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   Lime Bar (limebar@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 00:26:45 JST Lime Bar

   The way crypto mining works, the whole point, is that if a billion CPU cores are trying to mine a coin, one and only one wins, and gets the coin.

   The results of the other 999,999,999 are scrap and get wasted -- their results are heat and fossil fuel emissions.

   It is literally the least efficient use of computing power in history. And that includes LLMs which ostensibly produce a "useful" result each time.

   We should outlaw crypto mining through the EPA. For a start.

   • Embed this notice
     David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 00:26:44 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     in reply to

     • Fluffgar - Chaotic-Creative

     @fluffgar @limebar Mining is an incredibly misleading term.

     Proof of work schemes rely on a problem where it's easy to determine whether an answer is correct, but hard to find the right answer. Each node in the network can guess an answer and then see if they got the right one. Whoever guesses right 'wins'. With a faster processor (especially a GPU or custom hardware), you can make a lost more guesses, so you have a higher probability of winning.

     Whoever wins can use their solution to add a new block to the blockchain. Roughly speaking, this means that they can process one transaction. This also lets them charge a small transaction-processing fee, so 'mining' generates new coins because you're paid for processing transactions.

     I haven't looked for a while, but last time I checked the entire Bitcoin network was processing around 7 transactions per second, with a power consumption of a modest country. To put this in perspective, a single Raspberry Pi running PostgreSQL can easily handle a couple of orders of magnitude more with a power consumption of a few Watts. If you have three of them, you can set up a replicated cluster and still easily handle a thousand transactions per second (probably more). Visa handles over 20,000 transactions per second, including running a load of fraud detection things.

     They aren't doing anything useful, they're just burning energy to play a gambling game where tickets are paid for in electricity and compute power.

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     Fluffgar - Chaotic-Creative (fluffgar@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 00:26:45 JST Fluffgar - Chaotic-Creative

     in reply to

     @limebar Forgive my ignorance but, when mining it is usually for an actual resource. What are these crypto "miners" actually doing that is useful? Genuine question.

   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 04:47:36 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Fluffgar - Chaotic-Creative
     • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
     @david_chisnall @fluffgar @limebar
     
     > 7 transactions per second
     
     This has always been misleading. A single block can have thousands of transactions. It's averaging about 4500 transactions per block lately.
     
     You have to remember Bitcoin is a settlement layer. It's final. Money truly exchanged hands. Not so with VISA; there are still multiple days before the banks settle all the transactions. So it would be better to compare VISA to a layer on top of Bitcoin like Lightning, which theoretically can do millions per second.
     
     edit: just gonna delete this because i don't want to argue about it with strangers which is what is bound to happen