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The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zero

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain?

trhway 9y ago
>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that master. How we make sure that there is only one master for a given block, and that when you say 6 you really got 6 as i have no way of checking whether you even threw the dice at all? Satoshi's great insight was in building such a verifiable and statistically [for several minutes] single-master dice by using the good old hash based PoW. Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...
- zeroxfe 9y ago
  > Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale... A handful of the top cryptos are using some variant of proof-of-stake (like dPoS, dBFT, etc.), all of which are energy efficient. Ethereum is currently experimenting with PoS in Casper.
  - trhway 9y ago
    PoS basically increases energy efficiency by decreasing the degree of randomness and skewing the dice in favor of stakeholders to the degree depending on their stakes (at the limit you'd have just one entity verifying all the transactions, a very energy efficient situation we have today with fiat). In general PoS looks like a reasonable trade-off, and we're to see whether it gets accepted.
  - ActsJuvenile 9y ago
    Ah PoS, the "Rich get richer" algorithm. Ethereum's PoS implementation requires lock up of balances in stake accounts, so it removes any incentive to do transactions. I believe that ETH PoS will calcify the economic strata, kill all transaction volume, and have the opposite of network effect.
- rpearl 9y ago
  a cheaper way to achieve this is to have a centralized currency and mature financial infrastructure.
  - oh-kumudo 9y ago
    But...government and banks are evil, cried my inner libertarian self /s
elmar 9y ago
A little known fact is that validating a block with 1 Bitcoin transaction or all the world 10 minute transactions in Bitcoin would spend roughly the same energy. The energy is spent on security independent of transaction volume.
- GhostVII 9y ago
  But as transaction volume increases, the reward for mining increases, so miners will spend more money on electricity.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    The fee reward increases, the mining reward decreases and the difficulty also increases Until someone realizes it's cheaper to have their tokens moved by a different blockchain than the original BTC
msuvakov 9y ago
Primecoin is an example: https://primes.zone https://primes.zone
paulddraper 9y ago
Same is true of gold, diamonds, ivory, other items whose rarity makes them precious.
- oh-kumudo 9y ago
  Unlike Gold, bitcoin's rarity is artificial, comparison of Bitcoin to high-end artworks might be a more proper one.
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    It's not artificial, it's based on natural laws of computation. Choosing a particular starting block or blockchain algorithm is arbitrary. Just as choosing a particular metal is arbitrary. Its scarcity is 100% natural.
- objclxt 9y ago
  Gold and diamonds both have industrial applications. They have intrinsic properties outside of their scarcity that also give them worth (for gold, their corrosion resistance, for diamonds their hardness). Even if they had no aesthetic value they would still be mined and sold, because they have practical uses. Is the same true of Bitcoin? Right now, I don't think so.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Yes and I don't need to spend several kWh to transact with coin or diamonds
lalaland1125 9y ago
It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks). The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. This means that attacks are much cheaper and much more likely to happen. One interesting part about this is that you can consider PoW usefulness on a sliding scale. The more useful the PoW, the more vulnerable your coin is to attack. Thus, you can probably get away with a "useful" PoW if it isn't actually very useful. This is one of the reasons why most "useful" PoW schemes focus on something which is pretty much useless (such as finding weird primes and whatnot).
- whatshisface 9y ago
  In that case, you'd want everybody running profitless basic research scientific computations for other people's research teams. Eventually we may be able to buy cloud compute by inventing a new coin with a proof of work useful only to us, buying some Etherium to back it with (so that there's some initial value to mining it), and then letting speculators put it in there currency baskets to give it long-term value.
  - alphydan 9y ago
    > profitless basic research May not scale in 20 years. Useless research can become very valuable in a decade or two.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      That's true, but nobody would be able to bet on it being useful specifically to them. (I'm thinking about simulating LHC stuff, searching astronomical data, the sorts of things where at the time of computation nobody has a clue who will end up benefiting. Protein folding might be off-limits depending on who wants to know how it folds, and why.)
alphydan 9y ago
A few years ago I read a comment on HK which addressed that very point. The argument said that if PoW was useful, the security could be compromised unpredictably. It goes something like this: Imagine that you are mining Bitcoin and protein folding for a drug. Let's also imagine that if your mining rig finds the protein, it's worth $15m (as a company could commercialise a new drug with that information). You can imagine a point where you can make more money from the results than from the mining (if they are useful, they will be worth some money after all). But the security of the Bitcoin network lies precisely in the game-theoretical aspect that it's more profitable to mine than it is to cheat. But if you can mine and make some money on the side (because it's useful), then cheating [double spending] might become more interesting. Or perhaps your "side-business" can bootstrap a 51% attack. Finding a useful & relevant computational problem, whose monetary value is predictably low far into future and whose computation scales with a simple function ... well, it's a really difficult question. So the safest option is to go for "brainless" computation. That is trying random numbers. I think it is not useless. It does the job: "Keeping the network secure by calculating random hashes". Useless, of course, is very subjective. I wish most video games did something useful like protein folding (I consider them and the machines powering them a waste of energy, matter, mining, time and intellectual power).
- Hextinium 9y ago
  On the topic of video games being useless, the computers that run top of the line games also end up being almost exactly what you need to run most scientific computing projects. So what a non-negligible amount of gamers do is when they are not playing run programs like BOINC. EVGA has a program that actually incentives this. https://forums.evga.com/m/tt.aspx?f=79&p=1 https://forums.evga.com/m/tt.aspx?f=79&p=1
- mygo 9y ago
  If only video game creators did something like... while your noob character wears this free special hat, he gets +1 XP and your machine folds proteins in the background
seanwilson 9y ago
> Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain? It's not that easy. You need to be able to generate tasks that have a predictable levels of difficulty.
- Blindedwino 9y ago
  You don't "need" to, though. We're talking about internet pogs here.
erentz 9y ago
People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? Do you know how much electricity Facebook burns running computers to serve fake images and shitty news? Or Youtube serving Logan Paul videos? If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another isn't. We would instead argue to directly solve the root problem, which is dirty energy polluting our environment, by making sure energy pricing covers that cost. That way the market can tell us if Logan Paul videos are more valuable to people than say Bitcoin, and we would actually do something to fix the environment rather than simply making it cheaper for one energy consumer (Youtube) to pollute at the expense of outlawing another (Bitcoin).
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Facebook, Google, and Amazon all buy renewable energy for their computing operations through the use of power purchase agreements.
  - erentz 9y ago
    True, they're all about 50% renewable this year, aiming to be 100% at some time. I'm a bit skeptical of this argument though. If we go down this path we have to answer what percentage of bitcoin mining is from renewable sources too. As I understood it (correct me if I'm wrong) a very large amount of Bitcoin mining is located around hydro sources to get cheap hydro electricity. That would mean the same argument that Youtube is green would apply equally to Bitcoin. But then I suspect someone would say something like "well they're using power from a hydro dam in china but look at all of China's coal plants, now other chinese people have to buy from those coal plants" to which we'd probably have to then say "yeah, kind of like when Microsoft buys Columbia river power cuz it's cheap and green or Facebook buys solar and wind power because its green that means that someone else in America can't buy that green power and is "using" power from one of our coal plants too". It's all one grid at the end of the day.
- usaphp 9y ago
  > People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? It’s like saying that actors are wasting food and energy by doing what they do. Facebook YouTube and others are here for our entertainment, meanwhile bitcoin right now is mostly used by people with a final goal of selling it and making money. Most of the miners I know don’t ever use it to purchase something or send money to someone. That’s the problem in my opinion
Nec28 9y ago
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency where you earn it by lending your computing power to help scientific studies
comcastic123 9y ago
Do you have heat in your house? If so, you're literally wasting a ton of electricity. At least bitcoin miners and folding@home folks are doing something besides productive along with making heat.
ConcernedCoder 9y ago
I've done all sorts of "mining" since 2010, bitcoin, ethereum ( eth really ), monero, etc... and I've come to the same conclusion as you ( as far as proof-of-work being wasted electricity/time/and effort ), recently I've switched to "mergefolding", folding@home and curecoin, see: https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and-more/ https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and... it makes me feel good that there's some possibility my proof-of-work could actually help someone someday.
sethgecko 9y ago
How many resources are being "wasted" to protect world's wealth? From buildings to vaults to security teams to computer systems? If I had to guess I would say considerably more than what bitcoin wastes.
tzakrajs 9y ago
SONM.io
mvindahl 9y ago
I think that as the value of bitcoin decreases, a lot of the mining will stop for want of profitability. Right now it's still Klondyke days and everybody is out there with his pickaxe. In a few months, slightly used pickaxes, or in this case GPUs, will be cheap and plentiful. It's stupid while it lasts bit fortunately it won't. Bitcoin has no practical utility, neither as currency nor as a store of value, and you can't pick the blockchain apart to extract anything of value. Bitcoin is like my dad's books of completed sudokus: Proof of hard work but not of any value to anyone. ATM Bitcoin is approaching the $10K mark from above. The press will soon be writing stories about people who lost this-and-this-much. The stupid money which fueled the bubble will dry up.
- throwaway13632 9y ago
  https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ No but you're right. This time it will be gone for good. lol
unsignedinteger 9y ago
The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. Other alternatives are simply to switch to a PoS style of consensus, which without a doubt has it's own set of tradeoffs. Currently Ethereum is planning to switch to PoW/PoS system where the amount of computation on the PoW is drastically reduced from the current level of difficulty i.e. There essentially having a PoW/PoS model where the PoW is just like HashCash it's purpose isn't to do consensus but stop "spam".
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. That's been an active field of CS research for decades (it was an active field mentioned, though not explored in depth, in an introductory-level class I took in 1990), and (from Google Scholar) seems to have been hugely active starting about 4-5 years before Satoshi’s paper. But I think the relevant point is that there has been progress since Satoshi, not that the progress is due to or solely in response to Satoshi.
throwaway13632 9y ago
Please tell me how much a tamperproof, borderless, and permissionless global ledger should cost in your opinion.

trhway 9y ago

>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that master. How we make sure that there is only one master for a given block, and that when you say 6 you really got 6 as i have no way of checking whether you even threw the dice at all? Satoshi's great insight was in building such a verifiable and statistically [for several minutes] single-master dice by using the good old hash based PoW. Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...

zeroxfe 9y ago
> Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale... A handful of the top cryptos are using some variant of proof-of-stake (like dPoS, dBFT, etc.), all of which are energy efficient. Ethereum is currently experimenting with PoS in Casper.
- trhway 9y ago
  PoS basically increases energy efficiency by decreasing the degree of randomness and skewing the dice in favor of stakeholders to the degree depending on their stakes (at the limit you'd have just one entity verifying all the transactions, a very energy efficient situation we have today with fiat). In general PoS looks like a reasonable trade-off, and we're to see whether it gets accepted.
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  Ah PoS, the "Rich get richer" algorithm. Ethereum's PoS implementation requires lock up of balances in stake accounts, so it removes any incentive to do transactions. I believe that ETH PoS will calcify the economic strata, kill all transaction volume, and have the opposite of network effect.
rpearl 9y ago
a cheaper way to achieve this is to have a centralized currency and mature financial infrastructure.
- oh-kumudo 9y ago
  But...government and banks are evil, cried my inner libertarian self /s

elmar 9y ago

A little known fact is that validating a block with 1 Bitcoin transaction or all the world 10 minute transactions in Bitcoin would spend roughly the same energy. The energy is spent on security independent of transaction volume.

GhostVII 9y ago
But as transaction volume increases, the reward for mining increases, so miners will spend more money on electricity.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  The fee reward increases, the mining reward decreases and the difficulty also increases Until someone realizes it's cheaper to have their tokens moved by a different blockchain than the original BTC

msuvakov 9y ago

Primecoin is an example: https://primes.zone https://primes.zone

paulddraper 9y ago

Same is true of gold, diamonds, ivory, other items whose rarity makes them precious.

oh-kumudo 9y ago
Unlike Gold, bitcoin's rarity is artificial, comparison of Bitcoin to high-end artworks might be a more proper one.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  It's not artificial, it's based on natural laws of computation. Choosing a particular starting block or blockchain algorithm is arbitrary. Just as choosing a particular metal is arbitrary. Its scarcity is 100% natural.
objclxt 9y ago
Gold and diamonds both have industrial applications. They have intrinsic properties outside of their scarcity that also give them worth (for gold, their corrosion resistance, for diamonds their hardness). Even if they had no aesthetic value they would still be mined and sold, because they have practical uses. Is the same true of Bitcoin? Right now, I don't think so.
raverbashing 9y ago
Yes and I don't need to spend several kWh to transact with coin or diamonds

lalaland1125 9y ago

It is impossible to create a "useful" PoW. The issue comes down to incentives. As bitcoin is a decentralized, trust-less system, there needs to be constant and powerful incentives to prevent miners from cheating (by creating forks, or executing any number of other attacks). The current main incentive against cheating is that miners will lose their invested PoW (compute time + electricity) if they cheat and get their block thrown out. However, with a useful PoW, this calculus changes. Now, the PoW is no longer "wasted" when the miner cheats and gets caught as the PoW is now useful for something besides mining. This means that attacks are much cheaper and much more likely to happen. One interesting part about this is that you can consider PoW usefulness on a sliding scale. The more useful the PoW, the more vulnerable your coin is to attack. Thus, you can probably get away with a "useful" PoW if it isn't actually very useful. This is one of the reasons why most "useful" PoW schemes focus on something which is pretty much useless (such as finding weird primes and whatnot).

whatshisface 9y ago
In that case, you'd want everybody running profitless basic research scientific computations for other people's research teams. Eventually we may be able to buy cloud compute by inventing a new coin with a proof of work useful only to us, buying some Etherium to back it with (so that there's some initial value to mining it), and then letting speculators put it in there currency baskets to give it long-term value.
- alphydan 9y ago
  > profitless basic research May not scale in 20 years. Useless research can become very valuable in a decade or two.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    That's true, but nobody would be able to bet on it being useful specifically to them. (I'm thinking about simulating LHC stuff, searching astronomical data, the sorts of things where at the time of computation nobody has a clue who will end up benefiting. Protein folding might be off-limits depending on who wants to know how it folds, and why.)

alphydan 9y ago

A few years ago I read a comment on HK which addressed that very point. The argument said that if PoW was useful, the security could be compromised unpredictably. It goes something like this: Imagine that you are mining Bitcoin and protein folding for a drug. Let's also imagine that if your mining rig finds the protein, it's worth $15m (as a company could commercialise a new drug with that information). You can imagine a point where you can make more money from the results than from the mining (if they are useful, they will be worth some money after all). But the security of the Bitcoin network lies precisely in the game-theoretical aspect that it's more profitable to mine than it is to cheat. But if you can mine and make some money on the side (because it's useful), then cheating [double spending] might become more interesting. Or perhaps your "side-business" can bootstrap a 51% attack. Finding a useful & relevant computational problem, whose monetary value is predictably low far into future and whose computation scales with a simple function ... well, it's a really difficult question. So the safest option is to go for "brainless" computation. That is trying random numbers. I think it is not useless. It does the job: "Keeping the network secure by calculating random hashes". Useless, of course, is very subjective. I wish most video games did something useful like protein folding (I consider them and the machines powering them a waste of energy, matter, mining, time and intellectual power).

Hextinium 9y ago
On the topic of video games being useless, the computers that run top of the line games also end up being almost exactly what you need to run most scientific computing projects. So what a non-negligible amount of gamers do is when they are not playing run programs like BOINC. EVGA has a program that actually incentives this. https://forums.evga.com/m/tt.aspx?f=79&p=1 https://forums.evga.com/m/tt.aspx?f=79&p=1
mygo 9y ago
If only video game creators did something like... while your noob character wears this free special hat, he gets +1 XP and your machine folds proteins in the background

seanwilson 9y ago

> Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain? It's not that easy. You need to be able to generate tasks that have a predictable levels of difficulty.

Blindedwino 9y ago
You don't "need" to, though. We're talking about internet pogs here.

erentz 9y ago

People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? Do you know how much electricity Facebook burns running computers to serve fake images and shitty news? Or Youtube serving Logan Paul videos? If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another isn't. We would instead argue to directly solve the root problem, which is dirty energy polluting our environment, by making sure energy pricing covers that cost. That way the market can tell us if Logan Paul videos are more valuable to people than say Bitcoin, and we would actually do something to fix the environment rather than simply making it cheaper for one energy consumer (Youtube) to pollute at the expense of outlawing another (Bitcoin).

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Facebook, Google, and Amazon all buy renewable energy for their computing operations through the use of power purchase agreements.
- erentz 9y ago
  True, they're all about 50% renewable this year, aiming to be 100% at some time. I'm a bit skeptical of this argument though. If we go down this path we have to answer what percentage of bitcoin mining is from renewable sources too. As I understood it (correct me if I'm wrong) a very large amount of Bitcoin mining is located around hydro sources to get cheap hydro electricity. That would mean the same argument that Youtube is green would apply equally to Bitcoin. But then I suspect someone would say something like "well they're using power from a hydro dam in china but look at all of China's coal plants, now other chinese people have to buy from those coal plants" to which we'd probably have to then say "yeah, kind of like when Microsoft buys Columbia river power cuz it's cheap and green or Facebook buys solar and wind power because its green that means that someone else in America can't buy that green power and is "using" power from one of our coal plants too". It's all one grid at the end of the day.
usaphp 9y ago
> People keep saying this. But are have you also thought about how wasteful is Facebook or Instagram or Youtube are? It’s like saying that actors are wasting food and energy by doing what they do. Facebook YouTube and others are here for our entertainment, meanwhile bitcoin right now is mostly used by people with a final goal of selling it and making money. Most of the miners I know don’t ever use it to purchase something or send money to someone. That’s the problem in my opinion

Nec28 9y ago

Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency where you earn it by lending your computing power to help scientific studies

comcastic123 9y ago

Do you have heat in your house? If so, you're literally wasting a ton of electricity. At least bitcoin miners and folding@home folks are doing something besides productive along with making heat.

ConcernedCoder 9y ago

I've done all sorts of "mining" since 2010, bitcoin, ethereum ( eth really ), monero, etc... and I've come to the same conclusion as you ( as far as proof-of-work being wasted electricity/time/and effort ), recently I've switched to "mergefolding", folding@home and curecoin, see: https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and-more/ https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and... it makes me feel good that there's some possibility my proof-of-work could actually help someone someday.

sethgecko 9y ago

How many resources are being "wasted" to protect world's wealth? From buildings to vaults to security teams to computer systems? If I had to guess I would say considerably more than what bitcoin wastes.

tzakrajs 9y ago

SONM.io

mvindahl 9y ago

I think that as the value of bitcoin decreases, a lot of the mining will stop for want of profitability. Right now it's still Klondyke days and everybody is out there with his pickaxe. In a few months, slightly used pickaxes, or in this case GPUs, will be cheap and plentiful. It's stupid while it lasts bit fortunately it won't. Bitcoin has no practical utility, neither as currency nor as a store of value, and you can't pick the blockchain apart to extract anything of value. Bitcoin is like my dad's books of completed sudokus: Proof of hard work but not of any value to anyone. ATM Bitcoin is approaching the $10K mark from above. The press will soon be writing stories about people who lost this-and-this-much. The stupid money which fueled the bubble will dry up.

throwaway13632 9y ago
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ No but you're right. This time it will be gone for good. lol

unsignedinteger 9y ago

The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. Other alternatives are simply to switch to a PoS style of consensus, which without a doubt has it's own set of tradeoffs. Currently Ethereum is planning to switch to PoW/PoS system where the amount of computation on the PoW is drastically reduced from the current level of difficulty i.e. There essentially having a PoW/PoS model where the PoW is just like HashCash it's purpose isn't to do consensus but stop "spam".

dragonwriter 9y ago
> The answer is yes, since Satoshi's paper back in 2008 a whole subset of CS research has propped up just on consensus algorithms. That's been an active field of CS research for decades (it was an active field mentioned, though not explored in depth, in an introductory-level class I took in 1990), and (from Google Scholar) seems to have been hugely active starting about 4-5 years before Satoshi’s paper. But I think the relevant point is that there has been progress since Satoshi, not that the progress is due to or solely in response to Satoshi.

throwaway13632 9y ago

Please tell me how much a tamperproof, borderless, and permissionless global ledger should cost in your opinion.