Some folks have recommended nabbing some passing asteroids and detonating them in the Martian atmosphere, just to create more atmosphere as they burn up.

Even if it didn't create more atmosphere, wouldn't that be a cool thing to do just for the hell of it?

If 1600W is enough, then just buy two vacuum cleaners. Duh.

That is incorrect. The validity of a transaction depends only on how it relates to the transactions that precede it. Mining simply keeps track of the "official" history of transactions, to guard against double-spend attacks.

Transactions are useless unless they're confirmed in the blockchain. That's the whole point of bitcoin. Mining and the blockchain is all there is to bitcoin.

And that's another problem: the energy used for mining depends on the hashrate, not transaction rate. It's true that increasing popularity of Bitcoin rises both, but trying to calculate "energy per transaction" on that basis is pretty much the same as trying to calculate "drowned people per litre of ice cream consumed" on the basis that warm weather increases both.

You might have noticed that my calculation started off with network hash rate because that's where the energy is being used. I don't really think it's that important a calculation anyway, but I did it to show the $35 per transaction of the OP was incorrect. Indeed, if the transaction rate goes up faster than the hash rate, then the transaction cost is even lower.

Instead of criticizing, maybe you can come up with a better cost per transaction for bitcoin (because there surely is one).

This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home

How would that work? Do any of these tasks benefit from a metric fuckton of SHA-256 rounds?

Pretty much all the power needed for a transaction is going to be the mining (a transaction isn't valid unless a miner has entered it into a block). So we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation; if we assume:

- 150000 Thash/s total network performance
- power consumption of 1kW per Thash
- power cost of 10 cents per kWh
- 6 blocks per hour
- 400 transactions per block

((150000 * 0.1) / 6) / 400 = $6.25 per transaction

With (true) dual Gbit LAN, I would use a boatload of these. Never mind, there are (more expensive) alternatives.

British Rail did it first with the ATP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

And for doing the funny voice.

A turboprop is not a jet engine; it's a turbine engine mated to a propeller.

A jet engine produces thrust using jet propulsion (it doesn't even have to be a turbine).

Bitcoin will soon be on a parity with gold (per ounce) and is much cheaper and easier to secure and transport.

Symmetric (shared-key) algorithms do have vulnerabilities to quantum computing: Grover's algorithm allows a brute-force search to be performed in square-root time of the key size (i.e. 256-bits -> 128-bits, 128-bits -> 64-bits). This isn't a big problem as long as you're using at least 256-bits.

And those wobbly suicide doors are hilarious.

Why can no modern car maker design something with the beauty and elegance of an E-Type or Muira?

The last thing this industry needs is yet another wave of bad Java programmers.

One would hope they do the compression first otherwise there's very little point.

It's actually 400 MB. You need to get this sort of thing right if you're planning a career in the tech industry when you finish school.