6 ms·

Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future

44 points by cardamomo 9y ago

briantakita 9y ago
Same with the Military Industrial Complex, Big Agriculture, & mass prescriptions of Pharmaceuticals. Funny there aren't any complaints there from this outlet. I suppose it's not in their priorities to notice...
- jasonmp85 9y ago
  Those outfits often actually produce something of value.
  - briantakita 9y ago
    Each of the topics provide different value to different parties. The crux of the matter is noticing this type of distinction. For example, Bitcoin seems to provide independence from the Banking Establishment, which alters what sorts of activities are funded. Industries such as the Military Industrial Complex, Big Agriculture, & Big Pharma has largely been co-opted by established interests. Public Relations is utilized to convince people to adopt philosophies that are friendly to these industries while not looking out for their own interests. On the surface, there seems to be a dialectic between decentralized (Bitcoin) & centralized (the Establishment) forms of control. It's easy to see the possibility for media outlets or NGO's are nothing more than fronts using the "greater good" as an argument to advocate for the interests of their benefactors. Edward Bernays describes this technique in some of his books.
  - bitconion 9y ago
    eventually (on large time scale) this "value"has no difference except it produce the garbage that pollute environment even worse
gremlinsinc 9y ago
B.S. -- if we replace all electric grids with solar, it doesn't matter how many miners spin up, they'll all be on solar thus renewable. If anything -- it'd even make more sense for BTC companies to use solar since costs are a LOT cheaper.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rebuilder 9y ago
  More power usage = greater overall cost of energy production. That's true regardless of method of production. We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy. Bitcoin miners compete for energy with other industries, driving total energy usage up. Ultimately, there's a cap to how much energy we can produce on Earth, and you'd be surprised how close we are to that limit, assuming production growth similar to the historical average. Edit: To expand on the last claim a little, I was thinking of this: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ The graph of Earth's surface temperature assuming 2.3% yearly growth in energy consumption is... illuminating. Basically, in a bit over 400 years, the surface temperature on Earth would reach the boiling point of water, not due to the complex effects of climate change, but simply because the amount of waste heat generated by energy production and usage will exceed the Earth's capacity to dissipate into space. Obviously disastrous temperatures would occur rather sooner. Unfortunately our societies hinge on constant economic growth, which, in turn, seems to hinge on growing energy usage.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    "We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy." Unless we build nuclear fusion reactors, which seems quite likely on the 400 year time scale you're talking about.
    - rebuilder 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
GreaterFool 9y ago
Just like burning coal fueled industrial revolution proof of work fuels bitcoin revolution. This is a stepping stone. Alternatives to proof of work are coming but slowly and that's fine. But we'll get there. Bitcoin is not "Money 2.0" but is a necessary stepping stone.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bamboozled 9y ago
I would love to see a comparison of what current financial institutions greenhouse emissions look like. Think of all the banks, branches, employees, servers, dirty investments, the works. I'm pretty sure BTC would pale in comparison. On a side note, I've heard similar wild claims be made about the electricity used per Google search.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Wouldn't you then have to compare the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, not just mining?
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    Because bitcoin has a striking lack of middle men, unlike banking.
rebuilder 9y ago
Bitcoin's energy usage is getting a lot of press of late. Deservedly, I think - it is a bit ludicrous. None of the articles I've seen really manage to get at the economics of mining, or what's likely to happen in the future, though. A Big Think article projected that by 2020, at the current growth rate, Bitcoin will use as much power as is generated globally today. Obviously that's not going to happen, something will give and that something is likely to be Bitcoin's price. But even though the articles I've seen are pretty fluffy, they probably stem from an underlying issue that makes Bitcoin different from traditional, energy-heavy industry: The value produced is not directly connected to the energy expended in production. Bitcoin would work just as well with a small fraction of the hashpower it has today. Security is an issue, but surely it must be over-secured many times over at the moment. Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost, except for the crash-boom market cycle Bitcoin constantly goes through. How much hashpower is needed? The question is moot as there is no way to moderate it, and I'm starting to think that may be Bitcoin's biggest design flaw. (Market forces will certainly bring the energy cost of mining down one way or the other, but it's not clear how much damage will be done to Bitcoin in the process.)
- trophycase 9y ago
  You can't really extrapolate the current growth rate. There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency. The electricity usage likely won't exceed this unless miners begin to sell heat and displace traditional heat generation sources.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    "There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency.". How are you coming to this conclusion? In addition to the coinbase, miners earn fees, which are valued according to current market conditions (supply and demand)
- modeless 9y ago
  > Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost Bitcoin does include a perfectly good mechanism to balance security vs cost: the transaction fee market. Users decide how much they want to pay in transaction fees. The reason for the high electricity use today is the temporary block reward for mining each block. The block reward halves every three years. Once it goes away, the only thing funding Bitcoin's electricity consumption will be the transaction fees users pay. Obviously if Bitcoin does not provide enough value to users, they will not pay high fees. Electricity consumption will naturally go down to a level that matches the value people get out of the network. Remember this next time you see an article complaining about Bitcoin's electricity use. I haven't seen a single article about this written by somebody who understands the difference between the block reward and the transaction fee market.
thisisit 9y ago
I am sure this topic will be full of whataboutism - what about x, y, z industry's emissions? Here's the thing - Bitcoin hung the energy albatross around it's neck long back - First by choosing SHA based PoW, then the one of the early transactions in US being calculated using the energy required to mine those and then most of the sold equipment focusing on hashes per watts consumed. No other industry other than automotive has tied itself to energy so strongly. So, it is quite disingenuous to not answer this criticism without devolving into whataboutism. There has been a solution in form of Proof of Stake but that has it's own issue. I am sure there will be more energy efficient PoW in the future, so let's wait and see if Bitcoin is going to cost the future or not.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Calling out "whataboutism" only makes sense if the supposed "whataboutism" is meant to distract and bring up an unrelated topic. But the argument here is that no one comments at all on other "frivolous" pursuits that take similar if not more amounts of power. As I've mentioned in other posts, no one complains about the energy usage of video games and porn. It can be argued that video games, porn, and Bitcoin all have utility. So why is it a problem for Bitcoin and not porn and video games? That's not whataboutism, that's calling out inconsistent logic by detractors.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    So...saying (but what) "about the energy usage of video games and porn" is not whataboutism? Got it.
    - colordrops 9y ago
      No. As I tried to explain, whataboutism is to distract from the topic to avoid addressing the issue, which is not what I am doing here. What I am saying is that no one sees any problem with using energy on porn and video games, and I think Bitcoin has as much utility as those, so I don't see why anyone has a problem with its energy usage either. My point is that sometimes pointing out people's narrow-minded tunnel vision, in this case applying an inconsistent standard to something they dislike, is mistaken as whataboutism. Now if I thought Bitcoin's energy usage was a bad thing, this would be whataboutism, but I do not.
kbody 9y ago
Talking about clean-energy yet failing to compare CO2 emissions but merely refer to GWhrs is totally missing the point. Several big Bitcoin miners are setup near or just being powered by hydroelectric dams or other renewable energy sources. And all of them of course target low costs, which a lot of times means that there's an oversupply of power in essence helping in some cases use energy that would go to waste otherwise. You have to compare the gold or bank industry's to Bitcoin's mining emissions. Gold is constrained by the gold mines positions, uses oil a lot, unless someone does a proper study, all this articles are just sensationalistic articles by clueless journos hunting pageviews and likes. Sidenote, funny how this is filled under "Currency Manipulation"
- barrkel 9y ago
  I don't believe that energy would "go to waste otherwise"; if it was priced low enough (and it should be, if it's going to waste), it would make economic sense to build distribution infrastructure, and it wouldn't be going to waste any more. Energy is really fungible, one of the most fungible commodities. Hydro can easily substitute for coal, oil, gas and nuclear elsewhere. This makes your defence especially weak.
- sremani 9y ago
  If you said, the miners are near wind-farms, then I would eat up your statement about oversupply. For hydro more or less, that is electricity that could be used for something else but being burnt. I am not sure about Chinese miners being near hydro-electric some may be and some may be not, but over all its complete waste of energy. When it comes to energy efficiency nothing beats centralized. I do understand the motivation behind decentralized, but you pay the price! Hopefully Proof of Stake with reduced power consumption becomes a norm, but I am skeptical.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Which do you think uses more computing hardware, every Bitcoin miner in the world, or the VISA payment network? Even today, the answer is quite clearly the total Bitcoin mining network--now consider expanding the scale of Bitcoin transactions to the VISA network, a 1000× scale increase. Almost by definition, cryptocurrency requires spending useless energy. In electronic transactions as they exist today, you essentially only have to update the tables in two institution's databases (plus all the replication and backups that entails). A cryptocurrency requires everybody to record their transaction--and do a bunch of useless cryptography to to ensure that they do so. Asking how much emissions it costs to mine the gold or grow the cotton to satisfy my paycheck is misleading. Exactly 0 joules were spent: no gold needed to be mined, nor coins minted, nor dollar bills printed to satisfy the electronic transactions to decrement a number at my employer's bank and increment the number at my personal bank appropriately.
gt_ 9y ago
It’s easy to conclude the inefficiencies brought on by the abuses of the financial sector have done leagues more damage to our “clean energy future.” Poverty cuts environmental concern clearly out of the picture. -typed in the mid-winter warmth of x3 GTX 980 Tis running NiceHash
tomaha 9y ago
Proof of stake will solve this for Ethereum by not burning processing power to secure the network. We'll likely end up with several of these methods and even if proof of work is still part of this it's likely much more specialized and just a small part of the system we'll end up with. So for the future this really is no problem at all.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  There’s no evidence Proof of Stake is a viable replacement for Proof of Work.
  - cantrip 9y ago
    I honestly had deja-vu when I saw this comment but then realized I guess it's just a shill-bot.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  There is no known trustless architecture of PoS.
matte_black 9y ago
Sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin was a plot to destroy the world through exponentially increasing energy consumption that leads to accelerated global warming that ends the human race. Whoever created such a thing would have reason to hide.
- cwkoss 9y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin was a plot to transfer wealth from cynics to optimists.
rgbrenner 9y ago
13 TWH globally? The US alone produces 4000 TWH of electricity [0]. This isn't a problem. It shouldn't be an article. edit: global energy consumption is 110,000 TWH [1] 0. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_01_01.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_01_01.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  If your average power plant is 500MW, that's still 26,000 power plants the world would not otherwise need. Edit: gah, embarrassing error. It's late.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    No, you haven't converted MW to MWH. A 500MW plant produces 4.4TWH per year (assuming 100% capacity factor.. it'll be less than that depending on the type of plant). It's maybe 3.5 x 500mw nuclear plants.
- unchocked 9y ago
  That's 1% of global energy usage, and you say it isn't worth writing about? *edit yep math's wrong. It's still a shitload of power and worth writing about.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    Check your math. 13 / 110,000 = 0.00012. Or 0.012%. That's 1/80th of 1%. If it gets to 1% -- 1100 TWH -- then sure, it'll definitely be worth discussing.
conanbatt 9y ago
I'd say its the opposite. Bitcoin has the practical capacity for its generation to happen in a place where you can put all solar panels. Maybe the future of miners is a cave in the saudi desert.
unchocked 9y ago
I wonder how many people defending bitcoin here are _aren't_ bitcoin holders. I suspect very few, as I suspect that if you're holding an asset that's appreciated 1000% in the last year you're going to have a hard time being very objective about any criticism that seems to undermine that asset. The amount of power bitcoin is sucking up is truly astounding. There will eventually come a point where states are motivated to act against the network, and I'd consider it wishful thinking on the part of bitcoin investors/true believers that states have no real recourse. All that power comes from very large physical sources, which can be controlled with violence. Short of that, China could nationalize the miners and run a 51% attack, driving the price to zero. TLA's have sufficient resources to deanonymize transactions and enforce civil or criminal penalties. People keep viewing bitcoin as this abstract cryptographic thing, but it exists in the physical world, and in this world sovereign states hold ultimate power. When major powers decide that bitcoin is not in their interest, they will end the experiment. The truest believers will be left holding the bag.
- splintercell 9y ago
  Cryptocurrencies are one of those cats which have gotten out of the bag, and now it is very difficult for it to be put back in. > Short of that, China could nationalize the miners and run a 51% attack, driving the price to zero. A hard fork which renders nearly all existing ASIC architecture useless can defeat that attack. It would be a huge cost to China, with all that mining infrastructure go to waste. What China could do better is to disable bitcoin traffic to pass through their firewall, and that would be a better attack, because then it would be chaos in the rest of the world, with really high difficulty level, which would take time to readjust because no new blocks would be mind for a while. Then when difficultly readjust, they open the firewall again, and now you got all these China vs non-China btc transactions to consolidate. This is a big concern of bitcoiners, and there are attempts to figure that out, but it isn't an impossible problem. Keep in mind, Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency, PoW isn't the only consensus algorithm, the current snapshot of the chain isn't immutable. In case of catastrophic disruption, the chain will be forked, that disruption removed, and business will continue. > When major powers decide that bitcoin is not in their interest, they will end the experiment. This is an issue for prisoner's dilemma. Major powers aren't a monolithic entity. The interests of Russia are vastly different from the interests of USA. A LOT of world powers are interested in getting off Dollar as a reserve currency. This alone makes any decision on bitcoin between the world powers far from agreeable.
gersh 9y ago
People seem to have some misconceptions. If we assume the cost of the mining hardware becomes negligible over time, then the cost of mining bitcoin is the cost of the energy. The amount earned by miners is: mining reward + transaction costs. The mining reward will decrease over time, so in the end it should be the transaction costs. Now, we then get that as t --> big transaction costs = cost of energy because spending more energy than you make on Bitcoin loses money. People should be incentivized to reduce their transaction costs by going off-chain, using a POS chain, or other means.

44 points by cardamomo 9y ago

Same with the Military Industrial Complex, Big Agriculture, & mass prescriptions of Pharmaceuticals. Funny there aren't any complaints there from this outlet. I suppose it's not in their priorities to notice...

jasonmp85 9y ago
Those outfits often actually produce something of value.
- briantakita 9y ago
  Each of the topics provide different value to different parties. The crux of the matter is noticing this type of distinction. For example, Bitcoin seems to provide independence from the Banking Establishment, which alters what sorts of activities are funded. Industries such as the Military Industrial Complex, Big Agriculture, & Big Pharma has largely been co-opted by established interests. Public Relations is utilized to convince people to adopt philosophies that are friendly to these industries while not looking out for their own interests. On the surface, there seems to be a dialectic between decentralized (Bitcoin) & centralized (the Establishment) forms of control. It's easy to see the possibility for media outlets or NGO's are nothing more than fronts using the "greater good" as an argument to advocate for the interests of their benefactors. Edward Bernays describes this technique in some of his books.
- bitconion 9y ago
  eventually (on large time scale) this "value"has no difference except it produce the garbage that pollute environment even worse

gremlinsinc 9y ago

B.S. -- if we replace all electric grids with solar, it doesn't matter how many miners spin up, they'll all be on solar thus renewable. If anything -- it'd even make more sense for BTC companies to use solar since costs are a LOT cheaper.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rebuilder 9y ago
More power usage = greater overall cost of energy production. That's true regardless of method of production. We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy. Bitcoin miners compete for energy with other industries, driving total energy usage up. Ultimately, there's a cap to how much energy we can produce on Earth, and you'd be surprised how close we are to that limit, assuming production growth similar to the historical average. Edit: To expand on the last claim a little, I was thinking of this: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ The graph of Earth's surface temperature assuming 2.3% yearly growth in energy consumption is... illuminating. Basically, in a bit over 400 years, the surface temperature on Earth would reach the boiling point of water, not due to the complex effects of climate change, but simply because the amount of waste heat generated by energy production and usage will exceed the Earth's capacity to dissipate into space. Obviously disastrous temperatures would occur rather sooner. Unfortunately our societies hinge on constant economic growth, which, in turn, seems to hinge on growing energy usage.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  "We are not now, and never will be (barring radical changes in our economic system) living in a world with abundant energy." Unless we build nuclear fusion reactors, which seems quite likely on the 400 year time scale you're talking about.
  - rebuilder 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

GreaterFool 9y ago

Just like burning coal fueled industrial revolution proof of work fuels bitcoin revolution. This is a stepping stone. Alternatives to proof of work are coming but slowly and that's fine. But we'll get there. Bitcoin is not "Money 2.0" but is a necessary stepping stone.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bamboozled 9y ago

I would love to see a comparison of what current financial institutions greenhouse emissions look like. Think of all the banks, branches, employees, servers, dirty investments, the works. I'm pretty sure BTC would pale in comparison. On a side note, I've heard similar wild claims be made about the electricity used per Google search.

bdcravens 9y ago
Wouldn't you then have to compare the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, not just mining?
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  Because bitcoin has a striking lack of middle men, unlike banking.

rebuilder 9y ago

Bitcoin's energy usage is getting a lot of press of late. Deservedly, I think - it is a bit ludicrous. None of the articles I've seen really manage to get at the economics of mining, or what's likely to happen in the future, though. A Big Think article projected that by 2020, at the current growth rate, Bitcoin will use as much power as is generated globally today. Obviously that's not going to happen, something will give and that something is likely to be Bitcoin's price. But even though the articles I've seen are pretty fluffy, they probably stem from an underlying issue that makes Bitcoin different from traditional, energy-heavy industry: The value produced is not directly connected to the energy expended in production. Bitcoin would work just as well with a small fraction of the hashpower it has today. Security is an issue, but surely it must be over-secured many times over at the moment. Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost, except for the crash-boom market cycle Bitcoin constantly goes through. How much hashpower is needed? The question is moot as there is no way to moderate it, and I'm starting to think that may be Bitcoin's biggest design flaw. (Market forces will certainly bring the energy cost of mining down one way or the other, but it's not clear how much damage will be done to Bitcoin in the process.)

trophycase 9y ago
You can't really extrapolate the current growth rate. There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency. The electricity usage likely won't exceed this unless miners begin to sell heat and displace traditional heat generation sources.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  "There is a maximum total mining revenue even if Bitcoin becomes the only globally used currency.". How are you coming to this conclusion? In addition to the coinbase, miners earn fees, which are valued according to current market conditions (supply and demand)
modeless 9y ago
> Unfortunately no mechanism seems to exist to balance security vs cost Bitcoin does include a perfectly good mechanism to balance security vs cost: the transaction fee market. Users decide how much they want to pay in transaction fees. The reason for the high electricity use today is the temporary block reward for mining each block. The block reward halves every three years. Once it goes away, the only thing funding Bitcoin's electricity consumption will be the transaction fees users pay. Obviously if Bitcoin does not provide enough value to users, they will not pay high fees. Electricity consumption will naturally go down to a level that matches the value people get out of the network. Remember this next time you see an article complaining about Bitcoin's electricity use. I haven't seen a single article about this written by somebody who understands the difference between the block reward and the transaction fee market.

thisisit 9y ago

I am sure this topic will be full of whataboutism - what about x, y, z industry's emissions? Here's the thing - Bitcoin hung the energy albatross around it's neck long back - First by choosing SHA based PoW, then the one of the early transactions in US being calculated using the energy required to mine those and then most of the sold equipment focusing on hashes per watts consumed. No other industry other than automotive has tied itself to energy so strongly. So, it is quite disingenuous to not answer this criticism without devolving into whataboutism. There has been a solution in form of Proof of Stake but that has it's own issue. I am sure there will be more energy efficient PoW in the future, so let's wait and see if Bitcoin is going to cost the future or not.

colordrops 9y ago
Calling out "whataboutism" only makes sense if the supposed "whataboutism" is meant to distract and bring up an unrelated topic. But the argument here is that no one comments at all on other "frivolous" pursuits that take similar if not more amounts of power. As I've mentioned in other posts, no one complains about the energy usage of video games and porn. It can be argued that video games, porn, and Bitcoin all have utility. So why is it a problem for Bitcoin and not porn and video games? That's not whataboutism, that's calling out inconsistent logic by detractors.
- thisisit 9y ago
  So...saying (but what) "about the energy usage of video games and porn" is not whataboutism? Got it.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    No. As I tried to explain, whataboutism is to distract from the topic to avoid addressing the issue, which is not what I am doing here. What I am saying is that no one sees any problem with using energy on porn and video games, and I think Bitcoin has as much utility as those, so I don't see why anyone has a problem with its energy usage either. My point is that sometimes pointing out people's narrow-minded tunnel vision, in this case applying an inconsistent standard to something they dislike, is mistaken as whataboutism. Now if I thought Bitcoin's energy usage was a bad thing, this would be whataboutism, but I do not.

kbody 9y ago

Talking about clean-energy yet failing to compare CO2 emissions but merely refer to GWhrs is totally missing the point. Several big Bitcoin miners are setup near or just being powered by hydroelectric dams or other renewable energy sources. And all of them of course target low costs, which a lot of times means that there's an oversupply of power in essence helping in some cases use energy that would go to waste otherwise. You have to compare the gold or bank industry's to Bitcoin's mining emissions. Gold is constrained by the gold mines positions, uses oil a lot, unless someone does a proper study, all this articles are just sensationalistic articles by clueless journos hunting pageviews and likes. Sidenote, funny how this is filled under "Currency Manipulation"

barrkel 9y ago
I don't believe that energy would "go to waste otherwise"; if it was priced low enough (and it should be, if it's going to waste), it would make economic sense to build distribution infrastructure, and it wouldn't be going to waste any more. Energy is really fungible, one of the most fungible commodities. Hydro can easily substitute for coal, oil, gas and nuclear elsewhere. This makes your defence especially weak.
sremani 9y ago
If you said, the miners are near wind-farms, then I would eat up your statement about oversupply. For hydro more or less, that is electricity that could be used for something else but being burnt. I am not sure about Chinese miners being near hydro-electric some may be and some may be not, but over all its complete waste of energy. When it comes to energy efficiency nothing beats centralized. I do understand the motivation behind decentralized, but you pay the price! Hopefully Proof of Stake with reduced power consumption becomes a norm, but I am skeptical.
jcranmer 9y ago
Which do you think uses more computing hardware, every Bitcoin miner in the world, or the VISA payment network? Even today, the answer is quite clearly the total Bitcoin mining network--now consider expanding the scale of Bitcoin transactions to the VISA network, a 1000× scale increase. Almost by definition, cryptocurrency requires spending useless energy. In electronic transactions as they exist today, you essentially only have to update the tables in two institution's databases (plus all the replication and backups that entails). A cryptocurrency requires everybody to record their transaction--and do a bunch of useless cryptography to to ensure that they do so. Asking how much emissions it costs to mine the gold or grow the cotton to satisfy my paycheck is misleading. Exactly 0 joules were spent: no gold needed to be mined, nor coins minted, nor dollar bills printed to satisfy the electronic transactions to decrement a number at my employer's bank and increment the number at my personal bank appropriately.

gt_ 9y ago

It’s easy to conclude the inefficiencies brought on by the abuses of the financial sector have done leagues more damage to our “clean energy future.” Poverty cuts environmental concern clearly out of the picture. -typed in the mid-winter warmth of x3 GTX 980 Tis running NiceHash

tomaha 9y ago

Proof of stake will solve this for Ethereum by not burning processing power to secure the network. We'll likely end up with several of these methods and even if proof of work is still part of this it's likely much more specialized and just a small part of the system we'll end up with. So for the future this really is no problem at all.

etr-strike 9y ago
There’s no evidence Proof of Stake is a viable replacement for Proof of Work.
- cantrip 9y ago
  I honestly had deja-vu when I saw this comment but then realized I guess it's just a shill-bot.
Frogolocalypse 9y ago
There is no known trustless architecture of PoS.

matte_black 9y ago

Sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin was a plot to destroy the world through exponentially increasing energy consumption that leads to accelerated global warming that ends the human race. Whoever created such a thing would have reason to hide.

cwkoss 9y ago
Sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin was a plot to transfer wealth from cynics to optimists.

rgbrenner 9y ago

13 TWH globally? The US alone produces 4000 TWH of electricity [0]. This isn't a problem. It shouldn't be an article. edit: global energy consumption is 110,000 TWH [1] 0. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_01_01.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_01_01.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

sliverstorm 9y ago
If your average power plant is 500MW, that's still 26,000 power plants the world would not otherwise need. Edit: gah, embarrassing error. It's late.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  No, you haven't converted MW to MWH. A 500MW plant produces 4.4TWH per year (assuming 100% capacity factor.. it'll be less than that depending on the type of plant). It's maybe 3.5 x 500mw nuclear plants.
unchocked 9y ago
That's 1% of global energy usage, and you say it isn't worth writing about? *edit yep math's wrong. It's still a shitload of power and worth writing about.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  Check your math. 13 / 110,000 = 0.00012. Or 0.012%. That's 1/80th of 1%. If it gets to 1% -- 1100 TWH -- then sure, it'll definitely be worth discussing.

conanbatt 9y ago

I'd say its the opposite. Bitcoin has the practical capacity for its generation to happen in a place where you can put all solar panels. Maybe the future of miners is a cave in the saudi desert.

unchocked 9y ago

I wonder how many people defending bitcoin here are _aren't_ bitcoin holders. I suspect very few, as I suspect that if you're holding an asset that's appreciated 1000% in the last year you're going to have a hard time being very objective about any criticism that seems to undermine that asset. The amount of power bitcoin is sucking up is truly astounding. There will eventually come a point where states are motivated to act against the network, and I'd consider it wishful thinking on the part of bitcoin investors/true believers that states have no real recourse. All that power comes from very large physical sources, which can be controlled with violence. Short of that, China could nationalize the miners and run a 51% attack, driving the price to zero. TLA's have sufficient resources to deanonymize transactions and enforce civil or criminal penalties. People keep viewing bitcoin as this abstract cryptographic thing, but it exists in the physical world, and in this world sovereign states hold ultimate power. When major powers decide that bitcoin is not in their interest, they will end the experiment. The truest believers will be left holding the bag.

splintercell 9y ago
Cryptocurrencies are one of those cats which have gotten out of the bag, and now it is very difficult for it to be put back in. > Short of that, China could nationalize the miners and run a 51% attack, driving the price to zero. A hard fork which renders nearly all existing ASIC architecture useless can defeat that attack. It would be a huge cost to China, with all that mining infrastructure go to waste. What China could do better is to disable bitcoin traffic to pass through their firewall, and that would be a better attack, because then it would be chaos in the rest of the world, with really high difficulty level, which would take time to readjust because no new blocks would be mind for a while. Then when difficultly readjust, they open the firewall again, and now you got all these China vs non-China btc transactions to consolidate. This is a big concern of bitcoiners, and there are attempts to figure that out, but it isn't an impossible problem. Keep in mind, Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency, PoW isn't the only consensus algorithm, the current snapshot of the chain isn't immutable. In case of catastrophic disruption, the chain will be forked, that disruption removed, and business will continue. > When major powers decide that bitcoin is not in their interest, they will end the experiment. This is an issue for prisoner's dilemma. Major powers aren't a monolithic entity. The interests of Russia are vastly different from the interests of USA. A LOT of world powers are interested in getting off Dollar as a reserve currency. This alone makes any decision on bitcoin between the world powers far from agreeable.

gersh 9y ago

People seem to have some misconceptions. If we assume the cost of the mining hardware becomes negligible over time, then the cost of mining bitcoin is the cost of the energy. The amount earned by miners is: mining reward + transaction costs. The mining reward will decrease over time, so in the end it should be the transaction costs. Now, we then get that as t --> big transaction costs = cost of energy because spending more energy than you make on Bitcoin loses money. People should be incentivized to reduce their transaction costs by going off-chain, using a POS chain, or other means.