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Couldn't the processing power be used for productive work? Like those @Home distributed computing networks that fold proteins or process astronomical observations, or whatever? Presumably it's been thought of and discarded for some reason, but I'd be curious to know why.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:11
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I think you could do any type of problem that's extremely difficult to solve but extremely easy to verify. Protein folding is probably out completely because it probably doesn't have the second property.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:19
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McNerd posted:The number of Bitcoins in existence is allowed to grow at a small rate. The new coins are given to people who contribute processing power to the network, therefore providing an incentive for anybody to actually maintain the network and process payments. Why wouldn't you just pay out rewards for processing transactions instead of feeding the system fake problems to get a statistical approximation of individual contributions to said processing?
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Jan 29, 2016 18:23
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steinrokkan posted:Why wouldn't you just pay out rewards for processing transactions instead of feeding the system fake problems to get a statistical approximation of individual contributions to said processing? The problem being fed is the creation of a hash of the blockchain, which is used by the system to verify transactions and allows the system to vary the rate at which it doles out coins. If you just reward transaction processing, then you would have to include another mechanism to verify those transactions and maintain a single stable history, which is what the blockchain does. It's a cryptographic system that has a bunch of interworking parts that work really well as a proof of concept but is atrocious as an actual means of currency
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Jan 29, 2016 18:28
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Oberleutnant posted:Couldn't the processing power be used for productive work? Like those @Home distributed computing networks that fold proteins or process astronomical observations, or whatever? that would require bitcoiners to give a poo poo about anyone but themselves
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Jan 29, 2016 18:32
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steinrokkan posted:Why wouldn't you just pay out rewards for processing transactions instead of feeding the system fake problems to get a statistical approximation of individual contributions to said processing? When they say math problem, it is cryptographic hashing. They are basically looking for the summary of the next step of the transaction ledger. The odds are managed by requiring the summary to look a certain way. Its a really neat system for a computer nerd to download and gently caress around with on a rainy afternoon, and absolutely baffling why anybody thinks its exactly what finance and economics needs.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:51
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zedprime posted:That's exactly what they are doing, the only thing fake is the complexity to keep the odds stacked. I'm curious Does anybody involved in running bitcoin actually have any sort of background in economics or even accounting? Because to me it really seems like some sort of cargo cult economy. It's like a physicist and an engineer trying to fly a plane with absolutely no piloting experience. Cool Web Paige fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 19:22
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vxskud posted:I'm curious Yeah, lots of them have owned a bunch of e-companies, offered e-services, money lending services, and run pyramid schemes
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Jan 29, 2016 19:41
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EngineerSean posted:Laughing my rear end off at these drug stories, especially not wanting to damage the guy's rep. Free market working exactly as expected
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Jan 29, 2016 20:11
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vxskud posted:I'm curious
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Jan 29, 2016 20:14
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steinrokkan posted:Why wouldn't you just pay out rewards for processing transactions instead of feeding the system fake problems to get a statistical approximation of individual contributions to said processing? Bit coin made more sense when it was P2P. It used to be everyone did a little calculation on their cpu and you might win the lottery, but pretty quick smarter people figured out you could just run those little calculations over and over on a graphics card or make a custom chip to do it and with the lotteries always and basically now bitcoin's entire design makes no sense because it was originally based on people interacting with eachother on a p2p network instead of 5 guys in china.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:16
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Did they ever figure out how to fix the 50% problem, or could three of the five Chinese dudes collude to take all the butts?
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Jan 29, 2016 20:19
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Oberleutnant posted:Couldn't the processing power be used for productive work? Like those @Home distributed computing networks that fold proteins or process astronomical observations, or whatever? Some altcoins had the idea of doing that but they never became popular. And back when CPU and GPU mining was a large fraction of the network, you could have hypothetically changed the algorithm to do something else. But since mining is now down almost entirely by warehouses full of custom-built ASICs, you can't use the processing power behind bitcoin for doing anything except basically the Bitcoin calculation, or some very similar calculation that requires computing sha256 over and over. It's functionally useless. vxskud posted:I'm curious Bitcoin has been described as having had to learn How to Banking the hard way. It's hilarious to watch people in the bitcoin ecosystem go from "yeah, free market! No more banks, no more regulation, no more government!" to "HELP all of my bitcoins were stolen, I filed a police report, maybe someone should create some sort of regulation to prevent this from happening in the future???" Most of them don't even have software experience so they do hilarious things like using floats in accounting software
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Jan 29, 2016 20:26
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Remember that time a guy earning 50k a year got fired for loading all his university's computers with mining software. Dude is now sucking cock for crack. Probably.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:30
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QuarkJets posted:Most of them don't even have software experience so they do hilarious things like using floats in accounting software Can you explain why this is funny?
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Jan 29, 2016 20:53
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Is that group still doing that thing where they turned off telling the network they solved the puzzle for the next bitcoin and started the next block only to publish that they solved the last puzzle block when someone else tried to say they did. You know to trick people.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:54
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raditts posted:Can you explain why this is funny? rounding works differently on floats so things can get real inaccurate real fast
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Jan 29, 2016 21:00
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raditts posted:Can you explain why this is funny? Floats are notoriously imprecise. Accounting software has to be incredibly precise. You end up with a system with tons of Office Space holes in it, where little fractions of a bitcoin go missing or appear out of nowhere when you do math with floats. There was an instance where an exchange was using floats to store the number of bitcoins in accounts. It was obvious to anybody with a computer science degree because numbers would change a little, like from 4.0 to 3.9999999 without any other explanation other than that the exchange was using floats.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:02
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Floats can only exactly represent rational numbers with a power of two denominator. 1/4 a bitcoin, you can represent. You add 4 of them together you get exactly 1 bitcoin. 1/3 a bitcoin, nope, you can only represent a number that's almost but not exactly 1/3, so you add 3 of them together you get something that's almost but not quite 1 bitcoin.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:12
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QuarkJets posted:Mining is mostly performed by a few guys in China now, who already run at a loss because their real goal is to convert Chinese currency into international currencies. So as long as there's not a more profitable method of doing this, they're probably going to continue mining. Every time that the reward halves there's a chance that some of them will pull the plug, but that probably won't happen willingly anytime soon I don't think its going to be the case for much longer, because the bitcoin blocksize is rapidly approaching 1mb. Once its over that hump, it will be fairly difficult for the Chinese miners to conduct effective transactions on the US market due to data exchange limitations with the US, so chances are that the mining hot spots will migrate to Europe/Russia and an average non-organized miner will be able to make money again. The main reasons Chinese miners are effective is due to cheap rent/electricity. If you could find cheap rent in your country along with a constituency that does the cheapest electricity, you could conceivably make a return on bitcoin mining. Bonus points if your area has cold weather. That said, if you DO decide to mine bitcoins for profit, bear in mind that the entirety of bitcoin community is 100% retarded and you are basically making money of idiots who don't know what they are doing and could collapse the whole thing at any moment. There are probably better ways to invest your money than mining bitcoins, with higher ROI's, but if you REALLY want to mine bitcoins now is not such a terrible time to do it.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:41
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Yeah, like everything Bitcoin related, you can do anything better without Bitcoin
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Jan 29, 2016 21:56
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Professor Shark posted:Yeah, like everything Bitcoin related, you can do anything better without Bitcoin You cant use electricity like a comic book super villain though.  BUT WITH BITCOIN
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Jan 29, 2016 21:59
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Captain Gordon posted:That said, if you DO decide to mine bitcoins for profit, bear in mind that the entirety of bitcoin community is 100% retarded and you are basically making money of idiots who don't know what they are doing and could collapse the whole thing at any moment. Also full of people with "rational self interest," theives and scam artists who would happily collapse the thing to make a few bucks.
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Jan 30, 2016 00:04
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Tenzarin posted:You cant use electricity like a comic book super villain though. I am absolutely positive I could use electricity to make waste heat either more or less efficiently (depending on your preference) for a far lower cost without bitcoin than with
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Jan 30, 2016 00:39
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Freaking bitcuck 
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Jan 30, 2016 00:41
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LGD posted:I am absolutely positive I could use electricity to make waste heat either more or less efficiently (depending on your preference) for a far lower cost without bitcoin than with you're not already?
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Jan 30, 2016 01:40
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LordSaturn posted:Really it's less about solving a math problem and more about rolling dice repeatedly. You roll your dice and put the result through a math problem and if THAT result has enough zeros in it, you win. The math problem makes it so that you can't game your result. You could try every possible roll in order or just roll randomly and have the same chance of winning. They call this "work".
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Jan 30, 2016 02:01
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Tenzarin posted:You cant use electricity like a comic book super villain though. jamie foxx is on a downward sprial
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Jan 30, 2016 02:50
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JamesieAB posted:My favourite butterfly labs video-Josh Zerlan. 4/5 he was pretty rude but he didn't say "cocksucker". Isn't he the guy who liked to call their customers cocksuckers?
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Jan 30, 2016 04:05
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Was that the box of fans display?
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Jan 30, 2016 04:27
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never forget
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Jan 30, 2016 04:46
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there's at least one company that tries to sell blockchain tech as a zero knowledge encryption / signing solution to very large companies. that conf call was amazing, also I was polite to them but they never got the RFP
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Jan 30, 2016 05:03
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Buttcoin purse posted:4/5 he was pretty rude but he didn't say "cocksucker". Isn't he the guy who liked to call their customers cocksuckers? That was Inaba (also Josh but since it was under a different name that made it his personal opinion and not that of the company loooooooooooool)
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Jan 30, 2016 12:50
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It's always great to see someone introduced to the mechanism behind Bitcoin for the first time. The reaction is invariably "...why would anyone go through any of this and how can anyone actually believe this is a good idea?" The answer is: Dunning-Krugerrands.
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Jan 30, 2016 14:19
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loving cuckcon idiots  get a real money lossers
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Jan 30, 2016 17:44
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Naxuz posted:It's always great to see someone introduced to the mechanism behind Bitcoin for the first time. The reaction is invariably "...why would anyone go through any of this and how can anyone actually believe this is a good idea?" The answer is: Dunning-Krugerrands. Nah this whole banking thing isn't that hard, I'm gonna be my own bank *fat-fingers keyboard and irrecoverably sends all of his bitcoins into a black hole* No problem, no problem, I've got some spare bitcoins on PonziExchange *bitcoin exchange closes, webpage just says "Sorry, we lost all of the bitcoins, no more withdrawals, please stop sending us your money"*
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Jan 30, 2016 22:17
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QuarkJets posted:please stop sending us your money Yeah right.
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Jan 31, 2016 00:10
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Bitcoin is everything Bitcoiners deserve, it's Wallet Inspector level of scams but people lose "money" over and over
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Jan 31, 2016 00:17
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Is Wired still black holing coins on purpose? Because that was the best Bitcoin troll.
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Jan 31, 2016 02:12
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Razorwired posted:Is Wired still black holing coins on purpose? Because that was the best Bitcoin troll. Bitspergs heads exploded because their coins simultaneously became more scarce yet were wasted on a non-cult activity.
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Jan 31, 2016 14:45
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!