China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI
qz.com
qz.com
It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.
If history is an indication, selling the "shovels" to others during this digital gold rush is more lucrative for Bitmain than mining would be.
A single actor controlling a majority of hash power isn't a problem. Double-spends are a problem. If anyone double-spends, it will be noticed because there will be a permanent record of it in the form of orphaned blocks, and bitcoin value will decrease because Bitcoin transactions will have become less trustworthy.
Thus, even in the case where a single actor has 51% hash power, that actor has a strong financial incentive not to conduct a 51% attack.
The Sybil-style independent mining pools you describe aren't really hiding what people would be looking for, which is a coordinated preference for the fork that causes the double-spend. (Plus miners would have to accept the relayed second transaction into the mempool to begin with, which today nobody does. RBF might have changed this, but even then you should still be able to reason about whether anyone is even contemplating allowing a double-spend.)
I'm not sure if I'm talking past you -- am I correct that we disagreed on what a 51% attack looks like?
Malicious pools can prioritize their transactions and manipulate activity in the network to grant them as many block rewards as they want.
You just steer as many block rewards as you want towards your accounts, maybe give %10 to normal users.
"Giving ten percent to normal users" is also a novel concept. I have never seen coinbase awarded to any address but ones having a relationship to the successful miner. Are you under the impression that normal users usually get some part of block rewards? They don't. (I'm not sure what a "normal user" is, either.)
Nor can a miner change the destination of funds in transactions included in the completed block. That would be isomorphic to calculating private ECDSA keys from addresses, which is not possible with Earth technology.
Finally, the miner can't simply change the rules (for example, including both parts of a double-spend in a single block, or substituting a different signature for others' transactions). That would cause a hard fork, and every client on the planet would choose the side that followed the rules.
According to the design and implementation of Bitcoin, your statements cannot be anything but wrong.
On an unrelated matter, why do you put the percent sign in front of numbers? I have never seen that before in any language, forum, or writing style. Not only is it stylistically uncommon, but it's incorrect inasmuch as the % symbol is short for "per hundred." It wouldn't make grammatical sense to say "give per hundred ten to normal users," which means the prefix symbol doesn't make sense, either. Where are you from, if you don't mind my asking?
I'm from Moon.
Also IIRC, digital currency is base on how much someone is willing to pay for it. If you own 90% of bitcoin and the rest own 10%, then wouldn't it be useless? I mean I'm not force to use bit coin I can just use real money if it's so hard to get bitcoin. There aren't that many people who are deeply invested in bit coin with a 90-10. The whole thing is kinda base on greed...
> effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network.
They are providing the processing power by selling mining chips. They are not operating those mining chips, so they don't control the processing power. They only provide it.
They can't generate infinite bitcoin units anyway but if they controlled 70% of the mining power they could conceivably execute double spends, although even this would be unlikely.
In any event the post above mine asked a yes or no question and the answer is no.
The article implies that providing mining cpus is much more of a problem than it is since they don't actually control that much mining hash power.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42378/how-releva...
If you're digging for gold and there are 5 different shovels you can buy, but 1 is clearly the best, is it that hard to believe that 70% of all shovels in use will be that best one?
Nvidia stuff 1080ti cost too much for a graduated student.
AMD is working on their own stuff supposely later this quarter we'll get tensorflow and other support on their card.
Google's TPU is not for consumer, only for cloud.
If bitmain can sell ASIC for consumer with reasonable price and support tensorflow, pytorch, etc... then it'll be good for the deep learning community.
Would you like to rephrase this to something more accurate?
> Hashnest is a cloud hashing platform. This means you can participate in bitcoin mining without maintaining the hardware yourself.
That's not all it is. They do sell actual hardware as well, which you then run yourself.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...
It's not a major plot point that's being given away
It's more like "there's an Alien in Nostromo"
It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.
Bitmain is a private company. And even if you can describe bitcoin as a libertarian technology, I wouldnt think that most of Bitmain's profits come from libertarians based on who uses their hardware.
>It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.
Nothing special in the biggest part of the market dominating the price the most, really.
It is purely dictated by the market of supply and demand.
This is just what I think why Libertarian see it as libertarian; I'm not one in any real sense nor do I subscribe to any of Ayn Rand's reasoning.
Further speedups can be gained by going with lower precision ops (eg: float16). A chip specialized for deep learning could support f16 only, which would allow it to have more compute power using less area and less power.
So, in short, there are ways to make ASICs that are more efficient for deep learning while still giving the ASICs flexibility. ASIC doesn't mean there is no programmability.
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