Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Justus Ranvier]

The communists have decided to make their move as well:

http://taler.net/

 

[lunar]

@Melbustus
You are right of course I was simplifying the argument for the sake of discussion.

Energy distribution is a complex system. Renewables often more so ( as local conditions vary greatly) In the case of the powerwall though, this is dealing with storage of power. (implying later usage on site) These act as batteries or capacitors. The idea of an ASIC miner acting as a transistor is a more subtle distinction.
Lets say you have a hydro turbine ruining on your local river, sufficient to supply the entire farm during the day, but consistently running surplus during the night. You could store some of this in a battery form, but as we live off grid the rest goes to waste. With the bitcoin transistor model You now effectively have a way to convert this surplus energy into stored transportable 'digital potential energy'.

This is a fascinating concept and it's mid boggling to think as we progress energy can be stored digitally. There is a convergence happening here. Data, Energy, Value, Information and possibly even Speech are becoming freely convertible commodities.

The three hundred 'upvotes' for your idea gives you sufficient satoshis to convert into a new seal or washer for the hydro turbine. How mad is that ?

Side note following this logic, a crypto based forum is a 'speech transistor' ??

 

[cypherdoc]

talk about volatility...

nice cliff dive by stocks:

 

[Peter R]

@Peter R
The problem is one of co-ordination. It's fine in theory for the whole market to say "we need to handle more volume" but the problem in practice is that individual market participants can't act unilaterally because they will isolate themselves from the market...

I agree, partly. I am wondering if we can view a change to the consensus rules as a chemical reaction:

If a lower energy state (X) emerges (market demand for a larger block size limit) then the market wants to move to this state (i.e., from state Y-->X). The problem is overcoming the activation energy threshold (the coordination problem). My hunch though, is that the greater the difference in energy between the two states (ΔH), the smaller the catalyst required to start the chemical reaction and move to the larger block size limit.

 

[theZerg]

@lunarboy, @Melbustus

Yes its an awesome concept when you start assuming a baseline Bitcoin hash rate as a social necessity.

Let's say you turn off hashing in Chicago and turn it on in China. For simplicity, let's pretend it is the same amount although small variations do not matter much. Now look at the system from the outside. Everything is exactly the same except, we've just "magically" transported energy at 100% efficiency from China to Chicago!

BTW, Tesla has put a fancy battery into a pretty package but I do not see any statements on Tesla site about the energy loss charging and discharging these. Its probably pretty high... as it is in all batteries

 

[cypherdoc]

i have short and medium term sell signals in force on stocks.

the primary Dow Theory bear trend continues.

@Melbustus
You are right of course I was simplifying the argument for the sake of discussion.

Energy distribution is a complex system. Renewables often more so ( as local conditions vary greatly) In the case of the powerwall though, this is dealing with storage of power. (implying later usage on site) These act as batteries or capacitors. The idea of an ASIC miner acting as a transistor is a more subtle distinction.
Lets say you have a hydro turbine ruining on your local river, sufficient to supply the entire farm during the day, but consistently running surplus during the night. You could store some of this in a battery form, but as we live off grid the rest goes to waste. With the bitcoin transistor model You now effectively have a way to convert this surplus energy into stored transportable 'digital potential energy'.

This is a fascinating concept and it's mid boggling to think as we progress energy can be stored digitally. There is a convergence happening here. Data, Energy, Value, Information and possibly even Speech are becoming freely convertible commodities.

The three hundred 'upvotes' for your idea gives you sufficient satoshis to convert into a new seal or washer for the hydro turbine. How mad is that ?

Side note following this logic, a crypto based forum is a 'speech transistor' ??

nice discussion.

amazing what ideas and innovations a fixed supply digital new form of money can spawn. things we can't even imagine right now.

i also think this concept of storing energy effectively kills any POS scheme.

 

[lunar]

Real collapsing Bitcoin up.

 

[molecular]

If the block size limit remains to the right of Q*, then it doesn't really matter what the limit is because it does not affect the free market dynamics. However, if the limit falls to the left of Q*, then the economic pressure due to the deadweight loss will eventually cause a protocol fork that moves the limit back to the right of Q*.

Not necessarily. The economic pressure could also just subside due to other effects like people being driven to use alternative solutions.

 

[sickpig]

The communists have decided to make their move as well:

http://taler.net/

I saw it yesterday on hackernews (YC), I glanced the site but
I did't find a white paper, did someone have better luck than me?

 

[molecular]

@sickpig I couldn't even figure out wether they use a blockchain or not. Not sure what to think of it. They idea of that asymmetric privacy feature is interesting in it's own right, though. Not sure if or how exactly it works... might just be hot air. If anyone has formed an educated opinion on this Taler thing, I'd like to hear it.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Their feature set makes it sound like they are taking an approach superficially similar to Open-Transactions, but with extra added anti-features.

 

[Melbustus]

@sickpig I couldn't even figure out wether they use a blockchain or not. Not sure what to think of it. They idea of that asymmetric privacy feature is interesting in it's own right, though. Not sure if or how exactly it works... might just be hot air. If anyone has formed an educated opinion on this Taler thing, I'd like to hear it.

I actually thought it was a joke at first.

 

[Peter R]

Not necessarily. The economic pressure could also just subside due to other effects like people being driven to use alternative solutions.

Good point, @molecular. The economic pressure could also be relieved, for example, by people voluntarily leaving the economic system. This would drop the supply curve such that it meets the demand curve at a point near the quota (Qmax).

What is interesting, is that either way (by fork or by people leaving the system), somehow the result would be that Q* ends up to the left of Qmax! If this is actually true, I think it would imply that it's not possible to use a block size limit to drive up fees.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

What is interesting, is that either way (by fork or by people leaving the system), somehow the result would be that Q* ends up to the left of Qmax! If this is actually true, I think it would imply that it's not possible to use a block size limit to drive up fees.

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but that really is a long explanation of a fact that surely would be obvious to anyone who has ever run a business of any kind.

Imagine trying to convincing a Girl Scout that her optimal strategy is to sell fewer cookies rather than as many as possible.

Maybe we should adopt as a standard that before somebody tries to centrally plan an economic system they first demonstrate that they can successfully run a lemonade stand before letting them on to anything more complicated.

 

[cypherdoc]

pushing down tonight:

 

[AdrianX]

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-September/011157.html

In the link above Gavin has proposed to reduce empty blocks "SPV" mining.

Is my understanding wrong? wouldn't this undermine the propagation risk when creating large blocks. It makes syncing block to the blockchain an insignificant formality.

If implemented would the protocol lose the free market incentive to mine small blocks?

 

[Peter R]

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but that really is a long explanation of a fact that surely would be obvious to anyone who has ever run a business of any kind.

Imagine trying to convincing a Girl Scout that her optimal strategy is to sell fewer cookies rather than as many as possible.

Maybe we should adopt as a standard that before somebody tries to centrally plan an economic system they first demonstrate that they can successfully run a lemonade stand before letting them on to anything more complicated.

If it is true, it is quite significant. I think it would mean that it is not possible to force fees upwards artificially. Brg444, Carlton Banks and hdbuck (from bitcointalk) are calling myopic/stupid/et cetera for even suggesting that it may be true.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Peter R

There is just momentum/friction to consider. However, that kind of thing is such that it loses its effect as competition starts to make inroads. Probably such effects will front heavily for the time being but be revealed as paper tigers when rubber hits road. Building a fee market up through artificial scarcity based on such momentum/friction seems like spinning a castle out of cotton candy.

 

[theZerg]

If it is true, it is quite significant. I think it would mean that it is not possible to force fees upwards artificially. Brg444, Carlton Banks and hdbuck (from bitcointalk) are calling myopic/stupid/et cetera for even suggesting that it may be true.

I think that history shows that natural monopolies are very rare to nonexistent and that there is strong pressure to alleviate them, which is why throughout most of civilization the state was required to enforce them.

 

[sickpig]

yes, it is. only bitmain's last chip come close to this, if memory serves it should be something like 0.23-0.26 Joules/GHsGHs.

One last thing worth noting, the 21inc "bitcoin computer" is capable of running a full node and comes with the blockchains preloaded.

so the device will contribute also to the network decentralization.

edit: fix bitmain consumption values

spondoolies tech to the rescue: their last product (SP50) come with an alleged power efficiency of 0.15W/GH/s (actually in the spec related to the asic chip, named PickAxe, they claim 0.14 W/GHs "in typical corner")