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Stuff like this worries me. We should be doing everything we can to curb the energy and heat we produce and instead we're using vast amounts of energy to basica

Stuff like this worries me. We should be doing everything we can to curb the energy and heat we produce and instead we're using vast amounts of energy to basically waste trillions of CPU cycles so that we can produce digital money that might never actually be worth anything. It's just about the most pointless use of planetary resources I can think of

henryw 8y ago
I also wonder why are humans wasting resource like this. Like all this compute power could be used towards curing cancer or something.
- GW150914 8y ago
  People as a group are selfish and short sighted, prone to maximizing personal gain. Individuals can be self sacrificing and possess a long view, but there will be a thousand others willing to work the system to death in their place. More specifically, there are almost limitless rationales to be employed if you stand to gain from turning entropy into personal wealth. “This compute power was never going to be used to cure cancer anyway...” that kind of thing. More pernicious are people who cloak themselves in ideology or Utopianism somthst they convince themselves that this waste of resources is a good thing. Some may even believe it, but most just don’t care and are too busy finding greater fools so they can make money.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    Bitcoin is created through the use of exponentially increasing amounts of energy (I daresay there's a 'crash' scenario where it doesn't expand that way and also doesn't retain value as currently expected). Bitcoin is VALUED in a way similar to the stock market, where people collectively decide it's super good and useful because they're invested into the system. This process is exploitable, and is purely social engineering. If it gets too big to fail, we're all in bad trouble, but we were already in trouble from many other things that have financially become too big to fail.
- ozmbie 8y ago
  People mine bitcoin because there are millions of dollars per day of bitcoin rewards available. I would guess that collectively, millions of dollars are being spent each day on cancer research around the world. These mining farms were built for a purpose. It’s not like all these spare ASICs were laying around waiting for somebody to find a use for them. The people running these farms would be on some other venture if cryptocurrency was never invented. And those ventures probably wouldn’t involve curing cancer either.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    No, but it would not probably involve installing large space heaters for the crows.
- roryisok 8y ago
  Greed is usually the answer. Cancer research doesn't pay. Bitcoin does. If someone could just harness one to do the other. If there was a crypto currency whose calculations helped to cure cancer then we'd be on to something
coralreef 8y ago
Heat pollution is something to worry about, as is the material construction of electronics/chipsets due to crypto mining. However, one side effect of this is that increasing demand for clean, cheap electricity is a good thing. Miners are basically subsidizing the development of eco-friendly energy infrastructure which ends up being good for everyone.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Which MIGHT end up being good for everyone.
  - coralreef 8y ago
    What would be the downsides of cheap, eco-friendly energy?
    - LeoPanthera 8y ago
      High demand for electricity may increase the price of energy as a whole, which may make the production of electricity from fossil fuels profitable enough to expand.
    - sirsar 8y ago
      See Jevons paradox, where increasing coal-efficiency counterintuitively increased coal usage and pollution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - jacobush 8y ago
      What are you going to use it for, if it's all dumped into the jaws of Mammon, quite literally, just to uphold status quo. (Mining.)
apr 8y ago
Why? Doing anything of value requires expending of energy and producing heat, this is unavoidable. Saying that this activity is pointless just because you are not seeing any value does not mean that it is actually pointless. In general anything that people are willing to pay money for is not pointless for someone, otherwise that money would be spent on something else. It is like saying why a farmer needs to drive that big tractor down the field using precious (for whom?) oil and polluting the air whereas I can do things manually on my pea patch just fine. If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. And just to address 'waste' here, energy is not free so 'waste' that actually wastes resources cannot go on for long lest the waster goes bankrupt.
- roryisok 8y ago
  There are so many things I could argue with here but I'm tired so I'll just pick one. > If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. Why would it mean that? If we were talking about households using more and more it might, but it might not. My tv uses far less energy than the one I had twenty years ago but there's no chance I'm going back to that heap of CRT junk. Likewise all my other appliances, my car etc. My life has improved as my energy usage has decreased. But even if the opposite were true, it's not households, but industry that in this case is consuming more and more power. An industry that produces no goods, provides no service, does no research, improves only the lives of the direct owners of that industry. It's as if they're building enormous, energy sucking diamond factories, but with the added chance that diamonds might be worthless by the time they have them. Even if I'm wrong, even if higher energy usage means higher standard of living, that's a short term outlook, because over a hundred year period it will mean a much, much lower standard of living for everyone who hasn't drowned or starved yet
  - apr 8y ago
    You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture. And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change. By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Crypto in the longrun could create a world where people could instantly, anonymously, and freely exchange currency with one another. Imagine how liberating that would be for the world as a whole. Companies deciding to outsource various jobs to India really helped revolutionize their economy. The internet along with cryptocurrencies would take this corporate level development down to the individual. Think about mutually beneficial exchanges like tutoring. You want to hire a mathematics tutor for somebody. Somebody in e.g. the Philippines who has excellent English and Math skills wants to sell their service as a tutor at a rate that would be extremely desirable relative to western incomes but also extremely desirable relative to his locale's average incomes. Right now even if these people are able to connect, working out how to actually pay each other is very awkward. Cryptos could remove all barriers to entry for inter-personal financial exchange. This is something we take for granted, without realizing how much such barriers are really holding us all back. Or maybe we do realize it, but imagine these are necessary obstacles. Think of the, what now probably numbers in the dozens of, different payment platforms people jump through just to try to be able to give their money to people who they want to give it to (and all the new tertiary problems those said platforms then introduce into the process). It's really quite remarkably how backwards our global financial capabilities truly are.
- throwawayqdhd 8y ago
  > Right now even if these people are able to connect, working out how to actually pay each other is very awkward I'm one of those people. Paying me is honestly pretty damn trivial and a solved problem. Heck, I've hired people in the US and paid them online right from my bank's interface.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Applejinx 8y ago
I agree. The big change in bitcoin is that it is a way to literally change energy into capital without doing a damn thing in any other way, or benefiting any human being, or anything else on the planet. It's literally waste heat from conversion of energy that could do some good, into numbers controlled by rich people. We might do better to just say outright 'all rich people, you now have twice as much money just for being you' and use the energy elsewhere… or use less and avoid cooking the planet. In practice this is a dumb, bad idea even if you stand to benefit.
- heptathorp 8y ago
  Why does it only benefit rich people?
- throwaway37585 8y ago
  > or benefiting any human being If bitcoin isn't benefiting any human being, why are so many human beings using it?
  - ux-app 8y ago
    >why are so many human beings using it? honest question: isn't crypto currency a closed system of speculators selling to speculators? From the outside, to me at least, it seems like an incredibly energy hungry ponzi scheme designed around printing monopoly money using ultra rare deep sea squid ink. So are people using it for any purpose other than to sell it to the next rube? All honest questions. I really don't know of any economically useful way that crypto currency is currently used for.
    - roryisok 8y ago
      I've never heard crypto summed up so well
    - throwaway37585 8y ago
      On what basis do you claim this? Personal speculation? To speak plainly, I highly doubt you believe what you're claiming to believe (that cryptocurrecy is being used solely for speculation), which leaves dishonest rhetoric as the only alternative.
mikec3010 8y ago
> waste trillions of CPU cycles so that we can produce digital money Point-of-sale systems have been doing this for 15-ish years (in the US). We found value in that over using cash, and now many are finding value in blockchain over banks.
- Sol- 8y ago
  Point-of-sale is pretty trivial computation and costs very little energy. Its value was also obvious. >now many are finding value in blockchain over banks Debatable, people are using it for speculation, yes. But 90% of the people hyping blockchain probably don't even know what specific problem it solves and when this trustless model is even useful. It usually doesn't hold up to closer inspection.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    Each unit is roughly the equivalent of an i960 risc system with cpu ram and a display running 24/7 powered by a heat-generating wall wart. Not even counting the network equipment, before broadband many gas stations had satellite uplinks. Multiply that millions of times and the power consumption adds up. Bitcoin speculators have profited from bitcoin, just like ACH industry investors and executives profited from $0.50 per transaction ACH fees. The only difference I see is bitcoin hasn't driven up the cost of goods for everyone.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      Bitcoin doesn't avoid the need for point-of-sale systems any more than Apple Pay does. We still need something to ring up your order, even if you can pay from your phone. So to be clear, we still need the POS systems plus we would also need the computers doing a meaningless busy-work math problem to generate the blockchain.
hcs 8y ago
Isn't this article precisely about using the infrastructure for crypto mining for more practical computing?
- roryisok 8y ago
  Yes, after bitcoin stops being profitable to mine. After we've pumped a few billion more tons of carbon into the air in the name of blockchain. And assuming of course that some newer crypto doesn't take bitcoin's place which it almost certainly will
deltateam 8y ago
input "article about recycling bitcoin mining infrastructure" output "sound bite about bitcoin mining energy use unrelated to the article"
cup-of-tea 8y ago
There is just as much waste in the finance industry. It's strange that we can't seem to do money without using an incredible amount of energy.

henryw 8y ago

I also wonder why are humans wasting resource like this. Like all this compute power could be used towards curing cancer or something.

GW150914 8y ago
People as a group are selfish and short sighted, prone to maximizing personal gain. Individuals can be self sacrificing and possess a long view, but there will be a thousand others willing to work the system to death in their place. More specifically, there are almost limitless rationales to be employed if you stand to gain from turning entropy into personal wealth. “This compute power was never going to be used to cure cancer anyway...” that kind of thing. More pernicious are people who cloak themselves in ideology or Utopianism somthst they convince themselves that this waste of resources is a good thing. Some may even believe it, but most just don’t care and are too busy finding greater fools so they can make money.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  Bitcoin is created through the use of exponentially increasing amounts of energy (I daresay there's a 'crash' scenario where it doesn't expand that way and also doesn't retain value as currently expected). Bitcoin is VALUED in a way similar to the stock market, where people collectively decide it's super good and useful because they're invested into the system. This process is exploitable, and is purely social engineering. If it gets too big to fail, we're all in bad trouble, but we were already in trouble from many other things that have financially become too big to fail.
ozmbie 8y ago
People mine bitcoin because there are millions of dollars per day of bitcoin rewards available. I would guess that collectively, millions of dollars are being spent each day on cancer research around the world. These mining farms were built for a purpose. It’s not like all these spare ASICs were laying around waiting for somebody to find a use for them. The people running these farms would be on some other venture if cryptocurrency was never invented. And those ventures probably wouldn’t involve curing cancer either.
- jacobush 8y ago
  No, but it would not probably involve installing large space heaters for the crows.
roryisok 8y ago
Greed is usually the answer. Cancer research doesn't pay. Bitcoin does. If someone could just harness one to do the other. If there was a crypto currency whose calculations helped to cure cancer then we'd be on to something

coralreef 8y ago

Heat pollution is something to worry about, as is the material construction of electronics/chipsets due to crypto mining. However, one side effect of this is that increasing demand for clean, cheap electricity is a good thing. Miners are basically subsidizing the development of eco-friendly energy infrastructure which ends up being good for everyone.

jacobush 8y ago
Which MIGHT end up being good for everyone.
- coralreef 8y ago
  What would be the downsides of cheap, eco-friendly energy?
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    High demand for electricity may increase the price of energy as a whole, which may make the production of electricity from fossil fuels profitable enough to expand.
  - sirsar 8y ago
    See Jevons paradox, where increasing coal-efficiency counterintuitively increased coal usage and pollution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - jacobush 8y ago
    What are you going to use it for, if it's all dumped into the jaws of Mammon, quite literally, just to uphold status quo. (Mining.)

apr 8y ago

Why? Doing anything of value requires expending of energy and producing heat, this is unavoidable. Saying that this activity is pointless just because you are not seeing any value does not mean that it is actually pointless. In general anything that people are willing to pay money for is not pointless for someone, otherwise that money would be spent on something else. It is like saying why a farmer needs to drive that big tractor down the field using precious (for whom?) oil and polluting the air whereas I can do things manually on my pea patch just fine. If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. And just to address 'waste' here, energy is not free so 'waste' that actually wastes resources cannot go on for long lest the waster goes bankrupt.

roryisok 8y ago
There are so many things I could argue with here but I'm tired so I'll just pick one. > If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. Why would it mean that? If we were talking about households using more and more it might, but it might not. My tv uses far less energy than the one I had twenty years ago but there's no chance I'm going back to that heap of CRT junk. Likewise all my other appliances, my car etc. My life has improved as my energy usage has decreased. But even if the opposite were true, it's not households, but industry that in this case is consuming more and more power. An industry that produces no goods, provides no service, does no research, improves only the lives of the direct owners of that industry. It's as if they're building enormous, energy sucking diamond factories, but with the added chance that diamonds might be worthless by the time they have them. Even if I'm wrong, even if higher energy usage means higher standard of living, that's a short term outlook, because over a hundred year period it will mean a much, much lower standard of living for everyone who hasn't drowned or starved yet
- apr 8y ago
  You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture. And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change. By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Crypto in the longrun could create a world where people could instantly, anonymously, and freely exchange currency with one another. Imagine how liberating that would be for the world as a whole. Companies deciding to outsource various jobs to India really helped revolutionize their economy. The internet along with cryptocurrencies would take this corporate level development down to the individual. Think about mutually beneficial exchanges like tutoring. You want to hire a mathematics tutor for somebody. Somebody in e.g. the Philippines who has excellent English and Math skills wants to sell their service as a tutor at a rate that would be extremely desirable relative to western incomes but also extremely desirable relative to his locale's average incomes. Right now even if these people are able to connect, working out how to actually pay each other is very awkward. Cryptos could remove all barriers to entry for inter-personal financial exchange. This is something we take for granted, without realizing how much such barriers are really holding us all back. Or maybe we do realize it, but imagine these are necessary obstacles. Think of the, what now probably numbers in the dozens of, different payment platforms people jump through just to try to be able to give their money to people who they want to give it to (and all the new tertiary problems those said platforms then introduce into the process). It's really quite remarkably how backwards our global financial capabilities truly are.

throwawayqdhd 8y ago
> Right now even if these people are able to connect, working out how to actually pay each other is very awkward I'm one of those people. Paying me is honestly pretty damn trivial and a solved problem. Heck, I've hired people in the US and paid them online right from my bank's interface.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Applejinx 8y ago

I agree. The big change in bitcoin is that it is a way to literally change energy into capital without doing a damn thing in any other way, or benefiting any human being, or anything else on the planet. It's literally waste heat from conversion of energy that could do some good, into numbers controlled by rich people. We might do better to just say outright 'all rich people, you now have twice as much money just for being you' and use the energy elsewhere… or use less and avoid cooking the planet. In practice this is a dumb, bad idea even if you stand to benefit.

heptathorp 8y ago
Why does it only benefit rich people?
throwaway37585 8y ago
> or benefiting any human being If bitcoin isn't benefiting any human being, why are so many human beings using it?
- ux-app 8y ago
  >why are so many human beings using it? honest question: isn't crypto currency a closed system of speculators selling to speculators? From the outside, to me at least, it seems like an incredibly energy hungry ponzi scheme designed around printing monopoly money using ultra rare deep sea squid ink. So are people using it for any purpose other than to sell it to the next rube? All honest questions. I really don't know of any economically useful way that crypto currency is currently used for.
  - roryisok 8y ago
    I've never heard crypto summed up so well
  - throwaway37585 8y ago
    On what basis do you claim this? Personal speculation? To speak plainly, I highly doubt you believe what you're claiming to believe (that cryptocurrecy is being used solely for speculation), which leaves dishonest rhetoric as the only alternative.

mikec3010 8y ago

> waste trillions of CPU cycles so that we can produce digital money Point-of-sale systems have been doing this for 15-ish years (in the US). We found value in that over using cash, and now many are finding value in blockchain over banks.

Sol- 8y ago
Point-of-sale is pretty trivial computation and costs very little energy. Its value was also obvious. >now many are finding value in blockchain over banks Debatable, people are using it for speculation, yes. But 90% of the people hyping blockchain probably don't even know what specific problem it solves and when this trustless model is even useful. It usually doesn't hold up to closer inspection.
- mikec3010 8y ago
  Each unit is roughly the equivalent of an i960 risc system with cpu ram and a display running 24/7 powered by a heat-generating wall wart. Not even counting the network equipment, before broadband many gas stations had satellite uplinks. Multiply that millions of times and the power consumption adds up. Bitcoin speculators have profited from bitcoin, just like ACH industry investors and executives profited from $0.50 per transaction ACH fees. The only difference I see is bitcoin hasn't driven up the cost of goods for everyone.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't avoid the need for point-of-sale systems any more than Apple Pay does. We still need something to ring up your order, even if you can pay from your phone. So to be clear, we still need the POS systems plus we would also need the computers doing a meaningless busy-work math problem to generate the blockchain.

hcs 8y ago

Isn't this article precisely about using the infrastructure for crypto mining for more practical computing?

roryisok 8y ago
Yes, after bitcoin stops being profitable to mine. After we've pumped a few billion more tons of carbon into the air in the name of blockchain. And assuming of course that some newer crypto doesn't take bitcoin's place which it almost certainly will

deltateam 8y ago

input "article about recycling bitcoin mining infrastructure" output "sound bite about bitcoin mining energy use unrelated to the article"

cup-of-tea 8y ago

There is just as much waste in the finance industry. It's strange that we can't seem to do money without using an incredible amount of energy.