Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[TPTB_need_war]

The only reason to care about energy efficiency is either:

1. You personally care.

2. Society benefits.

I assert neither are true in the case of Westerners using electric water heating. And neither are true in the case of enticing dumb people to adopt Bitcoin so they can get some ringtones and later be enslaved with new requirements for this money.

This is benefiting the utility companies (which the TPTB/government now owns via carbon tax and other regulatory capture) and the enslavement of the dumb, which then pits us who want choice against the inertia.

Of course the way to hide this action is to obscure it in more of the same bullshit as climate change or global warming or environmentalism. This is clearly the fingerprint of the Rockefellers.

[1714205623]

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[1714205623]

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[TPTB_need_war]

The network does. Difficulty goes up. Security goes up.

Security goes down! These nodes are all serving the designated pool.

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

Myopic. Big farms are just usury. This is same usury that is backing utilities. The real profit comes from a monopoly on money, what we were fighting by supporting crypto.

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.

How can we have a meaningful discussion if you pigeonhole to the irrelevant factors only.

This is not about energy efficiency. You argued very hard that is it about efficiency (energy or otherwise).

[pa]

Monero has lost ~90% of it's value vs. BTC since last September

Uh, no. You are misreading something.

My bad, I was looking at the market cap valuation which is off that much. The BTC price is only down ~75% from last Sept. Still not exactly great price performance....

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/  (click on "all" for the full history)

There's something buggy about coinmarketcap.com's XMR charting. The "All" chart only goes to Feb 15, before the recent increase in XMR price. For a better price chart, see: https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_xmr

[smooth]

How can we have a meaningful discussion if you pigeonhole to the irrelevant factors only.

This is not about energy efficiency. You argued very hard that is it about efficiency (energy or otherwise).

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.

[TPTB_need_war]

The real goal here is to extract say $3-5 per month (what ever the end user will not notice) from the electric bill and use this "loan repayment method" to get more smartphones and bitcoin to people in the developing world. This is  a way to loan a smartphone in exchange for electricity usage.

This can also help centralize the mining of Bitcoin faster as it will bloat the blockchain and tx rate forcing centralization of mining.

The user may get so few BTC that isn't worth converting to an altcoin investment.

It creates a market for the BTC centralized mining micropayments thus driving network effects against any other altcoin's attempt to do decentralized micropayments.

[TPTB_need_war]

How can we have a meaningful discussion if you pigeonhole to the irrelevant factors only.

This is not about energy efficiency. You argued very hard that is it about efficiency (energy or otherwise).

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.

His question was not asking about energy efficiency, but rather what is the holistic point of it all. And he is correct that the energy efficiency is scam. The real goal is enslavement of the developing world by loaning a smartphone in exchange for unnoticed electricity usage.

And this is a critical point. If you can move the worlds CPUs into your coin decentralized, you can beat Bitcoin because you can move more hardware value into your coin. Especially if you can give the mined morsels to be so small that no one sells and they instead circulate those morsels on a use-case that Bitcoin can't do.

+1

This is exactly what 21 Inc. will be doing…adding bitcoin miners to devices like cellphones, thereby giving "mined morsels" to potentially millions of new devices.  I'm very excited to see how this plays out!

yeah, i thought of that too.

i think it's going to be a huge win.

Ok, perhaps you can help me understand, as I am really stuck on this one. Is it possible for a toaster/phone + mining chip to be as/more efficient than the best ASIC's on the market, and if it is not, how can this be a cost-efficient way to mine? I get that the network effect of so many devices mining would be hugely beneficial for BTC, and the 'free BTC' could be a PR/adoption coup, but is there a 'sleight of hand' going on here? Will consumers be receiving what they perceive as 'free BTC' through their toasters or phones, but in reality end up paying more than the market rate for BTC due to the higher electricity costs of running/charging these devices? Surely a toaster-miner has to be more expensive to use than a regular toaster, even if only at the margin, where it is not noticed as a small increase in the electricity bill.
In a market economy the most cost-efficient mining ought to win out, but this seems like a possible (intentional) way to 'distort' that.
Apologies if I am missing something completely obvious

EDIT: Also, as I understand it, a percentage of these mined morsels will go directly to 21Inc, making them yet more expensive for Joe Public.
It almost seems like a legal mining bot-net

[smooth]

Monero has lost ~90% of it's value vs. BTC since last September

Uh, no. You are misreading something.

My bad, I was looking at the market cap valuation which is off that much. The BTC price is only down ~75% from last Sept. Still not exactly great price performance....

You can't really blame XMR (which is priced against BTC, and more fundamentally trades relative to the greater crypto ecosystem) for BTC being down 75%. XMR is down relative to BTC over that time period (but up >100% since December, so why cherry pick starting points here?) but not anywhere near 90%.

I disagree here, there are multiple proposals on how to layer privacy oriented transactions on top of bitcoin. Some rely on shared secrets, some enable wallets to communicate and build distributed trustless mixing mechanisms (which is exactly what Monero says it does).

You are incorrect. That isn't exactly what Monero does. Monero doesn't do "distributed" mixing, it does counterparty-less mixing. Which means nothing distributed between any parties (or using any kind coordinating "node") and no shared secrets. There is no other proposed solution to do that. It can't be done in wallets.

[justusranvier]

I am not surprised to hear about the bold part, but question whether or not this is legal on an employer's part. Employers can (and should) censor employee communication regarding their specific industry (customers, competitors, etc). But they can not censor employee's speech in general. Obviously there are gray areas on where you draw the line and my understanding is from a legal sense the line fairly well defined to a specific & narrow set of firms that an employer interacts with or competes with. Having an investor with an unrelated investment does not qualify.

A bitcoin company does not work with or compete with an altcoin company, they are in separate areas. I would not be happy with an employer who censored me here, and think I would have legal standing to push back on that.

I'm not going to name the specific companies involved due to the risk of retaliation against the employees involved, but it might be worth asking the CEOs of established, respected Bitcoin companies about their policies regarding the right of their employees to express their own personal views in public.

[smooth]

His question was not asking about energy efficiency, but rather what is the holistic point of it all. And he is correct that the energy efficiency is scam. The real goal is enslavement of the developing world by loaning a smartphone in exchange for unnoticed electricity usage.

His question was exactly efficiency. I answered both with respect to energy efficiency (much better than the best ASICs as currently deployed, given effectively free electricity) and overall efficiency (likely also, since the chips will likely be very cheap). If I recall correctly I also said I didn't think it was a particularly good idea, regardless of efficiency.

He didn't ask about Larry Summers, etc. That's fair game for you be interested in talking about, but not what he asked.

Is it possible for a toaster/phone + mining chip to be as/more efficient than the best ASIC's on the market, and if it is not, how can this be a cost-efficient way to mine?

[smooth]

The network does. Difficulty goes up. Security goes up.

Security goes down! These nodes are all serving the designated pool.

We don't know that yet. They haven't disclosed how the mining is actually going to work. I'd guess you are right about it being a pool, but whether that is an increase or decrease in security overall is a matter of interpretation (including, relative to what?)

[Peter R]

There is nowhere else for the heat to go.

Aren't you forgetting that the efficiency of a thermodynamic process is proportional the ratio of the differences in temperature and the ambient.

For someone who trumpets regularly about his superior intelligence and his breaking insights into fields from physics to economics, you sure get a lot of the basics wrong.  If a mining device uses X joules of electrical energy to perform Y hashes, those X joules get converted into an equal amount of heat.  This is basic conservation of energy.  

What you're confusing this with is the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine working between a hot and cold reservoir to perform useful work.  Interestingly, a heat engine run in reverse becomes a "heat pump" and can be used to convert work into a greater amount of heat at the hot reservoir side; it's actually possible to get 2, 3 or more Joules of heat output for every Joule of mechanical or electrical energy put into the heat pump (because this extra heat gets "pumped" from the cold reservoir)!  

¹For the pedantic, minus a negligible amount lost as EM radiation, etc.

[cypherdoc]

the 21 mining chip rollout is mostly about smartphones.

this is a well documented fast, growing mkt that is leapfrogging laptops/desktops in developing nations like Africa.  there are literally billions of new customers on the line and they also happen to be unbanked.  this is a way to subsidize getting phones into their hands.  the other problem has been getting ppl in developed nations to use their credit cards with their phones.  the UI's have been clunky (ever tried buying anything from a website from your phone?) and no one quite trusts doing it.  Apple Pay has been failing miserably basically b/c the bank verification process has been defrauded with stolen cc info and there is no good way to marry the two technologies with all the ongoing hacks.  there is no safe way for the traditional fiat system to secure smartphone payments.  until now with 21.  

the mining chip appears to be quite efficient and will most likely include a private/public keypair to and from which BTC can be sent.  this will act like a secure element hardware device where the keys can't be hacked.  much like a Trezor or what LedgerWallet is trying to build into the sandboxed security elements or trusted space.  this will enable not only the micropayments from the mined BTC but a fully functional and safe wallet on the phone which should enable widespread ordinary commerce in these developing nations.  you know this is why Qualcomm is involved.  the smartphone makers will love it b/c this is a way to get new users of their phones in exchange for their paying electricity to charge their phones and mine.  battery life is likely not to be a factor as most ppl keep their phones plugged in most of the time.  i know i do while at work all day and at night while at home or sleeping.  the phone might as well be mining during those times and generating usable BTC for later services.  plus, electricity at work is free.  as well, this is a foolproof way to authenticate the phone with their wireless network on initialization.  Cloud service costs will be easily defrayed with micropayments.  makers of the smartphones will receive BTC payments which they can either cash in immediately or hold for future appreciation.  remember, we are still dealing with a deflationary currency (fixed supply) with huge upside potential and with the smartphone makers seemingly willing to determine their own financial future with this move, this will ensure Bitcoin's future.  and with that, a tremendous increase in value of BTC going forward as we have always believed.  this is the binary future unfolding to the upside before our very eyes.  this is also about the tech industry breaking free of the reins of Wall St which i've well characterized for a couple of years now.  

the great thing that will result is the decentralization of mining across millions and more likely billions of devices round the world all at the individual level that can't possibly be shut down unless you believe in unified gvt violation of human rights.  i don't.  if you do, you'll have to explain why we still have wars, conflicts, cross border intelligence agency hackings, Stuxnet, Sony hacks, China & Russia stockpiling gold while the US is disgorging gold, Angela Merkel phone taps, as well as a myriad of other international conflicts.

Bitcoin's future is bright.

edit:  the device makers will have the incentive to form their own mining pools to collect BTC which i am sure they'll do.  this will further decentralize mining.

[worth]

I find the 21 Dot Co. plans to be interesting and potentially pretty exciting. Speaking of efficiency though, I can't help but wonder if this could be achieved more effectively with a different algo like Blake256 which, to my understanding, is vastly more efficient than SHA256. 

Obviously that would require using an altcoin instead of bitcoin, and I know this tends to be a very bitcoin-only thread, so don't run me out of town on a rail as a heretic for asking. 

[cypherdoc]

I find the 21 Dot Co. plans to be interesting and potentially pretty exciting. Speaking of efficiency though, I can't help but wonder if this could be achieved more effectively with a different algo like Blake256 which, to my understanding, is vastly more efficient than SHA256.  

Obviously that would require using an altcoin instead of bitcoin, and I know this tends to be a very bitcoin-only thread, so don't run me out of town on a rail as a heretic for asking.  

why would you need more efficiency when POW is designed to force real resource expenditure costs so as to prevent lazy, cheapass hacks?

[79b79aa8d5047da6d3XX]

the device makers will have the incentive to form their own mining pools to collect BTC which i am sure they'll do.  this will further decentralize mining.

or it may concentrate it. we shall find out.

[cypherdoc]

the device makers will have the incentive to form their own mining pools to collect BTC which i am sure they'll do.  this will further decentralize mining.

or it may concentrate it. we shall find out.

i don't see how taking today's mining pools and adding dozens of phone maker, router maker, and other device making mining pools with their millions of users can result in centralization.

[79b79aa8d5047da6d3XX]

water heater miners don't get to chose their pool, they mine for the manufacturer's.

[smooth]

battery life is likely not to be a factor as most ppl keep their phones plugged in most of the time

I'm pretty sure that's wrong, but they can be configured to mine only when plugged in, which might be 20-25% of the phones in the world, which is still an enormous number, or mine at a lower power level when on battery (cutting the mining power to 1/4 cuts the power usage to 1/16, which might be negligible)

I agree the idea of a hardware wallet combined with mining in a small device makes a lot of sense.

[cypherdoc]

water heater miners don't get to chose their pool, they mine for the manufacturer's.

that's ok.  there are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that could eventually participate.

i believe, on a macro level, that these companies are driven by the same attraction we all have for Bitcoin; usage of a fixed supply, apolitical currency that should at least over the long term be stable in value.  not only that, it has the potential to increase, not decrease, in value in a pretty large way.  this innovative 21 business model facilitates the integration of Bitcoin into their business through the proper incentives.

[smooth]

the device makers will have the incentive to form their own mining pools to collect BTC which i am sure they'll do.  this will further decentralize mining.

or it may concentrate it. we shall find out.

i don't see how taking today's mining pools and adding dozens of phone maker, router maker, and other device making mining pools with their millions of users can result in centralization.

It isn't clear those parties will create their own mining pools. They may outsource. But we don't know at this point, everyone is guessing, including whether this who concept gets any traction at all.