Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Libre/Open blockchain / cryptographic ASICs

From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 14:07:24 +0000

On Wednesday, February 3, 2021, ZmnSCPxj <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Good morning again Luke,

:)

> If you mean miner power usage, then power efficiency will not reduce
energy consumption.

> Thus, any rational miner will just pack more miners in the same number of
watts rather than reduce their watt consumption.

yes, of course.  the same non-consumer-computing-intuitive logic applies to
purchasing decisions for beowulf clusters.

> Thus, increasing power efficiency for mining does not reduce the amount
of actual energy that will be consumed by Bitcoin mining.

arse.

and if everybody does that, then no matter the performance/watt nobody
"wins".  in fact a case could be made that everybody "loses".

my biggest concern here is that the inherent "arms race" results in very
few players being able to create bitcoin mining ASICs *at all*.

i mentioned earlier that geometry costs are an exponential scale.  3nm must
be somewhere around USD 16 million for production masks.

if there are only a few players that leaves the entirety of bitcoin open to
hardware backdoors.

l.

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