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Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

99 points by URfejk 6y ago

yownie 6y ago
https://imgur.com/YWGgpWW https://imgur.com/YWGgpWW
siriusz 6y ago
Let us use Solar Power to mine the coins.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  Go ahead. Won't really make a difference. There's no authority to force miners to go solar. And even if they did so, energy markets are very liquid, so increased demand overall increases the pollution produced by energy production market wide. If miners started building massive new solar installations, that would help, but again that's just clean energy someone else could have used for something else. There's no particularly compelling case for miners to go solar vs. other users of electricity.
- jonhendry18 6y ago
  If you spend the money to put up panels to fund your mining, you'll probably never make a profit from the mining.
gus_massa 6y ago
> Finally, it is not even necessary that a computer attack actually take place, but that speculators fear it. If a group of hackers (real or fake) announced an impending attack, the price of Bitcoin would likely collapse. > If you’re not a green hacker, and you’re not doing it for the planet, you can also do it for the money: by speculating downward on the price of bitcoin before launching attacks. Or the speculators make just laugh about the threats of script kiddies and the price will not change and you will loose money.
retrofuturism 6y ago
Yeah, good luck with that.
Dudideloo 6y ago
> If a group of hackers (real or fake) announced an impending attack, the price of Bitcoin would likely collapse. Look further: What would happen after the attacks failed, when not even the green hackers can do anything to their network ? Nobody can currently shut it down, that's also why it is valuable.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  There's literally an internet requirement for it, to use it. Also, using it locally has a delay of several days for being "up to date". So in practise, security for most people is dependant on 3rd parties.
  - herewegoagain2 6y ago
    So you propose shutting down the internet to end Bitcoin?
  - yownie 6y ago
    >Also, using it locally has a delay of several days for being "up to date". what even?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eznzt 6y ago
Destroy yourselves and you won't have to live in a world where people use energy as they see fit.
tofurocks 6y ago
This is so stingingly dumb it reads like satire
jpcooper 6y ago
TLDR: Troll-piece, that cannot actually be serious, written by self-professed green hacker whose fluttering and tenuous sense of meaning, value in life and connection to the universe are challenged by the existence of things like Bitcoin, the absurdity inherent in nature, Versace, and an artist’s shit in a can that sold for over 100k at Sotheby’s according to Wikipedia.
puskavi 6y ago
This makes me lol, but it also makes me sad because some people really think like this. I think its same group that thinks nuclear power will kill us all.
globular-toast 6y ago
I supported bitcoin when it first came out because I support the idea of decentralised, trustless money. Far too much money is redirected into the hands of financial workers who are not adding any value to the economy. Finance is good and necessary, but the way it currently works is not. But bitcoin simply does not work as money. There is really no doubt about this. Even the biggest proponents of bitcoin right now call it a "digital gold". But we don't need a digital gold. We have gold and gold has none of the same problems as money and is a far more stable storage of wealth. Today bitcoin proponents don't understand what Satoshi was trying to do. So I'm in agreement that this is all just a monstrous waste of resources at this point.
- john_alan 6y ago
  Completely agree. The core tenet has been lost. Monero is closer to digital private money than anything else right now. And in my view, worth the cost of POW.
  - knuthsat 6y ago
    Yeah, although a bunch of work on Monero is still a result of work from people that worked on Bitcoin. There's some independent research there but AFAIK Bitcoin people did not stop working on confidential transactions or fungiblity. Just explaining that the core tenet was not lost, but that it was still not researched. Bitcoin jump started a research movement that reaped all kinds of cryptocurrency variants as time went on. https://electroneropulse.org/public/doc/Bulletproof%20RingCT.pdf https://electroneropulse.org/public/doc/Bulletproof%20RingCT... Here's a paper whose coauthors belong to the Bitcoin team discussing efficient confidential transactions that were eventually implemented in Monero (not by the Bitcoin team).
    - jonhendry18 6y ago
      "Here's a paper whose coauthors belong to the Bitcoin team discussing efficient confidential transactions that were eventually implemented in Monero (not by the Bitcoin team)." The knowledge held by the Bitcoin team wouldn't disappear if Bitcoin was shut down. They could still contribute to other crypto projects.
tluyben2 6y ago
Better promote 'non-shit' shitcoins then instead? Because this 'plan' won't really work/do much.
- medecau 6y ago
  I'm out of the loop on blockchain currencies. What would be a good 'non-shit' shitcoin?
  - marmadukester39 6y ago
    I like Iota a lot. Decentralized, no fees (to get a transaction validated, you validate others) low energy requirements, lots of industrial partnerships. About to get smart contracts a-la Ethereum, but without the out of control costs for transactions.
    - LittlePeter 6y ago
      IOTA arguably is not decentralized at the moment and has questionable history: https://www.coindesk.com/iota-being-shut-off-is-the-latest-chapter-in-an-absurdist-history https://www.coindesk.com/iota-being-shut-off-is-the-latest-c...
  - skinnyasianboi 6y ago
    Have a look at Cardano Ouroboros: "An environmentally sustainable, verifiably secure proof-of-stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees."
  - linschn 6y ago
    Tezos is technically awesome, it uses proof of stakes, and use a non brain dead Turing complete language for its smart contracts.
yuvadam 6y ago
As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Let me relate for you how Bitcoin has been sold to me at various times in the past, because its entire history at this point seems to have been forgotten by bitcoin proponents. First it was a revolutionary currency, which would replace fiat with a deflationary alternative. Then it was a revolutionary payment network which would displace evil incumbents (despite being fundamentally unsuited to this task). Then it was for micropayments. Then it was for selling drugs and doing things governments don't want you to do. Then there was the lightning network which would make it super fast and super distributed at the same time, solving all known problems by this time next year (in 2015). Then it was for transferring money across borders. Then it was a revolutionary technology called blockchain for building apps on top of, who cares about the currency. Then it was for tracing assets and proving ownership of every asset in the world with blockchains. Then it was for smart contracts - we're going to replace the law with the blockchain. Then it was going to the moon (in 2017), and who cares what it is used for, or even if anyone is using it, because it's going to make us all rich baby - we still appear to in that last phase because nobody seems to know or care about the value of it, only the price. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, we currently seem to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing, and the rising price is what is driving current interest in Bitcoin, nothing else.
  - pseudozach 6y ago
    Your grasp of bitcoin seems to be similar to a casual newspaper reader commenting on middle east peace without knowing any of the complex cultural differences. No worries it's the norm online. Even tech enthusiasts can be ignorant, after all bitcoin is a complex phenomenon a complex mix of social, economic and technical concepts. Bitcoin never tried to be law, that's eth and other similar centralized scam blockchains. Being as it's "only" 12 year old money, Bitcoin does evolve and adjust as its users govern it via running their own nodes. Until 2017, major companies (miners/payment processors) tried to fit all kinds of narratives on it (as you mention) but it became clear that they COULD not make bitcoin what they wanted it to do. Meanwhile users did a soft fork with segwit and kept the blockchain as small as possible while allowing Lightning to be developed on it. This means the decentralized network wanted to keep being sound money, keep being censorship resistant, decentralized and still be scalable. Lightning Network is a very solid success, used amongst early adopters, major exchanges joining (Bitfinex, Kraken, OKCoin), multiple VISA backed startups building rewards programs and remittance applications on it. Unlike a typical tech startup Bitcoin does not need to trick everyone to use it and get as many investors as soon as possible and figure out something later. It is what it is. It does not force anyone to join it or spend a single thought on it unless they choose to. It's completely voluntary. While I understand the skepticism (which just comes across as "salty" as they say) one should consider a simple web search to see how Bitcoin adds value to financially underserved people, allows politically censored organizations to take donations anywhere in the world and protect tens of millions of people from rampant inflation in most of the developing world.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
It would be easier to target and lobby politicians to ban crypto exchanges. A stranded asset isn't worth much.
ohgodplsno 6y ago
This post, aside from being very hopeful, misses one crucial point about bitcoin: its users don't give a shit about it being bad for transactions, or being slow. All they care about is that big number goes up and gets green. The amount of bitcoin users that are truly excited about its potential for a decentralized currency are few. When 90% of the mining power is held by chinese farms... These guys do not care about decentralization. As much as I wish we could destroy bitcoin because of how utterly fucking useless it is, the fact is, we now have to deal with people wasting this energy, forever.
imtringued 6y ago
Or you could just close the money faucet at the central bank and let the government invest that money into renewable infrastructure instead. You can even claim that this will create more jobs and thus helps with unemployment.
ggm 6y ago
Putting to one side if the attack would work, or have perverse outcomes, I do have concerns about the ludicrous amount of dirty energy used to mine coins. Proof of stake would terminate that problem?
- skinnyasianboi 6y ago
  Yes it would solve the problem. Don't want to look like spam because I replied to a few other comments already but have a look at Cardano Ouroboros
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  It does not. Proof of stake would quickly devolve into the system we have in place.
  - ggm 6y ago
    you're saying that it burns as much energy, to mine state? It is a form of blockchain which demands mining, and so incurs the energy cost?
    - inter_netuser 6y ago
      not sure what you mean to be honest? "to mine state" ? proof of stake just means the rich get to call the shots, at no expense to them. No disincentive to cheat. All previous attempts, and there were many - have failed to date. Miners in PoW have to risk incredible amount of capital, and cheating is strongly disincentivized by that. PoW stood the test of time.
      - ggm 6y ago
        "mine state" -Bitcoin miners are hunting complex bit patterns from functions, by exhaustive search in a GPU or CPU farm. They are converting time and electricity into unique solutions to a problem, which then provides a mechanism to seal the chain in cryptographic signature. The "state" they create is the block they "mine". The point at hand, is that PoW incurs energy costs which drive to cheapest which is to ignore externalities and burn brown coal in china. the problem is the ignored externalities: the CO2 pollution. You're arguing "its the same" about the end outcome of the chain as a thing in itself. The point of my comment and I believe the article, is that PoW incurs a huge energy cost which is pointless: its make-work. It does not relate to the value of the chain. I ask if PoS is "the same" IN THIS REGARD. Not in terms of what the end outcome as a chain is: if the energy inputs to achieve PoS are the same as PoW.
can16358p 6y ago
How did this waste of time article even get popular on HN? I just want to assume that it's got popular so that it can be ditched.
- tomComb 6y ago
  The article may be bad, but the ideas are worth debating.
  - can16358p 6y ago
    Sure, there is some insight. But the general hatred-oriented language of the article doesn't allow to think in a constructive manner, at least for me.
castratikron 6y ago
The author misses the point. The root of the problem is that electricity is not carbon free. What the electricity is used for is irrelevant. What the author suggests would be similar to saying, "let's stop climate change by minimizing our driving instead of transitioning to electric transport."
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  No, even if the electricity were carbon-free there would still be an opportunity cost in wasting ever-increasing amounts of it doing bitcoin mining instead of, say, aluminium smelting, or powering electric trains, or any other useful thing. Also just for the record, minimizing driving is a good way to combat climate change.
- eightails 6y ago
  I think the point was that POW specifically is an inefficient method of verification. They weren't arguing against the notion of using energy to run a virtual currency, just that Bitcoin specifically is needlessly wasteful, so we should move to alternative cryptocurrencies. So actually I think they are arguing for 'switching to electric transport', to use your example.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  But that's exactly the best way to reduce global warming, minimize consumption. Obviously to minimize consumption you should cut away the things that provide the least value for the highest reduction. So for example turn of lights during the night in empty buildings is much better than using renewable energy to power the lights.
- jonhendry18 6y ago
  "What the author suggests would be similar to saying," No, because driving has a legitimate purpose.
  - herewegoagain2 6y ago
    In many cases it doesn't.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
No joke, I want to apeal to the Greta Thunberg type activists/followers and Extinction Rebellion crowds; so, if Franck Leroy wants to have a chat (your misguided attack is absurd and BTC just hit another ATH in the time you wrote that) I extend a friendly open-invitation to discuss how as an environmentalist myself with a background in sustainable Ag, farmers rights, farm to table, and anti nuclear activism we can get to the bottom of this. You have a clear misunderstanding of this matter and I see it as an opportunity to get other activists involved. > This is so stingingly dumb it reads like satire Perhaps, but its also an opportunity to settle this matter once and for all and get the aforementioned crowds into BTC. In typical HN logic: downvoting doesn't disprove his absurd thesis, only coherent discourse does, but go ahead and downvote it because you don't want to hear your views challenged.
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  > so, if Franck Leroy wants to have a chat I'm thoroughly convinced this author is a made up pseudonym. No other articles, no information on what development work they do for what project paired with a generalized emotional call-to-action while misunderstanding fundamentals.
- cecja 6y ago
  It is a waste of energy how you can even argue against it is bonkers.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  Seems too early still. It's amazing how nobody on this board understands it.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    Maybe people understand and just aren't buying what you're selling. Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. Bitcoin advocates are fond of comparing BTC to WWW, but at the equivalent point in the web's development we had Yahoo, eBay, Paypal, Google, Facebook, Amazon... The only "killer app" of bitcoin is HODL speculation.
pharmakom 6y ago
Don’t destroy Bitcoin. Invent a more efficient alternative for people to switch to.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Deliberately making bitcoin worse would incentivize users to switch to alternatives like Libra or Ethereum (which claims to be moving to proof-of-stake).
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Making Bitcoin deliberately worse would also hinder the development of those future improvements in efficiency, perhaps actually leading to proof-of-work systems being around for even longer.
    - jonhendry18 6y ago
      Er, no it wouldn't? You don't need Bitcoin around to do that.
      - shawnz 6y ago
        I didn't say you need it, but it incentivized the development of those more efficient cryptocurrency technologies by providing a decentralized store of value in which the market could build trust in the interim period where proof-of-stake technologies were still being developed. What I am saying is that perhaps proof-of-work coins actually bootstrapped proof-of-stake technologies, thus leading to more rapid development of cryptocurrency technology in general.
        jonhendry18 6y ago
        Sure, but in that respect Bitcoin has been redundant for years.
        6y ago
zed88 6y ago
The energy in mining is not being wasted, it's being converted into something of perceived value. The real waste of energy, one could argue is pornography, which hogs around 30% of the internet, with little value output. Imagine replacing those servers for something more productive for humanity as a whole.
- LittlePeter 6y ago
  Your argument is not even an argument, it's just: "In my opinion Bitcoin has value and porn does not". For the same reason Bitcoin has value, you could argue porn has value. At the very basic level, if someone is paying for it, who are you to decide it has no value to that person?
  - zed88 6y ago
    What I said is that Bitcoin is a perceived store of value, and like any currency it's valuable only if it's perceived by the masses to be so, no different than fiat. Bitcoin ticks that box and is scarce, as opposed to inflating fiat. Porn doesn't creates value storages, except dopamine hits. And am not making a personal judgement, but just making a contrasting argument for someone who says that mining bitcoin is a waste of energy.
primitivesuave 6y ago
I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized system running. I see this call to destroy it as akin to the 1969 Apollo mission protests, when civil rights leaders argued that the space mission resources would be better used on Earth. https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-protests https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
  - dave_sullivan 6y ago
    Some people think the internet should be beyond the control of a single government, and perhaps by extension so too should the financial system. There are a lot of caveats to this idea.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Even for those that do, a network capable of handling maybe a few million transactions per day while consuming more energy than many small countries is so obviously useless in that regard that it should be abandoned entirely.
      - dave_sullivan 6y ago
        I don't disagree with the weaknesses you point out, but I do think "abandon entirely" is an extreme stance. It's completely possible for bitcoin to lose while some other crypto (or basket of crypto coins) wins.
heckerhut 6y ago
Idea: Change BTC protocol to include a new field in coinbase transactions documenting the CO2 emissions of each block. Introduce an uncle block reward like ETH. Miners agree to audits of their reports. Make block reward dependent on carbon emissions. Use rest for offset programs.
- outloudvi 6y ago
  Bitcoin is not a protocol for honest people to reach spontaneous agreements. It uses algorithms to create consensuses, and audit might be powerless in this system.
  - heckerhut 6y ago
    My thinking behind this idea is that the sentiment of the author of this blog article is becoming more and more prevalent. Over the coming years pressure on bitcoin’s legitimacy will increase. To get ahead of this movement I propose to miners worldwide to create their own climate change accord and do this voluntarily. All it needs is a consensus to do so.
    - outloudvi 6y ago
      It's obviously good if worldwide miners all agree to protect the environment together. It's also right that many governments have paid a lot of attention to Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is not to be strictly regulated by design. A government strong enough might have the ability to control Bitcoin mining over the holders, but breaking decentralization in this way will kill Bitcoin in its fundamental, and it seems that no such government is going to do this for now, especially when the reason is "environmental problems", which is generally not in high priority. Beside this idea, maybe a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) is the best way of achieving consensus, but I can't imagine such a proposal being approved based on its limited feasibility.
- herewegoagain2 6y ago
  Interesting idea, but how exactly would you validate the CO2 emissions? If somebody mines a block and claims it only consumed x of CO2, how do you know it is true? What seems possible is to check what miners mined a block, and externally verify their footprint. But I don't think there is a decentralized way to do it. An entity certifying "green miners" would be a centralized authority.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
outloudvi 6y ago
> ... Ethereum uses POS ... No, Ethereum is at least not using PoS for now.
- heckerhut 6y ago
  But it’s clearly headed there. Unlike bitcoin, Ethereum has sufficient resemblance of governance to actually pull it off.
  - outloudvi 6y ago
    I would agree to your idea. Ethernum 2.0 is doing its work towards PoS, althought that is still in the future (maybe ~1.5 yrs). In the long run, Ethernum might become environmental friendly.
  - inter_netuser 6y ago
    why use a blockchain if you want to rely on governance? Just use USD.
    - tomComb 6y ago
      Very different governance. Not all governance is bad unless you are a hardcore anarchist.
      - inter_netuser 6y ago
        who do you think should govern the reserve currency of the world? Nobody governs gold, seems to work just fine.
_0ffh 6y ago
I think the best way to make bitcoin "green" is to make it more energy efficient by pushing the Lightning Network. As a nice side effect it also gets more practical.
- jasdine817 6y ago
  That makes the system more efficient by allowing more transactions but doesn't lower the total energy expenditure.
skinnyasianboi 6y ago
Bitcoin is the first generation blockchain. It has it's weaknesses. Ethereum the second generation. Watch out for the third. Little resources, low fees, more secure. Little hint: a few days ago we had the Ouroboros paper on the front page.
- LittlePeter 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373
A12-B 6y ago
I'm a fan of bitcoin, but there are clearly serious environmental detriments, and i see it ultimately becoming another regulated entity (it's already happening in india).
CryptoPunk 6y ago
I'm no fan of Bitcoin, seeing the project as essentially coopted and sabotaged, but I see this 'green' criticism as totally baseless. As I wrote a couple weeks ago: If you want to take a Puritanical attitude, any luxury product/service can be argued to be wasting resources that could be expended on essentials. In other words, its alleged lack of utility doesn't provide a justification for destroying or banning it. It's up to others to decide how to spend their resources. If CO2 emission, and its negative externality, is specifically the problem, then the principled position is to advocate that production of all non-essential/luxury products/services use non-CO2 emitting energy inputs. Unless the measure is agnostic to what category of non-essential activity it targets, you'd just be singling out cryptocurrency, because it's not a non-essential that you personally believe is worthwhile enough to pollute the environment in order to produce, unlike say gaming, and the massive amounts of energy that gaming GPUs use.
- jonhendry18 6y ago
  Except everything people do with Bitcoin could be done just as well with a less obscenely wasteful coin.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Then don't use Bitcoin.
midjji 6y ago
There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use. Everything else uses authority in one way or another, and is vulnerable in ways btc is not. Reducing energy use for environmental reasons is ridiculous, the sun gives plenty of power and we have fissile materials to last for many millennia. The problem isn't power use, its power production, which requires global enforcement of carbon emission laws.
- blindgeek 6y ago
  "There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use." Why would I want to engage in trustless transactions in the first place? All desirable social relationships are based on trust and always have been. I think a need for trustless transactions implies that one or more parties is not trustworthy, so why would I want to transact with them?
  - mr_woozy 6y ago
    because by assuming blind trust (or your ability to discern who is trustworthy to interact with) with mean statistically you will get burned eventually. Better to build systems that assume on untrusted actors as the default start state and not regret it after.
chill1 6y ago
[ x ] Make provocative statements about the uselessness and wastefulness of Thing A without real evidence. But make sure to at least link to some source that provides the illusion of evidence. [ x ] Recommend Thing B that claims to solve the problems of Thing A. But you probably forgot to mention that you have a financial interest in Thing B succeeding. [ x ] Finish with unclear call-to-action that requires others to take insane financial risks to support your made up "movement" (e.g shorting Bitcoin - great way to lose infinite money).
joshfraser 6y ago
Total nonsense, but I'll let Antonopoulos respond: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFqEofdAZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFqEofdAZ0
- subsection1h 6y ago
  That video includes a lot of whataboutisms (e.g., Christmas lights) and speculation (e.g., Bitcoin mining will fund the construction of green power plants). I wouldn't call it total nonsense though. But I suppose I might be tempted to do so if I were the founder of, oh lets say, a decentralized e-commerce platform for Christmas lights.
FlyingSnake 6y ago
Controversial opinions below: Feeling might be hurt. - Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time. - The digital Gold-rush aspect, HODLing, and no regulation makes it more lucrative to players who would love to cash out big on it. Greed trumps it all. - Most of the BTC mining has been cornered by big mining, and it's way out of reach of regular Joe. This doesn't look democratic to me. - The hugmongous energy wastage of the network should be the biggest cause of concern, but most proponents shoo it away by buzzwords like lightning network etc.
- idrae 6y ago
  "Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has." This only applies to the US, Europe has a instant bank transfer system.
  - apexalpha 6y ago
    Yeah I was just gonna say, it's been instant for a while now. I think outside of my country it can still take a workday though. But then again it doesn't cost anything, where BTC can cost a few dollars per tx.
- chill1 6y ago
  My understanding of the space contradicts each of your points. So without either of us providing citations, both of our opinions are pretty useless to the casual reader. But I will add some thoughts here. > The [humongous] energy wastage of the network should be the biggest cause of concern, but most proponents shoo it away by buzzwords like lightning network etc. Lightning Network is a second layer payment network that is working today. Its goal is to take the transaction pressure off of the base layer (blockchain). Its design has privacy built-in, so it's not possible to generate statistics [3] on its total transaction thru-put. That's also why articles like the one on which we are commenting are so disingenuous. The source they cite makes a direct comparison of the total transaction volume of the Visa network with the Bitcoin blockchain while completely ignoring layer 2 networks built on-top of Bitcoin. > Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time. Bitcoin is not "popular" anywhere. The total number of Bitcoin ATMs [1] and physical shops/vendors [2] transacting with Bitcoin is still quite limited. The vast majority of commerce occurs online. But what I do see is that there is slow, steady growth globally. The infrastructure is still developing to support larger volumes of users - and with more diverse levels of computer skills. [1] https://coinatmradar.com/ https://coinatmradar.com/ [2] https://coinmap.org/ https://coinmap.org/ [3] https://1ml.com/ https://1ml.com/
inter_netuser 6y ago
Proof of work exists maintain unforgeable costliness. It's a basic pre-requisite without which you cannot have digital scarcity, because it would be far too easy and too cheap to forge/create new coins. It's amazing how early we still are in Bitcoin after 12 years. Almost nobody on this forum understands why proof of work exists, and yet most people here are intelligent enough and have enough technical skill to figure out why. It is much greener than: napalm, nuclear weapons, etc. Trillions are spent every year on war to maintain the reserve currency status. Would you really rather prefer to spend trillions on standing armies, rather than incentivize cheap fusion reactors?
- seaman1921 6y ago
  Classic - assuming anyone who doesn't hold BTC is an idiot. Followed by a 'Have fun staying poor' to stir some social anxiety and FOMO. Unfortunately a lot of people keep falling for such statements and the price keeps going up - I have friends buying loads of dogecoin over the past week who told me they have literally no idea what crypto or doge is - but they know for sure that the prices are going to go up over the next month so they don't really care.
  - inter_netuser 6y ago
    You are exactly correct, everyone who ignores does so at their own cost. Close to one _trillion_ in foregone profits at the moment. You think this is a fad?
    - myWindoonn 6y ago
      I think that it is a target. And apparently so does the original article's author.
- ac29 6y ago
  "This isnt so bad, because war exists" is one of the thinnest arguments in favor of something I've ever seen. In this hypothetical future where cryptocurrencies replace national ones, couldnt wars still be fought over the mining infrastructure or the resources needed to run it?
xerxespoy 6y ago
Should probably destroy all technology that uses energy for the same reason, using the same methodology. Ie, ignore every conceivable benefit and focus only on energy usage as the singular and all-pervasive critical factor. I guess humans even without technology might use energy too, simply by existing, so we should probably attack and end us as well. This is surely humanity's only sensible path to a sustainable future, and one that everyone can and must get on board with. Right?
nnx 6y ago
Bitcoin is actually a (if not the) great accelerator for cheap renewable energy (hydro, solar, etc) by being a market incentive. Even helps reducing methane emissions flaring from oil fields by putting that flaring to productive use (hashing) instead of releasing it into atmosphere, see https://gam.ai/ https://gam.ai/ for instance.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  Bitcoin is the best bounty for clean fusion power. Direct monetary incentives.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  Except it hasn't been, instead places like China (the largest crypto mining market on the planet) has instead opted to open new coal plants to feed their state operated mining centers.
pineaux 6y ago
I think it's mostly CCP strategy to control as much cryptospace as possible, be it via exchanges or miners. I believe china is in the game of using any method to undermine the western hegemony in the world. This is not even controversial. I'm even willing to believe that the whole covid-19 crisis is leveraged by them for relative power gains. There's not much evidence for this, but that's what I would do. I think the cryptomining rigs could eventually be claimed by the government to house a large general AI and destroy the crypto market in one swing. If I were the Chinese government I would at least entertain that idea. The fact that people don't care about crypto not being really decentralized makes me believe china would research such ploys. They are growing their power in any domain they can get away with, this is one of them. - south chinese sea islands - HK annexation - pressuring Taiwan and constructing infrastructure towards the island. - hacking attacks - tibet (making sure homeland security is maximal) - the concentration camps with Uyghurs (making sure homeland security is maximal) - the infrastructural projects in africa to gain access to resources - the buying of as much european assets (like ports, factories, real estate) as possible. - the state assisted development of large cyber start-ups/companies (jack ma didn't disappear for nothing) - the state infiltration of big technology firms like huawei 5g and others. It seems like a clear picture to me. One of America's greatest strategical assets is the dollar being the world's reserve currency. It's basically a way to be able to print almost endless amounts of dollars without the punitive danger of inflation. Other countries will buy your excess money to make sure their reserves won't devalue. If china wants hegemony, they would need to undermine this asset in a subtle way. If bitcoin becomes very mainstream and more stable, then this will become the new reserve currency. With the air of being unbiased. However, china controls many of the levers. Just my three cents.
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  >. I think the cryptomining rigs could eventually be claimed by the government to house a large general AI what? via hashing sha256? what are you even talking about,nutter?
blindgeek 6y ago
I have some green sensibilities, but I'm more of a Post-scarcity Socialist. Backing a currency with a scarce resource serves no purpose other than to keep us serfs "down on the manor" so to speak. Standards of living didn't start rising significantly until fiat money really took off. Societies and governments give currency value; it has little to no inherent value on its own. But the primary philosophy behind bitcoin is right-libertarian / Ayn Rand / a return to the 19th century with futuristic technology. Go look up the Cyphernomicon for instance, where you'll find Tim May cheerleading for cryptocurrency-powered darknet murder marts. Here's a choice sample quote: begin quote 16.10.4. Will I be sad if anonymous methods allow untraceable markets for assassinations? It depends. In many cases, people deserve death--those who have escaped justice, those who have broken solemn commitments, etc. Gun grabbing politicians, for example should be killed out of hand. Anonymous rodent removal services will be a tool of liberty. The BATF agents who murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son should be shot. If the courts won't do it, a market for hits will do it. - (Imagine for a moment an "anonymous fund" to collect the money for such a hit. Interesting possibilities.) - "Crypto Star Chambers," or what might be called "digilantes," may be formed on-line, and untraceably, to mete out justice to those let off on technicalities. Not altogether a bad thing. end quote Attacking vulnerabilities in the bitcoin network seems like a great idea. At this point, so does anything that might take it down. It's a technology that deserves to be eliminated.
tromp 6y ago
> Sadly, the proof of work (POW) principle makes Bitcoin not physically nor ecologically sustainable. Any cryptocurrency based on this principle suffers from the same problem. Not to the same extent. A big contributing factor is the very high price of bitcoin that results from the FOMO on its finite supply, nearly 90% of which is mined already. If Bitcoin had no halvings, then its inflation rate would come down much slower and its price would be much more reasonable. Sadly, very few PoW coins follow that wide distribution model.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If the Work is easy and doesn't consume much energy, than it's easy to forge. This is true even if 1 BTC were worth 1 cent - the cost (in Watts, not dollars) of mining doesn't depend at all on the price of BTC. Instead, if BTC weren't worth much, people would likely just stop mining, and the transaction speed of the BTC network would grind to a halt, further driving down its value.
Glench 6y ago
Here to mention Chia (https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/) which is made by the creator of bittorrent Bram Cohen and is launching its mainnet soon! Uses proof of space instead of proof of work or proof of stake to make it use very little energy.
- ac29 6y ago
  I dont see how that solves the energy problem. Presumably, if allocating X space gets you Y rewards, allocating 2X space gives you 2Y rewards. So, if the rewards are worth anything, there will be a race to install and run as much storage capacity as possible, which has an energy cost.
  - Glench 6y ago
    Definitely not an expert on this but the creators say that one thing that is helpful is that hard drive space is already massively over-provisioned which is helpful — individuals as well as institutions with space will be able to make use of existing space without needing to make a run on hard drives.
yownie 6y ago
a look a woke person.

99 points by URfejk 6y ago

yownie 6y ago

https://imgur.com/YWGgpWW https://imgur.com/YWGgpWW

siriusz 6y ago

Let us use Solar Power to mine the coins.

rebuilder 6y ago
Go ahead. Won't really make a difference. There's no authority to force miners to go solar. And even if they did so, energy markets are very liquid, so increased demand overall increases the pollution produced by energy production market wide. If miners started building massive new solar installations, that would help, but again that's just clean energy someone else could have used for something else. There's no particularly compelling case for miners to go solar vs. other users of electricity.
jonhendry18 6y ago
If you spend the money to put up panels to fund your mining, you'll probably never make a profit from the mining.

gus_massa 6y ago

> Finally, it is not even necessary that a computer attack actually take place, but that speculators fear it. If a group of hackers (real or fake) announced an impending attack, the price of Bitcoin would likely collapse. > If you’re not a green hacker, and you’re not doing it for the planet, you can also do it for the money: by speculating downward on the price of bitcoin before launching attacks. Or the speculators make just laugh about the threats of script kiddies and the price will not change and you will loose money.

retrofuturism 6y ago

Yeah, good luck with that.

Dudideloo 6y ago

> If a group of hackers (real or fake) announced an impending attack, the price of Bitcoin would likely collapse. Look further: What would happen after the attacks failed, when not even the green hackers can do anything to their network ? Nobody can currently shut it down, that's also why it is valuable.

NicoJuicy 6y ago
There's literally an internet requirement for it, to use it. Also, using it locally has a delay of several days for being "up to date". So in practise, security for most people is dependant on 3rd parties.
- herewegoagain2 6y ago
  So you propose shutting down the internet to end Bitcoin?
- yownie 6y ago
  >Also, using it locally has a delay of several days for being "up to date". what even?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eznzt 6y ago

Destroy yourselves and you won't have to live in a world where people use energy as they see fit.

tofurocks 6y ago

This is so stingingly dumb it reads like satire

jpcooper 6y ago

TLDR: Troll-piece, that cannot actually be serious, written by self-professed green hacker whose fluttering and tenuous sense of meaning, value in life and connection to the universe are challenged by the existence of things like Bitcoin, the absurdity inherent in nature, Versace, and an artist’s shit in a can that sold for over 100k at Sotheby’s according to Wikipedia.

puskavi 6y ago

This makes me lol, but it also makes me sad because some people really think like this. I think its same group that thinks nuclear power will kill us all.

globular-toast 6y ago

I supported bitcoin when it first came out because I support the idea of decentralised, trustless money. Far too much money is redirected into the hands of financial workers who are not adding any value to the economy. Finance is good and necessary, but the way it currently works is not. But bitcoin simply does not work as money. There is really no doubt about this. Even the biggest proponents of bitcoin right now call it a "digital gold". But we don't need a digital gold. We have gold and gold has none of the same problems as money and is a far more stable storage of wealth. Today bitcoin proponents don't understand what Satoshi was trying to do. So I'm in agreement that this is all just a monstrous waste of resources at this point.

john_alan 6y ago
Completely agree. The core tenet has been lost. Monero is closer to digital private money than anything else right now. And in my view, worth the cost of POW.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  Yeah, although a bunch of work on Monero is still a result of work from people that worked on Bitcoin. There's some independent research there but AFAIK Bitcoin people did not stop working on confidential transactions or fungiblity. Just explaining that the core tenet was not lost, but that it was still not researched. Bitcoin jump started a research movement that reaped all kinds of cryptocurrency variants as time went on. https://electroneropulse.org/public/doc/Bulletproof%20RingCT.pdf https://electroneropulse.org/public/doc/Bulletproof%20RingCT... Here's a paper whose coauthors belong to the Bitcoin team discussing efficient confidential transactions that were eventually implemented in Monero (not by the Bitcoin team).
  - jonhendry18 6y ago
    "Here's a paper whose coauthors belong to the Bitcoin team discussing efficient confidential transactions that were eventually implemented in Monero (not by the Bitcoin team)." The knowledge held by the Bitcoin team wouldn't disappear if Bitcoin was shut down. They could still contribute to other crypto projects.

tluyben2 6y ago

Better promote 'non-shit' shitcoins then instead? Because this 'plan' won't really work/do much.

medecau 6y ago
I'm out of the loop on blockchain currencies. What would be a good 'non-shit' shitcoin?
- marmadukester39 6y ago
  I like Iota a lot. Decentralized, no fees (to get a transaction validated, you validate others) low energy requirements, lots of industrial partnerships. About to get smart contracts a-la Ethereum, but without the out of control costs for transactions.
  - LittlePeter 6y ago
    IOTA arguably is not decentralized at the moment and has questionable history: https://www.coindesk.com/iota-being-shut-off-is-the-latest-chapter-in-an-absurdist-history https://www.coindesk.com/iota-being-shut-off-is-the-latest-c...
- skinnyasianboi 6y ago
  Have a look at Cardano Ouroboros: "An environmentally sustainable, verifiably secure proof-of-stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees."
- linschn 6y ago
  Tezos is technically awesome, it uses proof of stakes, and use a non brain dead Turing complete language for its smart contracts.

yuvadam 6y ago

As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value.

grey-area 6y ago
Let me relate for you how Bitcoin has been sold to me at various times in the past, because its entire history at this point seems to have been forgotten by bitcoin proponents. First it was a revolutionary currency, which would replace fiat with a deflationary alternative. Then it was a revolutionary payment network which would displace evil incumbents (despite being fundamentally unsuited to this task). Then it was for micropayments. Then it was for selling drugs and doing things governments don't want you to do. Then there was the lightning network which would make it super fast and super distributed at the same time, solving all known problems by this time next year (in 2015). Then it was for transferring money across borders. Then it was a revolutionary technology called blockchain for building apps on top of, who cares about the currency. Then it was for tracing assets and proving ownership of every asset in the world with blockchains. Then it was for smart contracts - we're going to replace the law with the blockchain. Then it was going to the moon (in 2017), and who cares what it is used for, or even if anyone is using it, because it's going to make us all rich baby - we still appear to in that last phase because nobody seems to know or care about the value of it, only the price. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, we currently seem to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing, and the rising price is what is driving current interest in Bitcoin, nothing else.
- pseudozach 6y ago
  Your grasp of bitcoin seems to be similar to a casual newspaper reader commenting on middle east peace without knowing any of the complex cultural differences. No worries it's the norm online. Even tech enthusiasts can be ignorant, after all bitcoin is a complex phenomenon a complex mix of social, economic and technical concepts. Bitcoin never tried to be law, that's eth and other similar centralized scam blockchains. Being as it's "only" 12 year old money, Bitcoin does evolve and adjust as its users govern it via running their own nodes. Until 2017, major companies (miners/payment processors) tried to fit all kinds of narratives on it (as you mention) but it became clear that they COULD not make bitcoin what they wanted it to do. Meanwhile users did a soft fork with segwit and kept the blockchain as small as possible while allowing Lightning to be developed on it. This means the decentralized network wanted to keep being sound money, keep being censorship resistant, decentralized and still be scalable. Lightning Network is a very solid success, used amongst early adopters, major exchanges joining (Bitfinex, Kraken, OKCoin), multiple VISA backed startups building rewards programs and remittance applications on it. Unlike a typical tech startup Bitcoin does not need to trick everyone to use it and get as many investors as soon as possible and figure out something later. It is what it is. It does not force anyone to join it or spend a single thought on it unless they choose to. It's completely voluntary. While I understand the skepticism (which just comes across as "salty" as they say) one should consider a simple web search to see how Bitcoin adds value to financially underserved people, allows politically censored organizations to take donations anywhere in the world and protect tens of millions of people from rampant inflation in most of the developing world.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

It would be easier to target and lobby politicians to ban crypto exchanges. A stranded asset isn't worth much.

ohgodplsno 6y ago

This post, aside from being very hopeful, misses one crucial point about bitcoin: its users don't give a shit about it being bad for transactions, or being slow. All they care about is that big number goes up and gets green. The amount of bitcoin users that are truly excited about its potential for a decentralized currency are few. When 90% of the mining power is held by chinese farms... These guys do not care about decentralization. As much as I wish we could destroy bitcoin because of how utterly fucking useless it is, the fact is, we now have to deal with people wasting this energy, forever.

imtringued 6y ago

Or you could just close the money faucet at the central bank and let the government invest that money into renewable infrastructure instead. You can even claim that this will create more jobs and thus helps with unemployment.

ggm 6y ago

Putting to one side if the attack would work, or have perverse outcomes, I do have concerns about the ludicrous amount of dirty energy used to mine coins. Proof of stake would terminate that problem?

skinnyasianboi 6y ago
Yes it would solve the problem. Don't want to look like spam because I replied to a few other comments already but have a look at Cardano Ouroboros
inter_netuser 6y ago
It does not. Proof of stake would quickly devolve into the system we have in place.
- ggm 6y ago
  you're saying that it burns as much energy, to mine state? It is a form of blockchain which demands mining, and so incurs the energy cost?
  - inter_netuser 6y ago
    not sure what you mean to be honest? "to mine state" ? proof of stake just means the rich get to call the shots, at no expense to them. No disincentive to cheat. All previous attempts, and there were many - have failed to date. Miners in PoW have to risk incredible amount of capital, and cheating is strongly disincentivized by that. PoW stood the test of time.
    - ggm 6y ago
      "mine state" -Bitcoin miners are hunting complex bit patterns from functions, by exhaustive search in a GPU or CPU farm. They are converting time and electricity into unique solutions to a problem, which then provides a mechanism to seal the chain in cryptographic signature. The "state" they create is the block they "mine". The point at hand, is that PoW incurs energy costs which drive to cheapest which is to ignore externalities and burn brown coal in china. the problem is the ignored externalities: the CO2 pollution. You're arguing "its the same" about the end outcome of the chain as a thing in itself. The point of my comment and I believe the article, is that PoW incurs a huge energy cost which is pointless: its make-work. It does not relate to the value of the chain. I ask if PoS is "the same" IN THIS REGARD. Not in terms of what the end outcome as a chain is: if the energy inputs to achieve PoS are the same as PoW.

can16358p 6y ago

How did this waste of time article even get popular on HN? I just want to assume that it's got popular so that it can be ditched.

tomComb 6y ago
The article may be bad, but the ideas are worth debating.
- can16358p 6y ago
  Sure, there is some insight. But the general hatred-oriented language of the article doesn't allow to think in a constructive manner, at least for me.

castratikron 6y ago

The author misses the point. The root of the problem is that electricity is not carbon free. What the electricity is used for is irrelevant. What the author suggests would be similar to saying, "let's stop climate change by minimizing our driving instead of transitioning to electric transport."

ForHackernews 6y ago
No, even if the electricity were carbon-free there would still be an opportunity cost in wasting ever-increasing amounts of it doing bitcoin mining instead of, say, aluminium smelting, or powering electric trains, or any other useful thing. Also just for the record, minimizing driving is a good way to combat climate change.
eightails 6y ago
I think the point was that POW specifically is an inefficient method of verification. They weren't arguing against the notion of using energy to run a virtual currency, just that Bitcoin specifically is needlessly wasteful, so we should move to alternative cryptocurrencies. So actually I think they are arguing for 'switching to electric transport', to use your example.
cycomanic 6y ago
But that's exactly the best way to reduce global warming, minimize consumption. Obviously to minimize consumption you should cut away the things that provide the least value for the highest reduction. So for example turn of lights during the night in empty buildings is much better than using renewable energy to power the lights.
jonhendry18 6y ago
"What the author suggests would be similar to saying," No, because driving has a legitimate purpose.
- herewegoagain2 6y ago
  In many cases it doesn't.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

No joke, I want to apeal to the Greta Thunberg type activists/followers and Extinction Rebellion crowds; so, if Franck Leroy wants to have a chat (your misguided attack is absurd and BTC just hit another ATH in the time you wrote that) I extend a friendly open-invitation to discuss how as an environmentalist myself with a background in sustainable Ag, farmers rights, farm to table, and anti nuclear activism we can get to the bottom of this. You have a clear misunderstanding of this matter and I see it as an opportunity to get other activists involved. > This is so stingingly dumb it reads like satire Perhaps, but its also an opportunity to settle this matter once and for all and get the aforementioned crowds into BTC. In typical HN logic: downvoting doesn't disprove his absurd thesis, only coherent discourse does, but go ahead and downvote it because you don't want to hear your views challenged.

mr_woozy 6y ago
> so, if Franck Leroy wants to have a chat I'm thoroughly convinced this author is a made up pseudonym. No other articles, no information on what development work they do for what project paired with a generalized emotional call-to-action while misunderstanding fundamentals.
cecja 6y ago
It is a waste of energy how you can even argue against it is bonkers.
inter_netuser 6y ago
Seems too early still. It's amazing how nobody on this board understands it.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Maybe people understand and just aren't buying what you're selling. Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. Bitcoin advocates are fond of comparing BTC to WWW, but at the equivalent point in the web's development we had Yahoo, eBay, Paypal, Google, Facebook, Amazon... The only "killer app" of bitcoin is HODL speculation.

pharmakom 6y ago

Don’t destroy Bitcoin. Invent a more efficient alternative for people to switch to.

ForHackernews 6y ago
Deliberately making bitcoin worse would incentivize users to switch to alternatives like Libra or Ethereum (which claims to be moving to proof-of-stake).
- shawnz 6y ago
  Making Bitcoin deliberately worse would also hinder the development of those future improvements in efficiency, perhaps actually leading to proof-of-work systems being around for even longer.
  - jonhendry18 6y ago
    Er, no it wouldn't? You don't need Bitcoin around to do that.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      I didn't say you need it, but it incentivized the development of those more efficient cryptocurrency technologies by providing a decentralized store of value in which the market could build trust in the interim period where proof-of-stake technologies were still being developed. What I am saying is that perhaps proof-of-work coins actually bootstrapped proof-of-stake technologies, thus leading to more rapid development of cryptocurrency technology in general.
      - jonhendry18 6y ago
        Sure, but in that respect Bitcoin has been redundant for years.
        6y ago

zed88 6y ago

The energy in mining is not being wasted, it's being converted into something of perceived value. The real waste of energy, one could argue is pornography, which hogs around 30% of the internet, with little value output. Imagine replacing those servers for something more productive for humanity as a whole.

LittlePeter 6y ago
Your argument is not even an argument, it's just: "In my opinion Bitcoin has value and porn does not". For the same reason Bitcoin has value, you could argue porn has value. At the very basic level, if someone is paying for it, who are you to decide it has no value to that person?
- zed88 6y ago
  What I said is that Bitcoin is a perceived store of value, and like any currency it's valuable only if it's perceived by the masses to be so, no different than fiat. Bitcoin ticks that box and is scarce, as opposed to inflating fiat. Porn doesn't creates value storages, except dopamine hits. And am not making a personal judgement, but just making a contrasting argument for someone who says that mining bitcoin is a waste of energy.

primitivesuave 6y ago

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized system running. I see this call to destroy it as akin to the 1969 Apollo mission protests, when civil rights leaders argued that the space mission resources would be better used on Earth. https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-protests https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...

ForHackernews 6y ago
If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
- dave_sullivan 6y ago
  Some people think the internet should be beyond the control of a single government, and perhaps by extension so too should the financial system. There are a lot of caveats to this idea.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Even for those that do, a network capable of handling maybe a few million transactions per day while consuming more energy than many small countries is so obviously useless in that regard that it should be abandoned entirely.
    - dave_sullivan 6y ago
      I don't disagree with the weaknesses you point out, but I do think "abandon entirely" is an extreme stance. It's completely possible for bitcoin to lose while some other crypto (or basket of crypto coins) wins.

heckerhut 6y ago

Idea: Change BTC protocol to include a new field in coinbase transactions documenting the CO2 emissions of each block. Introduce an uncle block reward like ETH. Miners agree to audits of their reports. Make block reward dependent on carbon emissions. Use rest for offset programs.

outloudvi 6y ago
Bitcoin is not a protocol for honest people to reach spontaneous agreements. It uses algorithms to create consensuses, and audit might be powerless in this system.
- heckerhut 6y ago
  My thinking behind this idea is that the sentiment of the author of this blog article is becoming more and more prevalent. Over the coming years pressure on bitcoin’s legitimacy will increase. To get ahead of this movement I propose to miners worldwide to create their own climate change accord and do this voluntarily. All it needs is a consensus to do so.
  - outloudvi 6y ago
    It's obviously good if worldwide miners all agree to protect the environment together. It's also right that many governments have paid a lot of attention to Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is not to be strictly regulated by design. A government strong enough might have the ability to control Bitcoin mining over the holders, but breaking decentralization in this way will kill Bitcoin in its fundamental, and it seems that no such government is going to do this for now, especially when the reason is "environmental problems", which is generally not in high priority. Beside this idea, maybe a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) is the best way of achieving consensus, but I can't imagine such a proposal being approved based on its limited feasibility.
herewegoagain2 6y ago
Interesting idea, but how exactly would you validate the CO2 emissions? If somebody mines a block and claims it only consumed x of CO2, how do you know it is true? What seems possible is to check what miners mined a block, and externally verify their footprint. But I don't think there is a decentralized way to do it. An entity certifying "green miners" would be a centralized authority.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

outloudvi 6y ago

> ... Ethereum uses POS ... No, Ethereum is at least not using PoS for now.

heckerhut 6y ago
But it’s clearly headed there. Unlike bitcoin, Ethereum has sufficient resemblance of governance to actually pull it off.
- outloudvi 6y ago
  I would agree to your idea. Ethernum 2.0 is doing its work towards PoS, althought that is still in the future (maybe ~1.5 yrs). In the long run, Ethernum might become environmental friendly.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  why use a blockchain if you want to rely on governance? Just use USD.
  - tomComb 6y ago
    Very different governance. Not all governance is bad unless you are a hardcore anarchist.
    - inter_netuser 6y ago
      who do you think should govern the reserve currency of the world? Nobody governs gold, seems to work just fine.

_0ffh 6y ago

I think the best way to make bitcoin "green" is to make it more energy efficient by pushing the Lightning Network. As a nice side effect it also gets more practical.

jasdine817 6y ago
That makes the system more efficient by allowing more transactions but doesn't lower the total energy expenditure.

skinnyasianboi 6y ago

Bitcoin is the first generation blockchain. It has it's weaknesses. Ethereum the second generation. Watch out for the third. Little resources, low fees, more secure. Little hint: a few days ago we had the Ouroboros paper on the front page.

LittlePeter 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373

A12-B 6y ago

I'm a fan of bitcoin, but there are clearly serious environmental detriments, and i see it ultimately becoming another regulated entity (it's already happening in india).

CryptoPunk 6y ago

I'm no fan of Bitcoin, seeing the project as essentially coopted and sabotaged, but I see this 'green' criticism as totally baseless. As I wrote a couple weeks ago: If you want to take a Puritanical attitude, any luxury product/service can be argued to be wasting resources that could be expended on essentials. In other words, its alleged lack of utility doesn't provide a justification for destroying or banning it. It's up to others to decide how to spend their resources. If CO2 emission, and its negative externality, is specifically the problem, then the principled position is to advocate that production of all non-essential/luxury products/services use non-CO2 emitting energy inputs. Unless the measure is agnostic to what category of non-essential activity it targets, you'd just be singling out cryptocurrency, because it's not a non-essential that you personally believe is worthwhile enough to pollute the environment in order to produce, unlike say gaming, and the massive amounts of energy that gaming GPUs use.

jonhendry18 6y ago
Except everything people do with Bitcoin could be done just as well with a less obscenely wasteful coin.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Then don't use Bitcoin.

midjji 6y ago

There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use. Everything else uses authority in one way or another, and is vulnerable in ways btc is not. Reducing energy use for environmental reasons is ridiculous, the sun gives plenty of power and we have fissile materials to last for many millennia. The problem isn't power use, its power production, which requires global enforcement of carbon emission laws.

blindgeek 6y ago
"There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use." Why would I want to engage in trustless transactions in the first place? All desirable social relationships are based on trust and always have been. I think a need for trustless transactions implies that one or more parties is not trustworthy, so why would I want to transact with them?
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  because by assuming blind trust (or your ability to discern who is trustworthy to interact with) with mean statistically you will get burned eventually. Better to build systems that assume on untrusted actors as the default start state and not regret it after.

chill1 6y ago

[ x ] Make provocative statements about the uselessness and wastefulness of Thing A without real evidence. But make sure to at least link to some source that provides the illusion of evidence. [ x ] Recommend Thing B that claims to solve the problems of Thing A. But you probably forgot to mention that you have a financial interest in Thing B succeeding. [ x ] Finish with unclear call-to-action that requires others to take insane financial risks to support your made up "movement" (e.g shorting Bitcoin - great way to lose infinite money).

joshfraser 6y ago

Total nonsense, but I'll let Antonopoulos respond: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFqEofdAZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFqEofdAZ0

subsection1h 6y ago
That video includes a lot of whataboutisms (e.g., Christmas lights) and speculation (e.g., Bitcoin mining will fund the construction of green power plants). I wouldn't call it total nonsense though. But I suppose I might be tempted to do so if I were the founder of, oh lets say, a decentralized e-commerce platform for Christmas lights.

FlyingSnake 6y ago

Controversial opinions below: Feeling might be hurt. - Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time. - The digital Gold-rush aspect, HODLing, and no regulation makes it more lucrative to players who would love to cash out big on it. Greed trumps it all. - Most of the BTC mining has been cornered by big mining, and it's way out of reach of regular Joe. This doesn't look democratic to me. - The hugmongous energy wastage of the network should be the biggest cause of concern, but most proponents shoo it away by buzzwords like lightning network etc.

idrae 6y ago
"Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has." This only applies to the US, Europe has a instant bank transfer system.
- apexalpha 6y ago
  Yeah I was just gonna say, it's been instant for a while now. I think outside of my country it can still take a workday though. But then again it doesn't cost anything, where BTC can cost a few dollars per tx.
chill1 6y ago
My understanding of the space contradicts each of your points. So without either of us providing citations, both of our opinions are pretty useless to the casual reader. But I will add some thoughts here. > The [humongous] energy wastage of the network should be the biggest cause of concern, but most proponents shoo it away by buzzwords like lightning network etc. Lightning Network is a second layer payment network that is working today. Its goal is to take the transaction pressure off of the base layer (blockchain). Its design has privacy built-in, so it's not possible to generate statistics [3] on its total transaction thru-put. That's also why articles like the one on which we are commenting are so disingenuous. The source they cite makes a direct comparison of the total transaction volume of the Visa network with the Bitcoin blockchain while completely ignoring layer 2 networks built on-top of Bitcoin. > Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time. Bitcoin is not "popular" anywhere. The total number of Bitcoin ATMs [1] and physical shops/vendors [2] transacting with Bitcoin is still quite limited. The vast majority of commerce occurs online. But what I do see is that there is slow, steady growth globally. The infrastructure is still developing to support larger volumes of users - and with more diverse levels of computer skills. [1] https://coinatmradar.com/ https://coinatmradar.com/ [2] https://coinmap.org/ https://coinmap.org/ [3] https://1ml.com/ https://1ml.com/

inter_netuser 6y ago

Proof of work exists maintain unforgeable costliness. It's a basic pre-requisite without which you cannot have digital scarcity, because it would be far too easy and too cheap to forge/create new coins. It's amazing how early we still are in Bitcoin after 12 years. Almost nobody on this forum understands why proof of work exists, and yet most people here are intelligent enough and have enough technical skill to figure out why. It is much greener than: napalm, nuclear weapons, etc. Trillions are spent every year on war to maintain the reserve currency status. Would you really rather prefer to spend trillions on standing armies, rather than incentivize cheap fusion reactors?

seaman1921 6y ago
Classic - assuming anyone who doesn't hold BTC is an idiot. Followed by a 'Have fun staying poor' to stir some social anxiety and FOMO. Unfortunately a lot of people keep falling for such statements and the price keeps going up - I have friends buying loads of dogecoin over the past week who told me they have literally no idea what crypto or doge is - but they know for sure that the prices are going to go up over the next month so they don't really care.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  You are exactly correct, everyone who ignores does so at their own cost. Close to one _trillion_ in foregone profits at the moment. You think this is a fad?
  - myWindoonn 6y ago
    I think that it is a target. And apparently so does the original article's author.
ac29 6y ago
"This isnt so bad, because war exists" is one of the thinnest arguments in favor of something I've ever seen. In this hypothetical future where cryptocurrencies replace national ones, couldnt wars still be fought over the mining infrastructure or the resources needed to run it?

xerxespoy 6y ago

Should probably destroy all technology that uses energy for the same reason, using the same methodology. Ie, ignore every conceivable benefit and focus only on energy usage as the singular and all-pervasive critical factor. I guess humans even without technology might use energy too, simply by existing, so we should probably attack and end us as well. This is surely humanity's only sensible path to a sustainable future, and one that everyone can and must get on board with. Right?

nnx 6y ago

Bitcoin is actually a (if not the) great accelerator for cheap renewable energy (hydro, solar, etc) by being a market incentive. Even helps reducing methane emissions flaring from oil fields by putting that flaring to productive use (hashing) instead of releasing it into atmosphere, see https://gam.ai/ https://gam.ai/ for instance.

inter_netuser 6y ago
Bitcoin is the best bounty for clean fusion power. Direct monetary incentives.
thejynxed 6y ago
Except it hasn't been, instead places like China (the largest crypto mining market on the planet) has instead opted to open new coal plants to feed their state operated mining centers.

pineaux 6y ago

I think it's mostly CCP strategy to control as much cryptospace as possible, be it via exchanges or miners. I believe china is in the game of using any method to undermine the western hegemony in the world. This is not even controversial. I'm even willing to believe that the whole covid-19 crisis is leveraged by them for relative power gains. There's not much evidence for this, but that's what I would do. I think the cryptomining rigs could eventually be claimed by the government to house a large general AI and destroy the crypto market in one swing. If I were the Chinese government I would at least entertain that idea. The fact that people don't care about crypto not being really decentralized makes me believe china would research such ploys. They are growing their power in any domain they can get away with, this is one of them. - south chinese sea islands - HK annexation - pressuring Taiwan and constructing infrastructure towards the island. - hacking attacks - tibet (making sure homeland security is maximal) - the concentration camps with Uyghurs (making sure homeland security is maximal) - the infrastructural projects in africa to gain access to resources - the buying of as much european assets (like ports, factories, real estate) as possible. - the state assisted development of large cyber start-ups/companies (jack ma didn't disappear for nothing) - the state infiltration of big technology firms like huawei 5g and others. It seems like a clear picture to me. One of America's greatest strategical assets is the dollar being the world's reserve currency. It's basically a way to be able to print almost endless amounts of dollars without the punitive danger of inflation. Other countries will buy your excess money to make sure their reserves won't devalue. If china wants hegemony, they would need to undermine this asset in a subtle way. If bitcoin becomes very mainstream and more stable, then this will become the new reserve currency. With the air of being unbiased. However, china controls many of the levers. Just my three cents.

mr_woozy 6y ago
>. I think the cryptomining rigs could eventually be claimed by the government to house a large general AI what? via hashing sha256? what are you even talking about,nutter?

blindgeek 6y ago

I have some green sensibilities, but I'm more of a Post-scarcity Socialist. Backing a currency with a scarce resource serves no purpose other than to keep us serfs "down on the manor" so to speak. Standards of living didn't start rising significantly until fiat money really took off. Societies and governments give currency value; it has little to no inherent value on its own. But the primary philosophy behind bitcoin is right-libertarian / Ayn Rand / a return to the 19th century with futuristic technology. Go look up the Cyphernomicon for instance, where you'll find Tim May cheerleading for cryptocurrency-powered darknet murder marts. Here's a choice sample quote: begin quote 16.10.4. Will I be sad if anonymous methods allow untraceable markets for assassinations? It depends. In many cases, people deserve death--those who have escaped justice, those who have broken solemn commitments, etc. Gun grabbing politicians, for example should be killed out of hand. Anonymous rodent removal services will be a tool of liberty. The BATF agents who murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son should be shot. If the courts won't do it, a market for hits will do it. - (Imagine for a moment an "anonymous fund" to collect the money for such a hit. Interesting possibilities.) - "Crypto Star Chambers," or what might be called "digilantes," may be formed on-line, and untraceably, to mete out justice to those let off on technicalities. Not altogether a bad thing. end quote Attacking vulnerabilities in the bitcoin network seems like a great idea. At this point, so does anything that might take it down. It's a technology that deserves to be eliminated.

tromp 6y ago

> Sadly, the proof of work (POW) principle makes Bitcoin not physically nor ecologically sustainable. Any cryptocurrency based on this principle suffers from the same problem. Not to the same extent. A big contributing factor is the very high price of bitcoin that results from the FOMO on its finite supply, nearly 90% of which is mined already. If Bitcoin had no halvings, then its inflation rate would come down much slower and its price would be much more reasonable. Sadly, very few PoW coins follow that wide distribution model.

tsimionescu 6y ago
If the Work is easy and doesn't consume much energy, than it's easy to forge. This is true even if 1 BTC were worth 1 cent - the cost (in Watts, not dollars) of mining doesn't depend at all on the price of BTC. Instead, if BTC weren't worth much, people would likely just stop mining, and the transaction speed of the BTC network would grind to a halt, further driving down its value.

Glench 6y ago

Here to mention Chia (https://www.chia.net/ https://www.chia.net/) which is made by the creator of bittorrent Bram Cohen and is launching its mainnet soon! Uses proof of space instead of proof of work or proof of stake to make it use very little energy.

ac29 6y ago
I dont see how that solves the energy problem. Presumably, if allocating X space gets you Y rewards, allocating 2X space gives you 2Y rewards. So, if the rewards are worth anything, there will be a race to install and run as much storage capacity as possible, which has an energy cost.
- Glench 6y ago
  Definitely not an expert on this but the creators say that one thing that is helpful is that hard drive space is already massively over-provisioned which is helpful — individuals as well as institutions with space will be able to make use of existing space without needing to make a run on hard drives.

yownie 6y ago

a look a woke person.