Comment by frankenst1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankenst1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I say "the price people were willing to pay" instead of "value"

The price people are willing to pay is how you estimate the value of something.

> For Bitcoin, the most popular one, on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 of hashes get calculated to mine a single block, multiple trillion per second. Within ten minutes, only a single one of those 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes is actually used, depending entirely on luck. The rest are thrown away entirely. They do not form part of the final hash or anything else, the energy spent on them is lost.

You need to dig through 1 million gram of ore to find 1 gram of gold, depending entirely on luck. The rest is thrown away entirely. The energy is of course not lost but was necessary to find something of value (which also creates a lower price boundary). In contrast to gold, Bitcoin mining ensures provably fair probability of winning, has a tremendously lower barrier of entry, provides incentives to be run on renewable energy and produces far less waste.

The culprit here is likely that you don't consider Bitcoin to be something of value. Particularly for those with less financial privilege, Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services and a long-term hedge against inflation.

I really like that comparison with the gold to raw ore ratios as a frame of reference, but isn't mining hashes in general just a completely arbitrary selection for a definition of work and wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better ?

Even all the Miners locking cash in a single account with a constant reward function could be put to some real use and still generate the same return outcome of new minted coin to investment/work; just with fewer steps and without all the electric overhead.

> wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better ?

Can you devise such a provable activity that has a difficulty that can be adjusted to the levels Bitcoin requires and is dependent on the last block's hash?

> wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better

Yes, but such a puzzle needs to be

- easy to generate at a certain difficulty

- difficult to solve

- easy to verify and

- the solution needs to be dependent on previous solution (so you can't silently pre-solve them).

Solving (stupid) hashes so far is the only activity that checks these requirements.

Another option might be to design a certain hash function such that when the hardware miners dedicated to solve them become obsolete (i.e. too expensive to be used for crypto mining), they can be easily repurposed for another problem set.

Thank you for the constructive comment but I think you are approaching it from a cryptographical computer science angle which even if solved still results in work as an empty puzzle of floating point mips and what I cannot yet rule out is a reimagined scope for real provable work that also has some positive social value like say creation of 1kwh of renewable energy placed on the grid. Suspend disbelief for a moment as to the many actual mountains you would need to move and consider that such a scheme is hypothetically possible on paper under laboratory conditions given an infinite capacity of unrestricted action. Puzzle solving in a sandbox might have been fine back in the OG whitepaper hypothetical days of Bitcoin et al but the stakes are sufficiently high now that considerable thinktank type effort could reasonably be spent on this problem. My reductio ad absurdum argument of all miners proveably locking and unlocking real money as work in to and out of a single bank account tied to a snapshot lottery mimicking the existing mint award outcomes seems at least less impossible and the mining account's interest can at least then be put to a real world good use.

> Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services

Example needed here, how are people with less financial privilege censored by fiat? Loan conditions? Definitely not, that's just the financiers not wanting to issue risky loans.

Ukraine is a current example

Fiat:

- People unable to withdraw the money in Ukraine.

- Refugees being robbed of their live saving during their escape.

- Refugees unable to deposit/exchange Ukrainian currency.

vs

Bitcoin:

- Refugees being able to flee with their live savings safely stored by memorizing 12 words

- Refugees being able to access their savings in other countries simply by having access to a smart phone

- Ukraine being able to receive global donations while national banks being not operational.

> long-term hedge against inflation

lmao. no it's not.

it failed as a currency, failed as a hedge and failed as a store of value. for 99% of holders like me it's just a speculative asset. nobody really cares about the pie in the sky idealism or libertarian nonsense spouted by maxis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com