Nostr Web Client

Given that Bitcoin is built on the assumption of greed, not benevolence, what would be the personal reward of contributing to that collective effort?

Also, given that hash per watt is not a universal constant but instead determined by a wide variety of factors such as but not limited to minor model, firmware, current settings, idiosyncrasies of individual minors, temperature, etc., while it can obviously be measured and calculated, unlike the speed of a falling object given the local gravitational acceleration, time spent falling, and initial velocity, I'd argue that energy per block is not deterministic. And then even from there, given that network conditions are constantly changing, some minor operators constantly fluctuate minor settings which cause things to get even more complicated and non-deterministic. And depending on the goal of the exercise, does the efficiency of power generation and transmission need to be considered? What about the likelihood that the power would have been otherwise used rather than simply grounded, or not generated in the first place?

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me, calculating network efficiency seems like it be anything but a straightforward deterministic process, and would instead be a fairly handwavy estimation based on a variety of measurement averages and heuristics, which is doable, but you presumably won't get too many significant digits, but maybe that's all you need!

Jack K 1y ago

It’s in my white paper which I’ll be releasing soon, but without direct measurement of the energy:

you can sum up the total hashes produced by a miner (hashes) x their real operating efficiency (joules per hash) to get joules. The block energy would be the sum of all miners hashes x each miners real efficiency.

This is deterministic despite our inability currently to measure or determine it. It would certainly require a BIP and likely an anchor into each block; this is to be determined.

“Whether the humans can measure and determine the energy is not the point, the universe knows the exact amount of joules consumed to produce a block. It’s a real number.”

If you want to understand the real value of bitcoin, not the abstract value, you need the energy.

You can not equate the abstract value of bitcoin (satoshis) to is real value (energy/joules). This is the only way to price bitcoin outside of fiat. Price it in energy. It’s deterministic.

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Discussion

AJ2884 1y ago

In the name of avoiding a semantic debate, I'll merely point out that many things that are deterministic cannot be modeled via models that are simpler than the system which they are intended to model (such as many aspects of economics). So functionally, not all systems can be modeled and not all states can be predicted.

Either way, are you trying to determine the total energy used by the Bitcoin network, or the energy used by the particular minor that finds a block, since the last block? If it's the first, the fact that you're posing the question rather than simply using publicly available estimates implies that you need more accurate or precise data and I'm curious if public companies consider that to be a trade secret, and if it's the first or second, I could see that requiring hardware updates, again, depending on the accuracy and precision that you need.

I apologize if I seem dismissive or critical; in my field it's regularly joked that ideas are worthless because basically all of the value is in the execution and I get the impression from you that you have pretty specific data requirements, but occasionally there are revolutionary ideas that are worth some serious effort!

Jack K 1y ago

I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re absolutely right. My perspective was wrong. I was missing something in my equations and it was leading me in the wrong direction. After error correct in the equations, makes sense now. This is deterministic with the data that bitcoin gives us already in the Blockchain. There is no more urgency.