Bitcoin Forum

Thanks  for sharing looks like first draft is being distributed for free: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/the-princeton-bitcoin-textbook-is-now-freely-available/  Kinda neat to see it for free on first draft.

Sadly I missed CPU day's....  wish I would have been following it back then ohh well cant catch them all.

Great to see such a pre-eminent organisation releasing papers, and in draft, for free.

Not having yet read the paper, but commenting purely on the picture:
The similarity isn't accurate: An individual of moderate means can still afford to contribute meaningfully at the ASIC level for BITmining, unlike gold mining.
Basic infrastructure for an ASIC can cost about $1k with a moderate-low ROI, but still some ROI, unlike Gold mining at the pit mining level. Even 1 truck, or digger is so unfathomably beyond reach of the average joe it is just ridiculous.

The scales just do not compare.

Crash

Information age vs industrial age.
The cost of computing power dropped so much in a few decades -- we can buy a $5 computer, or get it for free with a purchase of one magazine issue.

(However, technically, a person can still get lucky gold panning.)

It's actually pretty interesting to read this from an academic standpoint. So much of what the average person learns about bitcoin comes from poorly punctuated and rambling blog posts or websites cobbled together in broken English that are targeting the uninformed. This is very well put together and almost refreshing to read.

the difference is that gpu mining is still viable thanks to altcoin, then you convert in bitcoin, can you do the same with gold?

diggin silver and exchange to gold for even better profit? i doubt

I agree. I too have greatly enjoyed the academic rigor of this captioned image.

I was referring to the academic text that was released by princeton and fully available online for free.

I really need to read this paper. Look like a good resume.  ;D Great job princeton!

Even though the photo analogy is completely wrong. At the asic level  I will read the article.


I can rent 12ph for a day which is  1% of the entire network.

My cost is under 50 btc or about 19,000 usd.

So the scale is so far off it is sad.

I would love to rent 1 % of all the gold mined in a day for only 19000 usd.

Sad when an "Ivy League School" allows for really poor examples that are off my a factor of 10,000 to one. Or more.

Fun way to look back on what I encountered back in the days when I used to mine with multiple GPU's (old memories). I wonder if there will be something next to ASIC anytime soon that would be few times the price asic have with few times more hashing power than what is on market and be called something different as well. Regardless of which, nice draft to see different timelines on mining world.

What it doesn't convey is that gold was never the largest mining operation at any time (there was always some other metal that was more important).

The bitcoin network is the largest network on Earth presently.

good point  so the scaling is wrong in that I can rent 1% of the world's hash power for a day.

and the value is  wrong.