Bitcoin now computes more hashes in 6secs than there are grains of sand on Earth

seebitcoin.com

11 points·seebitcoin··7 comments

Impressive. Never really got into the bitcoin game and have a lot of questions, like the purpose, who it benefits etc.

It doesn't solve relatable problems for most people

but it is pretty awesome if you notice a reason to use it

Imagine if they were all running Boinc instead. We might have cured Zika already.

Gridcoin pays cryptocurrency for 'mining' through a proof of work concept using Boinc credit.

But who cares where the carbon emissions from all that mining go? Someone else's atmosphere, no? At least a productive output would offset the needless waste.

A quote: "Researcher Sebastiaan Deetman came to the conclusion that at bitcoin’s current level of expansion, it will require 14 gigawatts of electricity to run by the year 2020 — an amount of energy equivalent to that of a small country, like Denmark. At the current time, a single bitcoin transaction requires as much electricity consumption as the daily consumption of approximately 1.6 American households."

via http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/04/03/bitcoin-could-consu...

The amount of energy wasted by miners is atrocious. I wonder how many tons of CO2 have been pumped into the atmosphere thus far as a result?

It just seems like a colossal waste, using all of this computing power to solve pointless math problems.

> The amount of energy wasted by miners is atrocious.

that awkward moment when you quantify it next to something else, like incandescent lights

But there is actually no limit to what can be pissed away mining imaginary points. There is a reasonable limit, and actual utility, to lights.

There is actual utility to what the miners get, and it usually worth more than their cost of electricity.

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