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One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proo

• deleted 9y ago
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• Squithrilve 9y ago
  > flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees. This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.
  • joe_the_user 9y ago
    Uh, power that isn't used for bitcoin mining could be used to improve human lives in innumerable way - or not used at all and allow a decreased production of greenhouse gases.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      Why do you think the power is not already being used to bring useful services for people? It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy... By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-in-siberia/ https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...
      • imtringued 9y ago
        It doesn't really work this way... If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining. Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money. Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
        • Squithrilve 9y ago
          Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste. > Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit. That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?
          • joe_the_user 9y ago
            Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here). Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.
  • eridius 9y ago
    If bitcoin's power usage is like a massive drain in the middle of the ocean sucking down millions of gallons of water per second, your comment is like complaining about the drip on your kitchen faucet.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      Maybe not exactly on my kitchen but rather all kitchens around the world as we all use monitors, TCP etc...
  • gtrubetskoy 9y ago
    > Why won't you complain about monitor pixels or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is
    • traverseda 9y ago
      Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.
    • imtringued 9y ago
      Bitcoin would happily consume it...
  • traverseda 9y ago
    The problem is that coin incentivizes* the use of electricity, which is a dumb thing to incentivize. Sure, we can incentivize the use of electricity, but we can also decide to incentivize something else. A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional software encourages more powerful general purpose computers instead of more powerful custom bitcoin ASICS. There are much better things to incentivize.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      > but we can also decide to incentivize something else. This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-independent-protocol-possible http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • free_everybody 9y ago
    You can't possibly be comparing SSL with bitcoin mining. SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. The price of bitcoin is EXTREMELY speculative no matter how you look at it. What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? All the computation dedicated to mining coins which were never spent would be wasted. Entirely different scenarios here.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      > SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties? > Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed? > What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).
  • kiddico 9y ago
    What are you even getting at here? That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      Well Bitcoin is always on because people are constantly using it so it can't "conserve power" just as a constantly on display or CPU can't.
  • viraptor 9y ago
    The comparisons fall short. - pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.
    • Squithrilve 9y ago
      > - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information And protecting money is not important? > - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically. Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining? > - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome. The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).
      • viraptor 9y ago
        > The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that) On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin which chugs energy/money by design, while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient. People concisely decide to burn money to keep this system running - that's why it's unreasonable.
        • 9y ago
• sillysaurus3 9y ago
  If Bitcoin reached 2 trillion dollars, it would use about 2% of the world's power. It seems tough to argue that a 2 trillion dollar GDP doesn't merit a 2% increase in power output.
  • kiddico 9y ago
    Solid point. Unless of course we can do it with 1% of the world's power, which is what I hope something like proof of space would allow.
  • txcwpalpha 9y ago
    Bitcoin's total value being 2 trillion dollars is not the same thing whatsoever as bitcoin being responsible for 2 trillion dollars of GDP. There is no "merit" here. We can have $2 trillion in GDP with paper money, too, and that uses 0% of the world's power.
    • yayitswei 9y ago
      Not 0% if you count the resources required to enforce that paper money.
    • simplify 9y ago
      To be fair, paper money requires banks & bank employees, bullet-proof transportation trucks, government regulation, anti-counterfeit research & technology, and perhaps more.
      • rspeer 9y ago
        Whataboutism is a form of propaganda, not of fairness.
        • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
          Comparing the consequences of alternative solutions to a problem is not whataboutism.
  • 9y ago
• gaetanrickter 9y ago
  You can always create a token basket which could be made up of crypto's that are more eco-friendly. Systems for doing this are described here https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-token-baskets-c4c2f9cbe329 https://medium.com/@alexanderwestin/3-crowdsales-leveraging-...
• toomim 9y ago
  Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again. It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in space, so it might end up just as centralized as bitcoin mining. But the power costs will be much lower. There also is a proof-of-time component, that does computation, but it is designed to not be parallelizable, which means that throwing additional power at the problem doesn't help you as much. Instead, imagine that each participant must spend a deterministic length of time to compute a solution, and the person closest to the internet backbone wins. But this proof-of-time component is also smaller subsidiary role to the proof-of-space. So overall, it's a hybrid proof. Bram didn't go into enough detail explaining the actual proof-of-time or space in his talk, so I'm not sure if it all works, but if it does, then you can expect it to use less power. Proof-of-Stake should use even LESS power, though.
  • kiddico 9y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. Does the proof of storage allow that storage to continue to be used?/does the proof use the space on a disk? Or is it sort of like mining bitcoin where a gpu is wholly used for mining?
    • tzahola 9y ago
      Certainly the latter. I can imagine proof of space implemented by requiring nodes to store terabytes of random bytes, and compute the hash of specific subsets of this huge blob based on the last block in the ledger.
  • sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking it on as "this would use even less power" is a sign that perhaps these alternate schemes (including the one in the article) should be taken with a dash of salt and pepper.
• zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Proof of chia would use disk storage which at idle wouldn’t require processing . So yes because the other way is to use GPUs which would have higher costs for electricity than a disk.
• nerdponx 9y ago
  There were some attempts at actually doing useful work with all that proof of work: https://curecoin.net/ https://curecoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ http://foldingcoin.net/ https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ http://primecoin.io/ http://primecoin.io/ and a detailed article about it https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocurrency-whose-mining-is-actually-useful-1373298534/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/primecoin-the-cryptocur...
  • civilian 9y ago
    Aren't curecoin and foldingcoin both centralized? Isn't that a bad property to have as a cryptocurrency?
  • chrisallenlane 9y ago
    I'll add Gridcoin, which is a cryptocurrency that rewards BOINC participation: http://www.gridcoin.us/ http://www.gridcoin.us/ I really wish coins like these would catch on more than they have. Proof-of-work is, to the best of my knowledge, the only system that provably works. If we could just harness that computational power to do useful work, we'd be in a great place.
• colordrops 9y ago
  > flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use or value.
  • ghthor 9y ago
    And that hard to reproduce hash represents computational trust, which is a new type of resource that just happens to be very expensive in energy cost using our current technology.
    • empath75 9y ago
      It would be expensive by design no matter what the technology.
  • jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    I read someone’s estimate — rough, I’ll grant you — that mining bitcoin (just bitcoin) consumes as much total electrical energy as an entire medium-sized nation. Divide network hashrate into how much power the most efficient ASICs use, and I don’t think it’s an unfair estimate. You can’t dismiss the argument that maybe we can do better as “naysaying,” nor that there is something about cryptocurrency that the people making the argument do not understand. How many joules go into making a bitcoin block? (Really, I’m curious.) It doesn’t take the entire output of a coal-fired generator to handle trillions in trade volume on traditional exchanges. Minting coins doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant dedicated to it. Even for newfangled cryptocurrency, the human race can handle a hundredish billion dollar market cap without using that much energy. It’s incredibly wasteful and destructive to our planet. How do you think the Chinese are throwing cheap electricity at all that mining gear? Provinces covered in solar panels? (For that matter, how do you think the Americans are?) Literally the entire concept of mining is brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing (to create the currency of value; nobody is saying bitcoin is worthless). Imagine if, instead, you dumped that energy into storage or even useful computation (again: proof of work, not the currency, is useless computation), and what you could do with it. There needs to be acknowledgment that brute force cryptographic hashing is a pretty serious design flaw. We just happen to be working around it now that bitcoin is a Big Deal. To drive this home, Bitfury is building out 30+ MW mining facilities that require immersion cooling in 3M Novec, because state-of-the-art datacenter CRACs aren’t capable of rejecting waste heat from that kind of power density. We are talking 150+ kW cabinet-equivalents, where anything over 15-20 kW per cabinet with CRAC is currently considered noteworthy. AIUI, they have to underclock their gear when relying on datacenter air. Two-phase immersion is a cool, efficient technology that will probably reimagine the datacenter and should be developed further, but machine learning and science workloads are barely starting to crack that nut. Bitcoin ran directly to the front of the line of “incredibly power-intensive workloads that we haven’t encountered in datacenter design before.” That’s good and bad.