3 ms·

> bitcoin is quite intentionally designed to encourage ever-higher energy consumption to "secure the blockchain" It's designed to have have an average of 10 mi

by ftlio 9y ago

> bitcoin is quite intentionally designed to encourage ever-higher energy consumption to "secure the blockchain" It's designed to have have an average of 10 minute blocks using the feedback of cumulative proof of work over a given amount of blocks compared to a difficulty parameter. The only reason it uses more energy is because people believe there is money to be made in mining. They will be wrong sometimes, and right sometimes, and equilibrium will be reached intermittently. This is called a market.

xg15 9y ago
And yet in result, this market is justifying that the exact same task (verifying a block every 10 min) needs orders of magnitude more energy today than it did in the past, even though the result is exactly the same. This is practically an energy hog. I'd argue that bitcoin is also an energy hog in theory: Why do people believe there is money to be made in mining? Because bitcoin's core mechanisms ensure that money is to be made, as long as bitcoin is worth enough (which it currently is). So the bitcoin protocol does three things: 1) Encourage people to mine by offering block rewards and tx fees. 2) Ensure that new miners don't actually add any useful capacity to the network. 3) Require that old miners do at least as much work as new miners if they want to keep their income. If you take those together, the bitcoin protocol encourages a race to spend more energy to archieve the same thing. > They will be wrong sometimes, and right sometimes, and equilibrium will be reached intermittently. There is an equilibrium of energy costs in bitcoin, obviously. However no one knows how the bitcoin/USD price will develop, so I don't see how that implies any cap for energy costa in USD. And even that is just an aporoximation for the actual energy costs in raw materials. One that can be very skewed as the posts further down in the thread explain.

by ftlio 9y ago

xg15 9y ago

And yet in result, this market is justifying that the exact same task (verifying a block every 10 min) needs orders of magnitude more energy today than it did in the past, even though the result is exactly the same. This is practically an energy hog. I'd argue that bitcoin is also an energy hog in theory: Why do people believe there is money to be made in mining? Because bitcoin's core mechanisms ensure that money is to be made, as long as bitcoin is worth enough (which it currently is). So the bitcoin protocol does three things: 1) Encourage people to mine by offering block rewards and tx fees. 2) Ensure that new miners don't actually add any useful capacity to the network. 3) Require that old miners do at least as much work as new miners if they want to keep their income. If you take those together, the bitcoin protocol encourages a race to spend more energy to archieve the same thing. > They will be wrong sometimes, and right sometimes, and equilibrium will be reached intermittently. There is an equilibrium of energy costs in bitcoin, obviously. However no one knows how the bitcoin/USD price will develop, so I don't see how that implies any cap for energy costa in USD. And even that is just an aporoximation for the actual energy costs in raw materials. One that can be very skewed as the posts further down in the thread explain.