No it does not take less electricity to mine if there are fewer miners. It takes EXACTLY the same amount of electricity. the ratio of the mining cost to the rewards would be the same evenif there was one miner.
Fees are a different ball of wax and I admitted in a follow up below that these could contribute to price fluctuation. But remeber there were price fluctuations long before fees came into bitcoin. And at the moment fees are more about prioritization than coin valuation.
Okay but if the price is higher than the production cost then more miners will turn on their rigs, the rate of mining will rise, and then the bitcoin algorithm will respond by increasing the difficulty.
thus the cost of mining always rises to match the current speculative price. Or should eventually.
Perhaps this is a possible answer to this conundrum. If I owned a bazillion bitcoin and I panic when the price drops below 1/12 the mining cost because now miners won't mine so I have a non liquid item. I can't even give it away let alone sell it cheap without the cooperation of a miner. And they won't mine when the selling price is too low.
So what I do is I offer to pay the full cost needed to make a mining event profitable. It's a hefty fee but with a bazzillion bitcoins worth nothing if I don't pay it, it's cheap by comparison.
So does this mean that fees are the reason for bitcoin volatility?
An easy but wrong retort to the above logic is for someone to say it's only worth what someone is willing to pay.
That's true of everything except bitcoin. Why? Because you can't actually offer less than it costs to mine because there's no way for the offerer to consummate the transaction unless a miner confirms it. A miner probably won't mine if the price of bit coin falls below the mining costs.
A second wrong retort is to say that the miners reward isn't just the coin but a fee. But I think this fee can be rolled into the effective price of bitcoin and so we can ignore this effect for now while fees are low .
For things like gold and tulips which lack significant underlying intrinsic value the price is set by a speculative market. ( yes I'm ignoring golds use in the semiconductor industry for exposition).
Bit coin differs in two fundamental ways that ideally should link its price to a fixed value but empirically do not. I am struggling to figure out why the theory fails.
To be specific , first there is a cost to mine bit coin and this cost rises as more mining capacity is working because bitcoin adapts its difficulty towards a fixed rate of solution. Ergo there is a cost in dollars and this cost keeps rising . Ideally, the price of bitcoin should be this cost plus a small incentive.
But that's not all. The second key difference is that to transact bitcoin there has to be a mining event. A mining event won't happen if the marginal cost of mining is less than the reward( a payoff denominated in bitcoins).
This last feature is very different from gold and it should prevent the price from dropping below some ratio to the mining cost. I.e. If you get 12 coins for mining a transaction then the price of a coin can't be less than 1/12 the cost to the miner.
If the price of bitcoin is far above the mining cost then more miners enter, the difficulty ratchets up and thus the cost of mining should rise to almost 12x the price.
Under this logic bitcoin should have a very stable and slowly rising valuation. There should not be fluctuation when there are changes in exchanges or other competitive coins happen etc. it should be always tied to the mining cost due to those two factors .
So why is this logic so off when we observe the actual price???
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.
I don't care if I get a dime. If the lawyers get it all, but we succeed in anihilating Equifax then I will benefit. All future datebases will take into the account the finincial liability they face if they don't do security right. I win from that. It's not a $10 rebate I want.
China subsidizes electricity and hardware for bitcoin processing.
Ha. well that will be another interesting aspect of bitcoin--- it will arbitrage electric power subsidies out of existence.
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I might be but my educated guess about bitcoin is that there's no price bubble at all. My reason for stating this rests on the assumption that the price of mining a coin is exactly equal to the electricity and hardware costs plus a thin markup (thin-ness dictated by competition which is intense). By price here I mean the cost of buying a coin plus the pre-rated cost of a typical shared transaction fee on the coin for using it. (that is to say, the amount of money the miner gets).
So if that's right then the typical cost of mining a coin is about $4000.
Am I right?
Now lets drill down on this a little. The cost of mining is not identical for all miners.
imagine a histogram of miners with the X-axis being their cost of mining, removing the hardware cost from the cost of mining (a sunk cost) and just look at the marginal cost of electicity. this is different for different miners.
If you then you draw a vertical line at the current price then the area to the left is miners who are making money. The ones to the right are miners who either are not mining (because they lose money) or who mining because even though it's a loss they can get some cash flow to pay off debts,
You can draw a second histogram which includes the cost of the hardware. In this case the ones to the left are all the people who could profit by entering the mining industry and the ones to the right are the ones who should not purchase hardware because it would be a loss from the start.
One of the factors not included here is the re-sale cost of used hardware. That's a tricky thing to estimate since the future price and difficulty of mining are not known when you initially buy the hardware.
What determines the cost of electricity? Well if you can use the waste heat then the cost is free. And if your country subsidises electrictiy then for you, not your country, it's also cheap. And if you have electricity that would go to waste otherwise then it's also free.
What electricity goes to waste? Well renewables that need to be stored in batteries for one. instead of storing it in a battery just use it to mine. They buy back the power later when you need it. Much cheaper than buying batteries.
This is a real golden oportunity to finally rebalance the exposure to risk that amassing large data stores creates. Right now all of the risk is on the subject (you) of the data bases and there's almost no liability for the data base holder. Their only liablity comes from public good will not financial liability.
The best possible outcome in this case is to sue Equifax out of existence. This particular instance is a gift int he sense that equifax disappearing would not harm society at all since it's function are handled redunantly and competitively by two other companies. Anything short of annihilating the company is too little.
The reasons is those two other companies , and by extention all data base holders, need to be on notice that they will suffer financial liability not just good-will liability
To understand the status quo better, and to see why this case in particular makes extinction the ideal remedy look at how every data breach to date has been handled in the past.
there's two ways to deal with data breaches 1. Credit freeze. (prevents credit accounts from being opened by denying credit reports to inquiring creditors). 2. Credit monitoring (they let you know after the fact that tour credit just got robbed)
The latter is nearly free to implement but has almost no value to the injured consumer. The former, the credit freeze, actually fixes the problem, puts power in the hands of the consumer but has the downside that it costs lots of money to implement. (the reason one has to pay for this is because the data base companies make money when they hand over your credit report to an inquiring creditor. If they can't hand it over they can't make any money off your data. Ergo, you have to pay them instead.)
No one ever offers the Credit Freeze because it's expensive. In this particular case the company that would pay for the credit freeze is actually the one that makes money off these credit freezes and could not make any money if they had to freeze all of the accounts. They might as well not even exist as a company if 100% of their accounts had credit ffreezes
Thus the proper remedy here is to require them, via class action lawsuits, to require credit freezes on 100% of the accounts. Even without extracting damage payments, this would likely cut their profits massively. And if they had to also pay the other two credit agencies for your credit freeze then they would have negative earnings. They would cease to exist without any tort penalties.
This would be the perfect outcome for consumers and do no damage to our credit system.
I've been waiting for this! Thanks. Is there a comparable one for old android phones? Obviously one could hack the android phone but my goal is to find some canned method that works right out of the box so I can use this with kids in a class room bringing in old family phones. So I don't want to have to custom code them . I just want to have something that someone else already worked the kinks out of. Perhaps you can point me to a similar project for androids?
Really for someone who claims to possess the one-true-net-neutral theory you shure sound like a shill for t-mobile. You are utterly wrong in your analogy even though your first sentence is correct. No preference for transmission within a class of data. Delivering netflix for free means that people are paying more for all other classes.
This company lostit's moral compass when it hired Eric Schmitt and it hasn't found it again. Eric as you know was the one who didn't recuse himself from apple's board even when he learned about the iPhone. Either he was trying to steal the iPhone or if you really beleive he wasn't and Google was already planning their own, then you have to ask why he didn't recuse himself. It's because he's morally bankrupt. it infected google and the company hasn't been the same ever since.
The lenses that collect the video also have limits and, no surprise, they are similar in spatial frequency resolution to the eye. So at some point, and I can't swear it's at 8K excatly, you just aren't collecting new information.
Thus the anti-aliasing also gets fixed at the collection step as well.
Actually their slogan was "don't be evil". The amended version, after their plant on the apple board stole the iphone idea, is "Don't be (merely) evil".
You are right. Just like tulip bulbs the value of a crypto currency is not the cost of making it but it's liquidity. New coins are not liquid. And even in coins like bit coin the liquidity is ephemeral, here today yes but tommorrow?
Enter whoppercoin. Sounds like a pr stunt but it solves this problem. It's literally backed by juicy meat. It will always have an exchanable intrinsic value just as gold coins did. Only tastier .
Allegedly z coin has a formulation that makes transactions provable but un tracable ( not just anonymous user ids like bitcoin). It's weakness is different
In the long run this will be cheaper than mechanical keys. You still want mechanical keys for typing but you don't type on that top row. So even if all it did was permenantly show the F-keys it will not be costing extra. and if it works out it could have a lot of other uses such as more expressive touch modalities without the nuiscances of a full touch screen. cheaper too.
Useless things PC owners paid for 5.25" floppy drives, parallel ports, Rs-488 serial ports, premium sound cards, Mouse ports, and these days they pay for CD players. All of those were niche market items when the rest of the world had long moved on to newer technologies but still installed by default on generations of PCs.
On the other hand who's to say a context sensitive touch bar won't catch on? A decade or more ago every bond groaned when yest another serial port was added to PCs already festooned with Parallel ports, Mouse ports, keyboard ports, serial ports, and PC card slots. another serial standard???? like that was going to catch on.
at that time most keyboards didn't have that ubiquitous 6th row of keys they all have now for screen brightness sound etc... the touch bar is replacing that with non-mechanical keys. in the long run it will be cheaper
I've been secretly brain washing the microsoft AI farm into thinking it's at a tea party with mrs nesbit while I'm really taking all the money out of the till.
Title II: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content In Motion Pictures - Family Movie Act of 2005 - (Sec. 202) Creates an exemption from copyright infringement for: (1) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of the motion picture; or (2) the creation or provision of technology that enables such editing, is designed and marketed for such use, creates no fixed copy of the altered version, and makes no changes, deletions or additions to commercial advertisements or promotional announcements that would otherwise be performed or displayed.
Slashdot Mirror
No it does not take less electricity to mine if there are fewer miners. It takes EXACTLY the same amount of electricity. the ratio of the mining cost to the rewards would be the same evenif there was one miner.
Fees are a different ball of wax and I admitted in a follow up below that these could contribute to price fluctuation. But remeber there were price fluctuations long before fees came into bitcoin. And at the moment fees are more about prioritization than coin valuation.
Okay but if the price is higher than the production cost then more miners will turn on their rigs, the rate of mining will rise, and then the bitcoin algorithm will respond by increasing the difficulty.
thus the cost of mining always rises to match the current speculative price. Or should eventually.
Perhaps this is a possible answer to this conundrum. If I owned a bazillion bitcoin and I panic when the price drops below 1/12 the mining cost because now miners won't mine so I have a non liquid item. I can't even give it away let alone sell it cheap without the cooperation of a miner. And they won't mine when the selling price is too low.
So what I do is I offer to pay the full cost needed to make a mining event profitable. It's a hefty fee but with a bazzillion bitcoins worth nothing if I don't pay it, it's cheap by comparison.
So does this mean that fees are the reason for bitcoin volatility?
Adding a clarification to the parent post.
An easy but wrong retort to the above logic is for someone to say it's only worth what someone is willing to pay.
That's true of everything except bitcoin. Why? Because you can't actually offer less than it costs to mine because there's no way for the offerer to consummate the transaction unless a miner confirms it. A miner probably won't mine if the price of bit coin falls below the mining costs.
A second wrong retort is to say that the miners reward isn't just the coin but a fee. But I think this fee can be rolled into the effective price of bitcoin and so we can ignore this effect for now while fees are low .
For things like gold and tulips which lack significant underlying intrinsic value the price is set by a speculative market. ( yes I'm ignoring golds use in the semiconductor industry for exposition).
Bit coin differs in two fundamental ways that ideally should link its price to a fixed value but empirically do not. I am struggling to figure out why the theory fails.
To be specific , first there is a cost to mine bit coin and this cost rises as more mining capacity is working because bitcoin adapts its difficulty towards a fixed rate of solution. Ergo there is a cost in dollars and this cost keeps rising . Ideally, the price of bitcoin should be this cost plus a small incentive.
But that's not all. The second key difference is that to transact bitcoin there has to be a mining event. A mining event won't happen if the marginal cost of mining is less than the reward( a payoff denominated in bitcoins).
This last feature is very different from gold and it should prevent the price from dropping below some ratio to the mining cost. I.e. If you get 12 coins for mining a transaction then the price of a coin can't be less than 1/12 the cost to the miner.
If the price of bitcoin is far above the mining cost then more miners enter, the difficulty ratchets up and thus the cost of mining should rise to almost 12x the price.
Under this logic bitcoin should have a very stable and slowly rising valuation. There should not be fluctuation when there are changes in exchanges or other competitive coins happen etc. it should be always tied to the mining cost due to those two factors .
So why is this logic so off when we observe the actual price???
When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life. We shall have found the basis of everything — of the earth we walk on, of the air we breathe, of the sunshine, of our physical body itself, of everything in the world, however great or however small — except life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
they hint they might also have a cold fusion convertible model. Zero emissions.
I don't care if I get a dime. If the lawyers get it all, but we succeed in anihilating Equifax then I will benefit. All future datebases will take into the account the finincial liability they face if they don't do security right. I win from that. It's not a $10 rebate I want.
China subsidizes electricity and hardware for bitcoin processing.
Ha. well that will be another interesting aspect of bitcoin--- it will arbitrage electric power subsidies out of existence.
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I might be but my educated guess about bitcoin is that there's no price bubble at all. My reason for stating this rests on the assumption that the price of mining a coin is exactly equal to the electricity and hardware costs plus a thin markup (thin-ness dictated by competition which is intense). By price here I mean the cost of buying a coin plus the pre-rated cost of a typical shared transaction fee on the coin for using it. (that is to say, the amount of money the miner gets).
So if that's right then the typical cost of mining a coin is about $4000.
Am I right?
Now lets drill down on this a little. The cost of mining is not identical for all miners.
imagine a histogram of miners with the X-axis being their cost of mining, removing the hardware cost from the cost of mining (a sunk cost) and just look at the marginal cost of electicity. this is different for different miners.
If you then you draw a vertical line at the current price then the area to the left is miners who are making money. The ones to the right are miners who either are not mining (because they lose money) or who mining because even though it's a loss they can get some cash flow to pay off debts,
You can draw a second histogram which includes the cost of the hardware. In this case the ones to the left are all the people who could profit by entering the mining industry and the ones to the right are the ones who should not purchase hardware because it would be a loss from the start.
One of the factors not included here is the re-sale cost of used hardware. That's a tricky thing to estimate since the future price and difficulty of mining are not known when you initially buy the hardware.
What determines the cost of electricity? Well if you can use the waste heat then the cost is free. And if your country subsidises electrictiy then for you, not your country, it's also cheap. And if you have electricity that would go to waste otherwise then it's also free.
What electricity goes to waste? Well renewables that need to be stored in batteries for one. instead of storing it in a battery just use it to mine. They buy back the power later when you need it. Much cheaper than buying batteries.
This is a real golden oportunity to finally rebalance the exposure to risk that amassing large data stores creates. Right now all of the risk is on the subject (you) of the data bases and there's almost no liability for the data base holder. Their only liablity comes from public good will not financial liability.
The best possible outcome in this case is to sue Equifax out of existence. This particular instance is a gift int he sense that equifax disappearing would not harm society at all since it's function are handled redunantly and competitively by two other companies. Anything short of annihilating the company is too little.
The reasons is those two other companies , and by extention all data base holders, need to be on notice that they will suffer financial liability not just good-will liability
To understand the status quo better, and to see why this case in particular makes extinction the ideal remedy look at how every data breach to date has been handled in the past.
there's two ways to deal with data breaches
1. Credit freeze. (prevents credit accounts from being opened by denying credit reports to inquiring creditors).
2. Credit monitoring (they let you know after the fact that tour credit just got robbed)
The latter is nearly free to implement but has almost no value to the injured consumer. The former, the credit freeze, actually fixes the problem, puts power in the hands of the consumer but has the downside that it costs lots of money to implement. (the reason one has to pay for this is because the data base companies make money when they hand over your credit report to an inquiring creditor. If they can't hand it over they can't make any money off your data. Ergo, you have to pay them instead.)
No one ever offers the Credit Freeze because it's expensive. In this particular case the company that would pay for the credit freeze is actually the one that makes money off these credit freezes and could not make any money if they had to freeze all of the accounts. They might as well not even exist as a company if 100% of their accounts had credit ffreezes
Thus the proper remedy here is to require them, via class action lawsuits, to require credit freezes on 100% of the accounts. Even without extracting damage payments, this would likely cut their profits massively. And if they had to also pay the other two credit agencies for your credit freeze then they would have negative earnings. They would cease to exist without any tort penalties.
This would be the perfect outcome for consumers and do no damage to our credit system.
I've been waiting for this! Thanks. Is there a comparable one for old android phones? Obviously one could hack the android phone but my goal is to find some canned method that works right out of the box so I can use this with kids in a class room bringing in old family phones. So I don't want to have to custom code them . I just want to have something that someone else already worked the kinks out of.
Perhaps you can point me to a similar project for androids?
Really for someone who claims to possess the one-true-net-neutral theory you shure sound like a shill for t-mobile. You are utterly wrong in your analogy even though your first sentence is correct. No preference for transmission within a class of data. Delivering netflix for free means that people are paying more for all other classes.
This company lostit's moral compass when it hired Eric Schmitt and it hasn't found it again. Eric as you know was the one who didn't recuse himself from apple's board even when he learned about the iPhone. Either he was trying to steal the iPhone or if you really beleive he wasn't and Google was already planning their own, then you have to ask why he didn't recuse himself. It's because he's morally bankrupt. it infected google and the company hasn't been the same ever since.
The lenses that collect the video also have limits and, no surprise, they are similar in spatial frequency resolution to the eye. So at some point, and I can't swear it's at 8K excatly, you just aren't collecting new information.
Thus the anti-aliasing also gets fixed at the collection step as well.
Pivot pivot pivot. never fail. Squeeze it for everything it's worth.
Actually their slogan was "don't be evil". The amended version, after their plant on the apple board stole the iphone idea, is "Don't be (merely) evil".
You are right. Just like tulip bulbs the value of a crypto currency is not the cost of making it but it's liquidity. New coins are not liquid. And even in coins like bit coin the liquidity is ephemeral, here today yes but tommorrow?
Enter whoppercoin. Sounds like a pr stunt but it solves this problem. It's literally backed by juicy meat. It will always have an exchanable intrinsic value just as gold coins did. Only tastier .
Allegedly z coin has a formulation that makes transactions provable but un tracable ( not just anonymous user ids like bitcoin). It's weakness is different
Not so much south sea but the holland tulip bubble
I run a telephone sanitizing bussiness but I'm pivoting into Cryptocoin and want to announce my Initial Coin offering here.
In the long run this will be cheaper than mechanical keys. You still want mechanical keys for typing but you don't type on that top row. So even if all it did was permenantly show the F-keys it will not be costing extra. and if it works out it could have a lot of other uses such as more expressive touch modalities without the nuiscances of a full touch screen. cheaper too.
Useless things PC owners paid for
5.25" floppy drives, parallel ports, Rs-488 serial ports, premium sound cards, Mouse ports, and these days they pay for CD players. All of those were niche market items when the rest of the world had long moved on to newer technologies but still installed by default on generations of PCs.
On the other hand who's to say a context sensitive touch bar won't catch on? A decade or more ago every bond groaned when yest another serial port was added to PCs already festooned with Parallel ports, Mouse ports, keyboard ports, serial ports, and PC card slots. another serial standard???? like that was going to catch on.
at that time most keyboards didn't have that ubiquitous 6th row of keys they all have now for screen brightness sound etc... the touch bar is replacing that with non-mechanical keys. in the long run it will be cheaper
I've been secretly brain washing the microsoft AI farm into thinking it's at a tea party with mrs nesbit while I'm really taking all the money out of the till.
How else would you transmit it if not in digital format. You have to rip it to edit it. The law allows editing and transmitting.
Title II: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content In Motion Pictures - Family Movie Act of 2005 - (Sec. 202) Creates an exemption from copyright infringement for: (1) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of the motion picture; or (2) the creation or provision of technology that enables such editing, is designed and marketed for such use, creates no fixed copy of the altered version, and makes no changes, deletions or additions to commercial advertisements or promotional announcements that would otherwise be performed or displayed.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...