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> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the
by cc-d 8y ago
> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated.
If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculations.
- ethbro 8y agoIn the same vein, I'd be curious how much energy gets consumed by HFT.
- wglb 8y agoAnd how much by machinery to run advertising?
- monochromatic 8y agoI would think far less. HFT isn’t intentionally computationally expensive.
- foobarchu 8y agoAnd the HFT industry is incentivized to use as little processor time as possible, and thus as little power as possible.
- gowld 8y agoThat's not true. They'll take a 400W 10GHz CPU over a 5mW 1 GHz CPU every time, if it generates better financial returns.
- ethbro 8y agoParent was referring to latency optimization, I believe. But I'd assume most of those folks have ML / other slower models constantly churning away in the background, even if their HFT reactions are highly tuned and simpler.
- perl4ever 8y agoMy impression is that to the extent that HFT is about relative speed, competition can't reduce power usage.
- lallysingh 8y agoNot very much. A handful of machines per exchange colo, for each of a few hundred orgs? Probably about as much power as a small-midsize college, if I were to guess?
- gnode 8y agoNaturally scarce stores of value like Bitcoin, gold, diamonds, etc. have always "wasted" resources, whether they be power, human resource, or polluting the environment. On one hand you could regard them as immoral because of this, on the other hand they enable the freedom to store value without trust.
- cc-d 8y ago>Bitcoin, gold, diamond You're being dishonest if you're pretending these things are identically comparable.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gnode 8y agoI didn't suggest they were identical. Only that a limited comparison can be made about their use as a store of value.
- d0lph 8y agoThey're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?
- rtkwe 8y agoOnly Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.
- acou_nPlusOne_t 8y agoSurely, those humans wasting precious energy, would not waste energy and ressources if they were not sitting at home and staring hypnotized at some netflix movie?
- coffeeacc 8y agoTask for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.
- burkaman 8y agohttps://curecoin.net/ https://curecoin.net/ https://foldingcoin.net/ https://foldingcoin.net/ https://gridcoin.us/ https://gridcoin.us/ http://primecoin.io/ http://primecoin.io/ Probably many more
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- edhu2017 8y agoHere's the problem for me. These mining operations can be exploited to an extreme. Any scientist or professor with knowledge in protein representations will have an unfair advantage over normal miners. This gap will be even larger than the hashpower gaps we see between ASICs and "normal" miners in bitcoin, litecoin, etc because scientists will have access to not only hardware but also extremely specific domain knowledge.
- usepgp 8y agoIsn't that good though? The scientists who make new discoveries get paid to do so, rather than just some random person with a gpu in their closet?
- edhu2017 8y agoIt's not, because no one would use a coin with such imbalance in mining power. It would be all around more efficient for people to just donate to scientists.
- naravara 8y ago>Any scientist or professor with knowledge in protein representations will have an unfair advantage over normal miners. I, for one, welcome our new protein folding overlords. May they rule us more justly than the investment bankers they've replaced. :-p
- madrox 8y agoThis has come up a number of times...probably because of the studies[1] over the last year or so. It's convenient to hit bitcoin on this front because it's conceivable to estimate its energy footprint. What I find frustrating is that we look at no other segment of tech this way. We never discuss the energy consumption of video games or the stock market. How can we say if this is very bad if we have nothing to compare it to? It's quite likely there are far worse offenders. To be clear, I hold no bitcoin. I'm no fan of it, but I find criticism of its energy consumption disingenuous...especially when there are so many more valid criticisms of it to seize on. [1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6 and others
- chc 8y agoThe assumption is that there is no real benefit to the energy expenditure Bitcoin demands. This isn't true for video games (entertainment is generally considered to be worth a decent amount of resources for the psychological benefits it brings) or the stock market (it's basically the heart of our economy). If you don't share these assumptions, you'll come to a different conclusion. But I don't think it's hypocrisy.
- madrox 8y agoExactly, discussing this requires the assumption that bitcoin has little value, instead of directly discussing its value. It may not be hypocrisy, but it's certainly fallacious. It only reinforces existing beliefs in the merit/demerit of bitcoin.
- perl4ever 8y agoI cannot understand why people (certainly not just you) are so relentlessly obtuse about the destructive effect of Bitcoin mining and how it differs from other currencies. Say I trade a barrel of oil for $65. That barrel of oil is going to get burnt, (because otherwise it wouldn't have value to the recipient) but the process of burning it can produce something useful, like transportation. If I burn a barrel of oil to create electricity to mine 0.0084 bitcoin (about $65), I've "traded" the same amount of oil for the same currency value, but I've used the energy up by hashing. Nothing is left over to transport people or make plastic or whatever. There is a clear difference between a currency where it costs maybe 10 cents to create a token that circulates at $100, and one where it costs $100 which nobody gains to circulate at $100. It doesn't balance out - it is an unambiguous terrible waste. And as I think of it, isn't it really just the same waste as a 100% gold standard?
- wellboy 8y agoOr focus on cryptocurrencies that are much more scalable and decentralized than Bitcoin and don't use Proof of work as a consensus mechanism, such as 1. Skycoin, Web of Trust 2. Iota, Tangle 3. Aeternity and soon alsk Ethereum with PoS/PoW hybrid
- urda 8y agoOr maybe start to focus on how cryptocurrencies just aren't working, are a waste of precious energy, and don't currently have real value outside of those that hold it and trade it.