Schedule
Friday, October 9: Problem Set 2 (moved from original deadline of October 2). Problem Set 2 will be posted later. Monday, October 19: Midterm Exam
Checkup 2
As was suggested in class today, there won’t be an immediate opportunity to submit revisions for this (like there was for Checkup 1), but there will be some opportunity to improve your checkup result given in Monday’s class.
Energy
Mining Hardware - current ASIC miners achive >5 Billion hashes per seconds and over 1500 Million hashes per Joule (the energy required to lift an apple one meter).
Antminer S5+ (here’s the specs on the mining hardware we looked at in class)
Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine, The Coinsman, 11 August 2014.
The first thing you notice as you approach the warehouse is the noise. It begins as soon as you step out of the car, at which point it sounds like massive swarm of angry bees droning away somewhere off in the distance. It becomes louder and louder the closer you get to the building, and as you step through the doors it becomes a deafening and steady roar…
Our nearest nuclear plant, the North Anna Power Station (Lake Anna) generates 1892 MW, “enough to power 450,000 homes” or about 9x the amount needed to power the current bitcoin network (only counting the miners themselves; additional power needed for cooling, etc.)
Is it financially lucrative to mine bitcoin in your residencev?
(Caveat: despite the very rough estimate from class today, we are not recommending anyone invest in bitcoin mining!)
How does the energy use of bitcoin compare to what is used by the current financial infrastructure for comparable service? (This is a very difficult question to answer, would be a good project idea, not something to answer in the blank below!)