mrb

100 ms·

961.
by mrb 8y ago
"22 percent couldn’t pay off their balance" Incorrect. Apparently a lot of users intentionally chose to not pay it. The original study (link: https://lendedu.com/blog/bitcoin-and-credit-cards/ ) asked
962.
by mrb 8y ago
I've never seen any multi-CDN setup that fully avoids central points of failures. For example Cloudflare requires making Cloudflare nameservers the authoritative servers for your domain name. Therefore if they have an outage (and if th
963.
by mrb 8y ago
I have a very good excuse for NOT hosting my site on "a CDN": one CDN is a central point of failure. Instead I host it on 3 geographically redundant dumb servers from 3 different hosting providers (and all my DNS records resolve t
964.
by mrb 8y ago
Why do you think cryptocurrencies do "so little"?
965.
by mrb 8y ago
« renewable power will always be at a premium over the cheapest power. » That's patently false. The share of global electricity that's going into crypto mining is small enough—less than 0.5%—that it's too small to directly af
966.
by mrb 8y ago
« the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough » What data are you basing this statement on? Or is this just your vague gut feeling based on reading about a few accidents in the news? I thought statistical data showed otherwise, th
967.
by mrb 8y ago
Exactly. This is also why I think the trend to be "ASIC-resistant" is misguided and should be considered harmful. All GPU-mined coins (except the hashrate-dominant one: Ethereum) are massively vulnerable to majority attacks becaus
968.
by mrb 8y ago
The elephant in the room is that with the exception of Ethereum, all GPU-mined coins can relatively easily be "51%-attacked" by a small fraction of GPU miners. There are ~10 million GPUs mining cryptocurrencies in the world today.
969.
by mrb 8y ago
« OK, so replace "Bitcoin" with "Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies" in the title » Changing the title would not resolve my main critic, which is that de Vries still overestimates the true figure (because of his assumpti
970.
by mrb 8y ago
« effective output which is transactions » No. The "output" of Bitcoin is bigger than that. You focus on a single aspect of the system (processing transaction) and disregard everything else. You fail to look at the big picture ,
971.
by mrb 8y ago
« A the cost of a single bitcoin transaction (~300kW) » Transactions don't consume energy. This is the biggest misunderstanding floating around here. The transaction rate could halve or double tomorrow without affecting the energy cons
972.
by mrb 8y ago
I provided this statement to some journalists who contacted me to get another viewpoint on Alex de Vries's paper: His findings are not completely accurate, but also not completely wrong either. My own formal well-documented estimate is
973.
by mrb 8y ago
Alex's BECI model claims Bitcoin currently consumes 7.6 GW. Whereas this paper is more reasonable and states the future consumption might grow to 7.6 GW by the end of 2018. These are 2 very different statemetns. What I call "f
974.
by mrb 8y ago
My model actually provides both an upper bound and a lower bound current-day figure (explained in http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ ) 0.50% is not predicted by my model, but it's just a targe
975.
by mrb 8y ago
« this is a standard economic assumption. » Yes, but given this convergence hasn't happened in years, it is unreasonable for de Vries to suggest it might happen in 7 months. For the second point, he definitely assumes 100% of the produ
976.
by mrb 8y ago
I provided this statement to some journalists who contacted me to get another viewpoint on Alex de Vries's paper: His findings are not completely accurate, but also not completely wrong either. My own formal well-documented estimate is
977.
by mrb 8y ago
« Current solutions are locked in to vendor platforms » Not true. For example, mesh technology Thread is built on 802.15.4 and is very much multi-vendor. At least 4 companies make Thread chipsets (Silicon Labs, NXP, Qualcom, Nordic Semicond
978.
by mrb 8y ago
How can the author write that a plastic bag has been found in an (open!) database of photos and videos, and not actually show the photo?? So I found it there: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/09/w
979.
by mrb 8y ago
« If you're a small business, this matters a LOT. » With a CC it takes 1-3 business day for the merchant to receive spendable funds. With a crypto tx it takes minutes (the time for 1 confirmation). This is a huge advantage for cryptocu
980.
by mrb 8y ago
« Cryptocurrency is slower than card networks » Not inherently. If you compare apples to apples, accepting a credit card transaction is equivalent to accepting a zero-confirmation cryptocurrency transaction, which is just as fast as a CC ch
981.
by mrb 8y ago
My beef with claiming Bitcoin consumes "as much as a country" is that it is uninformative, highly misleading. Countries span multiple orders of magnitude so it is like saying a vehicle weights "as much as a rock" when a
982.
by mrb 8y ago
[0] and [1] present zero evidence for supporting 60% as a current valid estimate. [0] even misrepresents the Morgan Stanley report (which actually supports my numbers, not his): http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci
983.
by mrb 8y ago
Don't refer to the Digiconomist BECI for electricity consumption figures. The author makes fundamentally flawed assumptions, causing him to overestimate the consumption by 1.5× to 2.8×, and likely by 2.2×. BECI starts with calculating
984.
by mrb 8y ago
It's not the "fastest SSD" on all metrics. My laptop's NVMe SSD, a Samsung PM981, benchmarks at 2100 MB/s sequential reads, whereas the Optane 905P measures only 1669 MB/s in Tom's Hardware bench.
985.
by mrb 8y ago
No because the dom field (8-14) and dow field (0) are treated as a logical OR by cron, not AND.
986.
by mrb 8y ago
Guile syntax to run every second Sunday of the month (example taken directly from the manual https://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/manual/mcron.html#Every-s... ): (job (lambda (current-time) (let* ((ne
987.
by mrb 9y ago
You are exactly right. WD explains the same in https://blog.westerndigital.com/rise-helium-drives/ : « Without air, the heads will crash into the disk »
988.
by mrb 9y ago
Again, the initial idea—mini-Amazon or whatever—doesn't (really) matter. It will evolve. It will change. The company may pivot. The valuation reflects the potential of the founder's skills, relentlessness, overall vision, track re
989.
by mrb 9y ago
The HN title is wrong. This was not taken "on the surface", but from a 13-14 km orbit, according to source ESA data (click on a picture to see its data): https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/index.php?/category&
990.
by mrb 9y ago
« don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project » By this attitude, you would have failed to correctly value the potential of early Amazon (because "an online bookstore is not worth $X.") One of the core princ

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