Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
righto.com
righto.com
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.
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.
USD is backed by "the full faith and credit of the US government". BTC is backed by the Internet and meme magic.
Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.
https://www.google.no/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/11/25...
... in this case, it's a sarcastic quip based on an exaggerated truth.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77377.How_to_Shit_in_the...
- The best paired squatting methods, for when there's no good tree available (takes a lot of trust).
- Advice to look below you before using a cliff.
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.
I would have ordered a full gross, but I had to run off and purchase a book for my second cousin's youngest son's friend who has a book report due. https://www.amazon.com/Trends-European-Television-Communicat...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Sharpen-Pencils-Theoretical-Contr...
http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.aspx?cat=1,42936,42452...
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.
It is computing the public key that is so hard.
[0]: https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/electrum/index...
Whether it is feasible... the amount of calculations around secp256k1 is likely practically prohibitive for pencil/paper.
Given the quality of this gig description, at least we know that whitepapers written by that person will be immediately recognizable as scams.
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].
[2] https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-thousand...
You know a market's full of suckers when even the wannabe scammers aren't discerning enough to avoid being ripped off.
We will need a BTC/Donut exchange soon.
https://thenextweb.com/cryptocurrency/2017/12/12/startup-use...
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.
For what it worth...
[1] https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingP...
The confirmations wait is gonna be a killer though.
Maybe UPS should be launching this?
Again the problem would be to create challenges that "can't be computed" but can be verified with a software.
I've been a Bitcoin proponent for a long time, but this lack of basic fungibility is one of its major downsides in my opinion.
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.
Block 74638 was mined almost 7 hours after the previous one, for example, because of a serious overflowing issue.
Of course, the combinaison of "no block created in 36 hours" & "the hand-calculated block is valid" is highly unlikely, but still possible.
Can someone elaborate on the math here? How do we get to 1 in 1.4 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.
I just recently learnt how difficulty works, so something like this is perfect for understanding the hashing part of the protocol.