The author, Ken Shirriff, is an important personality in the retrocomputing scene, who has involved in the restoration of multiple vintage computers. As a programming exercise and entertainment (mainly, it's just about the implementation of SHA-256), he has attempted to mine Bitcoin on various platforms, including pencil-and-paper (7.75e-6 H/s) [0], IBM 1401 (0.012 H/s) [1], and Xerox Alto (1.5 H/s) [2].
And now it's the Apollo Guidance Computer (0.097 H/s)! I think it's particularly hilarious, as the slogan says, Bitcoin to the Moon!
I'd also suggest checking out CuriousMarc's channel who is involved in restoring what I believe is the same AGC and has a bunch of very interesting videos about it (among other antique computing gear like teletypes and a Xerox Alto): https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/videos.
Speaking of AGCs, he just recently uploaded a video where they used a restored AGC to dump prototype core rope memory modules from the Computer History Museum's (non-functional) AGC.
That human pencil/paper figure is for one person doing the whole SHA-256 computation, right? Has anyone run the numbers for what it would be if you divode up the work, assembly-line style?
> Has anyone run the numbers for what it would be if you divode up the work, assembly-line style?
Repeated hashing is notoriously difficult to parallelize as it's naturally a serial operation, that's why we use repeated hashing as a Key-Derivative Function to protect passwords. For humans it's more challenging, since SHA-256 has 64 rounds internally, which means: to calculate a single hash, you need to iterate over the data 64 times, each time using the output of the previous round as your input.
What you can do, is:
(1) Optimizing the process of calculating a single round. I guess you can identify all the needed arithmetic steps (mostly logical opeartions and bitshifts) and divide them to multiple units of task-forces, assembly-line style, like a human-powered ALU. Ideally, workers that doesn't care about "which round it is", but only care about the computation itself should be as many as possible, i.e. using combinational logic instead of sequential logic.
I think many computations were done in this way before electronic computers, I believe even numerical simulations of fluid dynamics were done by rooms of female workers with mechanical computers running the same algorithm again and again over a matrix.
(2) Create as many copies of your human-ALU as possible. Although iterations within a single-hashing operation is not parallelized. But mining only requires you to do independent hashing, so it should scale linearly.
I don't have the needed skills to get an actual number, if you - the reader, thinks you can. Please do it and submit your blogpost to Hacker News.
Right, I was mainly thinking in terms of speedups from not having to switch tasks and the gains from specializing in one kind of computation. (The inability to parallelize would still be relevant in terms of limiting the gains from dividing the work, since each step has to wait for the previous to hand it more numbers, so variation in processing time between the humans will create delays.)
And I wasn't interested so much in the absolute throughput, but how the figure would change in terms of hashes per second per human, so duplicating a full ALU module wouldn't be relevant; the concern is how much an additional human improves the rate after adjusting for the fact that you added one more human-resource.
Edit: I'm new to queuing theory, but I may just grind through the numbers there. Could do it as a "Show HN" if there is a tool (preferably as a web app) where you can model a process and tweak the numbers like in Factorio.
I feel like you're going to run into lots of speed bottlenecks that aren't feasible to calculate.
> Right, I was mainly thinking in terms of speedups from not having to switch tasks and the gains from specializing in one kind of computation.
Switching tasks is going to be a relatively small amount of time over a 24 hr period. Given that one person can only hash 0.67 hashes per day assuming full undivided attention I'm really not sure what you could count on saving.
The biggest advantage adding more people would do would make it actually feasible to calculate continuously as I doubt any human has the focus/patience for doing mundane number crunching for 24 hours without breaks.
I totally get that this is all hypothetical-for-fun math, obviously nobody is going to actually try to mine bitcoin by hand. But that 0.67 hashes per day is terribly low, a 50% speed improvement would only barely put you over 1h/d. Not to mention we normally compare in h/s not h/d so it's actually 7.75e-6 H/s.
Rope memory is so fascinating and economical. Just wires and only one metal rings for each word, which can be hundreds of bits longs. My question is: is it possible to construct a finite state machine only with rope memory and mechanical relays and maybe capacitors. You can perhaps raise reading voltages so high, that the signal is detectable with relay coil. This would be the first real steam-punk, post-apocalyptic computer that people with early iron age technology can construct themselves.
Relay computers were a thing in the 1940s, for example Zuse's computers, Stibitz's machines at Bell Labs, the Harvard Mark I and IBM's SSEC. Vacuum tubes were orders of magnitude faster and killed them off, though.
As far as using core rope with relays, you'd probably need to wrap each wire around the core many times (transformer-style) to get enough voltage to trip a relay. The raw signals from cores are really small and hard to detect even with ICs.
Computers are really just finite state machines with really fancy input and output. We like to pretend they are Turing machines, but that breaks down when you run out of RAM: a Turing machine has infinite memory, a computer has a large finite amount of memory.
I suppose computers really are fancy clockwork. So are humans.
I think it's at least an open question whether humans are fancy clockwork or not. (Unless all you're doing is denying Cartesian dualism, in which case, I agree but so does everyone)
We don't really understand how the brain works, but it does seem that neuronal integration is an analog and probabilistic process, quite different from deterministic responses in computers (or clockwork). Some people have even speculated about quantum mechanical effects, though those hypotheses are very controversial and I don't put much stock in them personally.
It's overly reductive to compare the brain to a computer, and the analogy tends to obscure more than it illuminates.
Maybe. As far as anyone can determine, some physical processes (e.g. radioactive decay) really are random. There is "noise" in reality. Even with a perfect accounting of every subatomic particle in the universe, you couldn't predict when a particular atom will decay.
Honestly though a computer is just clockwork represented electronically. A modern computer can be represented mechanically even the display. Imagine colored marbles roll into a display slot every frame. Or a rotor rotates to a color. Or a flpboard flips to a character.
We are just accustomed to computers being electrical. In the end it's all binary and we just happen to all use digital input and output.
> the AGC results in a hash rate of 10.3 seconds per Bitcoin hash VS a relatively slow USB hash device that performs at 130 billion hashes per second.
> it would take the AGC 4×10^23 seconds on average to find a block. Since the universe is only 4.3×10^17 seconds old, it would take the AGC about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a block.
I also did this calculation and got a different result.
According to Google, one block requires 2,440,643 * 2^32 hashes. Multiply that by 10 seconds per hash, and you get 3.32176901e9 years. The Universe has been around for longer than that, about 13e9 years.
"The AGC that we're restoring belongs to a private owner who picked it up at a scrap yard in the 1970s after NASA scrapped it. For simplicity, I refer to the AGC we're restoring as "our AGC"."
How much other fantastic equipment of historical significance have we lost, I wonder?
Not quite as rare, and certainly nothing like this, but several years ago I picked up an Altair from a local electronics junk yard.
Crazy thing was, I must have walked by where it was stored hundreds of times over the years since I first started to go to this place back in 1991 (Apache Reclamation and Electronics, here in Phoenix). Apparently it was kept in a trailer that was outside. I never saw the Altair in there, but it was stuffed full of junk and hard to "wander" around inside (the few times I went in, I was lucky not to be bit or stung by any number of things, to be honest).
So one day I was out in the yard wandering around; I turned around - and saw it sitting on a chair (I must have walked right past it). I walked over to it, thinking "No way - just, no way" - but yes, there it was. Very dirty, missing it's top cover, but otherwise all there with a ton of peripheral cards slotted in place.
I went over to one of the owners of the place; he was up on a forklift - I pointed over at it, and said "I'll give you $100 for that thing over there". Yeah, I knew what it was worth, but this same guy had sold me 100 meters of multimodal fiber cable for the cost of copper, back when that stuff ran you 25 dollars a foot - so I thought "maybe he has no clue what it is".
He looked, turned to me and said "Nope - can't do that. Some guy a week ago pulled it out of that trailer there and told me it was an antique. Can't go any lower than $250.00". I dropped my smile, hemmed and hawed, grumbled a bit - you know, put on a show. Then I looked up, and said "Danny (that's his name) - you drive a hard bargain, but that's a deal."
15 minutes later I had it in the back of my pickup and was driving home as quick as I could before anyone changed their minds. A sale's a sale! I went back the next week, dug around some more, and came up with a ton of S-100 bus cards - and got those for nothing as well. Every now and then I go back and look for other cards, but other than a stash of NOS S-100 edge connectors - I couldn't find anything else.
I later went online on to an Altair message group, posted what I had, and was told mine was rather unique, as mine had flat handle toggles, and the later versions all used round handled toggles. I was offered close to a grand for it in as-is sight unseen condition, but I turned it down. My ultimate goal is to restore it to operating condition. I have not plugged it in (beer can capacitor would probably explode and catch fire if I did). It needs a ton of TLC.
It has a full amount of RAM, and the 8080 card was replaced with a Z-80 card (common upgrade of the time); there's enough RAM to run CP/M if I wanted to. Various serial and parallel I/O cards, plus a fixed-sector floppy drive card (good luck finding a drive, let alone media, for anything short of a fortune). I later had others donate to me other cards and parts (including an interesting unpopulated 6502 processor card - but I don't know if the pinout is the same as what the Altair used, or if it's meant for some other S-100 bus computer - despite the S-100 bus supposedly being a standard, there were a few variations of it - as it goes).
I figure if I can get it working to some extent, and get the test program from the manual toggled in and working, I'll consider that a success. But what I'd like to do is take it further, getting my VT-100 terminal hooked up to it, and using some kind of method to boot either BASIC or CP/M from a flash drive or something (I know this can be done).
Sadly, I contacted the case manufacturer about getting a top cover, and had no luck. The company (I don't recall their name), used to make that case as an enclosure that tons of companies used for their equipment. They made it for decades, long after the Altair ceased to be a thing, long after MITS went under. I told them what I needed, and they told me they no longer made that enclosure since a couple of years prior, and no longer had the engineering drawings, either.
So - if I want that part fixed, I'll either have to custom make something myself, try to find the part other ways (maybe visit and talk to people at a vintage computer fest?), or pray I run across one somewhere. Another possibility, though it wouldn't be cheap, would be to have a machine shop make me a one-off of a top that'd fit. Honestly, something tells me the first option might be the best, and in spirit with the machine itself. I doubt it would hurt it's value any.
This is amazing - I'd love to learn, some time in the near future, that you've gotten the system up and running and are doing something interesting with it.
I am the curator of a small collection of retro computers here in Vienna [1], and have managed to get a few systems up and running again - nothing as cool as an Altair, but you've now gotten me motivated to have another look at it as a platform. There's a clone kit out there [2], but I'm not sure its available .. but for sure its something I'm going to check out in an emulator.
Got a place we might be able to follow you for future updates about your restoration project?
This has to be the best description of how Bitcoin mining works that I have ever read (easy to understand and none of the usual ideology you find in usual Bitcoin writing)
I found this story interesting, but unsurprising knowing the author. I'm amazed he got that thing to work - but if there were anyone who could do it, it's him.
Unfortunately, I didn't find an answer to something I suspect, but I don't know for certain? Maybe someone here could shed light on it?
He mentions that the AGC was the first computer to use integrated circuits, in the form of 5600 NOR gates, built into custom "logic modules", each set then wired together using a backplane or something like that. But take a look at those ICs - are they thru-hole, or SMT?
I seem to recall seeing pictures of the AGC - of other parts of it - and that it used a form of SMT in its construction; does anyone know if this is true? If so, would that also make it the first time SMT was used in a computer? Or were there other prior examples.
It seems also curious that if it was SMT being used - that such a thing was chosen for this critical piece of hardware, mounted on a rocket undergoing tremendous strain and vibration. I would think in that case DIP would be the better solution, ideally with extended pins for wire-wrap, then everything embedded in conformal coating after test - but while the DIP vs SMT question is up in the air, I've never seen any pictures that suggest wire wrapping was used, and nothing that showed anything like conformal coating.
To answer some of your questions. The AGC was a very early integrated circuit computer, but probably not the first.
The ICs were surface-mount flat packs onto boards in the modules. They were welded, not soldered. The modules plugged into the backplane connectors, which were wire-wrapped. The modules and backplane were encapsulated in plastic (epoxy or polyurethane) for flight. (This AGC was for ground testing, so it was not encapsulated.)
The non-logic circuitry was built with cordwood construction, i.e. the components were inserted into holes in the module. Point-to-point wires were welded onto the components on either side. These were also encapsulated in plastic.
I don't know if DIP integrated circuits would have been more reliable, but the DIP wasn't invented until 1964, too late for the AGC.
The Saturn V rocket contained a Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC), which was completely different and built by IBM. It also used surface-mount modules, but IBM's hybrid modules, not integrated circuits. So the AGC wasn't the only surface mount computer at the time. (Does anyone have a good history of surface mount?)
> if there were anyone who could do it, it's him
Honestly, Mike Stewart is the AGC super-expert who made the restoration possible. He knows way, way more about the AGC than I do.
Super cool. I got mining to work on my forked bitcoin. I've got 5-8 GH/s using a usb miner. It was a lot of work. It's also a good way to learn about cryptocurrency. My effort is trivial compared to this.
> For instance, the AGC (like many 1960s computers) didn't have a stack, so you had to keep track of the return address for each subroutine call.
> I managed to get everything to fit in one bank by reusing these 16 words for multiple purposes, but I spent a lot of time debugging problems when a variable clobbered a location still in use.
It could be fun to make a slightly higher level ad-hoc assembly language for solving these problems. For example SSA with basic blocks.
Always happy to see another writeup from Ken Sherriff. I think he has an account here, so if you're reading this, thanks.
The estimate of the amount of electricity Bitcoin consumes (from a footnote) is distressing -- on the order of a small country...
This is one of the big reasons why I personally will never buy into a cryptocurrency (and especially bitcoin) -- too much wasted energy. If I want to engage in speculative trading, I'll do it in the stock market.
Ethereum is replacing proof-of-work with proof-of-stake in 2020, which should help with this.
But what are you comparing the cost of running Bitcoin to, the entire world's banking infrastructure? Does this take into account all of money that has slipped through the cracks over the years?
> "there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent"
> "In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained"
Could he post responses on the internet to people wondering more about this weird piece of history and how he came across with that thing. If you can surf the web then it is useful!
Gotta agree with you there - IIRC, he's also working on an Alto, plus a Symbolics LISP machine - and I think, IIRC, he helped to get the IBM 1401 transistor mainframe at the Mountain View Computer History Museum working, too.
But I seem to be wrong on the Lisp machine? I couldn't find anything on it, but I could have sworn somebody has been working on getting one into operating condition for a while now (it's been a slow process)...
Just to keep things straight... The Lisp machine isn't me and I don't know anyone working on one. As for the IBM 1401, I can't take credit for getting it working; I joined the team later and help keep it running. Currently I'm working on an IBM 360/50 microcode emulator and reverse-engineering an early FPGA chip.
From whose point of view? A mythical “10x” working at a Californian small startup making IoT juice machines isn't necessarily doing anything more useful.
The irony is strong here - the most productive computer computer in the world, the one that's taken us to the moon, has been tasked with the most un-productive activity, that is burning energy for the sake of maintaining a ledger of fictional possessions.
The irony is only there if you look at the tree instead of the whole forest. That's like looking at one human in a deserted island and criticizing humanity for being useless. That same human, working in cooperation with other humans could be capable of walking on the moon. But even then, there would be some snarky comment on HN criticizing the un-productiveness of humans walking on the moon.
This is a cool project that shows how far we've come. The Bitcoin network (wasteful or not) is currently capable of calculating 74.5 exahashes per second. You would need 10x74.5x10^18 Apollo Guidance Computers for that, you would probably need to build the equivalent of the Death Star to fit them all in the same place.
I don't like this philosophy because it assumes that with more computing power, we can unlock even greater feats in space travel.
Computing only gets you so far. The AGC was able to be so slow and still get the job done because what it needed to do was not "hard": it calculated orbital equations and monitored sensors. It didn't use AI, it didn't need to hash anything, it didn't work with databases or networks, it didn't render graphics in 3D 4K - all of these, we expect from modern phones.
If we want to advance space travel, the problem is not with computing. The problem is with chemistry (mostly), physics (to a lesser degree), and politics (let's be real, this is 99% of the battle).
Remember when computer nerds the world over pooled their spare compute resources for Folding@Home and Seti@Home, in exchange for nothing but leaderboard positions and bragging rights?
The real tragedy of the cryptocurrency gold rush is that by providing a profit motive it decimated these kinds of collaborative computing projects.
The worst aspect of ecoins is mining, followed closely by scamming and speculation.
I think the ecoin concept by itself is a step forward for the progress of humanity, and without mining, the blockchain needs a lot less resources. How would you fairly distribute ecoins if mining is excised? No idea.
Mining is arguably the best aspect since it incentivizes using cheap renewable energy, which is why you'll find many large industrial mining farms using hydroelectric dam-produced electricity.
Printing a dollar bill doesn't require dissipating a dollar's worth of energy. It only costs a few cents. "Printing" a dollar's worth of Bitcoin inherently requires a dollar's worth of energy to be used with no other purpose. That seems like a stark difference to me and the basis for thinking Bitcoin is like a virus. It's the closest thing to the "gray goo" scenario we've seen yet.
I wouldn't mind if the work of mining was going toward fulfilling ledgers that are doing meaningful things, like ensuring accountability, rather than trying to find vapor money.
sort of a meta question: would you consider your (or anyone's) past a fictional posession, or a real one? Though I'm highly skeptical of blockchainism (see username) I don't know if I'd be able to buy into this particular criticism of it.
Essentially a blockchain is a database of time and energy booked to a contrived measurable $particularActivity. This activity correlates to some past opportunity cost expense (and presumably a counterpart defensive loss aversion behavior expected in the future) on the part of the person burning time and resources to support that activity. A kind of rube goldberg electricity meter with a public log, that functions as a record of someone's ante in a super simple long running casino game.
The more you spend on/invest in this activity, the less inclined you are to forfeit your recorded proof of doing it for less than whatever you consider a fair return on that sunk cost.
This mechanism is fairly universal and applies to everything from hobbies to friendships to careers. What bitcoin (any blockchain really) does is just strip the commitment-payoff mechanic present in almost all human endeavors down to a cartoonishly simplified model and tie a bunch of charts and metrics to it, and use these to collectively goose our animal chase instincts into overdrive.
I don't understand this "unproductive activity" sentiment at all. It's as if we're taking away compute from "productive" processes that are in a dire need of compute! If there are productive processes that desperately need compute, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from getting it.
I can argue that every form of money is fictional, it's only in the minds of people, it's a social construct. In fact, I can go further and say that there is absolutely nothing "physical" in this world, what is physical? just some sensations you're perceiving in your brain? Your brain is making up all the meaning.
There's another (weak) argument: somehow, building all that crazy tech and going to the moon is more important than taking care of humans who're suffering here on Earth. Why is going to the moon more productive?? who benefited from it?
I suspect this is just an intellectual circle jerk.
the energy consumption of crypto transactions is quite dramatic. While it's true that most human inventions are fictions, some are more useful than others.
A current bitcoin transaction is equivalent to about 500kwh, which is about as much as a residential customer in the US uses in about two weeks. Or as a twitter user put it, "bitcoin is like leaving your car running over night to solve sudokus that you can trade for heroin."
And even though there is no current shortage of compute, opportunity cost still exists. Those units of compute or energy could be put to use that is a little more sensible.
We could be using the compute equivalent of the nation of Colombia to collectively simulate cancer drug molecules, or provide free resources to startups in the third world or just about anything that is more difficult than sending money from A to B, which we figured out how to do with much less resources decades ago. I think even buying a carrier pigeon might be more energy efficient (and possibly less prone to hacking) than cryptocurrency.
> We could be using the compute equivalent of the nation of Colombia to collectively simulate cancer drug molecules, or provide free resources to startups in the third world or just about anything that is more difficult than sending money from A to B
Get off HN and do it! what's stopping you??
> which we figured out how to do with much less resources decades ago. I think even buying a carrier pigeon might be more energy efficient (and possibly less prone to hacking) than cryptocurrency.
Sorry, you don't understand Bitcoin, you should do some research before making such shallow, reductionist arguments.
"Stone is better, why do you need metal? it's so much work to make metal implements"
"We have horses, why do you need cars that pollute the air??"
"Why do you need a smart phone, I have a desktop computer to do all that"
"Why do you need the internet?, we've already figured out how to send messages to each other via mail"
Energy has a cost. The current price does not reflect the externalities well, so the actual cost is higher than the apparent. This is very unfortunate for everyone planning on living on earth in the next few thousand years.
Just seems like a weird hill to die on that's convenient because HN doesn't like bitcoin and gets to grandstand on saving the environment.
Someone just as judgemental could criticize HNers for all the energy they waste using high powered devices to sit on HN. Or air conditioning their entire house when they could simply sweat a little bit or use a fan in the one room they are in. Or driving to the movies when they could twiddle their thumbs at home for entertainment.
This is why it seems like such a belabored circlejerk.
But is it a minor waste of energy, like a lot of things people worry about? A $100 bill costs around 10 cents to print. The value of bitcoin is defined by the cost of the energy dissipated to mine it, so that means it's a thousand times more expensive than conventional money. Do you disagree with that logic?
> the value of bitcoin is defined by the cost of the energy dissipated to mine it
Other way around.
Bitcoin is valued according to the market.
Mining is rewarded two ways: The inflationary (and reducing) coinbase reward for coin issuance, and transaction (txn) fees. The value of mining a block depends on these two factors, which both depend on the price of Bitcoin.
So long as the marginal cost of increasing hash rate is lower than the marginal gain of Bitcoins mined, hash rate will increase. When hash rates increase, mining difficulty is adjusted by the network to keep average block times near a 10 minute target.
With these costs and rewards, Bitcoin mining costs will reach an equilibrium near the value of mined Bitcoins, with two caveats:
* Risk from price variability and capital investment. Mining infrastructure takes time to deploy, so there is considerable lag between price and mining costs. And capital expenditures have opportunity costs, so deployed resources will reliably reflect predicted returns less these opportunity costs.
* Profit. The mining market will not mine Bitcoins for no profit (excepting brief periods, potentially) as there is no point to do so.
> it's a thousand times more expensive than conventional money
This is a comparison based on transactions, but why is that a suitable comparison? Money is both a medium of exchange and a store of value.
It's also absurd to consider that the costs of the US dollar are in printing alone; the value of US currency is underpinned by the entire US government. If they US did not have a powerful military, trade agreements reflecting that military, taxes that must be paid in dollars, etc., then dollars would not have the value they do.
The global monetary system - banks, sovereign nations, etc. - is extraordinarily expensive. But Bitcoin is a global currency, so this is the suitable comparison, even if it is very young and tremendously inflationary at the moment.
Most of the additional costs associating with the banking system would still have to be paid if bitcoin were to provide the same services. But also, there's no reason that they should account for exactly 1000 times the cost of printing the money. I think you can expect you've gone down the wrong track when you believe numbers are exactly what is necessary to justify your argument for no particular external reason.
The only costs that are reasonable and appropriate to include, it seems to me, in an apples-to-apples comparison, are the costs of actually creating the money and regulating the supply.
So, ok, over and above the negligible amount to create money, it's plausible to include the cost of the Federal Reserve system, since that is what keeps the money supply stable, analogous to the mining algorithm.
The M2 money supply (a bit arbitrary, but for this comparison it's somewhat generous to the opposing view and anyway, I guess they don't publish M3 any more) is something like $14.5 trillion. The cost of the Federal Reserve is something like $5 billion[1] So the "maintenance" cost for a dollar is something like 3 cents every hundred years. To me, that seems de minimus and it also seems a person with some common sense would expect that without doing an analysis.
If you want to be obstinate about this, I suspect you will argue that bitcoin as it currently exists provides the facility to do transactions which I am not including the cost of with dollars, and my response is that the throughput of bitcoin is negligible and therefore not appropriate to equate with the capacity of the real financial system.
This is another one of my pet peeves. So, you think a dollar bill is printed and that's it, there's no ecosystem around it to secure and manage the logistics around our current banking system. Sit down and think for a bit before typing out shallow comments like that.
One of my pet peeves is when people point out something is not particularly precise and then wave their hands and declare that makes up for three orders of magnitude difference.
Of course there is an ecosystem around regular money. There's no way it costs 1,000 times as much per dollar as printing the money, and, the major, universal complaint about bitcoin has been that it doesn't provide an alternative to all of the additional functions of the conventional banking system, so your point seems doubly void to me.
what "additional functions" are you referring to? I haven't set foot in a bank in a decade, I need someone to refresh my memory.
How can you consider my point "void" if it does provide some of the functions?
I can't understand how you can acknowledge the "ecosystem around regular money" and ignore it in the very next sentence and resort to your narrative of "1000 times the cost of printing a dollar", lol!
And you complain about hand-waving? italicizing "doesn't" isn't really a way to convince someone about what's missing.
If a pair of roller skates provides some of the functions of a car, is that a justification for it costing 1,000 times as much as a car? I'm not saying "oh, this is idiotic" because when something seems extremely dumb, often it's just because of some missing context. But you'll have to explain more if I'm going to understand.
And I don't understand what you don't understand about the factor of a thousand difference. Do you think that less than $100 in energy is dissipated in order to produce $100 worth of bitcoin, or do you think that the regular financial system costs more than a few pennies to produce and maintain $100? It's true that the cost of printing a $100 bill does not cover all of the functions of the banking system, but it's also true that dollars don't even have to be printed to be used, and those which exist only as ledger entries are far cheaper. So I think 0.1% is more like an upper bound than a lower one.
Look, if you really wanted to understand this, you'd be honest in your arguments and present a better understanding than just repeating that it costs pennies to print 100$ (and therefore USD is superior)
If it was so easy and cheap to print a 100$, why isn't everyone doing it?
Obviously, it's not easy or cheap to do, and it's also illegal.
The US govt enforces the legality. So, you should factor in the cost of running the US govt and the cost of enforcing the law through the judicial system.
Suppose the US military disappeared overnight, what do you think will happen to the value of the dollar? you most certainly should factor in the cost of running the US army as well.
And then the banking ecosystem itself in the US, which is well over 10 trillion $ as of now.
The bitcoin ecosystem rolls all of these features into a single concise, self-policed network. I'd much rather have a permission-less SoV that is not controlled/backed by a nation state or a set of corporations (like Libra).
'perl4ever' should've tipped me off, I never learn :(. I don't think I have anymore time to argue with you.
"'perl4ever' should've tipped me off, I never learn"
I don't use perl any more - I discovered the joy of Visual Basic.
:)
Anyway, see my other comment about the Federal Reserve. It's not that there are no other costs to maintaining dollars as a currency besides printing the paper money, it's that I think the printing costs obviously dwarf the rest.
They're not fictional possessions--millions of people have them, in the real world. They can be transacted, and exchanged for real-world goods and services.
Something can be real (and not fictional) without having the value people imagine it to have.
For example, I don't know if you own any old jewelry with diamonds in it, but if you do, you can probably assume that it is worth less than you paid for it, given that diamonds can now be artificially produced with clarity / hardness / etc that parallels "natural" diamonds, and a big part of a diamond's price has historically been it's relative scarcity in nature.
No, it's 2019: XBT is around $11.8k, more financial instruments like futures, trusts, and ETFs are coming online, and LN adoption keeps growing (Bitstamp just launched their first LN node!)
> And an intangible but fictional object still of value is, say, A hat in TF2 or epic armor in some games
A TF2 hat, like other digital collectibles, is a nonfictional intangible object (which happens to represent a tangible object in the fiction), not an intangible fictional object.
That's why context matters, and realizing that in this context "fictional" means "intangible" (kind of, in this case "fictional" more than just digital) would be important if we were having this conversation honestly.
This isn't an honest conversation though, because people are getting overly defensive about BTC.
I like how you've decided that people are being overly defensive about BTC, rather than the other side of the proverbial coin: people are being over-critical.
Person A saying "this thing is totally a waste" and Person B responding "actually, no it's not, for these reasons" is not an example of Person B being "overly defensive". Especially when B provides rationalizations of their position and A does not.
And in no context I've ever seen does "fictional" mean "intangible". Even if it did, this would not be one of those times, as the context of the OC clearly indicates being dismissive of the currency as a whole, not just pointing out that it is intangible.
> that is burning energy for the sake of maintaining a ledger of fictional possessions.
The original comment is obviously not using "fictional" to mean "intangible", as it is dismissive.
Since you used the word "fictional" as a continuation of the original usage without clarification at the time, one must assume, given the context, that you meant the same thing. Anything else would not be reasonable in context.
But again, nobody outside of this very discussion has ever used "fictional" when they really mean "intangible". "Imaginary" maybe, but not "fictional". I think we both know that this was a post-facto rationalization of your own unnecessarily dismissive comment.
I'm not the person who said "fictional", and my comment was not dismissive. Further, you stating something as true doesn't make it true, nor is it true if you blindly claim "one must assume". No, one must not assume, there is no one holding a gun to your head forcing you to be obtuse.
I do appreciate you proving just how defensive Bitcoin people are, that is nice.
Please don't do flamewars here and please don't go back to breaking the site guidelines again. Regardless of how wrong or annoying it feels like the other person is.
You know what most amazes me about a guy like Ken Shiriff? The fact that he is smart enough to do this but he uses his brains to just scratch a curiosity itch. It seems not only time consuming but in practical terms (other than mentally) obviously worthless. (Not that there isn't a worth to the acheivement after all people spend all sorts of time on hobby pursuits of little apparent value).
I have to therefore say (will leave out the 'honestly') that if I was 'that smart' I'd use my brains to do something that would put money in my pocket.
And now it's the Apollo Guidance Computer (0.097 H/s)! I think it's particularly hilarious, as the slogan says, Bitcoin to the Moon!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo
[1] https://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old...
[2] https://www.righto.com/2017/07/bitcoin-mining-on-vintage-xer...
Edit: fixed all incorrect H/s numbers, thanks for spotting that.