Petition to ban bitcoins

[peter.mitchell]

This falls in to the same category as the news where they calculate and announce that you can save over 9000 jiggawatthours when you remove phone chargers from the socket when you're not using them. But then they fail to mention that it's a tiny miniscule fraction of the energy used by lets say street lamps or even toasters (who needs toasters, you can eat your bread without toasting it, right!?). It probably used more energy to create and view the news article than they would save by removing the chargers from the wall...

Hahaha, people complaining about leaving the lights on in a room for 10 mins when you walk out... same people who leave the iron on for 15 mins accidentally, or set the kettle to boil and forget about it and come back an hour later and boil it again.

[TerraHertz]

Nothing like a good petition signing to demonstrate what idiots some people are.
For instance, the people willing to sign a petition to grant Obama immunity for any crimes. http://patriotaction.net/video/obama-supporters-petition-to-grant-him-immunity-for-all-crimes-he

I take it the 'anti-bitcoin petition' means some PR firm has been hired to demonize the dangerous idea of a virtual currency free of government and private banking extortion. After all if they simply tried to ban it, it would just get more popular.
I bet the same people are trying very hard to think of some way to claim bitcoins are a threat to children.

Oh wait, they already did.
http://www.dailydot.com/news/eric-marques-tor-freedom-hosting-child-porn-arrest/
An in-depth guide to Freedom hosting, the engine of the Dark Net.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158783

One month after starting up an independent virtual bank, Freedom Hosting gets destroyed for 'child porn'. What a coincidence.

[jucole]

Bitcoin to me is a really interesting currency system; I'm not sure why you'd want to petition to ban it.  I believe I read somewhere that if the mining returns drop to a point where it's not profitable, then the "foundation" could tweak the system to award a larger transaction fee to the miners to make it worth it.

[MacAttak]

Did you see that I was saying "on your home PC" though?  I agree that the ROI can be there if you use the right hardware, but I don't think it's there for the average Joe using their home PC.  The fastest GPU setups are about 3Mhash/Joule whereas most of the ASIC setups are over 100.  MHash/$ is another one - the ASIC's are so far out in front I don't think there is any ROI on doing it on your home PC.

Could be wrong though, I haven't been keeping that up to date with the latest.

Umm, right. I'm talking about apples and you're talking about apples.

CPU mining is absurdly inefficient. GPU mining has excessive power usage. I wasn't talking about people running mining rigs with those.

ASICs are a part of the average "home PC" mining rig configuration now. There are a ton of Block Erupters and Jalapenos out there, plus a recent boom in Avalon-based rigs. These are mostly people who just run a few of them attached to their PC. Like this:



Unless you invest a lot of money into it (thousands of dollars), mining is just a curiosity. Always has been. For now it is still something that an average person can do, if for no reason other than to learn about it. It is barely profitable using small Block Erupters like in the photo above, but it is still above the red line. The hardware does resell for a decent price - it doesn't depreciate faster than the value goes down - and bitcoin in general has enjoyed some pretty intense value gains lately.

So for what I paid for those four miners and the electricity cost (very small for ASICs), plus what I've mined (and what they sell for on ebay right now), it is a slightly profitable activity for now (VERY slightly). I'll probably get bored of it and sell the miners before it becomes a net loss.

And these are the lowest efficiency ASIC devices on the market. The others are much better MHash/$.

[Corporate666]

Umm, right. I'm talking about apples and you're talking about apples.

CPU mining is absurdly inefficient. GPU mining has excessive power usage. I wasn't talking about people running mining rigs with those.

Not what I'd call a home PC... but I see what you're saying.  I was talking about people mining on the computers they are also using for other tasks.  The ROI is already negative for that... and just barely there for other hardware (that you need to pay for the power cost for).  I think there are a lot of folks mining who aren't paying for the power (some not paying for the hardware either).  It's hard to compete with free.

[MacAttak]

I'm not sure why it is disqualified as a "home PC". That photo is just a USB hub (that I already had) plugged into my macbook that I use for nearly everything, including 8-12 hours per day of work. MacMiner just runs in a window, quietly feeding work to the dongles. Zero impact on the rest of the system. Negligible CPU activity and very low network utilization.

That's how an increasingly large swath of people are running miners (some with more USB hubs than others). These things are essentially plug-and-play devices with only a simple driver that needs to be installed.

[nctnico]

Bitcoin to me is a really interesting currency system; I'm not sure why you'd want to petition to ban it.  I believe I read somewhere that if the mining returns drop to a point where it's not profitable, then the "foundation" could tweak the system to award a larger transaction fee to the miners to make it worth it.

I'm not against virtual currency or whatever and I'm not endulging myself into conspiracy theories either. My beef is that we really don't need something new in this world which wastes a lot of energy while everybody is (forced to) conserving energy. You can't argue against that or claim its insignificant. The people behind bitcoin could have developed different methods for a gradual release of bitcoins.

[Corporate666]

Bitcoin to me is a really interesting currency system; I'm not sure why you'd want to petition to ban it.  I believe I read somewhere that if the mining returns drop to a point where it's not profitable, then the "foundation" could tweak the system to award a larger transaction fee to the miners to make it worth it.

I'm not against virtual currency or whatever and I'm not endulging myself into conspiracy theories either. My beef is that we really don't need something new in this world which wastes a lot of energy while everybody is (forced to) conserving energy. You can't argue against that or claim its insignificant. The people behind bitcoin could have developed different methods for a gradual release of bitcoins.

Not really... the whole point is that bitcoin is about production.  Every other fiat currency is about something else, except gold which is more about the amount that exists in total, the difficulty in extracting it, and of course supply/demand.

That is what makes Bitcoin so good and so different.  It's not just based on some business or government that backs it but rather on actual production.  Work had to be performed for each bitcoin in existence.

[MacAttak]

It does have one significant achilles heel though - bitcoin's foundation is cryptography technology. Which is derived from a science that we are still learning, still very much in its infancy really. And highly reliant upon both hardware assumptions and vulnerability assumptions. One really smart kid could figure out a small flaw in the SHA-2 hashing algorithms and overnight the "currency" would be effectively without value because the block chain would no longer be a trustworthy system of record. This has happened in the past to other algorithms - there is no reason to believe it won't happen eventually to the SHA-2 family.

This is not a weakness of traditional currencies except in the far less likely occurrence of a full financial system collapse.

[TerraHertz]

I'm not against virtual currency or whatever and I'm not endulging myself into conspiracy theories either. My beef is that we really don't need something new in this world

Pardon? In the field of currency & banking we most certainly DO need something new. To say we don't merely demonstrates that you somehow haven't noticed the serious structural/political flaws in the current global financial system, which everyone who pays attention is well aware of. Search terms: fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, private banking cartels, currency creation via loans, rigged gold & silver markets, US Federal Reserve is a privately owned corporation, Creature from Jekyl Island... just for starters.

which wastes a lot of energy while everybody is (forced to) conserving energy.

You absolutely haven't demonstrated that the total energy used for bitcoin mining is significant in any way. Especially relative to other large scale computing systems such as google searching, cloud computing, HF trading, and even the poor design of standard html/CSS/script which places much of the web page display calculation burden on Clients (every time), rather than the Servers (once.)

You can't argue against that or claim its insignificant.

Yes we can.

The people behind bitcoin could have developed different methods for a gradual release of bitcoins.

You need to propose at least one viable alternative before you can claim that. I bet you can't.

Btw, the only 'indulgence' related to conspiracy theories, is to pretend that the world is run on an 'open' model, and that the wealthy and powerful never do things in secret among themselves that you wouldn't like if you knew about it.
This is an extremely naive, even stupid assumption. Edward Snowden would sneer at you, and so would Michael Hastings - if he were still alive.

[Slobodan]

Ban BitCoin? 

Slaves will be slaves...

[ddavidebor]

Guys why we don't let this topic die?

Is so stupid

[nctnico]

I guess I'll put all my incandescent light bulbs back in the lamps and dump the CFL lights... Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy. Still don't see the light?

[dfmischler]

Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy.

Whatever happened to changing hearts and minds rather than making stuff illegal?

I think the goverment banned incandescent light bulbs because the manufacturers and distributors of the newer lighting technologies lobbied really hard for it.  They knew their newer products were not ready to meet consumers' needs on a level playing field (e.g. full output at initial startup).  It doesn't help that the packages tell you the bulb will last e.g. 10 years based on the projected percentage of new bulb output when the customer wants to know longevity based primarily on MTBF.

[Fsck]

I guess I'll put all my incandescent light bulbs back in the lamps and dump the CFL lights... Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy. Still don't see the light?

how do you intend to ban information/data? have mandatory logging of every packet transmitted and mandatory analysis of every encrypted packet?

[nitro2k01]

how do you intend to ban information/data? have mandatory logging of every packet transmitted and mandatory analysis of every encrypted packet?

It's obviously a futile exercise to try to people from trading BTC. A "ban" would likely consist of banning/blacklisting BTC exchanges, and maybe even banning companies from accepting BTC as payment. This would make it practically useless for many users. Such roadblocks are already in place even though they they do not constitute an outright "ban" at this point.

[Rufus]

Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy.

Whatever happened to changing hearts and minds rather than making stuff illegal?

Politicians want to change hearts and minds where legislation would result in the prosecution of law breaking voters.

Where legislation which might result in prosecution of a few companies that have no vote they don't give a shit, unless of course those companies are bribing them.

[smashedProton]

Legislation is the governments way of stating that it does not trust the populance.

[NiHaoMike]

Bitcoin makes a lot of sense for those stuck with electric heating and no practical way to use a heat pump or other way to get heat. The bitcoins produced "subsidize" the cost of electricity, which turns into heat anyways. Therefore, they could use just any hardware they could get, since any return is positive relative to plain resistance heating.

[MacAttak]

FWIW my previous statement about it still being profitable to mine bitcoins on a typical home PC is already no longer really valid.

In just the last two weeks alone, the global hashing speed has increased ridiculously quickly. My mining pool alone has seen a 30% - 40% rise in hash rates. I'm not sure what hardware suddenly went online, but yeah, it is not really viable now (even with USB ASICS) unless you have thousands of dollars to invest in large rigs.

It would be smarter to buy bitcoins and hold onto them instead.

[AndyC_772]

It's obviously a futile exercise to try to people from trading BTC. A "ban" would likely consist of banning/blacklisting BTC exchanges, and maybe even banning companies from accepting BTC as payment. This would make it practically useless for many users. Such roadblocks are already in place even though they they do not constitute an outright "ban" at this point.

I'm not quite sure how even that would work. Isn't a bitcoin essentially a block of data which constitutes mathematical proof that some very processor intensive operation has been carried out? In other words, it's just a piece of data which is regarded to have value - just like a music file, movie, chunk of source code, or any other intellectual property.

[ddavidebor]

"Isn't a bitcoin essentially a block of data which constitutes mathematical proof that some very processor intensive operation has been carried out?"

yes that's ONE bitcoins, also the bitcoins network is interesting and involve public transations and other interesting arguments.

[TerraHertz]

I guess I'll put all my incandescent light bulbs back in the lamps and dump the CFL lights... Oh, wait, the government banned incandescents light bulbs because they waste energy. Still don't see the light?

Personally I believe the government banned incandescent bulbs for _other_ reasons, including bribery. I have yet to see any study that compares the total product power usage per year for CCFLs vs incandescents when including total manufacturing costs, energy and materials consumption, given a realistic MTBF and replacement rate for each. Not to mention that tungsten bulbs contain no poisonous substances, while CCFLs contain many. (Mercury, the rare-earth phosphors, the fibreglass, aluminium, semiconductors, ferrites, electrolytics, plastics, and so on.) That whole changeover was insane imo. And FORCING it on us was yet another kind of insanity.

MacAttak: In just the last two weeks alone, the global hashing speed has increased ridiculously quickly. My mining pool alone has seen a 30% - 40% rise in hash rates. I'm not sure what hardware suddenly went online, ...

Perhaps the NSA decided it would have a go at bitcoin mining. if you can't beat them, join them. Then shoot them in the back.