ones describe at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain This is at least more useful than running a double sha on some input to produce some output that is hopefully less than a target t. But a altcoin that does something useful with its proof of work system is still not available.
- fragsworth 13y agoSomeone should make a coin whose proof of work involves solving difficult (but verifiable) problems that are in NP, that are frequently used in commerce. This would provide a more direct incentive for researchers to make these algorithms faster, and would therefore provide a tangible benefit to society.
- swalsh 13y agoThink about how much computing power is currently being used to "shoot people" whether it be virtual... or not.
- NathanKP 13y agoThe way I see it Bitcoin is inspiring people to create these insanely powerful mining rigs. Once they've developed the technology then its possible to make a more general application to other fields, not with the exact same hardware of course but with similar setups.
- nwh 13y agoThere's nothing special about this stuff really. The processors they are using at the moment are literally just standard SHA256 core designs slapped on a wafer. The ASICmimer gear is ridiculously inefficient, drawing something like 11W per gigahash of mining. Other designs like the anonymous Bitfury's are hand routed and do a lot better, around 0.8w per gigahash, but although there's skills in doing so, it can't really be applied to anything except for Bitcoin mining. They're pretty basic on the scheme of things, they're just very costly to get to a fabricator in the short timeframes the community wants.
- angersock 13y agoSo, this cooling is basically a ghetto monkey-copy of techniques Cray pioneered two or three decades ago--right down to the use of 3M Fluorinert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2). I don't think that this technology is going to be readily adaptable to anything other than brute-forcing hashes. I don't know of any fundamentally useful engineering or research being generated that would have application elsewhere. EDIT: Which isn't to say it isn't neat...I just don't think it'll bear fruit anywhere else.
- 13y ago
- Xdes 13y agoI don't think this can be practically done. Is there an algorithm for folding proteins? Where is the protein data going to come from?
- stdbrouw 13y agoI believe nakedrobot2 is referring to http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://folding.stanford.edu/
- Xdes 13y agoAnd that's based on Gromacs and several other software packages. It still doesn't address the issue of where does the data come from and will the outcome of mining it be fair and trustworthy?
- seslattery 13y agoInput data could come from the protein database, which has catalogs of thousands of protein structures. The issue being is when is a protein folded? Do we have some known ending structure and we just need to get within an acceptable Root Mean Square Deviation? The other issue would be there need to be some sort of centralized server used to collect the resulting data, and create the Markov State Model.
- jnbiche 13y agoThe answer to this question can be found in the response of David Schwartz (professional cryptographer and long-time Bitcoiner) to this same question on StackOverflow: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/11651 http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/11651 The long answer is: you cannot secure the network using another any other work. The work done has to be specifically tied to the previous block on the blockchain (made of up transaction data, which is of course unrelated to proteins or anything else "useful" in the view of the questioner). Otherwise, you cannot demonstrably prove the integrity of the blockchain. The short answer is: they are doing useful work -- they're securing an increasingly large and distributed financial network.
- darkmighty 13y agoThere are alternatives to hashing proof-of-work. Two interesting ideas are: - Peercoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin), which introduced an alternative concept called proof-of-stake, which essentially dismisses mining in the long run - Primecoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin), for which the "work" is engineed to be scientifically useful (I'm not sure how useful it actually is) I really wish the Bitcoin community had seeked more ingenious/efficient alternatives early on... a lot of energy is going to waste now.
- altoz 13y ago> a lot of energy is going to waste now. Is it? How much does Bank of America spend in energy to keep up its servers? Backups? disaster-recovery setups? That's a significant energy cost, too.
- simias 13y agoI think a better example would be high speed trading and similar. Of course any big corporation or administration is going to have a lot of underused ressources and redundancy but it doesn't mean they burn power "for the sake of it" as bitcoin does. Also, bitcoin is not a bank, it's supposed to be a currency. If big banks were to switch to bitcoin I don't think they would spend less energy doing all you said. So no matter what you think of bitcoin it's fair to say it's not very "green" so far.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoIt makes me sad that so many food manufacturers out there create crap for our bodies. They could be synergizing the world's healthiest superfoods. We all live in the same capitalistic world, for better or worse.
- ams6110 13y agoYour blame is misplaced. If people didn't like to eat those foods, they would not buy them and the food would not be produced.
- smtddr 13y agoNo, it's not misplaced at all. At least in America, Food makers & their exec buddies and all kinds of other social-economic factors make it difficult to choose otherwise. I've already had this debate before... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604104 Also, watch Food Inc. http://www.takepart.com/foodinc http://www.takepart.com/foodinc The excuse that "Well, nobody forced them. It was their choice." is an elaborate illusion that needs to be done away with. There have been a couple of articles this year about how being poor causes bad decisions, not necessarily vice-versa. I'm glad those articles are being written because it shows at least a few people are starting to realize how the system traps people and others can be convinced it was they're own fault. "Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it." @http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558/1469687530/@maxread http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decision... Growing up poor is bad for your brain @http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/growing-up-poor-is-bad-for-your-brain http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/growing-up-poor-is-bad-for-...
- ams6110 13y agoI never said they were making good choices. But the fact remains if people didn't buy junk food, it wouldn't get produced. I have heard these arguments, and I don't disagree with them. I think that efforts would be better directed at educating poor people to make better decisions, than to act like a collective hovering mother and try to keep anything bad away from them. And we often end up being exactly wrong about what's good and bad anyway (see: the USDA food pyramid of the last two decades. It turns out we've had it basically upside-down). This is drifting way off topic of this thread so I won't say more here.
- nilkn 13y agoI'm a cynic, but I like to think of this as an unusually direct measurement of the cost we all have to pay for human selfishness. We simply can't trust each other, so we must expend all this effort so that we don't need trust in the first place.
- mseebach 13y agoI don't have hard data, but I would suspect the effort going into Bitcoin mining is orders of magnitude less than the effort going into securing traditional monetary systems, even systems comparable in financial size to Bitcoin.
- dllthomas 13y agoSecuring traditional monetary systems also had to deal with the fact that we cannot trust each other (enough, in aggregate), and I think that's where most of the expense goes.
- salient 13y agoThe point is, Bitcoin can end up saving a lot of energy, by replacing traditional banking transactions, while everyone seems to be seeing it as "wasting" energy. Everyone sees the glass half-empty. Bitcoin only needs to be mined for another few decades, and then it won't need to be mined anymore.
- implr 13y agoBitcoin will still need to be mined - the whole 'trust' system is built on it, just the block reward will be zero. Miners will then profit only from transaction fees, so either the fees will go up or difficulty will go down to adjust for smaller income from mining.
- Smegger 13y agoactually they will as mining is needed for transactions to be processed, but the reward of unblocking new coins will get lower to compensate the miners though transaction fees will be paid.
- brfox 13y agoIts better (for the environment) than mining for diamonds or gold.
- seiji 13y agoWhat if they're powered by leaded gasoline generators?
- aortega 13y agoI'm sure way more computation power is used to determine your candy crush score.
- simias 13y agoI think you're overestimating the power used to determine your candy crush score by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.
- DanBC 13y agoThe Bitcoin network is currently more powerful[1] than the entire top500 combined. [1] At least, that's what they tell me. I suppose it depends what you define as power.
- redblacktree 13y agoDOTDIW, I guess.
- runeks 13y agoBut then again, my phone's GPU is infinitely more powerful at 3D rasterization than the entire Bitcoin network (because the Bitcoin network can't do 3D rasterization). My analogy might be a bit convoluted, but my point is that - as you mention - that we're comparing oranges to apples. We're comparing a general-purpose computer to doing a SHA256 hash.
- DanBC 13y ago> simultaneously Worse, the ASICs can't be used to fold proteins when they've finished being used for Bitcoin mining.
- simias 13y agoThat's a very good point. An other comment points out that the computation has to be tied to previous blocks to maintain integrity but it would be great if once the hardware is decommissioned (newer hardware came out/bitcoin crashed) it could be repurposed to do something else.
- nwh 13y agoTo do that the chip would have to be designed to have that feature already. Otherwise it's like looking at a bicycle and wishing you could repurpose it into being a plane. The structure is just not there to do that sort of modification.
- dllthomas 13y agoHopefully they can recycle the raw materials, and can build upon the designs.
- nwh 13y agoEh, not really. I don't think any form of electronics is recyclable, best you probably get is third world countries burning the boards to get the gold out and killing themselves with the gases produced.
- dllthomas 13y agoI said (and stressed) "hopefully" - I understand it's not mostly the case presently.
- jjoonathan 13y agoThe raw material is worthless. It's the processing that is expensive.
- AlexCoventry 13y agoI put some thought into how to do this. I think it would be hard to get right. One way, which is total vaporware and probably riddled with security flaws: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3qaT-ZL6aeKOHNEQWdpZEtRYWc/edit?pli=1 https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3qaT-ZL6aeKOHNEQWdpZEtRYWc/... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.5 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.5
- csomar 13y agoSorry but this computation is being done to secure the network and secure a wealth estimated at around $10bn at today market prices. I don't think it's unproductive at all.
- betterunix 13y agoAre you suggesting that there is nothing this energy might be used for that would be worth more than $10bn? I can think of a few things that might be more valuable. What if this vast amount of electrical power were used to solve traffic flow problems for major cities, thus saving fuel and reducing pollution? Maybe we could find better TSP solutions and improve transportation. Maybe we could be creating more power-efficient chips. Maybe we could be curing deadly diseases. Maybe instead of spending this energy on computers, we could be using it to build up the infrastructure of the developing world and help them become self-sufficient. I think that would create far more wealth for far more people than Bitcoin ever will.
- nullc 13y agoAre you suggesting that there is _nothing_ the time you spent writing that message might better be used for? :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dllthomas 13y agoIt could lead to strong demand for a "print your own high-performance ASICs" product.
- Sheepshow 13y agoGood luck. Making hardware in general, and silicon specifically, is a clusterfuck compared to the software world HN readers likely expect. Know how a good undergraduate CS degree involves writing hundreds of fully functioning programs? A great graduate EE degree might involve one single functioning piece of silicon. Know how we bitch about compile time in the minutes or, god forbid, hours? Turnaround time on silicon is weeks at the minimum.
- dllthomas 13y agoOh, I've no illusion that it's easy. It's just one of the few possible "building something for bitcoin miners" developments that is likely (if it happens) to have significant positive benefits (other than through bitcoin) long term. I wish anyone attempting it substantial luck, as well!
- melling 13y agoNot to worry, the unintended consequence of the increasing need for large computational power will lead to faster and cheaper computers. The fact that someone can directly justify spending large amounts of money means that they will. We all win in the end.
- JoachimSchipper 13y agoNo. This was (insignificant but) true in the CPU and GPU mining days, but ASICs dedicated to double hash collisions do not have any non-Bitcoin use, nor do these appear to push the state of the art in any way.
- melling 13y agoSo, you're saying that none the of innovation or money funneled into finding Bitcoins will lead to zero reusable innovation? It will not create more profitable companies that produce ASICs? It won't possibly lead to even lower power ASICs? Better manufacturing techniques? Doesn't the fact that money is being redistributed to technology companies good for technology, by definition?
- wmf 13y agoRealistically, Bitcoin ASICs are a very small fraction of the chip market.
- melling 13y agoI think you're only looking at the small picture. Start-ups, that aren't social, are already forming... http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/11/18/silicon-valley-startups-race-to-sell.html?page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/11/18/silicon-v... Also, you're asking how Bitcoin mining, the use of technology, and SV start-ups will directly impact the future. I can't do that. Of course, I couldn't tell you in the late 90's how a search engine company would lead to better self-driving cars (among other things), or how a company that made paying online popular would lead to electric sports cars and rockets. I bet convincing most people that Likes and building a better social graph in 2005 would lead to any sort of innovation would have been a stretch too.
- joosters 13y agoSurely they can make use of the heat output at least?
- runeks 13y agoThere was a merchant once that sold dried fruit for Bitcoin. Fruit that was dried over his mining equipment. Not sure if it still exists though.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kurige 13y agoWhile I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "me too" altcoins, Gridcoin[0] was created for exactly this reason. Solving blocks contributes to grid computing for real world problems. Using ASICs would prevent them from switching, though. [0]: http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/ http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]