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 whatshisface on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:43PM (#16209727)

In that case, you'd want everybody running profitless basic research scientific computations for other people's research teams.

Eventually we may be able to buy cloud compute by inventing a new coin with a proof of work useful only to us, buying some Etherium to back it with (so that there's some initial value to mining it), and then letting speculators put it in there currency baskets to give it long-term value.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by alphydan on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:56PM (#16209815)

> profitless basic research

May not scale in 20 years. Useless research can become very valuable in a decade or two.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by whatshisface on Monday January 22, 2018 @08:22PM (#16210010)

That's true, but nobody would be able to bet on it being useful specifically to them. (I'm thinking about simulating LHC stuff, searching astronomical data, the sorts of things where at the time of computation nobody has a clue who will end up benefiting. Protein folding might be off-limits depending on who wants to know how it folds, and why.)

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