You think the current global financial system is energy efficient? How about the raw materials used by global militarizes financed by unending money printing? If you fast forward a couple decades, and Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, mining will be far more efficient than the amount of enormous military spending and middle-eastern oil production financed by fiat currencies and the petrodollar standard.
You people are advocating for shutting down one of the most important human advancements of all time – money that is directly linked to energy.
That's preposterous, Bitcoin incentivizes production of whatever energy is cheapest. That does not necessarily mean fossil fuels, though it is often that those are cheaper.
Hydro is a perfect example. A sizeable percentage of all Bitcoin mining is done with cheap hydro.
Bitcoin will do the same for nuclear, making it cheap and plentiful.
Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity.
Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the grid – spin down some machines if there is high demand, spin up machines if there is low demand.
There are so many benefits. It is unfortunate that there is a serious lack of understanding on this website.
Skynet is built on top of the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform (https://sia.tech). Sia uses a blockchain to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions and store file contracts (which are like cryptographic SLAs between users), and is very similar to Bitcoin in architecture.
Anyone can operate a Skynet Webportal (the server), and Webportals can choose how they'd like to monetize – for example, they can run ads.
You can also run your own Skynet Portal by downloading Sia v1.4.3, released today. It costs about $10/mo to run a Portal because you have to form file contracts with a few hundred storage providers on the network. But then you do not have to go through a Webportal middleman.
Wholeheartedly agree, especially when demoing the ability to film simultaneously on multiple cameras, and the 4K front-facing camera. The 64 GB is really a slap in the face.
Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will foster competition between hosts on the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.
Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfamiliar with the high costs of S3 storage and egress.
We do not yet have the ability to share the same set of contracts across multiple machines, but it is on the roadmap. This would include using the same set of contracts on desktop and mobile devices, which will open up some intriguing use-cases.
You people are advocating for shutting down one of the most important human advancements of all time – money that is directly linked to energy.