Dark Money -
The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
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Friday, 20 April 2018
quote [ Eastern Washington had cheap power and tons of space. Then the suitcases of cash started arriving. ]
This is one of the things that drives me crazy about vapocurrencies. "Mining" is exchanging actual work, in the form of energy burned, in return for nothing of intrinsic value. That same energy could be used for lots of more useful things, including processing SETI or Kepler data (which has a very small but still far larger chance of yielding something of actual value), rather than doing nothing more than contributing to global warming and the entropy of the universe. At least the tulip bubble looked pretty and was useful, if nothing else, for fertilizer.
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Comments
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mechavolt said @ 5:50pm GMT on 20th Apr
[Score:1 Underrated]
How is that any different from day trading, though? A man-made imaginary thing exchanges ownership, and someone increases the amount of another man-made imaginary thing without having actually done anything productive or useful.
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dolemite said @ 6:30pm GMT on 20th Apr
[Score:3 Underrated]
Day trading hasn't completely f*cked up everyone else's ability to buy a decent video card.
Ass cancer is too good a death for cryptominers. |
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mechanical contrivance said @ 5:58pm GMT on 20th Apr
That's not beneficial to society, either.
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Mythtyn said @ 6:30pm GMT on 20th Apr
[Score:1 Insightful]
There is very little, if any, exchange of wealth that is.
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donnie said @ 4:21pm GMT on 21st Apr
This is a wildly ignorant viewpoint. Day traders are like bottom feeders - they may look yucky and you might think they're nothing but parasites and vermin, but like their natural world counterparts they perform a critically vital function in the markets.
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mechanical contrivance said @ 1:05pm GMT on 23rd Apr
What function?
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donnie said[1] @ 7:41pm GMT on 23rd Apr
It's the age of information - ask Google. If very lazy, click below.
Day traders serve two critical functions in the marketplace: They keep the markets running efficiently via arbitrage, and they provide much of the markets' liquidity (especially in the stock market). This article will take an objective look at day trading, who does it and how it is done. |
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mechanical contrivance said @ 7:42pm GMT on 23rd Apr
Nah.
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theRed said @ 6:39pm GMT on 20th Apr
[Score:1 Underrated]
I agree but look at marketing and law; the putative benefits are paltry compared to the amount of resources expended and yet...
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Anonynonymous said @ 2:04pm GMT on 21st Apr
[Score:1 Underrated]
Still waiting for the damn pullback so I can finally upgrade my 3-year-old graphics card...
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donnie said @ 4:18pm GMT on 21st Apr
"Mining" is exchanging actual work, in the form of energy burned, in return for nothing of intrinsic value.
Whatever you think of the blockchain, there is some intrinsic value - namely that the vast amounts of energy that go into generating the blockchain are exactly what makes it secure. The energy goes into producing something that has value because it represents a form of data that cannot be copied, stolen, or faked. This is quite unique in the world of data. Whatever real-world value such a digital asset might have is still being figured out, but it's disingenuous to say that it has *no* value. |
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dolemite said @ 6:32pm GMT on 21st Apr
Honest question here, anybody feel free to chime in:
Could a blockchain signature be used to watermark original (unedited) video or audio recordings at the point of recording to prove the authenticity of those media clips later? Could cameras be built with an inherent blockchain signature? Because that could have real-world value. |
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Kama-Kiri said @ 1:43am GMT on 22nd Apr
[Score:1 Insightful]
Yes, but blockchain isn't required to perform this function - it just removed the need to have a central registry.
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donnie said @ 10:25pm GMT on 22nd Apr
Yes, but the significance of that difference is not trivial. To be able to authenticate and verify digital information without a trusted third party is a very new thing, and potentially game changing.
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Kama-Kiri said @ 5:17am GMT on 26th Apr
I appreciate the differences are significant but I'm unconvinced they are meaningful.
Blockchain has been around long enough that were there any truly "game changing" end uses the resources would have already been made available to implement them by now... whether by Google, Amazon, the CIA or the MPAA. Instead blockchain seems perennially stuck in the realm of wishful thinking and speculation. |
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donnie said @ 9:21pm GMT on 26th Apr
No doubt, I won't disagree. Even if it were to find commercial or useful application, the critical weakness I see in cryptocurrency and blockchain in general is that it immediately is obsoleted when quantum computing becomes accessible. That alone makes for a bearish long-term outlook for the technology, particularly for one requiring significant investment to get put to use in the first place.
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donnie said @ 7:14pm GMT on 21st Apr
Yes.
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dolemite said @ 12:53am GMT on 22nd Apr
[Score:1 Underrated]
well, I guess that's something then.
I still want my fucking video card. |
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