Comments
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MTProceed with caution, just listening to this and heard several technical mistakes within the first few minutes.
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TSsaw this last night. ties in to comments below about mining profits. From yahoo fin but it is a coindesk article. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/race-toward-zero-hashrate-clouds-215114446.html
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LKI echo all the comments praising this interview. The questions were excellent and depth of knowledge in the answers was amazing. The economics and risks of mining are fascinating. There was tons of interesting information, which has provoked a few more questions in my mind. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can answer: 1. Is there some intrinsic property of intrgrated circuit design that prevents memory being added to ASICs - doesn't Moore's law create a barrier to ASIC-resistance of this type? My understanding is that Litecoin's Script Monero's Cryptonight algorithm were also designed to be memory-hard, but as mentioned ASICs were created for those coins. The current Monero algo, RandomX, was designed to utilize all aspects of a CPU, I believe, which makes ASIC development economically nonviable. I don't think they have changed the protocol in the last couple of years to fork off ASICs, and AMD Ryzen CPUs have been the dominant mining hardware (even better than GPUs). 2. Following on, what level of performance advantage over commodity hardware would be required to make economically viable ASICS? Presumably manufacturers could recoup some development costs by mining with their ASICs until difficulty adjusts upwards to a certain level before selling their hardware to customers. That was certainly alleged by developers of coins who have forked off ASICs. 3. There's been a lot of hype on RV and elsewhere about Ethereum 2.0, which will involve a switch from PoW to PoS. But Jean-Paul mentioned that Ethereum will not change their protocol. How will this work? Isn't a the main marketing claim about PoS that it does not require energy-consuming mining (an argument Jean-Paul did a very good job of refuting, IMO)? If my understanding is correct and Jean-Paul misspoke, how will Ethereum miners react to their revenue stream being cut off? Is there a chance of a chain split due to miners continuing to mine the old chain when the new chain moves to PoS, or will it be more advantageous just to deploy their hash rate on other GPU-mineable coins?
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JWThe mining industry is fascinating to me. Apart from the tech, the economics are being developed on more and more really innovative uses of obtaining cheap energy. Companies are developing mining pods which you can attach to anything with surplus energy from the primary business activity - for example, natural gas from oil fields or surplus energy from the local grid, power companies looking to monetize wasted energy or any company that burns things in earnest :-) . I would not mind having more interviews like this on RV.
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scGreat interview!
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PBTruly fascinating! Thanks a lot!
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MRVery interesting interview. A real shame there was no discussion as to what JohnPaul thinks happens to the mining industry when few and fewer coins will be released as rewards? How does this affect the integrity of the blockchain? Also if there are hashrate derivative markets whats to stop someone in the future cornering that market and causing security issues in the underlying blockchain?
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JBI really appreciate the interplay of Santiago and John Paul realizing that their intercourse is an educational lecture disguised as a conversation.
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MSMany thanks to both gentleman for a very insightful discussion. @Santiago, thank you for taking a step back to "translate" a lot of the content and investing the time for comments here. Brilliant!
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PRGreat stuff, this side to bitcoin is not highlighted enough - fascinating discussion.
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TSGreat interview ... loads of good information and food for thought. Thank you. Wanted to follow-up on mining overall and the comment towards the end about some miners being content getting their reward and making some money. From the information I gleaned from financial reports of the publicly-traded "larger" bitcoin mining companies (Hut, Riot, Marathon, etc.), they don't seem to be making that much money and/or to be consistently profitable. It almost seems like a "race to the bottom" in that you constantly have to get bigger (more hash power), faster (newest mining machines) and cheaper (lower energy, op costs, etc.). And, as mentioned during the video, this brings with it the need for more and more capital investment. These reports also mention that the existing equipment is becoming economically obsolete across shorter time periods (which brings the question of who is buying this equipment and putting it into service after it has been "discarded" by a much larger miner ?). Perhaps a smaller player can join a mining pool which may help somewhat but if I understand how they work and how they compensate participants, I may be missing something. If I am in a pool that represents 10% of hash power for the BTC network, on average presumably, that pool would "win" 10% of the rewards. I suspect that the rewards are in turn shared across the pool based on the underlying hash power each individual represents. Is my relative network hash power percentage different than if I was standalone ? Now, maybe the pool gives access to other revenue streams like the derivative hash power trading etc.; however, this must be offset somewhat by the pool membership/other fee(s) I pay. In any case, significantly increasing BTC prices would make lots of these problems moot ... but rising prices also attracts more competition, which starts the race all over again. Also, it would be interesting to find out from JP what the power producers are requiring as credit backstops from a crypto miners. These can get costly and eat away at profits. If insurance companies are charging higher premiums and/or avoiding writing coverages, I've got to believe that power providers are demanding letters of credit or cash deposits, etc. Thanks again ... sorry for the long-winded post.
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SVI really enjoyed this interview. JohnPaul and I barely touched the surface and I look forward to getting him back on again to touch on specific areas in detail. Please feel free to ask questions and I will do my best to get the answers.
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TRThank you both. Great job. An encyclopedia in a video format. Could only follow ~50% of what was presented but really interesting. Santiago, may I request, going forward and considering your deep understanding of the crypto and the real world and your high intellect, that you try to translate as many terms as possible to the language people like myself can understand... for me ASICS are running shoes... Thanks again gentlemen.
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MHGreat as always
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SMPOW over POS seems to be the issue I have these days. The real question is Quantum computing . Vitalic seems to address this recently and I say recently 6 months ago things are moving so fast in this space that it is making everyone's head spin. Lex Fridman's interview on March 16th, 2020 with Vtalik left me a few or more than a few questions as to all other POS coins being able to maintain Decentralization in the definition.
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SvThis is like listening to a lecture in Latin. I can only grasp about 40% of what is being discussed. I need a "bit coin mining for dummies."
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JHVery interesting, thank you both.
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PGFantastic interview especially the energy source and explanation on this direction and how the cost factors are for energy on how Bitcoin is consumed in the US where the power companies negotiate these cost factors to the miners and where the US gains. I hope RV allows you Santiago to host another interview with JohnPaul and dive deeper into this power sourcing and is there views to see what the market holds globally with this power source to drive the miners where countries can work together in these markets with more power sourcing? BIG State of Texas says TY