Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized (bbc.com) 312
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC:
The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels....
We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."
The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."
"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."
Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.
When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."
We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."
The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."
"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."
Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.
When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."
You would think (Score:3)
That environmental organizations like greenpeace would be all over this
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All over where? How do you hang a banner off a bitcoin? What publicity do you get scaling the side of an unassuming building with a few computers inside? There's no corporate logo infront of which you can dump a welded shut container with your staff inside. There's rocks you drop into bitcoins ocean, no cables you can dangle in front of its fleet. No selfies you can take with large cooling towers (which ironically are usually the greenest components of all the things they demonstrate against).
Greenpeace has
Indeed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin's energy use (with an earlier one further down below).
*** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! *** (but really, why are you even reading this story then?)
and more info (Score:2)
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"Our sun will not decay any faster because of Bitcoin, which is the only real fundamental thing to worry about."
It's fun to imagine a grown adult thinking he's just said something that isn't impressively stupid.
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Because Bitcoin can use renewable energy or other carbon free forms like nuclear plants, the amount of energy it consumes is irrelevant.
Except that at any one time, energy generation capability is finite and that energy could be used elsewhere, perhaps more productively.
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> Except that at any one time, energy generation capability is finite and that energy could be used elsewhere, perhaps more productively.
If only there was some way for people to signal to each other what use of scare resources was most important to them. They could perhaps even assign numeric representations so that competing uses for various resources could be assigned a point value.
There could even be a network over which this point system could be communicated, and in order to win the decision, a pers
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Because Bitcoin can use renewable energy or other carbon free forms like nuclear plants, the amount of energy it consumes is irrelevant.
Our sun will not decay any faster because of Bitcoin, which is the only real fundamental thing to worry about.
The problem is that whilst it can much of it doesn't and even if it does, because we don't generate enough electricity from renewables to meet current demand, it means something else that could be powered by that carbon free form isn't able to be because every time someone buys their kiddy porn with 0.000001BTC that single transaction uses over 600kWh due to the way the BTC network is set up to verify transactions.
So Bitcoin literally is cancer. (Score:2)
Bitcoin mining --> coal power plants --> radioactive cesium in its smoke --> cancer for everyone in its vicinity
Stop focussing on insignificant CO2 emissions! (Score:2)
And yes Bitcoin is so distributed over the world and yet so insignificant that you need to compare it to Argentine.
And this is why Fridays For Future ignores BTC .. they are smart and focus on the big targets minor improvements on big targets are easier and have a much greater impact than big improvements on little targets.
And anybody who wants to successfully tackle climate change - focus and not let your focus be distracted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Btw. The Bitcoin bubble is bursting right now
Units (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone else find it odd to use TWh/year as a unit? Since we're talking about (on average) continuous consumption, why wouldn't you just use watts (with an appropriate prefix).
The UK uses 35 GW and Bitcoin consumes between 4.5 GW and 51 GW, with a central estimate of 15 GW, for those who prefer less-silly units.
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It's a little strange, but the times hour/year actually serves a purpose. We commonly measure residential electrical consumption in kWh, so keeping it in those units per year makes it easier to compare. Even the government does this with energystar ratings (they base their standards on: "On average, consumer refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers, and freezers consume 384 kWh, 588 kWh, and 555 kWh per year, respectively.") See also, we could use horsepower, but that's not intuitive.
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See also, we could use horsepower, but that's not intuitive.
Even horses switched to the metric system years ago ...
Re: Units (Score:2)
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And the metric unit system measurement for residential energy consumption is kWh/year. You didn't like that.
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And why should anyone like that?
Energy consumption should be measured in Joules. Which, oddly enough, TWh/year reduces to nicely. Just slap a prefix (Tera/Giga/Mega/Kilo etc) on the joules number, and you're golden.
I've always wondered why SI users can't use the SI units as designed....
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It is a pretty common metric, just like [k|M|T]Wh/[day|month]; it is energy per reference period of time and not power. Specific to Bitcoin, I doubt the power over the course of a year is consistent— it should vary significantly with the price of Bitcoin.
The one that gets me for some reason is when they do similar things with BTu.
WHAT? Bitcoin uses tons of electricity? (Score:2)
Why oh why hasn't anyone pointed this out before?!
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SETI@home (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if SETI@home got the same amount of computing power. Or the protein folding project.
Re:SETI@home (Score:5, Insightful)
SETI@Home with this amount of computer power behind it would have achieved about as much as bitcoin has in making the world a better place. In all the years they have nothing to show for it, much in the same way that bitcoin is not a currency and doesn't generate any value.
Folding@home on the other hand is using the computing power for something that actually benefits society. Their results are large enough that they categorise them by year: https://foldingathome.org/pape... [foldingathome.org]
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SETI@Home with this amount of computer power behind it would have achieved about as much as bitcoin has in making the world a better place. In all the years they have nothing to show for it, much in the same way that bitcoin is not a currency and doesn't generate any value.
Ya, but having something to show for it or not was part of SETI's mission, so *not* detecting anything provides some useful data. Granted, not nearly as exciting as detecting something, but still useful from a scientific standpoint.
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True. Sad but true, regarding s@h. But, to add to fafhrd's comment, "absence of evidence is not..." etc. It added an incredible amount of data points, one could say, to one or more variables of the Drake equation.
As for worth to humanity, debatable of course: but what if there had been a hit?
PS: thanks for the reminder on f@h. I gave it up a while back, but now I have a better performing comp and I'm not as concerned about the electric bill atm.
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There are some cryptocurrencies that use useful computations as their proof of work.
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Imagine if SETI@home got the same amount of computing power. Or the protein folding project.
Protein folding has actually been "solved" and it wasn't solved due to excessive amounts of computing power. As a result, we will soon be able to compute protein folding rapidly.
Sadly, the SETI project still wouldn't have discovered anything due to the scope of the search.
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I can't speak for anyone else, but when bitcoin first came out it was being discussed on the folding and seti teams I contributed to. I know I was kinda disgusted that people would throw CPU cycles away for something as "crude" as a digital currency, but we did lose quite a few folks over to it. Anyway, eventually I shut my small farm down and these days wished I had thrown some weight into BTC for awhile. It certainly would've paid off, but I'm not sure I'd have been happy these days with the consequences.
Bitcoin and other crypto will burst when regulated (Score:2)
I have no idea why the governments of the world (for the most part) have not not realized or acted on the fact that the vast majority of the actual use of cryptocurrency as a currency is for illegal purposes.
For example, cocaine cartels used to move large quantities of money around with pallets of Benjamins, obviously with very high transportation costs and risk of interception. Now? They send an encrypted e-mail, and most likely while connected to a no-log VPN. The narcotics trade was an early adopter. Oth
These stats would have more impact (Score:2)
Bad math as usual (Score:3)
2)Miners will only mine if it is profitable. So the amount of money spent on mining is always going to be less than the block reward.
3) Bitcoin can never be used as a global currency. It is limited to just under 7 transactions a second (4000 per block, on block every 600 seconds). VISA can do 15000/second last time I checked.
Re:Bad math as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue with item 2 is that profitable can be relative if the miner can figure out how to externalize part of the cost.
Selling $1000 worth of stuff to a fence for $100 is profitable mainly because it's not your stuff. If you include the externalized costs, it's a net destruction of value.
At least make it do something useful (Score:3)
Add 'cryptocurrency' to the list.. (Score:3)
The solution is simple. (Score:3)
All you need to do is place a "carbon" tax on energy produced using fossil fuels that will grow annually until it's too costly to produce pollution for energy. Will this decrease computations for Bitcoin? Yes but only temporarily until the price of electricity subsides again as everything will become renewable fuels.
Politicians are fully aware they have the power to do this but are willing the sacrifice the future to save their own hides.
Carbon Tax (Score:2)
Bitcoin in a nutshell (Score:5, Funny)
A basic mistakes destroys credibiity (Score:2)
Err, Bitcoins transaction rate and the energy it uses aren't connected in any way. The fact Bitcoin hit it's max transaction rate a long time ago, but the energy use keeps going up should of
Re:Socialism? (Score:4, Informative)
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It does sound OK, as long as all the externalities are included in your energy price. They currently aren't.
Okay but each watt/hour of electricity has the same externalities involved in its production no matter what it's used for. Shouldn't it just be a call to increase the price of electricity rather than anything specific about bitcoin?
If we include secondary externalities then there is quite a bit worse than bitcoin, e.g., probably most if not all manufacturing. At least the electricity used to mine bitcoin is not itself powering the intake of yet more environmental resources and outputting toxic runoff.
Ultim
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Okay but each watt/hour of electricity has the same externalities involved in its production no matter what it's used for.
That is correct.
Shouldn't it just be a call to increase the price of electricity rather than anything specific about bitcoin?
Partly, but Bitcoin would then at least pay for its societal costs (or at least their environmental part) in a more proportional fashion. Obviously given its nature, it would be more affected than other industries, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? Bitcoin currently is one of the fields profiteering from insufficient environmental regulations. And if someone were to find out how to do Bitcoin more efficiently and to decrease its footprint, he'd be rewarded for that.
If we include secondary externalities then there is quite a bit worse than bitcoin, e.g., probably most if not all manufacturing.
But manufacturing at
Re:Socialism? (Score:4, Insightful)
My country (Canada) has a carbon tax, so I do pay for the externalities.
Not yet you don't. Canada has yet to start getting the big bills caused from climate change.
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No he just wants you to stop destroying the planet.
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Yes it is, a carbon tax does not get worked out to cover externalities, it is just a random value assigned by some politician, bought and paid for by businesses, no body has asked me how much polluting my portion of air is worth. And even if it was bitcoin miners would simply move their mining to cheaper locations, where it doesn't cover externalities. I value the environment as infinite because once its gone money is useless so nobody can even afford to by my share, and since you can't guarantee you not u
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Re: Socialism? (Score:2)
I agtee that if you want to throw away you money, by throwing it at me, you are welcome.
But if you are deliberately creating pollutiom that harms us all and ruins our property and bodies, then your freedom to do that ends right where my freedom from your shit starts.
Libertarian psychopaths always think their "freedom" to harm others has no conseqiences. Like that freedom could not apply to us too and we could not just have our "freedom" to kick you out of our civilization and lands, and if you complain, tel
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Two examples off the top of my head.
Abkhazia. One of the consequences of the 2008 war was that they got control of the giant hydroelectric at the Ingury Gorge which used to satisfy 60%+ of the electricity demand of both Georgia and Abkhazia. Most of the output of that has gone into mining and most of it has not been paid for. Organized crime + illegal grid connections going
Re:Socialism? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fossil fuel is the most heavily subsidized industry on earth. So sure, if you pay market prices for it, and pay for externalities, then go nuts. But you aren't and more importantly - you can't - so no, you can't do whatever you want with it.
Re: Socialism? (Score:2)
Sure, spend the money if youâ(TM)ve got it. But if you think you can ruin the environment for me, then you can go fuck yourself. You see, thatâ(TM)s where your freedom ends. Iâ(TM)d like to see you stand up to the rest of the world if you did try that, and thatâ(TM)s actually whatâ(TM)s beginning to happen.
Re:Socialism? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tilting at windmills. Dude you're just as old as any of the other fuckers on this site, and you're cherrypicking from this nebulous consensus as if slashdot holds one opinion.
So what good does Bitcoin do? (Score:5, Interesting)
And we know it's easy to do, because the Bitcoin folks are shitting themselves at the prospect of the founder waking up and dumping his currency on the market... which is a paltry $11 billion. As I pointed out elsewhere Bill Gates made more than that off his COVID profits.
You're only option to stop that is to regulate it, but then you lose the benefits most Bitcoin fans tout.
Bitcoin's also great for money laundering. Sure you can do that with cash, but we've got laws about reporting large cash purchases. We could do those laws about BTC, but, well, again if we're going to regulate it until it's a Fiat currency there goes the advantages I keep hearing about.
Finally as I've pointed out elsewhere it's entirely possible the 1% will convert Bitcoin into a defacto company script. Paying you in it and then manipulating it's price to suit their whims. Try to imagine how much power you would have if you controlled the value of your employees assets...
So the freedom aspect of Bitcoin isn't really there. Either the folks at the top use well known and understood currency manipulation techniques to manipulate the price to their liking or we turn it into another fiat currency but with an entire developed nation's worth of electricity wasted on it.
What's that leave us? What advantages does it offer that our current system does not.
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Well, the point is that it is difficult to regulate or police. A court can order you to disgorge your bitcoin, but it can't *make* you. Of course this has drawbacks too; if your Bitcoin are ever stolen you're never getting them back.
I think a lot of early adopters were utopians of a libertarian type who saw it as a way to get government out of its role controlling fiat money. The fact that the government (or a quasi-governmental bank) can say how much money there is and manipulate prices has always made t
You haven't given any solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair I'm not sure if you intended to though.
At any rate as a wage slave my wages are a large concern. We have a *very* precarious relationship with the 1% right now (Uber and the Gig economy is pretty clearly them trying to redefine that relationship). The thought of
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Nobody launders money through bitcoin, every transaction is traceable.
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So the freedom aspect of Bitcoin isn't really there. Either the folks at the top use well known and understood currency manipulation techniques to manipulate the price to their liking or we turn it into another fiat currency but with an entire developed nation's worth of electricity wasted on it. What's that leave us? What advantages does it offer that our current system does not.
Distribution. The current system is a central controlled fiat. This isnt. It is freedom is the greatest sense of the word. Just because arseholes have found ways to manipulate it doesn't make it less useful than the current US DOLLAR fiat we have, just "welcomes it" to the club.
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Bitcoin's also great for money laundering.
No, it isn't. Bitcoin is unstable and leaves a trail. There are many ways that are much better than bitcoin. I know of a way, with a small up-front investment, that can launder vast amounts of money that will probably turn a profit so one can charge to launder other people's money and take less of a cut. Unlike Bitcoin it is stable, has little chance of crashing, and uses regular fiat currencies.
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And these figures are likely under estimates, as the billionaires are using their money to go on buying sprees while the economic downturn is making assets cheap, just like they did in 2008, but those assets will regain their value once the pandemic is under control.
Buy low, sell high sounds good unless you're the one being forced to buy high... Did you know Bill Gates is now the biggest farmer in the America? [foodandwine.com].
I'm singling out Gates because he's a bit of a boogeyman right now but the sam
You can do the math (Score:2)
And again, all this is *before* we take into account all the assets they're buying up at a fraction of the value. They never let a disaster go to waste.
But you're splitting hairs because you don't want to face facts. The fact that the 1% and the
Gates has significant control over the food supply. If you're American He decides if you liv
Also I noticed nobody's answered the points (Score:2)
You can't have small government because robber barons won't let you. If you don't create a powerful central government to counterbalance the power of money then the robber barons will just build those power structures themselves and use them a
Re:Socialism? (Score:5, Insightful)
That was the opinion here when it came to things like LED and CFL bulbs
You're lumping CFL and LED together, but CFL was really a nasty alternative forced on us by government. Yes, they used less power than incandescent, but the list of downsides to those bulbs were very long, including environmental issues like mercury ending up in places it shouldn't, and numerous performance issues that directly affected consumers. LEDs are the perfect replacement to incandescent, and the fact that an entire industry of producing CFLs disappeared overnight shows just how poor this technology was for replacing the standard incandescent bulb. There literally was one single metric (consumer energy consumption) that was better, while it was a compromise in most every other way (for me, personally, CFLs did not outlast incandescent or not by much. I suppose, theoretically, they would last longer before the various chemicals in the tubes broke down and didn't perform, however I think the ballasts were prone to fail much, much earlier than that in the real world).
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Completely fucked over the fine art market in the process. And believe me, painters etc. are *very* sensitive to the quality of lighting. The pros prefer surplus commercial projector bulbs, tungsten at 5,000k. There is a small cottage industry of trying to rebuild these bulbs. And I have seen pro artists pay well over $100 ea for them.
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Indeed. The thing about incandescent is that it's basically an ideal black body radiator, with a smooth spectral power distribution, as opposed to LEDs which emit radiation at specific peaks. Even the white LEDs, which emit in the UV band which is converted to visible by a phosphor coating (and thus work on a principle that is actually closer to CFL than incandescent), the color rendering index is still far from ideal for color-critical applications. There are "full-spectrum" LEDs such as those found in
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For *some* applications.
Up here where we get a good bit of snow and ice in the winter, incandescents were actually pretty good at melting ice/snow that would obscure view of a traffic light. Not so much with LEDs, so you either need to install a secondary melting system, replace the entire unit, or accept that you are going have periods of time no one can safely see the traffic light.
Re:Socialism? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's foolish to stick with incandescents for that reason.
You can run a simple resistive heater continuously in combination with an LED bulb and still save energy over the old incandescent. Coupled with a thermostat to only run it if the temperature dips below freezing, you can save even more energy. Municipalities that have made the change have saved millions in energy costs.
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Because incandescents are inefficient resistive heaters? Where does the lost energy go?
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If I had to guess, in a light facing north, the wasted heat would be going west, east, south, up, and down.
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Note I didn't say we should stick with them for all reasons, I am noting how, correctly, that LEDs are not a universal fix, as I was responding to.
That's one way, which is a heck of a bit more complicated and exp
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[Citation Needed]
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It's perfectly useful to look at the resources required when evaluating the possibility of Bitcoin scaling up enough to actually fulfill the claimed utility. And the math says it can't be scaled up that much.
Side note, I am using LED bulbs throughout the house except in the oven. My only complaint is too many manufacturers designing intentionally short life into their bulbs by using too few LEDs driven too hard. By spending pennies more on manufacture they could add dollars of value.
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The longevity of an LED should mean that an LED bulb would last years and years [potentially decades] and cost cents per day to run. But that sort of performance would mean that once the manufacturers had saturated the marketplace, they would not get many repeat customers.
So they designed-in obsolescence; or, rather, they designed in an artificially limited lifespan.
Welcome to the free market.
Re: Socialism? (Score:2)
New things often have unintended consequences. Shutting down any discussion on the assumption that criticism comes from anti-progress luddites is naive at best and a fallacy at worst.
I would argue that first gen cryptocurrency will be completely replaced by later generations. Hopefully we can get past stupid arguments and make improvements on those new generations sooner rather than later.
But wasting energy is part of the scam! (Score:2)
The waste of energy for Bitcoins is the part of the scam that most amazes me. No sane reason for it. Remember that the objective is to randomly select the next signature for the blockchain. The actual constraint is how frequently the blocks need to be signed.
A cryptocurrency can use ANY basis for that lottery, but Blockchain picked the basis of wasting energy doing calculations that are discarded. It is sort of fair in that the biggest wasters are going to win most of the time, but there is NO rational reas
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Great idea! Instead of wasting electricity we'll be wasting hard drives (and all the resources that go into making them) and network bandwidth!
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Great idea! Instead of wasting electricity we'll be wasting hard drives (and all the resources that go into making them) and network bandwidth!
The point is that it is NOT wasted.
1. You make encrypted storage available
2. The CC-system uses some randomized algorithm to select blocks and test them by storing crypto-keys there.
3. One of these blocks is selected, by some random algorithm, as the "winner" of the next coin.
So instead of "proof of work", you are doing "proof of storage".
But unlike the CPU spinning "work", the storage is mostly making real storage available.
Disclaimer: This post contains a huge amount of hand-waving and lack of details.
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They have to store and access the blocks of transaction data in any case. I actually think that the network communication costs will dominate, but I admit that I can't figure out an easy way to take that into account. If the primary goal is to optimize the network, then you should also favor the storage that is located in good places. Lots of ways to do that, but are any of them fair?
(Obviously the current Bitcoin system isn't fair, either, basically favoring players who have access to the cheapest energy (
Re: But wasting energy is part of the scam! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gold has plenty of uses beyond value store. Infact those uses get severely curtailed by those who hoard it.
Once space mining becomes a reality some time around the turn of the next century gold will plumment in value.
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Re:How much energy for video games? (Score:4, Funny)
But should we really care about malware producers?
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Get rich quick schemes? I can see why some would want others to "mind their own business" on those. Shame the consequences don't stay confined to it's practitioners.
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Very, very few people are using bitcoin for financial transactions, and the ones that are are either using it because society doesn't want them transacting at all, or they're buying in speculatively.
The mining phase is bad, but it's not really the problem. The endgame is. When mining becomes permanently unprofitable you're left with two options:
1) Most miners quit, difficulty drops, transaction fees are reasonable, but the network is relatively cheap to attack.
2) Miners keep chugging away for transaction fe
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The people using bitcoin for financial transactions obviously do not agree with you. They think bitcoin is their best alternative
If the topic is energy use and "people using bitcoin" think that Bitcoin is the best alternative for financial transactions as far as energy use is concerned, then one necessarily has to conclude that "people using bitcoin" are ignorant morons.
Re:How much energy for video games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Video games and vacations give us something useful in return. On the usefulness scale, mining BTC is on par with shoveling dollar bills into a fire.
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Does anyone else think this waste intensifies with the bitcoin demand and value growing?
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It's designed to do that. It's not an accident either. It *has* to do that. The difficulty must increase proportionally to the value of controlling the system.
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There are currently approximately 37 trillion US dollars in accounts and in circulation.
There will only be approximately 18 million bitcoins possible to create.
If Bitcoin were to completely replace US dollars, each one would be worth approximately 2 million dollars.
If bitcoin grows to become a replacement for currency, (even just US currency, not all currency) then it's value must approach 2 million each.
The bitcoin proof of work algorithm grows more difficult automatically, requiring more energy to calcula
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I feel very similar smell. Either institutions would wake for action, as they are somewhat responsible, or thing collapses on its own, or we are toast in this fatal game if nothing else.
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Video games produce entertainment. Vacations produce entertainment and progressive wealth redistribution. Swimming pools produce entertainment.
Bitcoin produces malware and while initially progressive, I'd bet currently mostly regressive wealth redistribution.
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How much energy is wasted playing video games? How much CO2 is generated by people driving and flying to take wasteful vacations? My neighbor heats his swimming pool all winter long, what impact does that have on the drought crisis in the American west?
All of those at least do something. Video games provide entertainment, driving and flying moves goods and people to where they need to be.
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Everything will chest burst (Score:3)
Seen the movie Aliens, have we?
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These "experts" aren't aware of proof of stake and diminishing rewards?
Your ignorance is even more stunning. Proof of Stake is irrelevant when it is not used, such as in bitcoin. So it doesn't solve anything. Diminishing rewards doesn't disincentive mining, it is an economic mechanism that triggers inflation. If it disincentivise mining then the cryptocurrency would be self-defeating rending itself useless. So it also doesn't solve anything.
From my perspective
Sorry but after the first two sentences of yours your perspective is worth less than a dogecoin.
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Both are long-term solutions to the excessive power draw currently observed.
It's a good thing both will only cause effects in the future. Otherwise you'd have the problem of why they've done nothing to reign in power consumption so far, despite us going far past the point where something like a homelab is cost-effective.
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They may well be aware of those, but since Bitcoin isn't using either of those, they're about as relevant to the discussion as the mating practices of the Blue Satin Bower Bird.
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But bitcoin transactions depend on mining. No mining means no transactions. Their solution to that is you'll just pay people to generate enough hashes to drive your transactions. That amount will have to be enough to make it profitable after they pay for electricity.
Basically, people transacting in Bitcoin today aren't paying through the nose for their transactions because miners are still printing Bitcoin. Like any operation of printing Fiat currency, it's inflationary in nature. It's just not enough infla