5 ms·

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

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.

colordrops 9y ago
straw man. I was responding to the statement that the computation is doing nothing, and not arguing one way or another that the energy used is reasonable for the benefits gained.
- carussell 9y ago
  Try responding to the most charitable interpretation of others' comments. It's clear that nerdponx is referring to the same thing that jsmthrowaway went into greater detail about. Try this as a habit: If in response to something someone else has said, you find yourself thinking, "That would be ridiculous! Who would think that?", then follow up by answering your own question: "That would be ridiculous, so the person I'm responding to probably doesn't think that." Pondering how ridiculous it would be for you to choose to believe that someone else actually believed the first ridiculous thing is an exercise you can pursue at your own option.
  - krageon 9y ago
    While I grant that you may be correct in this case, this isn't a tenable position to take in general. An overwhelming amount of people do believe patently ridiculous things, and frequently talks about them as if they make sense.
    - chairmanwow 9y ago
      I would agree with you if this conversation were taking place anywhere other than HN. This community isn't infallible, but I argue that the level of discourse here is far above the mean.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    No, I actually agree with the person. Cryptocurrency is horrendously wasteful. But that person ignored what I said because that's not what I was discussing. That's the straw man argument I mentioned.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      How am I building a strawman? I didn’t ignore anything you said; I’m responding directly to it. The computation does nothing. Until the brute force finds a hash that meets difficulty, it’s computing literally nothing of value. That’s computation and energy we do not get back. You’re not folding proteins, you’re not rendering climatological models, you’re not training machine learning. You are hashing, then throwing it away. It’s a “nope, not it, next.” There is no measurable value until by chance you find one, then the energy you threw away getting there gains value in that you threw it away. Millions and millions of watts of absolutely zero computation of benefit to humanity. Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.
keymone 9y ago
> brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing wrong, bitcoin network brute forces through sha2 to find the one that secures the distributed ledger and transaction platform on top of it. the rest is irrelevant since it's based on wrong assumption.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  OK. Of what utility to mankind is SHA256(SHA256(candidate)) after it is discarded by the miner? What do we get from that?
  - keymone 9y ago
    isn't that obvious? it is of utility of verifying that candidate can't secure the ledger. this really comes down to question whether you think the distributed, writable by anybody ledger is useful to humanity. personally i think it absolutely is. do you?
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      Not quite. It most certainly doesn’t come down to that, and it’s a reduction of what I’m saying. I’m drawing a distinction between the specific way bitcoin verifies its ledger versus cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers themselves. I took pains to enunciate that repeatedly, so let me try to illustrate with an example: Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy folding a protein, simulating a gravitational system, or modeling a hurricane. I apply it to another computer and it spends that watt for however long computing a double SHA256 and throwing away the result. If, at the end of both calculations, I have worked toward proof of work on a secure ledger, which energy was better spent for humanity? That’s the difference: while the secure blockchain is a noble goal, what the computer is doing during that time is something we badly need to rethink. “The double-hash of these bytes is <foo>” isn’t even useful if we collected it. It’s meaningless computing. Yes, we ascribe meaning when blocks are made, but it’s a very irresponsible technical decision to waste energy in order to prove that work was done. This would be fine if it were a low amount of energy, but it isn’t. We are talking gigawatts that are potentially being spent on this, which is part of the point I was trying to make. Electricity isn’t free, and it’s important to consider our planet. Bitcoin essentially puts computers in a busy loop, and it’s a very hamfisted means of achieving its goal. We have already seen alternative concepts, including this one, that illustrate there is potentially another way to achieve what we want without throwing a small star’s worth of energy at the computing infrastructure behind it. Coming after people and assuming they’re criticizing cryptocurrency as a concept whenever a specific piece is questioned is tough to discuss against. I think cryptocurrency can do better, and there are undoubtedly better ways to come up with to secure a distributed ledger. I’m alarmed that the adoption of bitcoin has exploded our utilization of resources and that people feel that worry about this is an indictment of the whole concept; this polarization makes it difficult for all of us to improve. So, no, it isn’t obvious what value I should see out of a computer spinning itself through SHA2 for no benefit aside from securing a ledger. In any other domain, we’d consider such a design ridiculous. There has to be another way, one where that same (intensive) calculation can benefit humanity for the power that we are throwing at it, and we still end up with a secure blockchain. I’m not smart enough to invent it. I hope we can support the people who are, and perhaps admit that bitcoin’s proof of work scheme is a mistake in the larger landscape. I worry that given how deep we are into ASIC development, arguments against what I’m saying are only going to get louder as time goes on. We are probably long past the point of no return with bitcoin already.

colordrops 9y ago

straw man. I was responding to the statement that the computation is doing nothing, and not arguing one way or another that the energy used is reasonable for the benefits gained.

carussell 9y ago
Try responding to the most charitable interpretation of others' comments. It's clear that nerdponx is referring to the same thing that jsmthrowaway went into greater detail about. Try this as a habit: If in response to something someone else has said, you find yourself thinking, "That would be ridiculous! Who would think that?", then follow up by answering your own question: "That would be ridiculous, so the person I'm responding to probably doesn't think that." Pondering how ridiculous it would be for you to choose to believe that someone else actually believed the first ridiculous thing is an exercise you can pursue at your own option.
- krageon 9y ago
  While I grant that you may be correct in this case, this isn't a tenable position to take in general. An overwhelming amount of people do believe patently ridiculous things, and frequently talks about them as if they make sense.
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    I would agree with you if this conversation were taking place anywhere other than HN. This community isn't infallible, but I argue that the level of discourse here is far above the mean.
- colordrops 9y ago
  No, I actually agree with the person. Cryptocurrency is horrendously wasteful. But that person ignored what I said because that's not what I was discussing. That's the straw man argument I mentioned.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    How am I building a strawman? I didn’t ignore anything you said; I’m responding directly to it. The computation does nothing. Until the brute force finds a hash that meets difficulty, it’s computing literally nothing of value. That’s computation and energy we do not get back. You’re not folding proteins, you’re not rendering climatological models, you’re not training machine learning. You are hashing, then throwing it away. It’s a “nope, not it, next.” There is no measurable value until by chance you find one, then the energy you threw away getting there gains value in that you threw it away. Millions and millions of watts of absolutely zero computation of benefit to humanity. Yes, the end result is a secured ledger. The path to that secured ledger is entirely wasted computing. Bitcoin is wasteful solely based on this fact. How can you consider Bitcoin wasteful as I do and also claim people who point this flaw out are naysayers who don’t get it? Your argument makes no sense.

keymone 9y ago

> brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing wrong, bitcoin network brute forces through sha2 to find the one that secures the distributed ledger and transaction platform on top of it. the rest is irrelevant since it's based on wrong assumption.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago
OK. Of what utility to mankind is SHA256(SHA256(candidate)) after it is discarded by the miner? What do we get from that?
- keymone 9y ago
  isn't that obvious? it is of utility of verifying that candidate can't secure the ledger. this really comes down to question whether you think the distributed, writable by anybody ledger is useful to humanity. personally i think it absolutely is. do you?
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    Not quite. It most certainly doesn’t come down to that, and it’s a reduction of what I’m saying. I’m drawing a distinction between the specific way bitcoin verifies its ledger versus cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers themselves. I took pains to enunciate that repeatedly, so let me try to illustrate with an example: Say I have one watt of power. I apply it to a computer for however long and it spends that energy folding a protein, simulating a gravitational system, or modeling a hurricane. I apply it to another computer and it spends that watt for however long computing a double SHA256 and throwing away the result. If, at the end of both calculations, I have worked toward proof of work on a secure ledger, which energy was better spent for humanity? That’s the difference: while the secure blockchain is a noble goal, what the computer is doing during that time is something we badly need to rethink. “The double-hash of these bytes is <foo>” isn’t even useful if we collected it. It’s meaningless computing. Yes, we ascribe meaning when blocks are made, but it’s a very irresponsible technical decision to waste energy in order to prove that work was done. This would be fine if it were a low amount of energy, but it isn’t. We are talking gigawatts that are potentially being spent on this, which is part of the point I was trying to make. Electricity isn’t free, and it’s important to consider our planet. Bitcoin essentially puts computers in a busy loop, and it’s a very hamfisted means of achieving its goal. We have already seen alternative concepts, including this one, that illustrate there is potentially another way to achieve what we want without throwing a small star’s worth of energy at the computing infrastructure behind it. Coming after people and assuming they’re criticizing cryptocurrency as a concept whenever a specific piece is questioned is tough to discuss against. I think cryptocurrency can do better, and there are undoubtedly better ways to come up with to secure a distributed ledger. I’m alarmed that the adoption of bitcoin has exploded our utilization of resources and that people feel that worry about this is an indictment of the whole concept; this polarization makes it difficult for all of us to improve. So, no, it isn’t obvious what value I should see out of a computer spinning itself through SHA2 for no benefit aside from securing a ledger. In any other domain, we’d consider such a design ridiculous. There has to be another way, one where that same (intensive) calculation can benefit humanity for the power that we are throwing at it, and we still end up with a secure blockchain. I’m not smart enough to invent it. I hope we can support the people who are, and perhaps admit that bitcoin’s proof of work scheme is a mistake in the larger landscape. I worry that given how deep we are into ASIC development, arguments against what I’m saying are only going to get louder as time goes on. We are probably long past the point of no return with bitcoin already.