[FRIAM] Blockchain Questions

[Marcus Daniels]

There are large mining facilities in central Washington and Tibet and elsewhere that would have an energy budget like a Facebook facility or supercomputing center.   Because mining gets more competitive in time, the power budgets keep going up.   For example, running five modern bitcoin miners nonstop will yield a power bill of about $700 a month.  Multiply that by hundreds and you get the idea..

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/11/05/bitcoin-clusters-emerge-in-cloud-computings-footprints/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas-tibetan-highlands-the-bizarre-world-of-bitcoin-mining-finds-a-new-home/2016/09/12/7729cbea-657e-11e6-b4d8-33e931b5a26d_story.html

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2017 2:17 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Blockchain Questions

there is no known way to hack a blockchain, but "wallets" can be stolen - there have been several instances where large bitcoin banks have been hacked and lost all their virtual currency. A friend is a bitcoin miner and he uses four computers, with four heavy duty graphics processors - all water cooled to do so. A lot of computing power but still within the budget of an individual - no where near that of a "small country."

davew


On Fri, Mar 10, 2017, at 08:09 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:

From The Verge* with my emphases;

'Like blockchain technologies, this information will be write-only...' - funny!

'Blockchain entities like Bitcoin are distributed among lots of different players require a lot of power (computing and literal) to compile and check — as much as a small country,' - Really?

So there's no way to hack a blockchain? Or perhaps I should say why is it so secure?

*http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/10/14880094/deepmind-health-uk-data-blockchain-audit
Robert C


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