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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4169 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What use are super conductors? If they are used in computing and they'll drop the price of computation then Bitcoin or other computation limited cryptocurrencies could be a good idea.

Proof of work cryptocurrencies are, if anything, harmed by the development of cheaper compute. The compute difficulty is not a bottleneck, it's the POINT. When miners start solving the hashes too quickly the networks automatically adjust to increase the difficulty.

So if supercomputers got cheaper then all the miners would be forced to upgrade and otherwise nothing would change.

Nathan Fielder

You can't make more bitcoin, so price shouldn't go down unless stores of value that can't be inflated away become common.

There are plenty of factors that impact price besides total supply.

Yeah, if it gets banned or cracked down on. But US now approved Bitcoin ETFs, so that's quite .. unlikely now. It's also not great for crime either, so..

I don't really have any price thesis on Bitcoin, except that computation efficiency won't help it.

Generally, "electromagnets" as far as I know. So, cheaper/smaller MRIs, improved efficiency of motors and generators for everything under the sun, more viable mag-lev systems.

While there are probably some improvements for computers, I doubt it'd be a sea change, but a double digit efficiency improvement isn't terrible.

It depends on the kind of superconductor, particularly material properties.

Ideally it should be malleable and ductile, and I don't think LK-99 is that, so making wiring might be iffy.

There are heaps of other factors, such as maximum temperature for superconductivity (claimed to be very high by SC standards, as in an ice cream freezer works, you don't need liquid nitrogen or helium)*, the maximum amount of current it can carry, the amount of magnetic flux it can tolerate and so on.

In terms of computing, from what I heard speculated, LK-99 is probably not that useful, and besides, in Bitcoin the amount of energy needed to mine a single coin will increase as you make more, so it won't help.

*The Chinese replications claim it's still not quite room temperature, unless you live in Siberia I guess. Still an enormous big if true.

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