Quote from: jmw74 on May 21, 2015, 08:14:47 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on May 21, 2015, 06:48:02 PM

Quote from: jmw74 on May 21, 2015, 06:13:52 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on May 21, 2015, 04:59:29 PM

did you listen to the above audio? it doesn't necessarily have to make money for the OEM. they stand to profit from other ways.

So I listened to most of it. I don't really care whether OEM's profit or how, I want to know why regular people would have any interest in this at all.

He's changing the original plan as stated on their website. Their website says in big bold words:

"We've developed a chip for embedded bitcoin mining."

But this guy is talking about distributed apps - eg turing complete computation. Those are two different and mutually exclusive things. So I don't know who's correct here.

Let's say the audio guy is correct and they're embedding distributed app computation into all your devices. The guy says "oh you'll get *slightly* higher priority for stuff because your device spent energy on someone else's computation". This still makes no sense. If I want the 1 cent of electricity I burned to get me slightly higher chance of getting a parking space, why can't I just spend money directly?

He still doesn't address why it's beneficial for devices to sell their computing power, breaking even or at a loss, vs just using money that the device's owner earned, for example, from their job.

in the audio they explain that they want to automate those tx's as opposed to having humans make them. from what i could glean, an app would allow you to preset your preferences to allow, for instance, an Amazon drone to fly over your garage as opposed to your kids sandbox. the drone center would have this info in their controlling servers which could then pre-compute a flight path over your house. or the other example they gave was 2 Google driverless cars arriving at an open parking spot at the same time requiring an immediate decision/negotiation to take place determining which car gets the space. the audio emphasized the "immediacy" of a decision making process enabled by essentially a bidding process somewhere out on some ethereal exchange which would determine who gets what first. humans arguing in a public garage won't cut it. in order for these types of decision making tx's to take place, "cycles" (or Satoshi's i guess) need to be on the phone ready to be utilized. the only way to ensure that these are in place ready to go is to have the phone itself mine them continuosly. if you depend on someone to get a paycheck, go out onto an exchange to buy Satoshi's, pay the exchange fee, and then send them to their phone to enable this whole process, it will never happen.

Yeah, I get all that.

First of all, the use cases are nonsensical, are these the best they can think of?

It presumes a world where there is demand to make digital payments of very tiny amounts that don't exist today, but no demand to make payment of larger everyday amounts. That seems highly unlikely.

not exactly. they will provide a hardware wallet as well for larger storage amts for larger tx's.

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The car example doesn't even require money at all. It depends on the cars cooperating anyway - a non-cooperating car can always refuse to yield. So they might as well play a digital form of rock-paper-scissors. No mining or special hardware required.

In general, a device does not need money to communicate or "make decisions". They already do that today.

i agree that the above examples are kinda far out there. activities we can only imagine. but they are building off of Mike Hearn's original driverless car visions. not that that is a measuring stick or anything but just shows ppl have been thinking about how to do this for quite a while now.

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The real driverless car use case is the car paying automatically for a paid parking spot. There's no way mining would yield enough for that. The real solution here is payment channels - between your main wallet and your devices, and devices amongst themselves.

There is no special hardware required. This is a world where people are going to have to have digital cash anyway.

i agree completely altho we shouldn't discount micropayments completely. esp for developing nations.

as for mining, they do have the stated objective of trying to drive more decentralization of mining. if that requires subsidies or riding on the coat tails of other use cases for these devices, so be it. i think it's a worthy goal.