Hacker News Reader

Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

You could squeeze much more bitcoin out of yourself if you powered asic miner with a bicycle but I can appreciate low capital costs of pencil method.

View on HN

Capital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for brainpower.

That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;)

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.

Also might want to consider what is the opportunity cost of what else a literate person could do instead of mining.

Or the opportunity cost of what else could the creators of that literate person could be doing with 20 years worth of time spent on that person.

cloud mining sites are scammy though but this article narrows down the search for trustworthy cloud mining sites: https://passivetalks.com/3-trusted-cloud-mining-sites-passiv...

Fair point :)

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.

That's not capital in the sense of durable assets to be depreciated. That's an operational expense.

Always faster with an abacus.

using brain is way more cost efficient

(note: the conclusion of the paper actually performs a similar calculation)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com