I haven't seen any actual news sites reporting on it, just techwankery blogs all citing the same source. When Stross said he wanted bitcoin to die in a fire, I assume this is what he meant. (He's always complaining about his fiction coming true too soon, you know.)
Grim Meathook Mining Disaster
Tags: computers, corporations, doomed, dunning-krugerrands, grim meathook future, pranks
Current Music: Garbage -- Get Busy with the Fizzy ♬
5 Responses:
quite funny how stross and a lot of other people(...myself included), could almost instantly assess it's real potential. its fans get hurt and offended by the reputation bitcoin has developed, upset that their non pseudonymous contributions tar them with the same brush. they really didn't think it through - i guess they weren't misanthropic enough.
3 on a meathook, little broken dolls that go on dancing, after the music has stopped.
After seeing and experiencing the quality of certain mining-associated cables, I believe it. The power requirements are indeed ridiculous right now and people don't seem to understand how electricity works, plus China will get away with the minimum amount of copper possible and there are certain PCI-E splitters (as also used by gamers etc.) being sold in the US with false AWG markings - so even if you spec things out right it can still go up in smoke.
Of course the dream is that everyone can eventually move to a proof-of-stake system from Bitcoin's proof-of-work, just as soon as anyone finds a way to do that that people can accept.
The one thing I never see mentioned is how the deflationary aspect ends up being a "Libertarian social security", although it only applies to people who can afford to save.
Proof-of-stake seems like sheer insanity as an end goal. Bitcoiners claim (among many other things) that it's about revolutionizing money and returning power to the people, but whaaaaat you want to make it so that all the richest people can easily collude to decide which transactions are legitimate?
Of course, proof-of-work (mining) is only one level of indirection removed, since mining has naturally shaped up into a rich man's game. Bitcoin: fractal crazy.
Y'know, I've put off properly reading about PoS because it doesn't concern anything I'm playing with yet and you're highly right. (Not sure if my mistaken concept of it is mathematically impossible or not.)
Ironically real-world economies end up "confirmed" by their largest participants anyway, so it's both sort of gross and sort of only a reflection of how "money" actually works right now. The only way to keep it from becoming a checkerberry (Android just substituted that for circlejerk and I ducking like it) is to distribute some of that reward 'randomly' to encourage participation regardless of stake size, although at the moment all participants are "benefiting" to the extent they don't have to pay real-world transaction fees.
I don't think this stuff will actually fix the world, but free trade does seem to be good at financially disincentivizing war and getting pissed off at mathematically provable scarcity seems as futile as getting po'd at the "DeCSS number" on a t-shirt. I hope it doesn't fuck up any efforts to provide a post-industrial basic income, but it's not like shiny metal or Yankee blue jeans stop existing then either.
Goddammit now I'm
BitDogecoin Guy.