datadata

Or perhaps Vavilovian mimicry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry) that can fool the computer vision weed classifier.

Rate limiting output is a form of filtering. It would be effective at this kind of resource consumption attack.

It isn't a perfect inflation hedge, no one is claiming that. You are cherry picking a single interval where the correlation is negative. If you zoom out, you'll find that the correlation is mostly positive. Past correlation is also not predictive of future results.

There are certainly time frames where change in global m2 money supply and change in bitcoin's price over say 12mo would have a positive R value. That isn't the point I am making. If the amount of money available goes up, then one would expect that the price of other things, all else held equal would also go up. It would be quite strange for bitcoin or any other commodity to behave differently consistently and over a long period.

Not sure, it is just a correlation not an iron rule and definitely not the only influence. The shrinking here of m2 is much much smaller than the previous increase was as well.

Inflation is a lagging indicator. Bitcoin gained in 2020 and early 2021 when debasement happened and the supply of money increased. That debasement takes time to show up in price data, and then even longer to show up in headline inflation, which is a 12 month average.

TIPS and i-bonds are limited in their role as a hedge. Sure, you are exactly compensated for inflation on the capital you invest. However, without the ability to have any leverage, you can't actually use this as a hedge against other capital which has exposure to inflation but which couldn't be converted.

Another good way in which these companies are lying is with overbooking, or legally selling more tickets than seats on the plane and hoping that the statistical rate of people now showing up will cover the deficit.

Perhaps it is to make it look not like default style of ChatGPT output?

The payment was to not mine coins and thus conserve electricity to more important consumers during times of shortages

Do you have any example of your claim about providing help?

Where did I say burn piles of money? I'm saying that if the transmission line is profitable, build it. If it isn't profitable and bitcoin mining is profitable, mine bitcoin. Both options should only be done if they are profitable.

This is the exact opposite of burning money. Your assessment whether bitcoin mining is wasteful or not is beside the point, the point is merely to unlock the economic value of stranded energy.

Look, you are touting a metric that you agreed has no bearing on the argument you are trying to make. The number of machines does not matter, it isn't part of any meaningful equation at all. Akin to summing the miles per gallons per car over the number of cars to measure efficiency.

We are not measuring what YOU personally believe is "useful productive" work. We are measuring if there is a way to extract economic value (payment) for stranded energy.

So if there's a small amount of power, you get no yield from mining.

You are going in circles. The amount of mining you can do is exactly proportional to the available power. It does not suddenly go to zero. If the yield or profit is greater than the costs, it is economically worthwhile.

Would you then agree that your original point that "99.7% of machines do not solve a block" is not by itself an argument that bitcoin is more or less wasteful than it needs to be? Because through a bookkeeping trick you can reduce or increase that figure by an arbitrary amount.

If there's a small amount of power available then it's not worth mining.

Could you explain how you arrived at this conclusion? The value of mining is generally proportional to the available power. If the capital expense of a mining rig is less than a transmission line, it might be better to mine than to transmit. For example, if it costs 1 million dollars to install a transmission line, but only 1 thousand dollars to setup a mining rig that could consume all the energy, it probably be more feasible to mine than to transmit.

OK, let's make this a multiple choice question. Assume bitcoin mining machines magically each become twice as powerful, AND twice as heavy, but there are half as many of them, so the total energy and resources used is exactly the same. According to your argument is this change:

a) good, because now twice as many miners actually solve a block, so instead of 99.7% waste it is 99.4% waste.

b) doesn't matter, because I just changed the unit of measurement-- each machine is just doing twice as much work.

c) doesn't matter, because bitcoin is already infinitely wasteful-- in which case pointing out that 99.7% of machines are somehow more wasteful than the other 0.3% does not make sense.

d) bad, for some other reason.

Your argument (I think) is that bitcoin mining machines that don't solve a block directly are a complete waste, and only bitcoin mining machines that that solve a block do anything useful. Since 99.7% of mining machines don't solve a block, bitcoin is 333 times more wasteful than in needs to be. Is that right?

This misses the point that mining is probabilistic. Mining pools pay out based on the number of hashes tried, not the number of blocks solved. Your misunderstanding seems to be that the utility of something can be based on a probabilistic outcome. It is akin to saying that airbags are 99% (or whatever) wasteful because most of them aren't actually involved in a crash, and therefore 100x inefficient. You pay extra for a car with an airbag because it has value in the rare event you do have a crash it has immense value. Similarly, a mining pool would pay a single bitcoin mining rig to mine for years without it solving a single block, because the mining pool would realize the entire value if it did find a block, and so it pays out just under the expected value of this reward times the probability of the event happening.

Second, your argument ignores the fact that the unit of a "mining machine" is completely arbitrary. If mining machines were on average 2x larger and more powerful (but there were half as many of them), then by your argument bitcoin mining would be 2x less wasteful. That makes zero sense.

Transmission loss can actually be reduced to zero, if voltage is infinite (or super conductors were used). However, the important part is the installation and operational cost of a high voltage line-- which is definitely non zero. For a small enough economic value of a far enough away stranded power source, installing transmission lines would not be economically rational. It is a bit like saying that every house should have 10 Gigabit internet. The technology is there, but the capital expenses are not reasonable for ubiquitous deployment.

Or do something with it that isn't guessing random numbers on machines 99.7% of which will never successfully guess a single block and go from factory to space heater to landfill.

By this logic we should remove airbags from cars also-- the vast majority of airbags just cost money to manufacture and don't ever expand or save a life, ending up in landfills unused.

Food is also essential. If housing appreciated at a constant rate against a commodity like wheat for example, eventually you would be able to sell a house for the entire global supply of wheat (assuming wheat supply grew slower) .

I've never understood how real returns on house prices could be believed to be sustainable. If the value of a house appreciates in terms of purchasing power for some other good at a constant rate, at some point in the far future just a single house would become valuable enough to purchase the entire global supply of the other good.

The illusion of house price appreciation is due to historical population growth creating scarcity, and cheaper money allowing for higher and higher leverage. At some point the music has to stop.

You could get close to a binary output with an option spread with a tight range of strikes (e.g. buying a call at price X, and selling a call at price X+1). If the stock price goes above the high strike it is a maximal payout one way, and below the low strike maximal payout the other way. If the strikes are close compared to movements of the stock and near the current price of the stock, the outcome is likely to be nearly binary. If the stock settles between the strikes the payout would be partial and continuous, but that window is very small.

It is a sad state of affairs that being "state-affiliated" is a negative thing.

You are repeating the same false dichotomy by stating again that final settlement and self custody are bad defaults for the entire world. That isn't want I'm saying, I am saying a choice is better than no choice at all. I'm also not saying anything about crypto. Gold and cash are also useful instruments that should be financial instruments for everyone also.

You are imagining a false dichotomy where things like fast and final settlement, or self custody are forced onto every user, and pointing out the obvious problems with that scenario. They are not good defaults, but they are great to have as options to protect customers against a fraudulent or over leveraged system. It is a bit like any protected right-- you don't have to directly make use of it for it to be valuable, the real value is in the optionality you have to be able to use it, and the risk that optionality poses to those who would exploit the absence of the right.

Ask anyone waiting for an emergency withdrawal to settle from a failing institution like FTX or SVB.

The size of the market just for identify theft protection is 10 billion USD [0]. There is 30 billion USD in credit card fraud a year [1]. I don't think that is working well enough, that is a multiple-FTX sized loss of money every single year going into a problem that is fueled mostly by really bad underlying security systems.

0: https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/03/23/240.... 1: https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/credit-card-fr...

I agree that it is a feature, but that feature didn't come with any downsides initially when the speed of everything else was also slow. The downsides are now substantial as the customer expects higher speeds. The downsides of not having the option to have final settlement quickly also seems to be a source of many other problems.

We also don't even need to change this aspect of traditional banking in order to add strong asymmetric encryption in front of the system. That would nip most fraud in the bud, and if nothing else save a lot of effort that goes into fraud schemes, prevention, and reversal.

A normal pattern is to tier storage into a hot wallet and a cold wallet. Hot wallet is used for daily operations and can have lower security, but has a very low percentage of value, so that if hacked the exchange and eat the loss. The cold wallet can have very very high security measures such as multisig, physical security, geographic distribution, etc, and only needs to be periodically accessed.

Analogy in a old bank with cash or gold is hot wallet = cash that tellers have on hand, cold wallet = vault in the back that has everything else.

It is fantastic that a company operating with such horrific practices is dead. While we are at it, when can we fix similar issues below with mainstream financial systems that millions of people are still using?

- Social security numbers are used as a secret for identification, despite being in plaintext and having so low entropy as to be guessable, and originally issued on a card literally saying "Not for Identification".

- Every bank check lists the bank account number, which serves as the only information needed for a party to issue a request to withdraw money from that account.

- Credit card numbers are similarly a private number used as a public number, and printed on plaintext on the card.

Is there any effort working on bringing asymmetric encryption to these systems or to replace them that has a reasonable chance of working?