Coinexchange.io is Closing Down | Hacker News Reader

Coinexchange.io is Closing Down

coinexchange.io

28 pointsenigami44 comments

Hey if anyone wants to use their computer spare cycles on something a little more worthwhile ( as far as humanity is concerned ) try: https://foldingathome.org/

Also Rosetta@HOME: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

This is something that has boggled my mind since 2010 when I first looked at crypto. Why the hell would anyone waste CPU cycles computing some arbitrary hash value that is then ejected as "waste" rather than having the computational workload itself run scientifically important problem and the result of that computation is rewarded with a token? why the hell is everyone using all of this computational power for... nothing of value really?

The main currency in crypto is NOT the tokens/coins you get. It is the CPU cycles. So why the hell are we not putting those to good use? it´s freaking beyond me. Imagine if F@H (or something like it) had the bitcoin network´s power, we could potentially help solve cancer.

Maybe someone can help shed some light on this topic if there is something I´ve missed!

When you encounter your typical Bitcoiner, they'll do logical gymnastics and typically go the playbook, which is to deflect and talk about how much energy banks or treasuries use.

However, the true answer is always greed.

Who gives a shit about energy usage if it is used for a cause that could potentially help humanity overcome adversity? Granted, energy usage is important but it is a question about trade-offs.

If bitcoin helped solve cancer or some genetic diseases, I doubt anyone would say: "yea but it uses too much electricity!". The world is based on trade-offs, so why not have that electricity that the bitcoin network generate be used to solve actual real world problems?

It's just unbelievably, mind-bogglingly inefficient, and no credible plans have been put forward to change that. Scaling up the current power consumption and waste generation to Visa-levels of transaction, a Bitcoin powered economy would consume 38X the entire worlds' generation capacity of electricity and yield 132 million metric tons of e-waste per year. All to replace what Visa does today. Just Visa. Not MC, Amex, UnionPay, Discover, etc.

That's because a method of solving useful work has not been discovered yet. Are you also incredulous that we don't have flying cars yet and how come Ford hasn't fixed that problem? If you're so concerned, perhaps you should start working on the problem and become the inventor of the next big p2p currency?

I'd be incredulous if someone had designed a flying car made by taping about ten thousand fans together, pointed them down precariously, and powered them with a little nuclear reactor. Also, it didn't make it more than 3 feet off the ground. Then, had many people talking about how the future of transit had arrived. It clearly hasn't and nobody can point to a single reason their contraption is actually better or does anything novel. But they're all pretttttty sure.

> If you're so concerned, perhaps you should start working on the problem and become the inventor of the next big p2p currency?

I'm not concerned because the problems identified had already been solved with money. You know, the thing already in your bank account.

Ah I see. Perhaps you should check out https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-is-bitcoin some of your points are addressed there.

I’ve read that before. The core issues are not addressed or are glossed over as of course that’s a pro bitcoin advocacy site. Bitcoin is fundamentally broken at the lowest levels.

Which levels and how?

A single transaction consumes 600kWh of electricity and yields 95 grams of e-waste -- enough to power a US home for 20 days. [1]. This is projected to increase. It's 700,000 times less efficient than Visa. If Visa alone were ported to Bitcoin levels of inefficiency it would consume 38X the entire world's power generation capacity. [2] It's actively anti-efficient and becomes less efficient as the price scales and as technology improves. It has worse wealth distribution than any banana republic. [3] The PoW system creates a net negative drag on any economy approximately equivalent to a 48% rate of inflation [4]. It's slow, taking up to 10 minutes to process. It's inefficient. It allows payments to terrorists and rogue states [5]. It's built to allow scams to thrive. It's not even anonymous, it's pseudonymous and tools will automate deanonymization if it ever manages to make it through the top few issues, which, let's face it, it won't.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.cbeci.org/

[3] https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/08/14/2-of-bitcoin-addresses-co...

[4] https://www.snb.ch/n/mmr/reference/sem_2019_05_31_koeppl/sou...

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

And how does any of that mean "Bitcoin is fundamentally broken"

This is what you get if you want a decentralized currency. Full stop. There is no alternative currently designed or available.

Finally, we agree.

A PoW coin has the same economic impact as a 48% rate of inflation. If that’s what we have to pay to “decentralize” our currency it’s time to stop trying to do that. The burden is not on the incumbent to prove why it’s better, it’s on the new guy.

That’s what we’ve learned from this decade long experiment: it’s just not worth it. Time to put this idea to bed and pursue something worthwhile.

We could also make an argument that Mark Zuckerberg could solve income inequality by tracking everyone and providing true transparency to a utopian world.

I'm pretty certain that if you evaluate mining and exchange activity, very little of it is impacting areas where it can effect real change (like Hong Kong or Venezuela).

For example, here's a report from the trenches on Venezuela:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dht1qw/venezuela_u...

For the disaster that is that economy, only 0.004% of global BTC volume is taking place there (yes, that's the correct number of zeroes) Put another way, it represents about 0.08% of Venezuela's GDP.

That's what a typical anti-Bitcoiner would say.

Except I'm not an anti-Bitcoiner. I was mining in 2011, and I'm very active in online communities (obviously under a different persona). I just am a very extreme pragmatist.

"extreme pragmatism" is still an ideology, whether you admit it or not. The claim that anything can even be "pragmatist" is so meaningless to be almost absurd.

Who is not a pragmatist? Who could possibly insist on the impractical? This is ideological par excellence and the rejection of the impractical becomes, in a sense, ideology in itself. This ideology necessarily starts to reject criticism as "dogmatic" and this insistence and opposition to opposition becomes in itself a dogmatic principle.

The fact that you think greed is the reason bitcoin hasn't designed a useful work load means you don't understand the system at all. What useful workload should bitcoin calculate, and how would it work? I'll wait for your PhD thesis on the matter.

Can you give an example of a scientifically important problem that can be massively distributed in its calculation yet quick to verify?

The second part of that is the real hitch for mining. You must throw tons of CPU to "mine" the hash but it's a single evaluation to verify it for the proof.

Basically any NP problem fits that category. Protein folding is one but so are many other problems. But even if the verification itself is hard (EXP problem) that could still work as at least that energy we are putting into the network will eventually produce an answer (less efficiently, granted!) but it is far better than having energy be for literally 0 gain as the produced outcome right now is tossed out as "junk".

The gain is in the security of the currency. You can argue about how valuable that is, but it is not "literally zero".

Because that would just be another more regular token .. like the dollar. Everything will default to the easiest path - crypto worked mostly because people are actually using it for reasons that prevent them from using regular currency. There’s nothing nefarious about science work that need to jump the crypto hoop.

huh? Not sure you follow.

Nothing would change in the fundamental nature of bitcoin or any other currency. The only difference is the algorithm that you run on the back-end to mine the coin would be one of scientific importance rather than one with 0 societal value. The algorithm run right now is based on an NP problem. So why not just use another NP problem worth actually solving?

I’m saying that transaction need not be denoted by crypto. There’s no point to create something that already exist (buying computing power at AWS/ voluntary compute power sharing) just so it could be a crypto

How do you imagine this could be done? Is there an inexhaustible repository of "scientifically important problems" that can be solved every 10 minutes by some computing entity, and whose difficulty is adjustable -- a function of available compute power in the network, and are verifiable by others without human judgement involved?

> So why the hell are we not putting those to good use?

Some would argue that securing transactions that transfer value without trust is a good use

> Some would argue that securing transactions that transfer value without trust is a good use

Those folks haven't identified a good reason why being able to skirt sanctions, allow rogue states to accumulate value and to pay terrorists is worth "transferring value without trust." It's a pretty high bar, IMO.

> Is there an inexhaustible repository of "scientifically important problems" that can be solved every 10 minutes by some computing entity

Well, is the pool of mineable BitCoin hashes not limited? I'd say there are enough computational problems to be solved, certainly far more than there are BitCoins to be mined, for one.

As to trust and transactions, as far as I understand, every update of the BitCoin blockchain has to be agreed upon, meaning that it is verified by the network. To that end, you might as well verify useful computation, with the same mechanism.

Given the natural tendency of cryptocurrency artists to try stealing other people cycles, haven't they tried already to rewrite their hashing problems into protein folding ones?

I have no regrets making as much money as I did via Bitcoin. It was one of those once in a lifetime events you truly only have one chance to participate in. I remember various betting dApps that practically doubled your ethereum, and thinking there is no way this is what Satoshi had in mind.

> It has been a fantastic journey

Ah yes ... yes the journey. It was such a good shutdown notice until that point. Just leave it off. No one cares about your journey.

and nothing of value was lost..

I can't wait for the Tulip... err Blockchain hype to die down. Using the energy of a mid size european country for what is now essentially a pyramid scheme is just shitty.

(And I make that statement after having made a few thousand bucks by mining BTC at 5$ per coin.)

Using the energy of a mid size european country for what is now essentially a pyramid scheme is just shitty.

It is all fun and games until you realise this is NOT a metaphor and that shitcoin does indeed consume as much energy as a country.

Anyone who calls it a tulip isn't taken seriously.

I don't believe in the hype of altcoins, but I do see the problems Bitcoin solves.

I genuinely don't. It's not clear that Bitcoin does anything better than what's out there today. Not one thing. And it's less efficient.

Bitcoin seems to be just quietly sticking around for now.

Quietly like the best investment of 2019? Quietly like a multi billion dollar industry/currency/space cash? Quietly like the owners of NYSE creating a new exchange for BTC trading? Or do you mean quietly compared to when everyone and their moms was saying the word bitcoin from Sep-Dec 2017?

Living in a country where you have no choice but to earn in a local currency with runaway inflation is objectively shittier.

Bitcoin doesn't solve that problem. 600kWh of electricity are consumed for each transaction. Venezuelans would be mad to trade 2 weeks wages for a single BTC transaction. And that's when transaction fees are socialized by block rewards. If they actually had to pay the electricity consumed for their transactions it would be 10X higher.

Their problems are societal and need to be solved by societal means. Pretending magic beans in your computer will solve the Venezuelan objective nightmare is just ignoring objective reality. But don't just listen to me -- they all have access to Bitcoin. They know what it is. If it could solve their problems they would have started using it already. Bitcoin has no extrinsic barriers to adoption -- only intrinsic. People just don't want it, and why on earth would they?

The Bank of Canada study by real economists showed a BTC economy would have as much drain on the economy as a 48% inflation rate haha.

> Bitcoin ... 600kWh of electricity are consumed for each transaction

That’s jaw dropping.

Where can I read more about this?

Found this:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Which appears to support your claim.

Yeah, that's where I realized the magnitude of the number. They've got a bunch of extra reading articles at the bottom. The CBECI data from Cambridge University lines up with it (and I think is referenced from the Digiconomist writeup). Its methodology section explains how they got where they did [1].

[1] https://www.cbeci.org/methodology/

I think I need to have a lay down

Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

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