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A comment on Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year. Parent comment

Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by undersuit on Friday February 23, 2018 @06:50PM (#16450649)
I'm more concerned that it takes something "wasteful" like mining to make people wake up. What about DRM techniques like HDCP? Even with hardware acceleration we've been wasting power for at least a decade to encrypt every single video stream so that we can stop piracy. Piracy still exists. Mining most definitely uses more power than video encryption but only one of them has really produced anything of value.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by nradov on Saturday February 24, 2018 @12:01AM (#16451789)
Can you quantify the energy wasted on HDCP? My understanding is that it's typically handled by efficient custom circuits.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by undersuit on Saturday February 24, 2018 @12:18AM (#16451844)
Efficient? Maybe, you can still have inefficient hardware. The hardware dedicated to HDCP encryption is single purpose, just like a Bitcoin miner. I'd expect the Bitcoin hardware is far more tuned for efficiency than most hardware HDCP circuits since power usage is the major cost of owning a miner in the longterm.

I'm not aware of any actual metrics and like I originally said I'm pretty sure bitcoin mining still uses more energy.

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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by umanwizard on Friday February 23, 2018 @11:13PM (#16451624)
What of value has bitcoin mining (or for that matter, anything relating to bitcoin) produced?

DRM makes it harder to pirate, which is something of value in my opinion.

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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by wz1000 on Saturday February 24, 2018 @01:39AM (#16452088)
If bitcoin has zero value, DRM has negative value.

DRM doesn't make it harder to pirate. DRM makes it infinitely more attractive to pirate.

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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by aianus on Saturday February 24, 2018 @01:12AM (#16452015)
Bitcoin (well, its descendants now) makes my international money transfers dirt cheap while DRM prevents me from using media that I paid for on my favorite devices.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by undersuit on Friday February 23, 2018 @11:53PM (#16451748)
I think it's highly disingenuous to feign that bitcoin has no value.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by goldenkey on Friday February 23, 2018 @10:09PM (#16451408)
The encryption doubles as compression. Its not wasting power..
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by undersuit on Friday February 23, 2018 @10:53PM (#16451550)
No, the HDMI and HDCP specs support encryption and compression on video streams. Encryption is not compression.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by goldenkey on Saturday February 24, 2018 @12:40AM (#16451907)
Actually, most encryption includes compression. Google it.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by Nursie on Saturday February 24, 2018 @04:18AM (#16452467)
No, it doesn't. If anything, with the use of padding schemes, IVs and MACs, most encryption schemes make the data grow a little.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by undersuit on Saturday February 24, 2018 @12:47AM (#16451937)
I don't mean to be snippy, but could you instead just give me proof of your claims?
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