New York town imposes 18-month ban on Bitcoin mining for new commercial operations

[yRaz]

good info ,I did a bit of reading. and I have to admit there are some legit uses .but I still think its more for the money as opposed to bettering our species.most are supporting the idea for the wrong reasons.and populations are paying for it ,that can't afford it,hence my belief in regulating the process.preventing what is happening in small towns like those in the link and others I've read about.
if you are indeed legit ,then I regret offending you .but you must understand my distaste ,for outfits that have all the profit unaccounted for and it leaving the country through offshore accounts. I have a 270.00 power bill this month with one single gpu ,pc running .and game a few hours per day on it,we have a new Dam being built in Labrador ,muskrat falls ,and our power bill is going to go up even more .not down.

There are plenty of people in the crypto community who are screwing it up for the rest of us who are trying to make a legitimate business out of it. So, while I was left rather annoyed, I know where that came from. I also deal with that stuff all the time. I undervolt all my cards and an 60-70% decrease in power usage on a 1070Ti equates to roughly a 10-15% loss in performance. Mining has more to do bandwidth between the GPU and memory than it does with clock speed on either end. When I first started mining the ROI was closer to 3 months but now it's more like 10 months.

but I can mine several coins on one machine at the same time. I can mine Siacoin, whatever altcoin is most profitable on a GPU and usually something that is best served on a CPU. For me I look at this as a legitimate business and pay taxes on it because this is literally the easiest money I've made in my life. I'm also a futurist so when I saw my electric company offered a way to invest in renewables I jumped on it. Electricity is already cheap in Pennsylvania so I had no problem paying more. I know full well the impact that mining has on the environment and, frankly, I didn't want to be part of the problem. That being said, a lot of miners don't give a sh*t so I understand full well why people don't like "us".

I will say this, bitcoin and its' branch coins need to die. They serve no purpose AT ALL. Cloud computing and storage on blockchain adds tangible value, bitcoin and the like have no actual tangible value. They are essentially expensive ways to launder money. I am very pro crypto and only want to see the positives it has to offer society. These people who just want to get rich quick can go f*ck their hat IMO. These degenerates who evade taxes and destroy the environment to mine will ruin any benefit that crypto has to offer for the rest of society.

 

[MaikuTech]

I pay my taxes. when I say "free money" I mean money that requires no work to make. Not every miner is a tax evading degenerate. I'm also getting tired of people saying miners are horrible people and hope they go broke. The ill will isn't on the side of the miners, it's on people like you. You're the bad person, not me. I pay taxes and I pay an extra ~$0.02/kw for the electric company to invest in renewable energy.

Miners aren't bad unless their motives are in the wrong, if your want to make a little chunk change by mining lightly during the month.
Thats your own business however if its causing power issues in your city causing power outtages say midway through spring and summertime.
You really shouldn't be mining period, thats my thought on it, F@H is just like mining but they do it to find cures for uncurable diseases.
I did F@H back in 2010, when my mother saw the 500 dollar electric bill midway through july.
She nearly through my phenom II 965 machine out the window and me with it.
Thats how pricey mining and folding can be.

 

[Boilerhog146]

Miners aren't bad unless their motives are in the wrong, if your want to make a little chunk change by mining lightly during the month.
Thats your own business however if its causing power issues in your city causing power outtages say midway through spring and summertime.
You really shouldn't be mining period, thats my thought on it, F@H is just like mining but they do it to find cures for uncurable diseases.
I did F@H back in 2010, when my mother saw the 500 dollar electric bill midway through july.
She nearly through my phenom II 965 machine out the window and me with it.
Thats how pricey mining and folding can be.

I remember that F@H , I volunteered to fold on a couple of sites that had pools and folded competitively ,only if they would pay the power bill,funny, no offers ensued ,, I guess no sense in offering to mine either.

 

[regiq]

The thing that irks me the most about all the blockchain this and blockchain that,is the plain, simple ,fact that no matter who or what or where ,a mining op is set up.its about the money to be made ,not 1 bit about the actual blockchain ,or its potential for bettering humanity.and they all want it to stay as secret and secure ,for no obvious reason that I can see. other than to hide the profit and who is profiting.
The blockchain has been under development for some years now ,show me a constructive use for it already.even the guy or guys that started it don't want to be found out,don't want to be credited for such a wonderful thing?there's something wrong with this picture.

Greed runs this world :/

 

[regiq]

There are plenty of people in the crypto community who are screwing it up for the rest of us who are trying to make a legitimate business out of it. So, while I was left rather annoyed, I know where that came from. I also deal with that stuff all the time. I undervolt all my cards and an 60-70% decrease in power usage on a 1070Ti equates to roughly a 10-15% loss in performance. Mining has more to do bandwidth between the GPU and memory than it does with clock speed on either end. When I first started mining the ROI was closer to 3 months but now it's more like 10 months.

but I can mine several coins on one machine at the same time. I can mine Siacoin, whatever altcoin is most profitable on a GPU and usually something that is best served on a CPU. For me I look at this as a legitimate business and pay taxes on it because this is literally the easiest money I've made in my life. I'm also a futurist so when I saw my electric company offered a way to invest in renewables I jumped on it. Electricity is already cheap in Pennsylvania so I had no problem paying more. I know full well the impact that mining has on the environment and, frankly, I didn't want to be part of the problem. That being said, a lot of miners don't give a sh*t so I understand full well why people don't like "us".

I will say this, bitcoin and its' branch coins need to die. They serve no purpose AT ALL. Cloud computing and storage on blockchain adds tangible value, bitcoin and the like have no actual tangible value. They are essentially expensive ways to launder money. I am very pro crypto and only want to see the positives it has to offer society. These people who just want to get rich quick can go f*ck their hat IMO. These degenerates who evade taxes and destroy the environment to mine will ruin any benefit that crypto has to offer for the rest of society.

Just add speculation craze to the picture. Our century's tulip fever. It will be a long way down for many.

I mined a bit in times before asic and fpga, just to make some use of my pc hardware. I never decided to make an invest in special equipment. Especially after two of the coin exchanges I've been using disappeared... Is it still so risky..?

 

[yRaz]

Just add speculation craze to the picture. Our century's tulip fever. It will be a long way down for many.

I mined a bit in times before asic and fpga, just to make some use of my pc hardware. I never decided to make an invest in special equipment. Especially after two of the coin exchanges I've been using disappeared... Is it still so risky..?

It's not that risky if you're smart about it. I've far exceed the initial investment already. And one thing that people don't get about crypto is that it is nothing like the tulip craze or the dotcom bubble. Lets not forget the dotcom bubble was at, what $7trillion USD when it popped? The crypto market is hovering at around a $300 billion so we have atleast 20X to go and that isn't even accounting for inflation. Further, many of these coins are actually useful now. The first few are still lingering around but they need to die already. I also have a rule, for every dollar in reinvest in crypto I invest $2 somewhere else. Commodities, realestate, stocks, bonds. Crypto is by far my biggest money maker but I'm putting myself on the good end of things if the market decides to go south.

Funny thing is I haven't really "cashed" out yet aside from a few things. I still drive a 2004 honda CRV with 190,000 miles on it, lol.

 

[wiyosaya]

The few rich people In the community probably complained, the lower class probably only saw a $10-20 increase.

Speculation is easy. Without more details, we really do not know.

I understand people's frustration with large scale mining operations but it seems kind of wasteful from an infustructure standpoint to have all these cards idling in people's computers not being used.

I assume that you are speaking of having GPUs in personal computers - and not a commercial mining operation where they would not leave cards idle.

One way to get around that "waste" is to run a BOINC project. In that case, the cards are not sitting idle, and anyone can contribute computing power to scientific pursuits from searches for cures to mapping the milkyway and much more. It does cost to run these in terms of electricity, however, there has at least been an attempt to compensate those who run BOINC projects through Gridcoin. IMO, it is unlikely that one will get rich off Gridcoin, however.

 

[mbrowne5061]

What a freakin' huge waste of precious energy! All for greed, and nothing else. Don't just ban new 'miners' from coming in -- run the old ones out of town!

The blockchain tech could be used for things we can't imagine yet and it will stay with us, but - as I wrote eariler - the algorythm which lowers efficiency with the rise of network processing power is a grim joke.

The point of the blockchain is a distributed encryption. Maintaining an encryption against attacks - especially when every has open access to said encryption - will always require energy. The larger the network grows, the more potential for someone to break the encryption, the more energy it will require.

Its not that the blockchain is a sick joke - its that it is being used as a currency is a sick joke. We just need to limit it to activities that actually require that kind of energy investment, and to networks that don't scale-up quite the way currency ones do. Think securing digital voting machines at polling places, or medical records in a hospital network - both have fixed network sizes, but would benefit from an auditable encryption like blockchain.

 

[regiq]

The point of the blockchain is a distributed encryption. Maintaining an encryption against attacks - especially when every has open access to said encryption - will always require energy. The larger the network grows, the more potential for someone to break the encryption, the more energy it will require.

Its not that the blockchain is a sick joke - its that it is being used as a currency is a sick joke. We just need to limit it to activities that actually require that kind of energy investment, and to networks that don't scale-up quite the way currency ones do. Think securing digital voting machines at polling places, or medical records in a hospital network - both have fixed network sizes, but would benefit from an auditable encryption like blockchain.

I'm not an expert on encryption so I will have to dig deeper to get the first part of your post. But the block difficulty algorithm is something like this: "take this number, add some salt to your liking, hash it. If the result doesn't have n '0' at the beginning do it again with other salt value". It's there to keep the flow of new bitcoins from the rewards steady and it wastes most of the energy. Is it needed to keep the encryption safe?
I totally agree with the second part of your post.

 

[yRaz]

One way to get around that "waste" is to run a BOINC project. In that case, the cards are not sitting idle, and anyone can contribute computing power to scientific pursuits from searches for cures to mapping the milkyway and much more. It does cost to run these in terms of electricity, however, there has at least been an attempt to compensate those who run BOINC projects through Gridcoin. IMO, it is unlikely that one will get rich off Gridcoin, however.

Get rich? No. You could do what I did when I got into mining and pay for 1080Ti SLi within 5-8 months by mining in your spare time. Then, if you're a teenager, an extra $30-40 mining on a midrange card would be nice.

Its not that the blockchain is a sick joke - its that it is being used as a currency is a sick joke.

well I have to disagree there. Many blockchain technologies are moving away from style that has to be "mined" on such a large scale. The real joke to me is that we have people in the US who still think we're on the gold standard. Crypto is being using as a currency in many places around the world, especially the third world were they don't have a strong state-backed currency. If we are going to live in a world were we use something as a currency just because we say it has value then crypto has many advantages over fiat. And I'm just going to throw this out there, as far as money laundering goes, the US dollar is still the preferred method by a LARGE margin

 

[mbrowne5061]

Get rich? No. You could do what I did when I got into mining and pay for 1080Ti SLi within 5-8 months by mining in your spare time. Then, if you're a teenager, an extra $30-40 mining on a midrange card would be nice.


well I have to disagree there. Many blockchain technologies are moving away from style that has to be "mined" on such a large scale. The real joke to me is that we have people in the US who still think we're on the gold standard. Crypto is being using as a currency in many places around the world, especially the third world were they don't have a strong state-backed currency. If we are going to live in a world were we use something as a currency just because we say it has value then crypto has many advantages over fiat. And I'm just going to throw this out there, as far as money laundering goes, the US dollar is still the preferred method by a LARGE margin

My argument wasn't against a non-commodity-backed currency, more than the scaling requirements of blockchain - as it stands today - make it impractical to not only give everyone an 'account' on a single crypto-currency, but then continue to scale up with human population growth, while maintaining the records of those with an account that have died (because you'll have to).

 

[mbrowne5061]

I'm not an expert on encryption so I will have to dig deeper to get the first part of your post. But the block difficulty algorithm is something like this: "take this number, add some salt to your liking, hash it. If the result doesn't have n '0' at the beginning do it again with other salt value". It's there to keep the flow of new bitcoins from the rewards steady and it wastes most of the energy. Is it needed to keep the encryption safe?
I totally agree with the second part of your post.

To get to the root of the argument: every modern encryption scheme is based not on the assumption that it is unbreakable, but that power requirements in order to break it are not feasible ("more [power/time] than is available in the known universe"). By "power", computer scientists do mean cycles/second, but cycles/second still correlates strongly to electrical wattage. If you could create a super-low-power CPU (sub-1W), without sacrificing cycles/second of the highest of high-end processors available, that processor - in theory - would be extremely well-suited to brute-forcing encryption algorithms when compared to its high-power-requirement counterparts. The opposite would also be true - they would be good at maintaining an encryption scheme like Blockchain.

tl;dr - the lower the electrical power requires of a CPU, the more you can put in a building, the more one group can control, the more likely they are able to brute-force an encryption if they choose to - or make it even more difficult for an opponent to crack an encryption maintained by these processors.

Of course, all this assumes that the scheme is perfectly designed and perfectly implemented and the only solution to breaking it is to brute-force it.