One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by gtt on Monday January 22, 2018 @04:41PM (#16208170)

Nothing more useful for humanity, I think. It is literally mining electronic gold which facilitates transactions removing need for trusted third party. You may not ever pay for something "useful" in your life in bitcoin, like you've probably never paid with gold, which is still useful for governments and big investors as store of value.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by yitchelle on Monday January 22, 2018 @04:58PM (#16208349)

The gold that is mined has useful industrial application. Not so sure about Cryptocurrency..

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by cortic on Monday January 22, 2018 @05:20PM (#16208549)

I think you are looking at it wrong; its like saying a bank teller or stockbroker or even a cash machine has no 'useful industrial application'. They are necessary for the currency to work, and they must be paid to do a job. I suspect paying a cryptocurrency miner their 'fee' is a lot cheaper (per transaction).

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by bb88 on Monday January 22, 2018 @11:46PM (#16211070)

There's a non-zero cost with making stock trades, keeping money secure, and transporting money into an ATM machine.

There is a practical (as close as we can get) non-zero cost for moving bits around the internet. It seems like there should be a similar mechanism for building trust in the blockchain.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by tyrust on Monday January 22, 2018 @05:11PM (#16208469)

>Not so sure about Cryptocurrency

In the case of PoW cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, the token is the reward for the useful application: verifying a series of transactions.

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