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 yorwba on Monday January 22, 2018 @08:49PM (#16210171)

> The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining.

So you spend $x on (compute time + electricity) to mine a useful PoW worth $y outside the blockchain and an additional mining reward of $z. If you cheat, you don't get to collect the $z reward. Although your original $x are not completely wasted, you still only have $y instead of the $y + $z you could have had.

How is that not incentive enough?

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by beaner on Monday January 22, 2018 @10:23PM (#16210705)

$y + $z must be greater than $x. If $y is money and $z is scientific contributions... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for. So in an open market its value is at or near $0. So $z by itself must exceed $x.

To not care about the $z, $y must exceed $x by itself and that seems really unlikely for the types of things that OP suggested instead of proof-of-work.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by maldeh on Monday January 22, 2018 @11:15PM (#16210948)

If $y is the useful PoW, would that not make $y the scientific reward while $z is the (monetary) token reward by way of mining?

Edit: silly question on my part. y and z should be trivially interchangeable. Your argument appears to rest on the idea that the monetizeable scientific worth of the work would dominate the worth of the crypto token itself, since there would be limited value in an already-mined result beyond standard blockchain speculation - is that the case?

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by mygo on Monday January 22, 2018 @10:48PM (#16210822)

>If $y is money ... $y is most likely not something people are offering money for.

scrathes head

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by beaner on Friday January 26, 2018 @07:34PM (#16244085)

I think I was trying to be too smart and I got my variables confused.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by mygo on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @12:31AM (#16211271)

Seriously though, I would gladly offer to give anyone $100 in exchange for $1000.

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Re:One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC ... by ric2b on Thursday January 25, 2018 @11:59AM (#16232349)

> Although your original $x are not completely wasted, you still only have $y instead of the $y + $z you could have had.

That just makes $x grow to $previous_x + $y.

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