asdgkknio
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
Bitcoin is entirely owned by people with ASICs. The barriers to entry are enormous. It's totally pointless for me to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, or even on my Beowulf cluster. But if mining involves normal computations like you'd want to run on a normal cloud, then a laptop is capable of doing useful work and the barrier to entry is low.
Making normal computers useful is a huge improvement over Bitcoin and is the motivvation behind currencies like Monero.
I think the obvious solution is to do useful work rather than throwing away work on crypto. Have miners solve real problems and give them credit for getting the right answer.
This is what Ethereum is supposed to do. I don't think it's a great solution. It's still extremely wasteful since every node runs every computation. Even something like TrueBit, which is designed to be scalable and efficient, is still far less efficient than normal cloud architectures. It still throws away the vast majority of the work in the interest of safety and incentives. These systems are good if you want trustworthy computation, but not if you want high-performance and power-efficient computation.
I'm trying to design a system where something like 95% of the work goes to useful computation, but I have nothing anywhere near shippable. It's a hard problem.
2. No idea.
3. No idea.
4. About 0%. They're laughably unscalable and wasteful.
EDIT: Actually, yes I have. I know that Epyc allows encryption of every VM with a key the host can't access, which is wicked. But I haven't seen benchmarks or in-depth analysis.
I wonder how much power the 50 pounds of JS on Youtube costs.
That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.
And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.
They're playing psychologist and should be subject to a similar code of ethics.
Another interesting article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
Here's the correct headline:
"Japanese politician required to leave chamber after bringing her baby to work"
The Post has gone downhill very quickly since Bezos took over.
No shit. If it existed, it would be pointless to work on it.