Simple, someone asked about efficiency, and whether cheap chips in a water heater, toaster, etc. can compete with cutting edge mining chips. I answered. The answer is yes.

That may be irrelevant to you, but it was relevant to the person who asked.

The network does. Difficulty goes up. Security goes up. Profitability goes down. Big farms fade away. Maybe. Who gets those Bitcoins does't even matter much. Burn them for all I care.

Of course 21's chips will probably just mine on a pool, which might make things worse than ever. I don't claim this is some kind of cryptonirvana. My comments were focused on the question of efficiency.

The rest of your post was most about whether this is a good thing. I don't know. I have nothing to say about that at this point.

I'm going to try to explain this like you're five. I don't don't if it will work. You might not be quite at that mental level yet.

Show the bitcoin blockchain to the Average Joe, and he doesn't see a damn thing, just a bunch of letters and numbers. Better yet, show the actual bytes, not how it is interpreted on a block explorer. Understanding, interpreting, and verifying that blockchain requires an understanding of the protocol, and being able to do things like verify secp256k1 signatures and sha256 hashes (two bits of complex cryptographic math) in order to tell that the blocks are valid, the transactions are valid, and the outputs (coins) you receive are legitimate.

Monero is exactly the same damn thing. If you understand the protocol, and how to verify CryptoNight hashes and CryptoNote ring signatures (two more bits of complex cryptographic math) you can tell the blocks are valid, the transactions are valid, and the outputs (coins) you receive are legitimate.

It is a different protocol, with different cryptographic math, but from the point of view of verifying the chain, exactly the same.

You also don't know what fungibility even means as a definition. It means interchangeable. If the coins are all mathematically verifiable (and they are), and can't be attached to some unique and distinctive history (which the can't), then it is fungible. Whatever other gibberish you want to throw around in an ongoing months- (years- ?) long display of your own ignorance does not mean fungible, if it means anything at all.

Free in that of 100 customers in the world, 60 won't buy an electric heater. Fine. 40 will. If we divide those into 20 with miner chip (or even quite a few chips) and 20 without, both sets pay the same amount of electricity for the same amount of hot water. One mines Bitcoin, the other does not. Whether you think the 20 mining Bitcoin with no added electricity cost is a good or bad thing is likely going to depend on your opinion of Bitcoin, fair enough. But the fact of mining itself has no operational cost here, and I'm guessing that the chip cost can also be very, very low.

It might if there are enough of them. I don't really know how these numbers work out, considering for example electric water heaters, or every home having several of these chips in different devices (clothes dryer, hair dryer, dishwasher, portable heater, etc.)


Yes, that's a completely different approach and business model, as I said earlier. There is no free mining to be had on a phone. I'm frankly not too worried (incrementally) because phones are likely already the most thoroughly government controlled and compromised devices in existence.

That's an strange way of measuring efficiency (yes I know you said "energy efficiency", I just consider that measurement somewhat irrelevant). If it has better safety and fewer hassles, that increases efficiency.

The fact is, for whatever reasons, 40% of the water heater market buys electric. Unless that changes, adding mining chips to that is essentially free mining.

Not really, no. If the effective efficiency is very close to 100% infinite (which it is), the chip continues to be viable far longer than dedicated mining chips do. It doesn't need cutting edge performance.

Also, we don't know the cost of the chips, but cheap chips can be very, very cheap (<$1). Part of 21's model is silicon IP that you can license to incorporate into an existing chip design (obviously it would be a new design, by existing I mean a chip that already does something else). In terms of production cost for some products that can be literally free (other than IP license fees), if there is extra space on a convenient die size. It will reduce yield but so what, you just ship those as non-mining chips. The ones that work are free.

Electric water heating has a significant market share world wide, roughly 40%. Obviously there are other such devices, and markets vary. I guess the Philippines won't be hotbed of Bitcoin mining (that makes logical sense given the waste heat issue, conceivably PV might change that at some point).

Well work out the numbers if you like. The amount of energy stored in the mining chip will be negligible due to its small mass. Or you can use other tricks, like run the chip for a shorter period of time than the typical hair drying cycle (so the chip is usually idle and being cooled before the hair drier is turned off).

The heating chip will be kept relatively cool because first of all it is small and has a low mass, and second of all because it is being cooled by room air at the intake. The latter I can tell you from experience working with air cooled chips. A hair dryer has plenty of airflow to keep even a high power chip cool via air cooling. Worst case you downgrade the chip power if necessary to keep it cool (unlikely), so you get less output. Still (effectively) 100% efficiency, just less output, but that's not the play here.

These are engineering problems and I'm quite certain it won't be hard to dominate dedicated miners in terms of efficiency here. I'm far less confident in 21's investors getting a positive return on their investment, but that's a different story.


Just downgrade the chip power. You can air cool it easily without any kind of exotic heat sink, or maybe none at all.

The exchange is. Moneroclub is just a method of meeting people. Use another method if you like. Better yet, use both/many.

No. Work out the actual transfer equations if you like, but it ends up being an equivalence. Energy in = heat out. Or the device self destructs. Certainly true for a room heater. True in practice for a hair dryer, water heater, etc. I'm not so sure about a toaster. That may be a bad application for it.
 

No not to a point. Very nearly completely. The electricity at that point is literally free, and the only concern wrt efficiency is the cost of the chips themselves. With extreme mass production that may also be driven down below the cost of dedicated mining chips, especially if the latter is more concerned with operational efficiency. Or even if not, the expectation is that the cost of electricity dominates the cost of chips.

Yes, please list and use and spread the word. Centralized exchanges, meh. Always been trouble.

It certainly will for some of these devices. A portable room heater being one example. That is absolutely 100% efficiency. There is nowhere else for the heat to go. In most of the others the device can be designed in such a way that the efficiency approaches or reaches 100%. For example, in the case of a hair dryer you can put the mining chip at the air intake before the coils and reduce the power to the coils by the same amount. You get the same output as before. Clothes dryer, etc. is quite similar.

On the mobile/IoT side I think they are looking more at the distribution aspect and less at the efficiency of mining being significant.

EDIT: okay sure, there are RF emissions, and the deliberate power output for WiFi or mobile, but that is negligible compared to even 10 W of actual mining power. There is still no question this far exceeds the efficiency of dedicated mining.

In short, no.

1. The position of each word matters. The same word in a different position has a different value.

2. You're seeing the birthday problem (higher than expected likelihood of some match in the set), and no it does not affect security.

3. The last word doesn't count. It is a checksum.

Absolutely yes. Phone, maybe not. That's more of monetization play, and a long shot on creating a distribution vehicle for micro-BTC that could be used for micro-payments.

But for any device that produces heat (toaster, portable heater, hair dryer, clothes dryer, towel warmer, dishwasher dry cycle, etc.), the efficiency of mining is infinite.

i2p is somewhat better because of what they call garlic routing where multiple separate messages are deliberately combined to frustrate timing/traffic attacks. I don't know of a careful analysis of how effective that is, but at least they try.

It does hide every new address (in the sense that it is just a random number), and the change is blinded just like any other payee. You can't tell by monitoring at the network level which outputs are change and which are not. You also can't tell by monitoring at the network level which outputs are being spent, so you can't ever be sure that change is being spent.

Wallets do have to be careful how they select coins to avoid skewing probabilities. The best is probably to spend a change output by itself without combining with other outputs (this could be spent back to yourself, but at that point it no longer can be identified as change). It's probably still okay to spend it with other outputs of yours that don't share a near ancestor.

Even so, the worst case is a probabilistic correlation that is still denyable, and which erodes away after multiple transactions. At the IP level it is definitely true that monitoring Monero traffic reveals far, far less useful information than monitoring Bitcoin traffic.

I have no idea what Odalv is talking about, he makes these claims about simultaneous equations but he seems not to understand the math at all. He previously claimed you could steal coins that way, but I guess he's given up on that nonsense now and moved on to some other likely nonsense.

Uh, no. You are misreading something.


No you can't. It is totally different cryptography at the transaction level, and would require at least a soft fork, but that is very messy and far more complex than any existing or proposed soft forks, meaning it has essentially zero chance to happen in practice. It could and probably will happen on a side chain, but that raises various other issues.

There are other differences like an actual deployed (and somewhat stress tested) mechanism for managing the blocksize without a hard limit.

Well, there's a pretty decent argument that coins that share little to no code with Bitcoin and break significantly with its design principles with Bitcoin aren't really "altcoins" at all in the original sense (which was more like Bitcoin forks). That doesn't make them good technologies or good investments, but they're at least different. That's a start.