Is anyone else starting to become a bit worried? mod note in first post

smacl wrote: »

You might want to explain how a guy running miners, from power he generates himself, to bring his house to temperature he would have it at regardless of whether he was mining, is negatively affecting the polar ice caps?

How much noise does that rig make to heat the house? Is it a fire hazard? Can you set the times you want it to heat the place or not? Does it heat the water? Are you exceeding your supply agreement with the ESB? How do you distribute this heat to the rooks in your home ina controlled manner. Can you zone the heat so different temperatures apply to different rooms?

When the ESB talk about the electrification of heat I’m fairly sure they aren’t talking about banging a load of graphic cards into a box and sticking it under the stairs so it generates heat while mining for a cryptocoin that no one uses in anger and which has lost >90% of its value.

Proof of Work mining is an environmental disaster. It promotes a system where you prove your loyalty by throwing huge amounts of energy and compute power at solving maths problems. One of the main positives of this spectacular price collapse is the news of huge mining operations going bust, and the death of the home mining operation.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

How much noise does that rig make to heat the house? Is it a fire hazard? Can you set the times you want it to heat the place or not? Does it heat the water? Are you exceeding your supply agreement with the ESB? How do you distribute this heat to the rooks in your home ina controlled manner. Can you zone the heat so different temperatures apply to different rooms?

When the ESB talk about the electrification of heat I’m fairly sure they aren’t talking about banging a load of graphic cards into a box and sticking it under the stairs so it generates heat while mining for a cryptocoin that no one uses in anger and which has lost >90% of its value.

And that affects the environment negatively how exactly? Getting your straw men all in line there Johnny? And FWIW, GPU rigs don't make much noise and if he's using energy he's generated himself, how exactly would that lead to him exceeding his supply agreement with the ESB?

Proof of Work mining is an environmental disaster.

When it comes to huge mining systems, I've no argument there. That said, in terms of ongoing environmental damage and the polar ice caps, crypto represents a very tiny fraction of the overall problem. If you look at the carbon footprint of the posters on this board, whether crypto fans or sceptics, I'd imagine how many cars are in the family, whether they holiday abroad or locally, and how they heat their houses would play a much larger role than any interest in crypto. In Unkel's case, I'd say his interest in crypto means that he has a smaller carbon footprint than his neighbours burning oil, gas or coal.

It promotes a system where you prove your loyalty by throwing huge amounts of energy and compute power at solving maths problems. One of the main positives of this spectacular price collapse is the news of huge mining operations going bust, and the death of the home mining operation.

Yep, and as you're well aware it is a system that most new crypto currencies are moving away from, but you seem to forget that as it doesn't suit your narrative.

JJJJNR

worded wrote: »

Tell that to the polar bears drowning from lack of ice though.

Crypto doesn’t seem to have green credentials though does it ?

You don't believe all that fake environmental industry bull do you. I thought intelligent people question everything.

smacl wrote: »

And that affects the environment negatively how exactly? Getting your straw men all in line there Johnny? And FWIW, GPU rigs don't make much noise and if he's using energy he's generated himself, how exactly would that lead to him exceeding his supply agreement with the ESB?

When it comes to huge mining systems, I've no argument there. That said, in terms of ongoing environmental damage and the polar ice caps, crypto represents a very tiny fraction of the overall problem. If you look at the carbon footprint of the posters on this board, whether crypto fans or sceptics, I'd imagine how many cars are in the family, whether they holiday abroad or locally, and how they heat their houses would play a much larger role than any interest in crypto. In Unkel's case, I'd say his interest in crypto means that he has a smaller carbon footprint than his neighbours burning oil, gas or coal.

Yep, and as you're well aware it is a system that most new crypto currencies are moving away from, but you seem to forget that as it doesn't suit your narrative.

I keep hearing that crypto is moving away from the morally repugnant proof of work model towards alternative proofs such as proof of stake. But where are they? That weird looking Ethereum guy has been making promises for years about it for years, but nothing has emerged. Cleverer men and women than me have suggested that proof of stake will invariably lead to centralisation anyway and then all you have is a really slow database.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

I keep hearing that crypto is moving away from the morally repugnant proof of work model towards alternative proofs such as proof of stake. But where are they? That weird looking Ethereum guy has been making promises for years about it for years, but nothing has emerged. Cleverer men and women than me have suggested that proof of stake will invariably lead to centralisation anyway and then all you have is a really slow database.

I keep hearing that cars are moving away from the morally repugnant internal combustion engine, which FWIW is doing rather more damage to the environment than crypto, but it would seem these things take time. ETH had initially planned on moving from PoW to PoS via a hybrid stage which is no longer the case, but it is still their main focus for development. More here.

Pintman Paddy Losty

Did anyone hear the cryptocurrency segment on Sean O Rourke this morning? He revisited some canny crypto investors in January and again this week.

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/podcast/rt%C3%A9-today-with-sean-orourke/id698141459?mt=2&i=1000425191379

Worth a listen. 10.mins long.

Pintman Paddy Losty wrote: »

Did anyone hear the cryptocurrency segment on Sean O Rourke this morning? He revisited some canny crypto investors in January and again this week.

https://itunes.apple.com/ie/podcast/rt%C3%A9-today-with-sean-orourke/id698141459?mt=2&i=1000425191379

Worth a listen. 10.mins long.

Just listened to it. Lucky that the guys were canny enough to take out their initial investment. It’s always telling that they never tell you which projects they are invested in. Professor Brian Lucey pulled no punches at the end, did he? A speculative mania more akin to gambling.

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

Just listened to it. Lucky that the guys were canny enough to take out their initial investment.

Yeah, was it just me that had some difficulty believing bits of that?

Like, he went from gung ho before Christmas, "this is just the beginning" etc, to taking his initial investment out jan 5th..

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Yeah, was it just me that had some difficulty believing bits of that?

No, I found it very difficult to believe as well. On the one hand he invested everything he had in it, and believed the price would continue to rise, yet he was astute enough to withdraw his initial investment. Perhaps so, but it’s estimated that over 90% of crypto speculators have lost money. Maybe the luck of the Irish is real?!

Ah, it sucks, and I feel bad laughing..but it is kind of hilarious all the same..

makeorbrake

Schadenfreude alive and well it would seem....but to be expected as it's filtered into some of the 'opinions' expressed here.

unkel

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

How much noise does that rig make to heat the house? Is it a fire hazard? Can you set the times you want it to heat the place or not? Does it heat the water? Are you exceeding your supply agreement with the ESB? How do you distribute this heat to the rooks in your home ina controlled manner. Can you zone the heat so different temperatures apply to different rooms?

Rigs are very quite. Audible but not annoying. The hottest parts are the GPU cores, which never go over about 75C, so no, not a fire hazard. My water is heated mostly by solar tubes. My miners are running up to 100% on solar PV (around midday on a sunny day). I am not exceeding my supply agreement with the ESB. As for zoning, I have one medium size rig in the living room (where we like our temp to be the highest). One larger rig in the large conservatory / kitchen area and one small rig in the attic. We now only use 3 radiators in the house (on the ground floor), and only a few hours a day, even on a cold day. These radiators are fed from a modern 98% efficient condensing gas boiler.

Hope that answers all your questions? My family car is a full battery EV too. I think, even with my mining, that my family is a hell of a lot greener than the average

Tinder Surprise

ETH just broke the $100 floor.

interesting times

think I might transfer that $1000 to coinbase soon

Tinder Surprise wrote: »

ETH just broke the $100 floor.

interesting times

think I might transfer that $1000 to coinbase soon

32 ETH gets you a stake holder position when and if Casper hits which is probably the level I'd be looking at.

el diablo

JJJJNR wrote: »

You don't believe all that fake environmental industry bull do you. I thought intelligent people question everything.

Pretty sure that nobody has ever accused worded of being intelligent.

And apparently crypto mining worldwide uses over 75% renewable energy (mostly hydro) so I'm not convinced about the environmental argument.

TheAnalyst_

JJJJNR wrote: »

So another h&s pattern has formed on bitcoin, this time bigger than before. Buy signal usually but don't take my word on it.

What's your advice now? Buy?

TheAnalyst_

This stuff is hilarious.
https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/12/06/bitcoin-price-watch-btc-usd-bounce-from-lows-could-fade-soon/

TheAnalyst_ wrote:

This stuff is hilarious.

I read this earlier but the price has since dropped below $3600. So the part where it says its recovering nicely is a bit meaningless.

JJJJNR

TheAnalyst_ wrote: »

What's your advice now? Buy?

No wait for another h&s. It'll happen again, 10 euro gain the last time.

grindle

Figured it'd be best not to infect what's supposed to be a lighthearted (oh-so-very rare!) thread with more of this stuff, so:

grindle wrote: »

This would be so funny. Please let it happen.

TallyRand wrote: »

Why would that be funny?

The memes of crypto get better the worse things get. People revert to gallows humour. Obviously it's terrible for anybody who's banking on that money going up consistently but they knew the risks, or if they didn't they certainly understand them now. I don't want anybody to lose their shirts but some people use humour while it's happening.

TallyRand wrote: »

What coins do you fancy aside from the glut of sh1t coins? Eth your only tech / project you like?

There are tons I like whether I think their value will increase or not because they're sound ideas but could end up being terribly implemented or (especially for ERC-20 tokens) hampered near-term by scalability issues, in which case they could have to pull the plug, plunge to zero - I'm okay with that.
From the top 100: ETH, XMR, DAI, NANO, BAT, SIA, GNT, BNB, OMG, RVN
Many bags below those.

TallyRand wrote: »

This is why I can’t wrap my head around crypto, most of you here slag off bitcoin, is it good or bad in your eyes?

Here and now I don't think it's good for the space. It's a very big brand and it's secure due to the sheer cost of hobbling it temporarily but Blockstream have had Bitcoin hog-tied and double-fisted for a while now. I don't trust them, I don't trust their devs & I think their ethics are diametrically opposed to what Bitcoin was set up to be. Most of the Bitcoin drama of the past couple of years would have been avoided if they'd just increased blocksize sooner.
I hadn't noticed much BTC slagging here tbh. Most are fans of it, some get sucked into the Store-of-Value meme as if it means anything and maybe that actually becomes a reality? Maybe Core and Blockstream are genuinely using that meme to Trojan Horse the original goal because if there are ever trillions of USD tied up in it they'll be able to push updates through that would earn them the governmental stink-eye nowadays.

Everything should be critiqued btw, even Ethereum. If you were to listen to Vlad Zamfir speak about Ethereum you'd think he hated it, but he's just hell-bent on making it better. Vitalik constantly gives out shít about PoW and Johnny thinks a switch can be flicked to just make PoS happen with no problems. All the concerns of centralisation via PoS are being worked out, they've had to figure out how best to limit whales reaping the most rewards, how to make things more awkward for large wallets and how to punish those trying to exploit the system. It's a complex task.
Satoshi solving the trust problem was one thing and having some huge electrical cost securing the network was the easiest way to do it - Satoshi incorrectly assumed that sane BTC devs would increase blocksize as the network was scaling up in users - adding another layer of complexity on top in order to reduce wasted energy or compute cycles whilst retaining it's decentralised properties requires a lot of forward thinking about how sharding should be implemented in the most secure way possible. Bitcoin has the benefits of starting out valueless and of being fairly "dumb". Not as in "it's not a smart idea" but it's only job is to say "You own this now", "I own this now" or "We sign that he owns those" in the case of multi-sigs. Ethereum doesn't have that luxury, if they get things majorly wrong with this it's a colossal fúck-up.
e.g. of a relatively minor fúck-up...or maybe a miner-skewed fúck-up... for current prices the ETH issuance right now is a big deal to people who want the price to go up. It's like having an oversupply of oil, price without requisite buy pressure will go down. Given the ICO craze died as people are waiting to see how the SEC moves around the ecosystem and with ETH not currently scaling due to most of their time given over to hypothesising game theories and programming and testing them, well...there's not much buy pressure. Price goes down.

makeorbrake

grindle wrote: »

Here and now I don't think it's good for the space. It's a very big brand and it's secure due to the sheer cost of hobbling it temporarily but Blockstream have had Bitcoin hog-tied and double-fisted for a while now. I don't trust them, I don't trust their devs & I think their ethics are diametrically opposed to what Bitcoin was set up to be. Most of the Bitcoin drama of the past couple of years would have been avoided if they'd just increased blocksize sooner.
I hadn't noticed much BTC slagging here tbh. Most are fans of it, some get sucked into the Store-of-Value meme as if it means anything and maybe that actually becomes a reality? Maybe Core and Blockstream are genuinely using that meme to Trojan Horse the original goal because if there are ever trillions of USD tied up in it they'll be able to push updates through that would earn them the governmental stink-eye nowadays.

There are governance issues in crypto in general - across the board. In the case of Bitcoin, it manifests through the blockstream monopoly. ETH is not immune from that either. Vitalik is conscious of the fact and has written about potential governance solutions. I would hope that someone can find a better approach as any one group having dominance OR a lack of a 'clean' way to move on from contentious issues detracts from the benefits of decentralised crypto.

In terms of store of value, I can't see why it can't act as one over the long haul. Whether it will or not, remains to be seen.
Despite bitcoins problems, because it already has the most significant network effect, we have to keep watching it. Many don't like the idea of off-chain solutions. However, if LN ends up solving the scaling issue for Bitcoin, it's still in the game.

The very same to be said about ETH. Great potential but only if it overcomes it's current stumbling blocks.

Can't rule either of them out or someone building a better mouse trap in the meantime...

DontThankMe

Is there any truth in this statement:

"Bitcoin has no use value, only exchange value, and because it is has no worth in use other than what others are willing to pay for it, it is always in a bubble: these happen when prices of assets get dislodged from their fundamental value. So Bitcoin is the perfect bubble."

makeorbrake

DontThankMe wrote: »

"Bitcoin has no use value, only exchange value, and because it is has no worth in use other than what others are willing to pay for it, it is always in a bubble: these happen when prices of assets get dislodged from their fundamental value. So Bitcoin is the perfect bubble."

For some there is and for some there isn't. It's up to you to decide for yourself. It goes back to the intrinsic value debate. How does gold have value? Some will argue that it's useful whereas crypto isn't as it can be used as jewellery or for some limited industrial uses. In reality, it's stored in vaults and for the most part, it's use case is to act as a store of value. Who gave it a value? People. Who give anything a value? How are those smelly pieces of paper in your wallet anything other than paper? Some say they're backed by force/government. They also get printed off and devalued all day every day. Additionally, public debt relative to the USD stands at some $21 trillion.
If crypto has no redeeming qualities, then it would be fair to assume that it will fizzle out to zero shortly and never be heard of again. I suspect that won't be the case but that's a matter of speculation. Some crypto's have a finite amount - so they have built in scarcity and they can be very easily transacted from one side of the world to the other. They can be programmed to pay out upon completion of a smart contract. They offer the user the ability to store their own funds.

Grumpypants

€3k hit.

grindle

makeorbrake wrote: »

In terms of store of value, I can't see why it can't act as one over the long haul. Whether it will or not, remains to be seen.

It's the newly-decided limitation to store of value which I dislike. There are tons on the /r/Bitcoin sub who'll break your balls for inferring that there should ever be space for fee-free transactions but leaving some space for it was espoused as an ideal by it's creator. They've bought the fee-market propaganda hook-line-sinker and screw the have-nots. A blockchain for rich people which Samson Mow reckons poor people shoudn't be using anyway. It's a fairly scummy ideal to force upon "the people's money". But yeah, it could work as a store of value - just not the type originally imagined and not the type I'd encourage. Imagine if Linus Torvalds decided to implement a strict demand-based fee for Linux. Ask OSS devs how that'd go.
Bitcoin could have scaled to anywhere between 4-10 times the amount of transactions with less shítcoins scrambling into position while clogging up the space with little to no change to hashrate or centralisation unless that transaction throughput actually encouraged competition within BTC itself. Any hashrate increase or difficulty increase would be a product of that competition and so many pointless coins ("We've increased the limit to 21m+1 because that's the why!") needn't exist.

makeorbrake wrote: »

However, if LN ends up solving the scaling issue for Bitcoin, it's still in the game.

I don't think it'll be LN because of the invoice system on a P2P cash basis, it's very messy and requires too many large bankrolls. If you can't tip or lend without using a central source to funnel through it's a non-starter imo, but I do expect somebody'll have some Eureka! moment.
Bitcoin has so many problems inherent due to it's conservativism. They need to correct current mining problems wrt centralisation and power-sponging - they only keep the old algo because they know it works but if hashrate keeps growing to the size of a continent? That's shameful. It's one of my least favourite of Andreas' talking points, pure whataboutism. "Yeah, but they use more, plus this is truly irrevocably yours!"
It's a waste of energy. The network was considered secure enough at the start of last year, it's gained something like 1.5-2x in terms of theoretical transactions thanks to Segwit but consumes 14x the amount of electricity. Abysmal. The amount of energy usage per transaction growing exponentially with the price would make sense if Lightning worked well or was being used, but... Nope.

makeorbrake wrote: »

...someone building a better mouse trap in the meantime...

This could well happen. Something being kept mysteriously under wraps could be well-honed and spread at speed if somebody finds an even more faultless method of grabbing business mindshare, encouraging speedy adoption and ensuring mass decentralisation.
I can't remember which ETH core dev was talking about them recently but I recall him saying DFINITY were ETH's true competitor rather than godawful scammy shítshows like EOS. "PRAISE BE THE CONSTITUTION! Oh wait, can we change this bit? That didn't work well at all. Oopsies. NVM, only $4b in ICO funds to splurge. lol". Corporation-sucking wankfest if ever I saw one.

Anyway, DFINITY's cap based on tokens sold and supply is going to be quite high depending on their eventual distribution, same as Telegram's TON network. In the billions with nothing to show yet. $2b-ish? That's bananas.

Tinder Surprise

I read a lot of opinions on certain coins/projects being over valued, but very seldom are there opinions expressed on coins/projects being under valued.

What coins at present do you think are undervalued and why?....

Tinder Surprise wrote: »

I read a lot of opinions on certain coins/projects being over valued, but very seldom are there opinions expressed on coins/projects being under valued.

What coins at present do you think are undervalued and why?....

Difficult question to quantify, I'd read it as 'is the total worth of any coin worth more than its current market cap?' which then prompts the question 'when will you sell it to realise the profit'. So again this comes down to speculation as to which coins are going to jump in value and why? I'm still very interested in IOTA for its performance characteristics and ETH for its functionality (if it can get away from PoW). Both these coins have big hurdles still to overcome, but if they do, would represent great value. That's a big if though, bit like saying if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.

JJJJNR

Dogecoin holding fairly well. Might convert some eth into more doge.