• marius@feddit.org
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    1 month ago

    You mean getting paid for using energy is not a working business model? Was about time that the market found that out

    • Hirom@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 month ago

      Given the current price of bitcoin, I suspect the market still doesn’t know.

    • Midnitte@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      Mostly due to the fact that mining bitcoin becomes harder as more and more are found, and the “worth” of that work no longer exceeds the cost in electricity to do so.

      In the past, it was basically free money, especially with how volatile it’s value is/was

      • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.

        • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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          1 month ago

          There is not useful work being done. They may as well be crossword puzzles. Some coins do use the work to do useful things, but bitcoin does it as a way of “proving your work” to earn coin.

          • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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            1 month ago

            I suspected that, but why the hell is “proof of work” nothing of any use or value? That just seems so fundamentally absurd it doesn’t compute for me apparently

            • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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              1 month ago

              I always thought it would be ideal to do this to create a powerful distributed computing network that can both serve to process the transactions made with the coin and also to do something useful, like folding@home or seti@home or whatever. But apparently nope, GPU crossword puzzles that do nothing but use electricity to make heat (and, as a fraction of a fraction of the work, process a blockchain transaction) are the best they could think of.