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  • Introducing UAvicoin

    From Keith F. Lynch@21:1/5 to All on Fri Apr 1 15:56:04 2022
    Lots of people complain about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
    on the grounds that they waste a tremendous amount of energy.
    To a rough first approximation, the way Bitcoins are mined is
    by rewarding whoever, in each ten-minute span, wastes the most
    electricity repeatedly computing the SHA-256 function. According
    to https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate miners are currently
    averaging 2E+18 such computations per second, about two moles of
    computations per week. As such, the vast majority of computations
    ever done consist of SHA-256 hashes.

    (At least by our species. Though it has been suggested that this
    is the explanation of the Fermi paradox. Every species eventually
    consumes all available energy mining cryptocurrencies, leaving none
    to spare for interstellar exploration or communication.)

    So my modest proposal is to instead reward a more useful form of
    destruction. So I hereby introduce UAvicoin, short for Ukraine
    victory coin. Mining consists of destroying Russian military assets
    in Ukraine. Whoever destroys the most during each ten-minute span
    will be rewarded with one UAvicoin. Each act of destruction must be
    documented on a smartphone, tagged with current time, date, latitude,
    and longitude. That's to prevent cheating. For instance destruction
    of Russian military assets in Russia is disallowed, since it would be
    likely to cause World War III.

    For purposes of this mining, the borders of Ukraine are construed
    broadly, to include Crimea and all other places controlled by Ukraine
    at any time in the 21st century.

    This coin will be very valuable, since none will be mined after
    Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine, which, due to this mining, will
    be very soon.
    --
    Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
    Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Keith F. Lynch@21:1/5 to Keith F. Lynch on Sat Apr 2 21:37:01 2022
    Keith F. Lynch <kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
    According to https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate miners are
    currently averaging 2E+18 such computations per second, about two
    moles of computations per week. As such, the vast majority of
    computations ever done consist of SHA-256 hashes.

    Correction: 2E+20 hashes per second, more than one mole per *hour*.
    And those are not trivial computations. It would take more than a
    day to do one by hand. See http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html

    A mole, 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000, is usually only used when
    counting atoms, electrons, or photons. A mole of hydrogen atoms weigh
    about one gram and take up about 10 liters of volume at standard
    temperature and pressure. A mole of electrons is about 96,485
    coulombs (ampere seconds) of charge. A mole of electron volts
    represents 96,485 joules (watt seconds) of energy. A mole of
    visible light photons is enough light to read by for a week.

    For comparison, about six trillion cigarettes are manufactured each
    year worldwide, so it would take a hundred billion years to make a
    mole of cigarettes.

    A mole of bits is enough to store about a billion years of high
    definition video.

    That's 200 million hashes per picosecond. And there are more
    picoseconds in a second than there have been seconds since the
    last ice age.

    So that really is an utterly mind-boggling amount of computation.

    UAvicoin is of course an April fool's joke, but the above about
    bitcoin mining is perfectly true.
    --
    Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
    Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

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