asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you underestimate the tenacity of the circus clowns; they'll continue with Zimbabwean fiat if they have to
asciilifeform: a great many interesting things could be done (bring back the turing-complete 'script' engine, for one)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i still think that in the abstract it isn't, given that there's nothing magic about the code (quite a few people, myself included, have understood it)
asciilifeform: i can't help but suspect that bitcoind-as-we-know-it is only a Schelling point b/c virtually no one understands the code
asciilifeform: if the chumps decamp en masse, btc might end up as a Hawala for a dozen people.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: sure btc is ready to lose the chump money collector that is the 'dust' users?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: seems like bitcoind users are 'setting themselves up the bomb' by running the foundation's crap - sooner they quit, the better
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: so where's the authoritative 'clean' bitcoind fork?
asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: it publicly joined a traitorous 'NSA club'
asciilifeform: know what would be spiffy? mechanical btc engine, a la Kurta.
asciilifeform: you could spend a lifetime studying fun soviet recipes (trinary computer; or my personal favourite, the 'subterrine' - nuclear reactor melts a tunnel in front of you in real time...)
asciilifeform: we'd get to the end of the line considerably faster if the heater became standard equipment in every luser's house.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i don't doubt that an asic heater would shit money if you installed one today. question is about the endgame.
asciilifeform: anyone feel like calculating the minimal energy cost of fabbing an asic? use a single die's worth of Si 'enthalpy of fusion' as the irreducible cost.
asciilifeform: so, end result is something like: you can buy a BTC water heater that puts out 1% of the joules put in as rf, and it buys you a lottery ticket a day.
asciilifeform: the difference is that at some point in the difficulty rise it will make more financial sense to run ordinary heaters.
asciilifeform: now, you could shield your tiles. power line will still radiate though.
asciilifeform: buy a radio scanner (the $20 http://www.rtlsdr.org will do) and see how astoundingly 'rf-screaming' modern digital logic is.
asciilifeform: anyone got a 'bomb calorimeter' and a few btc asics?
asciilifeform: lightbulb, yes. LED technowanker bulb with switched DC power supply, less so.
asciilifeform: modern VLSI is very rf-noisy. you could fix this by fabbing the ASICs as ECL (emitter coupled logic)
asciilifeform: one little tidbit: vs. a resistance heater, a BTC heater will piss out considerably more energy as RF.
asciilifeform: yeah the jumpers. can make it say 'FU', whatever.
asciilifeform: actually the turbo on every 486 i've owned just turned off the cpu cache. the little LED freq. display was a lie.
asciilifeform: sort of how we don't have prison inmates turning generators. thermo says it's a loss, so it's a loss.
asciilifeform: still seems to be like cranking out ASIC water heaters will be a net thermodynamic loss at some point not too far off. and a thermodynamic loss can't be decoupled from financial loss forever
asciilifeform: benkay: the windmill would probably rake in more profit by selling the joules back to the local power co. (at least in countries where this is practiced.)
asciilifeform: question then is: ebay is chock-full of FPGA miner rigs being sold off for pennies on the dollar. why isn't anyone buying them up for use as space heaters?
asciilifeform: benkay: assuming the chips already exist (their cost of manufacture, in terms of energy and materials) has already been paid.
asciilifeform: i mean, at some point in the none-too-distant future, the expected yield is... zero? correct?
asciilifeform: the argument i was trying to make is that mining needs a certain minimal return for it to make sense even as a space heater replacement.
asciilifeform: this is invariably many times more than the energy (or materials) cost of making an ordinary coil heater.
asciilifeform: benkay: I was talking about the amount of energy spent in producing the chips
asciilifeform: and by the time we get the ASIC water heater, it will yield - what - a satoshi a day?
asciilifeform: benkay: no matter what you do, resistance heat coils are still cheaper - if only because nobody cancelled thermodynamics (look up how many joules it takes to fab even 1970s silicon.)
asciilifeform: where the only people guaranteed to profit are the hardware vendors (and the truly heroic profits go to vapourware vendors)
asciilifeform: scam in the sense of being a 'race to the bottom'
asciilifeform: or is this simply too obvious for an interesting conversation...
asciilifeform: anyone link to a good discussion of how mining itself (unless you're 2 or 3 steps ahead of the plebes' game tech-wise) is a scam?
