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Just to riff on this idea, despite inevitable pushback: Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money. This pushes competitio

• tikej 6y ago
  Cool, except so-called renewable energy sources still built using non-renewable materials. There also physical limits to efficiency of energy transformation and slightly less heat loss per unit of energy with much more energy production is not exactly what climate needs right now.
  • beaner 6y ago
    Haven't heard these points before but I'm not sure that they apply to proof-of-work specifically.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    "The estimated calculations presented in this work prove that the total power produced by us was 0.0414% in 2000 and 0.0577% in 2017 of the global solar power reaching the Earth’s surface"[0]. So even if Bitcoin mining were to cause global electricity production to increase by an order of magnitude, it would still be a rounding error compared to the amount of global warming caused by the Sun directly. Thinking about it thermodynamically, though, in a future where Bitcoin mining uses only excess solar and wind energy, it wouldn't be adding any heat to the planet because that energy would have become heat anyway. [0] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/16/3069/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/16/3069/pdf
    • tikej 6y ago
      Ok, of course true that sum of heat from sun that reaches earth remains constant no matter whether we use it. However, how it’s stored/used on the earth is another matter. E.g. if it’s absorbed by plants/fungi/other life forms and stored as biomass, part of it doesn’t contribute to heating of the atmosphere/oceans, contrarily to when it’s converted to electricity (where large part is lost due to heating of the solar panels) and then used to computing, where from physics perspective it’s mostly heating (only tiny part is converted to useful work). Also what about the Manufacruring/production of devices to convert solar/wind energy to electricity and to mine bitcoins? It’s based on non-renewable elements (of course any chemical process is reversible given enough energy but Entropy still grows mercilessly) and requires a lot of extra energy. EDIT: as far as we know, thermodynamically all energy will become heat at the end (although not sure if it should be called heat, since there will be no flux). However, we as humanity are/should be quite concerned first about decades and earth’s atmosphere/oceans (and connected parts) not millennia and energetically balance Earth as whole to come. In principle energy from sun could also be stored in form of chemical bonds energy (as it’s the case for biomass) or even nuclear energy (yup, sun-powered nuclear fusion sounds unlikely but why not ;). Then biomass (less efficiently) or nuclei/atoms could be ejected from earth allowing to disperse sun’s thermal energy somewhere else.
• mayank 6y ago
  > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Or you could just skip the Bitcoin part...
  • beaner 6y ago
    I guess you could. But the presence of Bitcoin and proof-of-work actually speeds up the competition in the renewable energy space by making it more profitable than it otherwise would be. That's a good thing, it gets us to the world we want more quickly.
    • stouset 6y ago
      Building more renewable energy capacity only to have that capacity immediately used to mine Bitcoin rather than replace some existing fossil fuel use is not progress.
      • beaner 6y ago
        I don't see why not. One consequence is investment in renewable efficiency, which applies to the energy industry generally outside of crypto mining specifically. Another consequence is needing something to do with excess energy, which leads to more competition amongst sellers in the grid, making energy cheaper. This does marginally reduce dependence on fossil fuel.
        • Applejinx 6y ago
          If conversion directly into money through bitcoin is so damn liquid that this is what we're doing, what is this 'excess' energy you're talking about? In this scenario there is NO SUCH THING as 'excess' energy. Or reducing dependence on fossil fuel, so long as that can still be used to produce energy to mine bitcoin with. You're right about competition and market dynamics, but it is utterly and completely dedicated to converting ALL the energy into money without any left over. To fail to do so is to fail to be competitive. I really do not understand this talk about 'excess' energy.
• brabel 6y ago
  > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. What a fucking dystopia that would be.
  • beaner 6y ago
    Why?
    • viraptor 6y ago
      "Price for Bitcoin is too high, no power for your home today, unless you outbid the market"
      • beaner 6y ago
        You're choosing to consider the case when the price is very high, but not when it's very low. The flip-side of that coin would be that energy not worth being put into mining, which would be sold at a loss to the grid, would instead be put into batteries and saved, to be sold when when market prices were high again. But I think by the time Bitcoin becomes so universal that all energy companies are mining companies, it is likely to already be at the scale of USD/EUR, or even become the reserve currency of the world, in which case it would not fluctuate nearly as much as it does now.
        • viraptor 6y ago
          Yes, I'm choosing the case where the price is too high, because most people rely on energy being available and that's why there's a number of laws (depending on the country) that protect from disconnection. In practical terms, I prefer my freezer not to stop working and spoil stored food rather than having universal world currency which fluctates less.
          • beaner 6y ago
            Then we shouldn't have an issue, since I explained how such a system would continue to provide in that case.
• vasco 6y ago
  Or you just add financial incentives in the form of subsidies for green energy and extra tax burden for other sources, no need to involve bitcoin.
• adrianN 6y ago
  There are many existing processes that basically turn energy into money. It's called energy intensive industry. So far instead of pushing for renewables, companies making their money this way were a major hindrance in clean energy investments.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    I'm not sure which energy intensive industries you're thinking of, but bitcoin mining has the potential advantage that it can be turned on and off at a moment's notice, and doesn't require constant human supervision. That's not true of a lot of industrial processes.
    • dvh 6y ago
      Aluminium smelting.
      • beaner 6y ago
        So, trying in good faith to understand, isn't the problem that the output in this case is physical, while Bitcoin's energy-to-money output is digital?
        • adrianN 6y ago
          Why is that a problem? The price for Aluminium is more stable than the price of bitcoin.
          • beaner 6y ago
            I mean, you tell me. I don't mean to sound snarky. But it seemed to be your point that existing processes which turn energy into money are a hindrance to clean energy investments. The previous commenter offered an example of aluminum smelting. Which is not exactly what I meant, because I was being more literal when I was talking about an energy-into-money process, and that example appears to really mean energy-to-aluminum-to-money. I understood this example to mean that the reason other existing "energy-to-money" processes have been a hindrance to clean energy investments is that they have byproducts which negate clean efforts. In contrast to this, renewable crypto mining has no physical byproducts. Dunno if I misunderstood something.
• brazzy 6y ago
  > Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there. > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Absolute insanity straight out of postapocalyptic SF. "The ancients destroyed their civilization by funelling an ever increasing share of resources towards some kind of elaborate game of numbers".
  • beaner 6y ago
    I don't know why this seems so dystopian to some. To me, it seems like a financial incentive for a decentralized, robust, renewable future.
    • brazzy 6y ago
      There is nothing particularly robust or renewable, or "future" about it.
      • beaner 6y ago
        Necessarily renewable because it is the cheapest possible energy long-term; you only need to pay for upkeep, not for resources to convert. Maybe this depends on whether you think renewables will become cheaper than coal/gas, and maybe you're pessimistic about that. I'm not. Robust because the phenomenon can begin detached from the energy grid by profit-seeking entities with capital to invest. Doesn't need permission, can be smaller, independent and eventually have something to offer back to the grid, but don't require it initially. Ability to bootstrap outside of regulation as a result. More nodes, more competition, shared excess. Fewer singular points of failure, more redundant, less fragile. "Future," because that's a great vision for the future.
        • The_Colonel 6y ago
          What has even higher potential to be cheap is nuclear energy - when you don't care as much about (operation, storage) safety, a lot of costs fall out ... Nuclear energy has high fixed costs but then scales pretty well. As crypto currencies with PoW become a major industry, it's not difficult to imagine it might be cost-effective to build huge nuclear plants in some corrupt African country. (Africa has also huge untapped uranium ore deposits)
• mathnmusic 6y ago
  > Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. Energy will become cheap even for malicious actors, so bitcoin hash difficulty will have to go up in order to keep it costly for them to fake transactions. Which means energy usage goes up too. There's no way to avoid "work" in a proof-of-work scheme.
• 1_player 6y ago
  > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Wasteful, why not put all their power output into Bitcoin mining then? Sounds like a version of the nano machines story multiplying and eating the planet, in this case for the sole purpose to mine Bitcoin, leaving a carcass of the Earth and nobody to spend those coins.
• rglullis 6y ago
  > Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money. Nope! Putting more energy is not going to make more money into the system, is just makes it more likely that you get to be in the front of a firehose that drips money into the system in a constant rate. Putting more energy into the system just increases the cost of money itself. But no one wants money, what people want is the what money can buy. Instead of spending ever more energy to get into the front of the line, one could just use the energy for something productive and then sell it.
  • beaner 6y ago
    > Putting more energy is not going to make more money into the system, is just makes it more likely that you get to be in the front of a firehose that drips money into the system in a constant rate. This doesn't negate what I'm trying to say. That the energy amount is variable but the currency units output on the other side are static doesn't change the fact that energy is being turned into money. By contributing a higher fraction of the input, you get a higher fraction of the output. If anything, higher energy input can only be justified when the money being made as a result has an equivalent value or purchasing power. You're confusing units of currency for the actual purchasing power they represent, which actually is variable. > no one wants money, what people want is the what money can buy This is wrong. People want the option to have things in the future, which is exactly what money is.
    • rglullis 6y ago
      > By contributing a higher fraction of the input, you get a higher fraction of the output. There are other ways to get a "higher fraction of the output" that do not involve contributing to the input. That is the point you are missing.
      • beaner 6y ago
        That there exist other ways to make money besides mining it, also does not mean that mining is not a conversion of energy into money.
• krageon 6y ago
  The whole "this costs too much power!" movement is disingenuous, it generally relies upon comparisons to Visa or similar networks. These networks are built upon the suffering of millions (which you can I suppose equate to rampant CO2 production, if you really wanted to) and should not be used at all. Any alternative is better than that. Then of course there is the whole notion that using a lot of power is in and of itself a big evil, which is ridiculous. Even from an environmental perspective, big industries are by far the biggest offenders. By shifting the perspective of the discourse away from the real offenders towards other "problems", we are doing a disservice to the actual issues. At this point I'm convinced it's a movement composed primarily of people who don't understand what they're talking about, sprinkled with a light dash of actual malicious actors. This makes sense, as that's a realistic cross-section of the internet at large.
  • pclmulqdq 6y ago
    Serious question: Who suffers at the hands of Mastercard?
    • SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Bitcoin exchanges?
    • zdkl 6y ago
      Sex workers off the top of my head?
    • dmantis 6y ago
      Well, not directly the mastercard, but current banking system - lots of people. TLDR; custody banking model keeps people out of control of their own property. There is a big problem with private property rights and safety guaranties of your capital today in most of the world. There are three problems: unstable govs in 3rd world countries, capital moving restrictions and QEs. I'm, for example, not from developed country, so I have several restrictions on my own money, some of which may be applied to US/Europe citizens and some may not: 1) my gov, speaking softly, is not stable. I have no guarantee on my bank accounts in the long term (eg 20+ years). I can assume that funds can be at least inflated in several times, if not withdrawn in the name of some "patriotic" gov initiative. It would be much better to have my funds away from such jurisdiction. It's safer to have the funds out of **any** jurisdiction due to some political conflicts and attacks. US and their banks are likely to freeze Russian/China/Iran citizens funds as well when another conflict will arise. 2) Capital moving. Even if someone assume that some jurisdiction is safe - there is another problem - not any country makes capital flowing outside its border legal. You just **can't** move your **own** funds somewhere where you see it fit the most. Domestic banks may be completely controlled by the gov and too much cash can be easily arrested on its way by customs. 3) QEs, which is my favorite part and applied to any human on the earth today. Your money is used to "save" someone without your direct permission even if you live in good country, paid your taxes and did nothing wrong. Just by printing more money - practically making your hard-earned money cheaper and less useful. They'd say that you can move your money to stocks (US, by the way, there is no stable stocks but theirs), but you both will need to pay tax from your so called profits (the hell, on SP500 I won't even earn on the long run, I barely save initial funds considering inflation!) and forced to invest in american economy, which not everyone (surprise!) want to do. And stocks can fail badly. With some assumptions, crypto solves all three problems very efficiently.
• rcxdude 6y ago
  Yes, let's revolutionise the financial system by making sure it takes up 95% of our energy use! That's only 5 orders of magnitude more than currently. I don't think there's actually enough energy on the planet for even renewables to make that work, not without seriously disrupting the global ecosystem even worse than global warming already is.
• baltbalt 6y ago
  lol
• jihodl 6y ago
  Well put. Furthermore, humanities demand for energy is capped by its capacity to economically convert energy into useful work (e.g. through the production of durable goods, commodities, transportation services, etc). The Bitcoin network effectively gives us a new category of useful work and uncaps our demand for energy by decoupling it from the physical economy. Thus Bitcoin presents us with a viable pathway to becoming a Kardashev level 1 society by removing this bound. Energy will become abundant, the real price of energy will decrease due to the action of this scale-out and the innovations that entails, and the real price of bitcoin will march upward in accordance with the stock-to-flow model. Thinking of energy as priced against bitcoin and remembering how the network difficulty adjustment operates should help to elucidate how these two price actions can occur simultaneously for those of you scratching your head on that one. The feature you pointed out about mining being the most direct conversion between energy and value is an important one for people to grok in order to "get bitcoin". I would argue that energy itself is the only thing in the universe with intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of energy transcends constructs of human society. For instance, consider the animal kingdom and the flow of energy through the food web. By intimately linking the value of the bitcoin to the aggregate joules of energy flowing into the network, Satoshi delivered the most important financial innovation in the history of mankind; a digitally transactable surrogate for the intrinsic value embodied within energy.
• layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  >The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Wow. This is beyond delusional.
• cad 6y ago
  Money + heat
  • Applejinx 6y ago
    Well put.
• hated 6y ago
  > Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money It's a conversion of energy into coinage which can be used by people to repay their debts to others.