News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigat... by rtkwe on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:54PM (#17249389)
It is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small compared to BTC.

We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to validate and secure the transaction ledger and that ledger and the things it enables is the whole value of BTC.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigat... by perl4ever on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:04AM (#17253184)
I think gold is flawed in essentially the same way as BTC. Mining BTC is called mining because it's a neat abstraction of the old fashioned process. The reason fiat currency took over historically is because there's a tremendous benefit to eliminating the dead weight of mining if you can evolve a more subtle way of limiting supply.
[ Parent | on HN ]