Posts by Neil Graham
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From a Motherboard/Vice article yesterday Ethereum transactions are estimated to take 45 kilowatt-hours of electricity per transaction, VISA is estimated at 0.00651 kWh per transaction.
That seems to be cherry picking data to make the problem sound as bad as possible. It's like saying that cars are terrible because the first automobiles could not travel as fast as a horse. New tech usually starts off worse than existing tech and gets better. This is what Solar Panels are doing right now.
The fact that they consider the power consumption of Graphics cards at all is an indication of this. The Newness of ethereum is why graphics cards are being used. Bitcoin is typically hashed using ASICs which are far more energy efficient.
Reporting Energy per transaction is a metric that implies that the energy cost scales with the number of transactions. It doesn't. For Visa it probably does a bit with some economies of scale helping out as the volume gets massive.
With BlockChains, Lots of transactions doesn't make the hashing significantly slower or faster. Transactions divided by Energy start to look better when the number of Transactions increase. If Visa ran on Etherium The efficiency of Etherium would look a lot better.
That does raise the question of "How many transactions can we have in a block?" The theoretical answer is "As many as we want" The practical answer is "As many as the protocol allows, and the protocol needs people to agree."
The most efficient solution would be a single blockchain with the entire world economy running on it. If that happened there'd be a lot more miners but the number of transactions would be rather a lot.
From another standpoint, Energy consumption is not a requirement of a blockchain . The requirement is that everyone may contribute but via a mechanism where contributors have a limiting factor to stop them from overwhelming other contributions. Processing power meets that criteria, but others may exist. I read about a RAM intensive hashing algorithm which uses far less CPU but requires lots of memory. In that case the miners with the most RAM would get the best results.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Thomas Lumley,
If Westpac is robbed or hacked I don't lose money, but there have been multiple examples of people losing Bitcoin because exchanges were robbed.
There are multiple instances of exchanges being robbed where people didn't lose bitcoin, If the theft was small enough to be covered they can continue. Same goes for Westpac. If someone stole all of their money then their customers would lose out.
I think the difference in likelihood of that happening is more down to the scale of the ventures involved. The BitCoin exchanges and MtGox in particular were not really equipped to deal with the huge value markets that things turned into.
There are bigger players taking things more seriously now but I kind of expect to see some brutal Darwinism over the next ten years.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Yeah the BlockChain aspect doesn't really work for single events. The idea of the chain is to for appended state over time. Strip away the chain aspect and you might as well be using public key signing.
and re: lingers comment. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. Providing privacy is easy(ish). Enforcing privacy is a tricky kettle of fish to skin indeed.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Voter eligibility is a judgement, so that needs some sort of trusted element to make the call. Once eligibility is sorted it's no different to a bean poll. You get given your digital bean in a ledger column of it's own and you put it into the column of the person you're voting for.
You can easily enough grant privacy if you don't record who you gave each particular bean to. but you have to trust the bean provider to do that.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to Lilith __,
I remember studying in the Library and coming to retrieve my boyfriend from Time Out when I was done. The first time I was invited into the Women’s Room, and how conspiratorial and revolutionary it felt.
I met a girl over a game of Bloxeed (Sort of a more combative Tetris) in the Time Out. I'm not entirely sure what happened but when I went home she walked with me and talked about stuff. Now we have a daughter in intermediate.
The Women's Room I had less experience with save for a quick... um...conversation, but that seemed rather conspiratorial and revolutionary at the time too.
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This is an interesting bit on gender flipping book covers to highlight the wrongness of it being something you can even do.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/coverflip-maureen-johnson_n_3231935.html
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Hard News: An unacceptable failure of care, in reply to Steve Barnes,
He is their Union boss, his job is to look after the cops, like it or not.
I would say you're right there but he hasn't always supported the officer in the spotlight.
He once went as far as to say, "Instinctively police officers know this is not right."
Of course that was when a police officer had a legal second job as a sex worker. The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective supported her though.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to CJM,
No, arguing about the veges while the car is stolen, in broad daylight, from the driveway just metres away.
OK, now I'm confused. Did we just eat the car?
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
re @whaledump's details.
Flat 3b, 3 Hans Cresent is the Euadorian Embassy in London.
9284C4A9EB9268918E03313DCDAD5C12EFF3D467 is a hash of bitcoin address
1EMihuUXnttweLaARu83CW9i8V5c4d1r3t with (as yet) no transactions. -
http://www.radionz.co.nz/radionz/programmes/news-extras/audio/20145679/john-key-on-nicky-hager
at 4:45 ish Key says "Nah well, he's making stuff up."