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Hopefully they invest heavily into making blockchain technology green and energy efficient because without doing so, you can't "help billions of people".

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Right now PoW blockchain doesn't require energy consumption to scale with # of tx or even total value tx, but rather with value tx * time spent waiting for confirmations * probability of double spend attempt. Unless we start seeing cartels that would aggregate tx that they'd like to see double spend having a long tail of users and tx means that the likelyhood that you'll be targeted for a double spend attack decreases. All that to say that you don't necessarily need to increase the electricity spend to extend the same security to more people.
- prolikewhoa 9y ago
  How many blockchains aren't using proof of work? There are large mining operations everywhere for various cryptocurrencies (the largest most popular ones!) taking large amounts of power and greatly contributing to climate change. The graphics card shortages proves my point here.
  - droidist2 9y ago
    > The graphics card shortages proves my point here. Oh man, do you think if the popular coins start moving to proof of stake, used graphics cards will flood onto eBay and the like and we'll get to snap them up cheap for some machine learning?
    - merlincorey 9y ago
      You probably don't want to use graphics cards that have been abused mining cryptocurrencies in generally poor thermal conditions. Floating point math errors similar to the recent Titan V issues could potentially mess with your machine learning. Regardless, if it has been mining for some time, the lifetime of the card is greatly shortened, if the operator did not take precautions such as running undervoltage and designing a good thermal solution. Most people will not have done these things!
      - lozaning 9y ago
        Do you have proof that mining reduces card life outside of mechanical fan failure? Anecdotally, I've been running 12 RX480's to mine ethereum since AMD launched the cards some year(s) ago. They're still just as fast as the day I got them. What in your opinion would make the cards fail at this point? If anything im inclined to argue that reduced thermal cycling will result in these GPU's lasting longer than cards that get torched to 100% to game for an hour every day and then sit at idle the other 23 hours.
  - wellboy 9y ago
    Almost all the new ones inclusing 3rd gen block chains don't, e.g. IOTA, Nano. They use PoS or a PoS/PoW hybrid, thus leading to 1/1000th of the energy consumption or 1/1,000,000.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Right now PoW blockchain doesn't require energy consumption to scale with # of tx or even total value tx, but rather with value tx * time spent waiting for confirmations * probability of double spend attempt. Unless we start seeing cartels that would aggregate tx that they'd like to see double spend having a long tail of users and tx means that the likelyhood that you'll be targeted for a double spend attack decreases. All that to say that you don't necessarily need to increase the electricity spend to extend the same security to more people.

prolikewhoa 9y ago
How many blockchains aren't using proof of work? There are large mining operations everywhere for various cryptocurrencies (the largest most popular ones!) taking large amounts of power and greatly contributing to climate change. The graphics card shortages proves my point here.
- droidist2 9y ago
  > The graphics card shortages proves my point here. Oh man, do you think if the popular coins start moving to proof of stake, used graphics cards will flood onto eBay and the like and we'll get to snap them up cheap for some machine learning?
  - merlincorey 9y ago
    You probably don't want to use graphics cards that have been abused mining cryptocurrencies in generally poor thermal conditions. Floating point math errors similar to the recent Titan V issues could potentially mess with your machine learning. Regardless, if it has been mining for some time, the lifetime of the card is greatly shortened, if the operator did not take precautions such as running undervoltage and designing a good thermal solution. Most people will not have done these things!
    - lozaning 9y ago
      Do you have proof that mining reduces card life outside of mechanical fan failure? Anecdotally, I've been running 12 RX480's to mine ethereum since AMD launched the cards some year(s) ago. They're still just as fast as the day I got them. What in your opinion would make the cards fail at this point? If anything im inclined to argue that reduced thermal cycling will result in these GPU's lasting longer than cards that get torched to 100% to game for an hour every day and then sit at idle the other 23 hours.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Almost all the new ones inclusing 3rd gen block chains don't, e.g. IOTA, Nano. They use PoS or a PoS/PoW hybrid, thus leading to 1/1000th of the energy consumption or 1/1,000,000.