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Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

78 points by downvote_me 9y ago

nonbel 9y ago
Something I've been thinking about is that proof of work "coins" are basically energy credits. When energy is cheap, miners can lower their fees and keep the same return, leading to more economic activity. When it is expensive, they need to raise their fees to stay profitable, thus reducing economic activity. I think this makes sense. Wouldn't it be beneficial if economic activity scaled with energy availability? It also creates a direct incentive to develop and utilize the most efficient energy sources possible, without regard for the politics between various stakeholders (hydro vs oil vs coal vs wind vs solar, etc).
- jstanley 9y ago
  > miners can lower their fees This isn't how fees work. Fees are based purely on supply and demand. The payer sets their fee level when they create the transaction, and it's up to the miners which transactions they will include. Since there is always an excess of transactions, the miners typically select transactions to maximise their payoff. If miners were to "lower their fees", they'd be accepting low-fee transactions and excluding high-fee transactions, which makes no sense for anybody. The miners would be getting less money than they could, and the people paying high fees don't even get any better service for it.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    The miners must set a rough minimum fee though. If energy costs rise enough at some point the miners will need to slow/shut down unless the sum value of the fees (in whatever currency is used to pay for the energy) rise above some threshold.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      They're not setting a minimum fee, they're either mining or not mining based on profitability. There is never any financial reason to mine blocks that have empty space if there are fee-paying transactions available to put in that space.
      - nonbel 9y ago
        I'm not even considering the block reward, consider when there are only fees (or block reward is negligible). In that case profitability is determined by energy/hardware costs vs fees. If costs go up (eg energy becomes scarce) the minimum fee also need to rise. Each "unit" of economic activity using the currency will be more expensive when energy is scarce than when it is abundant. This is a natural feedback loop.
        jstanley 9y ago
        That's not how it works. If costs go up, mining activity drops. Miners can not increase transaction fees. All they can do is accept the fee they're offered or not. If they're mining blocks at all, they want to accept the maximum fee that is offered. If they say "you guys aren't paying enough, I'm going to stop mining", then other miners will just get the fees that people are offering instead, and when the difficulty adjusts downwards, the miners that stopped mining might start mining again.
        nonbel 9y ago
        You seem hung up on the fact that miners do not broadcast a fee as part of the protocol. Ok, nobody is arguing with that in this thread... It is just like I will not pay $2000 for a cheeseburger. I am not going to advertise that, I simply will not buy it. There is some maximum price that I set for myself. However, the role of difficulty adjustments is a better point. As energy costs rise there could be two (non mutually exclusive) effects: 1) Fewer transactions are made with higher fees 2) Mining slows down, leading to a difficulty decrease, leading to less secure transactions Less secure transactions means waiting for more confirmations to get the same level of confidence there will be no double spend. Is this not another, less extreme, way to slow economic activity in the face of increasing energy costs?
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    When energy becomes cheaper, miners can do more mining, leading to an increase in blocks. Given that people are only willing to pay so much for a transaction to complete, there is only so much demand at a certain price point. Once the supply of blocks increases, you eventually have price points where the demand no longer matches the supply. At this point a miner would lower their fee until the demand increases back to supply. Supply and demand drives prices, but it does so through individual actors setting prices they are willing to pay/accept (or by algorithms that have been setup by some human who set up the rules by which it will set prices).
    - jstanley 9y ago
      > a miner would lower their fee They're not "lowering their fee". That's not how it works. They might stop mining altogether, but it can never cost more to include a transaction than not to include it, unless including it pushes out another transaction that pays a higher fee.
      - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
        >They're not "lowering their fee". So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block? >They might stop mining altogether Maybe, but any market can experience short term irrationality. Maybe it takes them a few hours to stop mining in which they lose money. Or maybe stopping operations costs enough money that the miner won't stop even at a small loss, at least for some amount of time.
        jstanley 9y ago
        > So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block? Sure, if you want to twist the wording like that, they "lower the fee" to the point where they can fill the blocks. But they're not really "lowering their fees". They don't even have a concept of the fee level they're "charging". They can either accept the fees that are available or not. If they are mining at all then they want to accept the best fees that are available. There is literally no rationale for them to be mining non-full blocks when fee-paying transactions are available to put in the blocks. It's not like it costs more to mine a larger block. The cost to mine a block is fixed, so you may as well get as much fees as you can find.
AJ007 9y ago
If we had as of precise data on both energy & resource consumption as we have on Bitcoin mining we could remove all taxes and create a consumption/VAT tax based on how much resources and energy something used. That could go a long way in shifting costs that are socialized back in to their consumers and producers.
- nonbel 9y ago
  See my post below about energy credits. Perhaps proof of work does not achieve this like I think, but "precise data on both energy & resource consumption" should not be necessary if the value of the currency is directly linked to the abundance of energy.
- Retric 9y ago
  Energy taxes are even more regressive than sales taxes. All it would do is increase the vast wealth subsidy.
  - jeremyjh 9y ago
    Data? According to the EPA nearly 2/3rds of electricity is consumed by businesses and industry. https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers#commercial https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers#commercial
    - Retric 9y ago
      http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aml6/pdfs&zips/RegressiveMandates.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aml6/pdfs&zips/RegressiveManda... Just an example: The poorest 5 percent of households use 247 gallons of gas per year, on average. The richest 22 percent, with incomes over ten times higher, each use about four times as much. The basic issue is as wealth increases people spend more on services which have lower energy needs than say food. A cheeseburger takes not just energy to cook much energy to manufacture. An account on the other hand uses much less energy per dollar spent.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    You can hypothecate the tax to provide energy efficient modifications to houses (insulation, LED lighting, double glazing), and to provide a small amount of free energy to poor people (subsistance levels of heating and cooking).
cs702 9y ago
The energy invested in adding transaction blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain (which requires iterating through nonces until one is found that can partially reverse a cryptographic hashing algorithm, consuming computing power) is what makes the blockchain immutable. Consider: Modifying a transaction block from, say, 3 days ago, is practically impossible, because it would require burning the same amount of energy the entire network has burned over the past 3 days in an instant, before the network invests even more energy adding more transaction blocks. Forget about trying to modify or revert transactions from more than a few days ago.[a] The energy invested in Bitcoin is securing the transaction history. There is value in that, no? [a] Edit: I mean modifying a transaction right now, without forking the blockchain. Please see maxerickson's comments and my responses below.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If the private blocks are calculated 10% faster it only takes ~10 days to go back in time 1 day). But of course this attack isn't practical, actually executing it would demonstrate that the public network was a farce.
  - cs702 9y ago
    > You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). Of course, but I don't know how anyone could be a lot more efficient that current miners, who are in a rat race to increase the efficiency of their mining operations. They probably think about energy consumption every waking hour of the day. > You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If the private blocks are calculated 10% faster it only takes ~10 days to go back in time 1 day)... Of course, but by then the Bitcoin network would have invested ~10 more days of energy into the network, and now instead of being one day behind, one would be ~10 days behind. One would have a different, forked blockchain far behind the original one, with no hope of catching up. If one wants to modify a transaction from a day ago over time, one must burn at least one day's worth of Bitcoin network energy consumption much faster than the network, in order to keep up with the network. If one wants to modify a transaction from a day ago right now, one must burn at least one day's worth of Bitcoin network energy consumption in an instant. PS. Note that I mean without forking. SORRY if that wasn't clear in my earlier comments!
creshal 9y ago
Proof of work was a mistake.
- masmullin 9y ago
  I have a hard time understanding proof of stake. I haven't found any discussions that make sense to me. Do you have any good easy to understand descriptions of proof of stake you could recommend to a layman like me?
  - FreeRadical 9y ago
    PoS: rather than buying mining hardware, let’s pretend we did. Now let’s randomly allocate block rewards amongst us all
  - GordonS 9y ago
    Think of bank accounts that don't allow instant access to your cash, where you gave to keep it in for a year or whatever to get your interest. With PoS, the more coins you tie up, the more chance you have of 'winning'. That's my understanding anyway - someone more knowledgeable, please feel free to correct me!
    - ufo 9y ago
      The problem is in the details: how do you use this to reach consensus? How do you agree on a randomness source to picks the "winners"? How do you prevent people from mining multiple parallel histories, devolving the system into proof of work?
  - lt 9y ago
    In a very simplified way, proof of work is a way to roughly uniformily distribute the block generation "queue". In a network without identities how do you prevent someone creating hundreds of accounts to have a hundred times more chance to be next in line? You give them a hard problem, and now the odds of you being next in line is proportional to your computing power, which you can't multiply effortlessly. Proof of Stake says that instead of distributing the work queue proportionally to the computing power you demonstrated to have, it does it proportionally to the amount of currency you have saved. It similarly prevents the attack where one could create infinite personalities to get in line, with different trade offs. In particular, beside the energy savings, it can be a much more scalable model, where you don't have to wait 10min in average for someone to solve the hard problem and instead you can know right away who are the next people eligible to generate the next blocks.
52-6F-62 9y ago
Relevant: * "Quebec's hydro surplus to lure companies into data hub initiative" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/quebecs-hydro-surplus-to-draw-in-data-hubs/article33697929/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-... * "Chinese bitcoin miners eye sites in energy-rich Canada" https://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCAKBN1F10BU-OCABS https://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCAKBN1F10BU-OC...
clashmoore 9y ago
Has there been articles or research done on how much energy is used to coin, print, distribute, and utilize fiat currencies?
- Nursie 9y ago
  Yeah, it's far far less.
- brazzy 9y ago
  I don't know, but the infrastructure for fiat currencies can achieve efficiency gains through scale. Bitcoin cannot, on a very fundamental level: energy expenditure for mining must at all times be so high that an attack is financially unattractive. So energy usage has to increase linearly with the market cap - and completely independant of how many transactions there are.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  The Bureau of Printing and Engraving budgeted $14.35 million in FY2017 for "Communication, utilities, and misc. charges." If we assume that 100% of that is electricity costs, and that electricity costs 12¢/kWh, then we get somewhere in the region of 120 million kWh in FY2017 to produce USD. That is 0.1% the annual electricity consumption of Argentina.
  - yithump 9y ago
    Just checked the Treasury 2017 budget which is around 3 billion.
- mutatio 9y ago
  I think it's only fair to include the cost of governments and armies in these costs, i.e. the value of GBP/USD is in part secured by guns and everything that comes with it.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    I suspect if you tried using bitcoin in a country with no government or army, it would turn out to not be very useful either.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
unmango 9y ago
Soon bitcoins will be replaced by patacones.
thisisit 9y ago
My article on this topic: https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-use-5f38e91c3253 https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-use-5...
mylons 9y ago
does anyone else think that articles like this are fueled self interested parties who don't have a stake in crypto? if crypto is here to stay, wont more efficient mining hardware, potentially more efficient software, and things like recent advances in solar relax these fears in reality?
- ggg9990 9y ago
  > does anyone else think that articles like this are fueled self interested parties who don't have a stake in crypto? Journalists aren’t supposed to have a stake in the subject they cover. That’s the point. Not having a stake in cryptocurrency is “disinterested,” not “self-interested.”
  - Para2016 9y ago
    There are plenty of journalists with conflicts of interest. It's not ethical, but they do. Financial columnists sometimes don't even admit their conflicts, it's crazy.
- thousandautumns 9y ago
  wouldn't the self-interested parties be the ones with a stake in crypto? and even if the article is written out of self-interest, does that somehow make its conclusions incorrect?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  In the long run hardware efficiency shouldn't matter. At longer time scales the cost of the electricity consumed will always trend towards the value of the reward. Just by the simple mechanism of people seeing an opportunity to profit and buying hardware and turning it on.

78 points by downvote_me 9y ago

Something I've been thinking about is that proof of work "coins" are basically energy credits. When energy is cheap, miners can lower their fees and keep the same return, leading to more economic activity. When it is expensive, they need to raise their fees to stay profitable, thus reducing economic activity. I think this makes sense. Wouldn't it be beneficial if economic activity scaled with energy availability? It also creates a direct incentive to develop and utilize the most efficient energy sources possible, without regard for the politics between various stakeholders (hydro vs oil vs coal vs wind vs solar, etc).

jstanley 9y ago
> miners can lower their fees This isn't how fees work. Fees are based purely on supply and demand. The payer sets their fee level when they create the transaction, and it's up to the miners which transactions they will include. Since there is always an excess of transactions, the miners typically select transactions to maximise their payoff. If miners were to "lower their fees", they'd be accepting low-fee transactions and excluding high-fee transactions, which makes no sense for anybody. The miners would be getting less money than they could, and the people paying high fees don't even get any better service for it.
- nonbel 9y ago
  The miners must set a rough minimum fee though. If energy costs rise enough at some point the miners will need to slow/shut down unless the sum value of the fees (in whatever currency is used to pay for the energy) rise above some threshold.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    They're not setting a minimum fee, they're either mining or not mining based on profitability. There is never any financial reason to mine blocks that have empty space if there are fee-paying transactions available to put in that space.
    - nonbel 9y ago
      I'm not even considering the block reward, consider when there are only fees (or block reward is negligible). In that case profitability is determined by energy/hardware costs vs fees. If costs go up (eg energy becomes scarce) the minimum fee also need to rise. Each "unit" of economic activity using the currency will be more expensive when energy is scarce than when it is abundant. This is a natural feedback loop.
      - jstanley 9y ago
        That's not how it works. If costs go up, mining activity drops. Miners can not increase transaction fees. All they can do is accept the fee they're offered or not. If they're mining blocks at all, they want to accept the maximum fee that is offered. If they say "you guys aren't paying enough, I'm going to stop mining", then other miners will just get the fees that people are offering instead, and when the difficulty adjusts downwards, the miners that stopped mining might start mining again.
        nonbel 9y ago
        You seem hung up on the fact that miners do not broadcast a fee as part of the protocol. Ok, nobody is arguing with that in this thread... It is just like I will not pay $2000 for a cheeseburger. I am not going to advertise that, I simply will not buy it. There is some maximum price that I set for myself. However, the role of difficulty adjustments is a better point. As energy costs rise there could be two (non mutually exclusive) effects: 1) Fewer transactions are made with higher fees 2) Mining slows down, leading to a difficulty decrease, leading to less secure transactions Less secure transactions means waiting for more confirmations to get the same level of confidence there will be no double spend. Is this not another, less extreme, way to slow economic activity in the face of increasing energy costs?
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  When energy becomes cheaper, miners can do more mining, leading to an increase in blocks. Given that people are only willing to pay so much for a transaction to complete, there is only so much demand at a certain price point. Once the supply of blocks increases, you eventually have price points where the demand no longer matches the supply. At this point a miner would lower their fee until the demand increases back to supply. Supply and demand drives prices, but it does so through individual actors setting prices they are willing to pay/accept (or by algorithms that have been setup by some human who set up the rules by which it will set prices).
  - jstanley 9y ago
    > a miner would lower their fee They're not "lowering their fee". That's not how it works. They might stop mining altogether, but it can never cost more to include a transaction than not to include it, unless including it pushes out another transaction that pays a higher fee.
    - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
      >They're not "lowering their fee". So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block? >They might stop mining altogether Maybe, but any market can experience short term irrationality. Maybe it takes them a few hours to stop mining in which they lose money. Or maybe stopping operations costs enough money that the miner won't stop even at a small loss, at least for some amount of time.
      - jstanley 9y ago
        > So a miner will never reduce the cost to include a transaction into their block, even when they aren't getting enough to fill up the block? Sure, if you want to twist the wording like that, they "lower the fee" to the point where they can fill the blocks. But they're not really "lowering their fees". They don't even have a concept of the fee level they're "charging". They can either accept the fees that are available or not. If they are mining at all then they want to accept the best fees that are available. There is literally no rationale for them to be mining non-full blocks when fee-paying transactions are available to put in the blocks. It's not like it costs more to mine a larger block. The cost to mine a block is fixed, so you may as well get as much fees as you can find.

AJ007 9y ago

If we had as of precise data on both energy & resource consumption as we have on Bitcoin mining we could remove all taxes and create a consumption/VAT tax based on how much resources and energy something used. That could go a long way in shifting costs that are socialized back in to their consumers and producers.

nonbel 9y ago
See my post below about energy credits. Perhaps proof of work does not achieve this like I think, but "precise data on both energy & resource consumption" should not be necessary if the value of the currency is directly linked to the abundance of energy.
Retric 9y ago
Energy taxes are even more regressive than sales taxes. All it would do is increase the vast wealth subsidy.
- jeremyjh 9y ago
  Data? According to the EPA nearly 2/3rds of electricity is consumed by businesses and industry. https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers#commercial https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers#commercial
  - Retric 9y ago
    http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aml6/pdfs&zips/RegressiveMandates.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aml6/pdfs&zips/RegressiveManda... Just an example: The poorest 5 percent of households use 247 gallons of gas per year, on average. The richest 22 percent, with incomes over ten times higher, each use about four times as much. The basic issue is as wealth increases people spend more on services which have lower energy needs than say food. A cheeseburger takes not just energy to cook much energy to manufacture. An account on the other hand uses much less energy per dollar spent.
- DanBC 9y ago
  You can hypothecate the tax to provide energy efficient modifications to houses (insulation, LED lighting, double glazing), and to provide a small amount of free energy to poor people (subsistance levels of heating and cooking).

cs702 9y ago

The energy invested in adding transaction blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain (which requires iterating through nonces until one is found that can partially reverse a cryptographic hashing algorithm, consuming computing power) is what makes the blockchain immutable. Consider: Modifying a transaction block from, say, 3 days ago, is practically impossible, because it would require burning the same amount of energy the entire network has burned over the past 3 days in an instant, before the network invests even more energy adding more transaction blocks. Forget about trying to modify or revert transactions from more than a few days ago.[a] The energy invested in Bitcoin is securing the transaction history. There is value in that, no? [a] Edit: I mean modifying a transaction right now, without forking the blockchain. Please see maxerickson's comments and my responses below.

maxerickson 9y ago
You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If the private blocks are calculated 10% faster it only takes ~10 days to go back in time 1 day). But of course this attack isn't practical, actually executing it would demonstrate that the public network was a farce.
- cs702 9y ago
  > You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). Of course, but I don't know how anyone could be a lot more efficient that current miners, who are in a rat race to increase the efficiency of their mining operations. They probably think about energy consumption every waking hour of the day. > You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If the private blocks are calculated 10% faster it only takes ~10 days to go back in time 1 day)... Of course, but by then the Bitcoin network would have invested ~10 more days of energy into the network, and now instead of being one day behind, one would be ~10 days behind. One would have a different, forked blockchain far behind the original one, with no hope of catching up. If one wants to modify a transaction from a day ago over time, one must burn at least one day's worth of Bitcoin network energy consumption much faster than the network, in order to keep up with the network. If one wants to modify a transaction from a day ago right now, one must burn at least one day's worth of Bitcoin network energy consumption in an instant. PS. Note that I mean without forking. SORRY if that wasn't clear in my earlier comments!

creshal 9y ago

Proof of work was a mistake.

masmullin 9y ago
I have a hard time understanding proof of stake. I haven't found any discussions that make sense to me. Do you have any good easy to understand descriptions of proof of stake you could recommend to a layman like me?
- FreeRadical 9y ago
  PoS: rather than buying mining hardware, let’s pretend we did. Now let’s randomly allocate block rewards amongst us all
- GordonS 9y ago
  Think of bank accounts that don't allow instant access to your cash, where you gave to keep it in for a year or whatever to get your interest. With PoS, the more coins you tie up, the more chance you have of 'winning'. That's my understanding anyway - someone more knowledgeable, please feel free to correct me!
  - ufo 9y ago
    The problem is in the details: how do you use this to reach consensus? How do you agree on a randomness source to picks the "winners"? How do you prevent people from mining multiple parallel histories, devolving the system into proof of work?
- lt 9y ago
  In a very simplified way, proof of work is a way to roughly uniformily distribute the block generation "queue". In a network without identities how do you prevent someone creating hundreds of accounts to have a hundred times more chance to be next in line? You give them a hard problem, and now the odds of you being next in line is proportional to your computing power, which you can't multiply effortlessly. Proof of Stake says that instead of distributing the work queue proportionally to the computing power you demonstrated to have, it does it proportionally to the amount of currency you have saved. It similarly prevents the attack where one could create infinite personalities to get in line, with different trade offs. In particular, beside the energy savings, it can be a much more scalable model, where you don't have to wait 10min in average for someone to solve the hard problem and instead you can know right away who are the next people eligible to generate the next blocks.

52-6F-62 9y ago

Relevant: * "Quebec's hydro surplus to lure companies into data hub initiative" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/quebecs-hydro-surplus-to-draw-in-data-hubs/article33697929/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-... * "Chinese bitcoin miners eye sites in energy-rich Canada" https://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCAKBN1F10BU-OCABS https://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCAKBN1F10BU-OC...

clashmoore 9y ago

Has there been articles or research done on how much energy is used to coin, print, distribute, and utilize fiat currencies?

Nursie 9y ago
Yeah, it's far far less.
brazzy 9y ago
I don't know, but the infrastructure for fiat currencies can achieve efficiency gains through scale. Bitcoin cannot, on a very fundamental level: energy expenditure for mining must at all times be so high that an attack is financially unattractive. So energy usage has to increase linearly with the market cap - and completely independant of how many transactions there are.
jcranmer 9y ago
The Bureau of Printing and Engraving budgeted $14.35 million in FY2017 for "Communication, utilities, and misc. charges." If we assume that 100% of that is electricity costs, and that electricity costs 12¢/kWh, then we get somewhere in the region of 120 million kWh in FY2017 to produce USD. That is 0.1% the annual electricity consumption of Argentina.
- yithump 9y ago
  Just checked the Treasury 2017 budget which is around 3 billion.
mutatio 9y ago
I think it's only fair to include the cost of governments and armies in these costs, i.e. the value of GBP/USD is in part secured by guns and everything that comes with it.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  I suspect if you tried using bitcoin in a country with no government or army, it would turn out to not be very useful either.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

unmango 9y ago

Soon bitcoins will be replaced by patacones.

thisisit 9y ago

My article on this topic: https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-use-5f38e91c3253 https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-use-5...

mylons 9y ago

does anyone else think that articles like this are fueled self interested parties who don't have a stake in crypto? if crypto is here to stay, wont more efficient mining hardware, potentially more efficient software, and things like recent advances in solar relax these fears in reality?

ggg9990 9y ago
> does anyone else think that articles like this are fueled self interested parties who don't have a stake in crypto? Journalists aren’t supposed to have a stake in the subject they cover. That’s the point. Not having a stake in cryptocurrency is “disinterested,” not “self-interested.”
- Para2016 9y ago
  There are plenty of journalists with conflicts of interest. It's not ethical, but they do. Financial columnists sometimes don't even admit their conflicts, it's crazy.
thousandautumns 9y ago
wouldn't the self-interested parties be the ones with a stake in crypto? and even if the article is written out of self-interest, does that somehow make its conclusions incorrect?
maxerickson 9y ago
In the long run hardware efficiency shouldn't matter. At longer time scales the cost of the electricity consumed will always trend towards the value of the reward. Just by the simple mechanism of people seeing an opportunity to profit and buying hardware and turning it on.