Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by wmf on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @11:03PM
(#7028675)
Right now the ASIC vendors seem to be capital-constrained and are not producing enough ASICs to meet demand. At equilibrium we should expect that the cost of mining will equal the rate of BTC generation and a significant fraction of the cost of mining will be power.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin
by DennisP on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @11:10PM
(#7028699)
Probably. On the other hand if chips get as optimized as they can get aside from further advance of Moore's Law, and they're produced in mass quantities, maybe people will start using them as heating elements in home water heaters.
A lot of the emerging currencies are focusing on memory-constrained hashing algorithms. RAM has price/energy ratios similar to what I mentioned for ASICs, and is already in mass production and about as optimized as major industry is able to make it.