> It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need.
He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of hashrate he can now.
Hmm. If you can mine 15 trillion hashes per second you are likely to find one bitcoin after 486 days (derived from numbers on this site www.cryptocompare.com). The human rate of hashing is .67 hashes per day. Based on a price of $1 million for one bitcoin, that would translate to a break even salary of one million-billionth of a penny per hour. Probably be hard to find good people at that rate.
Ignoring the racism baked into that comment, smart people in China probably have more job opportunities than ever, with greater opportunity for wealth creation. China has one of the hottest tech industries in the world: Tencent and Alibaba each have market caps above $450B USD, and Baidu, JD, and NetEase are all in the $50-80B range. All these companies are rapidly growing. Not to mention the booming startup ecosystem across the country.
>It’s not racism to make factually accurate observations.
That is not as true as it sounds at first glance. For example, a statement like "blacks are more violent and less educated than whites" is factually accurate, but frames the situation in a definitely racist way if you just leave it at that because without elaboration, it makes it sound like a fact of nature.
This is the problem with "facts and statistics can't be racist". No, technically they can't be, but if your conclusion you're drawing is that certain ethnicities are just genetically more criminal, you're handling the facts in a racist (and very incorrect) way (not implying in any way that you think like that).
> That is not as true as it sounds at first glance.
No. It is exactly as true as it sounds.
The conclusions one draws from facts are whatever they are. But the facts themselves are not racist, and it is not racist to say things that are factually correct. Ever. Full stop.
Also it’s ok to be white. Saying that it’s ok to be white is not racist.
If we consider stating facts without context needed to truly understand them as being equal on level of wrongness with something like discrimination, I think we should consider exactly how many people use such poorly informed facts. Gun crime facts, wage gap facts, just about any psychology paper cited ignores the limitations of the study (which likely has very few if any replications with different populations). Even medical research if filled with poorly stated facts that drop a lot of the details needed to understand the actual study done.
Given that stating facts without full context is the norm, attributing one specific case to racism seems hard to justify.
For a red delicious apples to granny smith apples comparison, look at the treatment of, framing of, and treatment of framing of crime facts based on race verses crime stats based on sex.
Interesting discussion. So when is it in your opinion allowed to draw conclusions based on personal attributes, e.g. when is something not discriminating.
I try to stick to Wikipedia definition, because people claim racism in a lot of situation where I wouldn't consider it as such: "Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity."
In theory, the discussed comment doesn't claim his race is superior, just stating that in China people are underpaid.
For sure he is projecting stereotypes, but that's not racism, it's a different thing.
Even the legal definition doesn't seem to make that comment fit:
"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."
East asians are good at math. Look at rankings by country. Obviously no one would actually do this, but if you were going to, China would be a great place to set up shop.
Youbate referring to a popular worldwide math test. There's no reason to believe those test scores aren't gamed, especially in Communist China where information is highly censored in general and the known "sampled" locations where the tests are given is highly suspect
I was thinking of mining ethereum. there was a 250$ video card that could mine 500$ worth of ethereum per year. I thought wow thats profitable, but I did some more research. the same card could mine 1500$ worth 2 months ago, and ethereum was 30% cheaper.
that would have been a losing deal to get into, and it assumed the machine was mining 24/7 without issue. I tried mining with my existing card, but it spent a substantial amount of time building the DAG, and it really wasnt worth turning my PC into a space heater.
between more people mining and hashes getting harder, the price of the coin is not as much of a factor in whether its worth mining.
If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying.
Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.
You can't really know that except for a few publicized ones. Those "transactions" you see are simply transfers. They "could" be a transfer to someone in exchange for USD. Or, as they are in almost all cases, they are transfers from one wallet to another both owned by the same person or exchanges that are holding large amounts of BTC moving money around internally as well.
To support your argument, according to this[0] the largest recent transaction about 3 hours ago was almost 25 million USD. 5 other transactions also exceeded 1 million USD in the last hour or so.
I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that almost all of those large transactions are inter or intra exchange movements simply moving money around into different wallets. Also, they only indicate a transfer, it seems very unlikely that anyone has cashed out $25m all at once with bitcoin.
There's a VR webapp that was shared recently that shows live btc transactions. Just thought i'd share that for the 10 minutes I watched it the other day I saw numerous 10M+ transactions
Those are transfers, not necessarily transactions. No one probably traded 10m in bitcoin for USD. If an exchange transfers btc from one wallet to another for holding, it will show up on the transactions list.
I'm in the same boat. CPU-mined somewhere between 1.5 and 2 BTC back in 2010 or 2011, and lost the wallet years ago. I wonder how much BTC has been lost to similar mistakes, but I guess there's no way to know or even estimate, right?
"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.
Money supplies are constantly inflating, every financial instrument can be looked at as a form of money, and quite a few of them are actually considered to be money, such as treasuries and traveler's cheques. According to Wikipedia, the broadest measure of money supply currently in use was 10.5 trillion, in 2013.
That cryptocurrencies are not currently considered to be money by the world economic order, it goes into a much broader range of financial assets like stocks and bonds. The S&P 500 market size reached 19.6 trillion USD in 2016
Bitcoin has a lot of room to grow before it even comes close to playing in that league. Everybody on HN should be buying crypto right now, the upside is that huge.
Except it isn't parked in any way. The money goes from the hands of the optimistic buyers into the hands of those who decided to cash out just now. The only asset "backing" Bitcoin is the people willing to buy it.
That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;)
Comparing capital cost between the two is also fun. Creating a literate person who can perform arithmetic certainly requires more resources than creating a person who can "merely" pedal a bicycle. There's a lot of embodied energy in a person's education, and the cost reflects that.
I guess the right comparison would be how much it would cost to produce another human capable of doing the SHA-256 hash by hand rather than the "fuel" to sustain it.
(note: the conclusion of the paper actually performs a similar calculation)
The brain uses ~300 kCal per day (roughly %20 of a human's resting metabolic rate of 1300 kCal per day)
= 0.35 kWattHours per day
= about 4.2 cents per day (assuming brain can be powered at average market rate of energy of 12 cents/hWattHours)
= about 6.3 cents per hash (at .67 hashes/day)
= about 12 sextillion days to mine one block (at current difficulty of 1,873,105,475,221)
= about half a septillion dollars to mine one block.
Of course might make more sense to use the full 1300 kCal, considering that a human calculator still needs to use hands for pencil manipulation and provide power to rest of organs to stay alive. Point being this is not efficient or profitable at current difficulty.
However, assuming a pre-computer world or post-apocalyptic world without computing machines, then difficulty will be adjusted to be much easier such that it conceivably would be profitable (maybe with a slave army of human computers). Transactions and blocks could easily be sent via carrier pigeon.
Lol. From the newyorker article “I’m sure there’s somebody in India who could sharpen your pencil for $8, but if you want authentic American craftsmanship … that’s how much quality costs these days.” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/pencils-and-noth...
There was a much lower price point originally, before he got sort of famous from the book, and subsequently a TV-show (Going Deep). The current price is basically to keep people from ordering, but still having it open if someone REALLY wants to get one.
I guess the joke is that sharpening pencils is what you do when you have writer's block, so if you really have writer's block, you write a whole book on sharpening pencils?
It's definitely majority charisma and being funny, but a portion of the show is talking to experts in the relevant fields to discuss underlying aspects of each "simple concept" that one doesn't normally contemplate.
Wait! The price is meant to STOP people from ordering? I naturally assumed after watching the video of his artisanal pencil sharpening techniques that the prices implied exclusivity and a cut above the rest.
I ran out to the dollar store lickety-split, purchased five dozen pencils, and put in orders for all 60 of them. Sure, it was a cool 30k, but you need your pencils sharpened properly for your entire family, maids, and baby-sitters.
He really should update his order cart for people who want to get a dozen or more sharpened at a time.
You can get the book for much less on amazon[1] though for a reasonable price (including a look inside). There is even a direct link to Amazon on his website.
I didn’t mean that I think this is anything bad, just that charging that much online for something not worth anywhere near the given price is generally questionable.
Around when this was published I looked into the feasibility of pencil-and-paper wallets. What would it take to generate a key-pair using just pencil and paper?
There are tricks like big tables of precomputed multiples of the generator that make it easier, but you still need to do hundreds of 77 digit modular multiplications. And you want to be absolutely sure you made no mistake.
Well secp256k1 private keys are just 32 random bytes (with some minor exceptions) so I think you could arrange something with a plain dice and a little bit of time.
Of course, but it would be cool if you could also calculate the public component on paper (and ideally verify it computerless as well). You could really create your bitcoin/ether/etc wallet with the public key only, whilst having an extremely low attack surface (private key never touches computer memory).
I wonder if a slightly more feasible solution of producing and verifying a solution out of simple TTL, so there's no "computer" just a application specific machine made of simple commodity parts which one could trust reasonably easily would be actually worth something.
Generating the private key is the easy part; Just 77 rolls with a ten-sided die and re-try if it exceeds the prime. Or 256 coin flips, if you prefer binary.
For practical purposes I'd recommend an offline laptop, maybe running Tails OS and Electrum [0]. Public key is one thing and making transactions and signatures quite another.
Now I want to read a steampunk sci-fi novel where cryptocurrency is mined on steam-powered devices. Of course, the algorithms should match the capabilities of the underlying hardware.
For signing, both your private key and a random number k need to be kept secret. The process then involves scalar multiplication, modular inversion and two more multiplications — strictly more work than generating a key-pair.
The "Useless Ethereum Token" [1] subtitles itself as so:
You're going to give some random person on the internet money, and they're going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics, to be honest. Maybe even a big-screen television.
Seriously, don't buy these tokens.
And people still invested more than $40.000 in it [2].
Bad example. That's one ICO I would actually buy into myself if I discovered it in time. I'm a believer in timely executed jokes, much like many other people on the Internet.
What's particularly alarming about that is he appears to have had at least three people purchase his service, two of them after the first had commented that it was substandard...
You know a market's full of suckers when even the wannabe scammers aren't discerning enough to avoid being ripped off.
Over last couple of weeks, I received a dozen or so contact requests on LinkedIn from "Blockchain and ICO experts". They don't have any other verifiable jobs on their resumes.
A whitepaper is not a contract. It's a description of "what does this do and why should you care", i.e. literally the thing you're buying into in an ICO.
The actual hash computation should be mechanical. It's a straight algorithm.
The part you want to optimize is the selection of the random noise you need to make the hash come out with the appropriate number of zeros. You ask your test subjects (monkey, human, slime mold, whatever) to provide the noise, you test it with your mechanical hasher, and then either reward or punish them based on the number zeros in the hash.
I think you could even mine Bitcoin with Turing-complete cellular automata simulated by a crowd of trained dogs, receiving movement orders by a small internet-of-things bluetooth radio (powered by IOTA?), implanted into their brains.
I find the article's video so interesting and easy to understand for a non-mining/technical background. I almost want to start doing it just for the sake of it (like a sudoku or mental exercice).
If anyone is a math teacher of the appropriate age group, "manually calculate 2 hashes" seems like a good punishment as an alterntive to the old "write x statement y times"
Well, assuming we can somehow prevent someone from cheating and writing code to solve the problems, the confirmation wait shouldn't be any worse if people are working in pools to solve the problems and submitting found answers in an online form. If 4000 people are working for their UBI in pools the confirmations should be roughly as fast as they are today.
Again the problem would be to create challenges that "can't be computed" but can be verified with a software.
To be able to mine at all (with whatever speed), you need to be able to complete an individual hash operation in less than 10 minutes - before the next Bitcoin block is created elsewhere on the network - because you have to base your calculation on that previous block's hash. If it takes more than a day to compute one hash, it does not work, no matter how many of them you could theoretically do in parallel.
The network adjusted difficulty aims to average 10 minutes between blocks at all times. In order to get a point where you could feasibly calculate a hash you would have to have an extraordinary breakdown of something (like all of the hashpower vanishing) in order to get enough time before the next block.
> individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain.
I'd say it's rather tainting transactions that use outputs of your "tainted" transaction. Personally I don't like bringing "coins" into discussion because people think it's something more material than it really is while in fact "coins" are just numbers in transaction outputs.
If you have transaction that sends 2 BTC to an address you can't taint 1 BTC out of it because in this scenario they are just numbers, like you can't distinguish both 1s in 1 + 1 = 2.
That you can track transactions back to their mining block is another matter.
The hash is a cryptographically random number. For it to be successful, it must start with seventeen zeros (base 16). The chance of a random number starting like that is 1 in 16^17, which is about equal to 1 in 3 x 10^20.
I can't reproduce the calculation from the article that got 1.4 x 10^20. But it does say "approximately 17 zeros" so maybe it really meant "the first 16 hex digits must be zero and the 17th must be either zero or one". That would give close to the right numbers, if I haven't messed up.
He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of hashrate he can now.