For my part, it was one part trivial inconveniences, one part that it read like woo. I was aware it existed through other avenues (I wasn’t a Less Wronger then), and aware of what it was trying to do, and I had the technical acumen to get in on it if I had so chosen. Given that, I’m a little bitter that I didn’t do so. I could retire today if I had. I could get into it today, of course, but now that everybody knows it’s a magic money making machine I suspect a bubble is well underway. I don’t want to be in when it breaks.
I’m a little worried about Bitcoin’s externalities. The mining process consumes more and more energy, and professional miners are driving up hardware costs. Which might be fine if most transactions were, well, transactions, i.e. if we’re getting human value out of the work. But I get the impression that the vast majority of the network’s effort goes towards playing musical chairs with money, and that seems bad.
Bitcoin doesn’t feel woo-ish, anymore, but it’s starting to feel paperclippy instead.
Yes, paperclippy. And also bitcoin network is equal to 10E23 flops now (but cant’t do anything else except bitcoinclips), which is 60 times more than total computational power of all other computers combined, which was estimated by Grace. It is really mindbending and astronomical amount of computations, and it doubles every 8 months. And it pays people for its construction.
I notice I am confused. 60 times more than all other computers combined would imply that >98% of human compute capacity is tied up in the bitcoin network. That seems...unlikely.
The figure’s misleading, because mining (these days) is done with specialised hardware: ASICs, chips dedicated to calculating SHA256 hashes (or whatever algorithm your favourite coin uses), which can calculate those approx.105 times times faster (per second per $) than a general-purpose CPU—but can’t do anything else.
So that implication may well be true in the sense that if all the worlds computers turned to mining bitcoin, the total mining capacity would only be increased by a couple percent over what it is at the moment (due to general-purpose computers being so inefficient at specific tasks compared to dedicated hardware). But false in the sense that very little of the world’s general-purpose compute capacity is tied up mining cryptocurrency.
I’m a little worried about Bitcoin’s externalities.
I think most such worries are not well-founded, but I would also like to point out that “Bitcoin seems like it might eat the world in a bad way” is not exactly a reason not to invest. It might be a reason to fight against Bitcoin, but if you’re not fighting against it, it seems like precisely a reason you would want to buy it.
For my part, it was one part trivial inconveniences, one part that it read like woo. I was aware it existed through other avenues (I wasn’t a Less Wronger then), and aware of what it was trying to do, and I had the technical acumen to get in on it if I had so chosen. Given that, I’m a little bitter that I didn’t do so. I could retire today if I had. I could get into it today, of course, but now that everybody knows it’s a magic money making machine I suspect a bubble is well underway. I don’t want to be in when it breaks.
I’m a little worried about Bitcoin’s externalities. The mining process consumes more and more energy, and professional miners are driving up hardware costs. Which might be fine if most transactions were, well, transactions, i.e. if we’re getting human value out of the work. But I get the impression that the vast majority of the network’s effort goes towards playing musical chairs with money, and that seems bad.
Bitcoin doesn’t feel woo-ish, anymore, but it’s starting to feel paperclippy instead.
Yes, paperclippy. And also bitcoin network is equal to 10E23 flops now (but cant’t do anything else except bitcoinclips), which is 60 times more than total computational power of all other computers combined, which was estimated by Grace. It is really mindbending and astronomical amount of computations, and it doubles every 8 months. And it pays people for its construction.
I notice I am confused. 60 times more than all other computers combined would imply that >98% of human compute capacity is tied up in the bitcoin network. That seems...unlikely.
The figure’s misleading, because mining (these days) is done with specialised hardware: ASICs, chips dedicated to calculating SHA256 hashes (or whatever algorithm your favourite coin uses), which can calculate those approx.105 times times faster (per second per $) than a general-purpose CPU—but can’t do anything else.
So that implication may well be true in the sense that if all the worlds computers turned to mining bitcoin, the total mining capacity would only be increased by a couple percent over what it is at the moment (due to general-purpose computers being so inefficient at specific tasks compared to dedicated hardware). But false in the sense that very little of the world’s general-purpose compute capacity is tied up mining cryptocurrency.
What are you referring to here?
I think most such worries are not well-founded, but I would also like to point out that “Bitcoin seems like it might eat the world in a bad way” is not exactly a reason not to invest. It might be a reason to fight against Bitcoin, but if you’re not fighting against it, it seems like precisely a reason you would want to buy it.
Individual incentives to back something collectively terrible seems like textbook Moloch to me.
(which doesn’t imply that you’re wrong, of course)