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I always wondered what will happen when the environmentalists find out about the energy consumption requirements of Bitcoin.
by nickgrosvenor 6y ago
I always wondered what will happen when the environmentalists find out about the energy consumption requirements of Bitcoin.
- loceng 6y agoThe counterargument is always that at some point in future the energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else the solutions proposed seemed to relay on centralized services that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a "trustless" blockchain.
- ece 6y agoOr PoS Ethereum or other PoS crypto currencies can take the place of exponentially energy-hungry PoW. They explicitly deal with the 50%+ attacks in their governance too.
- loceng 6y agoHow so - by central authority changes?
- ece 6y agoFor certain cases of attacks, yes with minority forks, and by destroying the attackers stake in other cases, see the section titled "Attacks are much easier to recover from in proof of stake" here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
- loceng 6y agoSo why not just have a trusted centralized authority(ies), arguably democratically elected who control the system(s), and where there isn't a transfer of wealth weighted from late adopters towards earlier adopters?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ece 6y agoThat's another alternative, which doesn't exist yet. Ethereum PoS could be here sooner and doesn't use energy like PoW does, along with other helpful features.
- ForHackernews 6y agoYou can't "solve" the energy consumption of Bitcoin - deliberate waste is built into the Proof-of-work protocol by design.
- Apocryphon 6y agoMakes me wonder if someone can create a cryptocurrency where the mining is for distributed computing research for achieving nuclear fusion power. Crypto-mining that does SETI@home/BOINC work.
- tal8d 6y agoThis has been wondered for years, usually by people who don't know the purpose of hashing functions. If nuclear fusion models + protein folding were easily verifiable, then there would be no point in leveraging distributed computing for them - we'd have the same level of understanding for them as we do for contrived hashing functions. If they somehow also ended up with the difficulty directionality intentionally designed for in cryptography, then that would be fine. But that is pretty unlikely, and in that event your currency is totally hacked and useless.
- Apocryphon 6y agoIt's still nice to dream of all this distributed computing activity going towards tangible real world benefits.
- tal8d 6y agoLike a global realtime financial network that grants participants complete freedom to do as they please with their own money? Yeah.
- Apocryphon 6y agoEvery single word of that description is intangible.
- tal8d 6y agoThe counterargument has been the same for years: the present financial system consumes for more energy, to the point where people complaining about it look like they're either trying to deceive others, or they've just put so little thought into it that they should be ignored.
- freerobby 6y agoThey'll complain and then we'll show them the energy consumption of the finance industry.
- p1necone 6y agoControlling for transaction volume the energy consumption of bitcoin is orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the finance industry.
- blhack 6y agoHow much energy does the rest of the finance industry use?
- api 6y agoI'm on the fence about whether this is correct or not. The question in my mind is: do you include military spending in the cost of maintaining a fiat currency and if so to what extent? Fiat currencies are backed in part by the power of the governments that issue them, so is defense spending a form of "proof of work" for them? If the US government disbanded its military would the USD hold any value for very long? Same goes for any other fiat... e.g. if the PRC disbanded the Chinese military would the Yuan retain much value? If fiat currencies require a constant demonstration of credible military (and police) capability, that's a rather enormous cost and brings with it quite a bit of resource use and pollution. (I would guesstimate that Bitcoin would still be less efficient than USD but that the margin would be smaller.)
- z77dj3kl 6y agoDo you honestly think that the value of Bitcoin would not tank if the value of the US Dollar tanked?
- api 6y agoWe're talking about the relative efficiency of Bitcoin vs. conventional finance in an energy or other cost per transaction sense. I'm asking whether some amount of military spending should be counted in the cost of maintaining a fiat monetary system. If people were using Bitcoin as currency directly its value would remain equal to whatever people were willing to trade for it. Obviously if all people were willing to trade it for was USD it would become worthless, but that's not the point in this thread. Bitcoin has other problems as a currency but that's not the topic of discussion here. Some other cryptocurrencies try to solve these, such as it being too deflationary or lacking functionality.
- 1996 6y agoThey will be super angry and look at all the details, including the past profits, then calmly decide to look the other way because they need a retirement account after all :)
- floor2 6y agoBit of an aside, but it's so wild that we label people as "environmentalists" and that anyone would place themselves NOT in that group. It seems like 100% of people should want air which is non-toxic, water which is non-toxic and food which is non-toxic. But of course, being an "abolitionist" was a political group in the 1800s but now it's just assumed that 100% of people are anti-slavery, so maybe the optimistic take is that "environmentalist" will undergo the same transformation as "abolitionist".
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThis black-and-white thinking ignores the spectrum of what constitutes non-toxic. There are those that accept nothing short of perfect purity in air, water and food, a condition which has never existed in a million years of human history. Others are less concerned about humans and more about ecology. Still others value the morals of human-animal relations above issues of nature. So no, we are not all 'ecologists', not in the same sense anyway. And not to the same degree.
- Craighead 6y agoI'm curious why you would post such a blatant lie about the air quality post industrial revolution by framing the scenario as "million years of human history" Why are you posting in bad faith?
- pasabagi 6y agoThere's as wide a gulf between our enviroment[1] and 'complete purity' as there is between slavery and 'complete freedom'. [1](complete ecosystem collapse, widespread poisoning of populations worldwide, etc)
- Apocryphon 6y agoOne assumes that air and water purity was fairly better pre-Industrial Revolution.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
- bpodgursky 6y agoHopefully everyone with move to Ethereum and other Proof of Stake coins. (Both for the environment, and my wallet since I'm already deep in Eth)
- centimeter 6y agoProof of stake is not secure in the same way as proof of work. Miner collusion attacks are free in PoS, expensive in PoW.
- bpodgursky 6y agoIt's only "free" if you get a substantial fraction of the coin's total wealth backing your attack. And it's not really "free", because you'd instantly devalue the currency itself (and thus your own stake).