45 ms·

When Bitcoin miners take over a town (2018)

203 points by edward 6y ago

eecc 6y ago
How about hooking up that excess energy to a federal grid and make that growth both permanent and sustainable? What will happen when BTC goes back into the dumpster for a couple years (if not forever)? All those tons of Carbon that could have been turned off had that hydro replaced Coal should be laid at the feet of crypto and fundie “anti-state” nutjobs
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It's on the grid (the article discusses the power being sold into California). Presumably the local miner operations are able to pay the producing utilities more than grid buyers are willing to pay.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Oh, umm. I admit to not having read so far into the article... :(
  - mtnGoat 6y ago
    Where this article is about, Wenatchee, they were for the longest time paying below wholesale, that is changing rapidly. It was even partially subsidized, the power company used to cover the costs of upgraded utilities to your site, with no contact in usage. then they realized these mines closed as fast as they opened, it cost the local power company millions. Nowadays if you want load, you gotta pay for everything and it takes years to justify, explain and build. Only new data center going in anytime soon will be a massive MSFT DC.
user-the-name 6y ago
Bitcoin is, at this point, an ecological disaster and a crime against humanity.
aokiji 6y ago
So now we are using the climate as an excuse to attack bitcoin? Weak propaganda.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It's not a new development, people have been pointing out the large amount of energy consumed for quite some time.
  - probably_wrong 6y ago
    The article is from March 2018. It is indeed not a new development.
- giacaglia 6y ago
  This attack will become more and more common
- Angostura 6y ago
  It uses a shocking amount of energy. Is it wrong to point this ou?
  - arebop 6y ago
    Aluminum production and datacenter operations also use a shocking amount of energy. Apparently Argentina uses a lot of electricity. People complain about bitcoin specifically because they don't recognize any value and they're frustrated that other people disagree. If they were genuinely worried about environmental impact, they'd look at the externalities of electricity production & distribution in a more general way (cap & trade? carbon tax?) rather than arguing that one particularly visible use of electricity is immoral.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      We get something useful from aluminium production.
loceng 6y ago
I wonder, all 3 current comments - including by someone shadowban - aokiji (I recently learned about the "showdead" setting you can toggle on in settings) - have been downvoted, I wonder if those downvoting all have financial interest in the success of the Bitcoin MLM?
- mrits 6y ago
  It only took a few months for me working around bitcoin warehouses to realize I was being extremely hypocritical. Some will argue that bitcoin is important to society so the electricity use can be justified. I personally drastically reduced my stake in bitcoin though and put it in crypto that is committed to greener proof of stake algorithms.
  - jakupovic 6y ago
    This is FUD. You provide your opinion based on zero evidence. Good for you, but what did that do for anyone else?
  - loceng 6y ago
    Cool, at least you're trying. I think Bitcoin's structure, the way its blockchain is designed, is inherently flawed with too many unavoidable-unfixable pitfalls - along with unnecessarily transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. Consensus and use, alignment towards its adoption, can occur through democratic processes - democratically elected governments (save regulatory capture) - to use a blockchain currency/system that's transparent and prevents printing of money (or at least unknown printing of money) by nations, without transferring wealth simply due to use - without aligning people via greed, financial incentive. Edit to add: I feel showered in the glory of downvotes today.
  - doomroot 6y ago
    Hfsp
seibelj 6y ago
Even if the electricity argument succeeds in harming bitcoin, luckily there are many Proof of Stake coins such as Polkadot and (soon) Ethereum that will use a fraction of the electricity. So no-coiners will have to use a different argument. They have definitely started pushing this one hard even though IMO it’s disingenuous given most BTC is mined through carbon-neutral sources like hydro and geothermal.
- bob33212 6y ago
  It is really interesting to see the crypto topic become so polarized. Either you think it is this amazing revolution that will be the future or you are a "No-Coiner" and you are against crypto. During the DOT COM bubble things were not this divided. There were certainly plenty of people pointing out that giving a company 100M just because they own a domain name may not end well, but it wasn't this heated. I assume this is because of social media. A lot more people have voices to point out flaws in the other side's arguments and then everyone gets echo chambered into one of two sides with the arguments that best support their side.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    Social media might be an amplifier, but the vehemence with which proponents of crypto defend its legitimacy reminds me of the people who defend MLMs. If you say "hey, isn't this a pyramid scheme?" to folks who have managed to slip into a profitable tier of the... well.. pyramid, they immediately lash out with circular claims like "obviously this isn't a pyramid scheme, because those are illegal!" So yeah, everyone defending crypto is trying to bootstrap the illusion of its value as anything while simultaneously trying to un-map it from comparisons to recognizable scams. They have more dollars than they should tied to both of these dreams.
    - bob33212 6y ago
      This is what I'm talking about. You are assuming the worst intentions or at least singling out the worst actors. Because of this polarization I'm having a really hard time gauging how many people are actually scammers vs the type of person who really thought in 1999 that shoes.com would have a monopoly on shoe sales in the future.
calabroa 6y ago
Side note - we've done a lot of work in Wenatchee on their conversion to electric transit buses, which also benefit from the low cost electricity from hydro. Great little town
- m00dy 6y ago
  Hi Calabroa, I would like to ask a couple of questions related to the work done in Wenatchee. I couldn't get your contact info in your profile. Would you send me an email to eren@countingcarbons.co ? thanks
mgberlin 6y ago
On the one hand, we have the biggest crisis to ever face humanity, where all of our lives literally hang in the balance and daily we're seeing the effects from wildfires to cold blasts. On the other hand we have bitcoin.
- elliotpage 6y ago
  Well, one of those is more fun to endlessly ramble about on Reddit so of course Bitcoin will get the attention!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Let's face it, when it comes down to it humanity, on the whole, will always choose to burn the world for a quick buck.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  On the one hand, we have the biggest crisis to ever face humanity, where all of our lives literally hang in the balance and daily we're seeing the effects from wildfires to cold blasts. On the other hand I ate a delicious burger. What's your point?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Haha no. You have the biggest crisis. You have a problem with wildfires. You have a problem with cold snaps. I have Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm not particularly helping with your problem but you never really helped with mine so it's all good.
  - SubiculumCode 6y ago
    what , you live on another planet?
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      No, but I have ways to survive all this. Even climate change will only lead to some billion deaths at worst. One in seven chance? Not a big deal for me. I'll take it.
vmception 6y ago
This should be labeled 2018 The North American crypto mining landscape and trade has evolved alot since this article, it is the most robust in the world as the hardware shifts from location to location to prevent becoming waste
moralsupply 6y ago
Bitcoin is mostly mined using excess energy, or "cheap" energy, which improves the efficiency and costs of energy production, making it surprisingly "green". Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than Gold and Silver. Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than credit cards and the banking system in general. Yet Bitcoin is frowned upon by environmentalists, as if Bitcoin was a company and they could use political power to shut it down.
- vmception 6y ago
  Yeah people harp on and on about the amount of energy instead of the source of energy turns out those entire countries in their favorite analogy also use a smaller amount of energy than many industries the source is more important either way
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  I’m a beginner but is your energy comment in perpetuity or at current point? Specially in 2734 or whatever due to the verification of Bitcoin transactions each requiring energy, as long as the transaction cost of non-Bitcoin was lower than Bitcoin in the long run (maybe the “you’re long dead” long run run) wouldn’t coin use more energy? Sorry for n00b question
- dtech 6y ago
  Bitcoin is not even close to a replacement of banking and debit/credit cards. If bitcoin fulfilled those roles, it would use a lot more energy than the current system because of how energy-intensive transactions are due to the required mining.
  - moralsupply 6y ago
    Bitcoin can't handle the amount of transactions the banking system can handle at the moment. For it to scale to that level it requires an L2 solution (eg. Lightning), in which case energy consumption is not going to increase.
    - 6y ago
burlesona 6y ago
Title should say (2018). Good article, especially for my extended family who live in that part of WA and have been wondering what this is all about. Does anyone know if this is still holding up? I would assume that minors are currently cashing in given the price has increased so much very recently, so new mines are only just now coming online. On the other hand we should be due for an explosion of mining difficulty. I was talking about this with my wife just a few days ago actually. I think that one of the base risks to bitcoin is that as the power demand continues to skyrocket, nation states begin to ban bitcoin mining, or more harshly regulate it to control power demand. You could imagine mining shutting down in more and more countries, until there’s a “last man standing” somewhere with almost all the mining activity, and hence a highly centralized and highly vulnerable blockchain.
- vmception 6y ago
  Its more likely that more nation states vie for control of bitcoin mining, causing more competition over the resource and continual decentralization, much like how Iran has put a lot of support into the industry so that they dont have to use the sanctioned state-sponsored payment rails like SWIFT As bitcoin mining is mostly using clean energy or a sustainability solution for economic reasons, people should put their energy on making sure it stays that way, because nation states competing would be able to undermine the economics and make mining an actual environmental disaster instead of the imagined one people have assumed is happening
  - lalaland1125 6y ago
    > As bitcoin mining is mostly using clean energy or a sustainability solution This is misleading and Bitcoin is currently an actual environmental disaster. Electricity is fungible and Bitcoin miners using green power sources are preventing the shutdown of coal power plants that would have otherwise shut down.
    - vmception 6y ago
      > misleading only because it's not a simple binary answer that people wish for. its a long answer with variables that have to be actively monitored. an annual dissertation really. even your acknowledgement of bitcoin miners using green power sources runs counter to detractor's worldview, and forces people to need to understand it better than "huh thats a lot of energy must be bad" so now we're at "wait they are green but now here is this indirect other problem when the goal post moves because I don't like how the energy is being used and I presuppose that energy is fungible" okay, yeah sure we can move the goal post a lot further and still show that its a working economic sustainability solution which can be improved when people direct their mental energy in a more nuanced way. your position is not to improve it, its to deflect towards there being no energy use at all, and that will never get you anywhere as the people that would actually have the authority to represent your wishes would look at it and come to my conclusion for example, not all the energy is fungible which is why it is being used by miners, and that's only in some of the variety cases, although a major case
sega_sai 6y ago
My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. A few years ago Bitcoin didn't really register there, and it was okay to disregard. Now with so much energy/efforts spent there, one should ask oneselves, is it good allocation of resources? Is it good that so much cheap electricity is used for mining bitcoin? Can we think of a way of either taxing, or changing incentives, so that society benefits from this. I don't know what's the best way of changing the incentives, but it must be done in my opinion.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  What if rather than taxing bitcoin, we just tax carbon usage?
  - sega_sai 6y ago
    I think it is probably good to tax for Co2 production as a way of addressing global warming. I just don't think we should equate bitcoin production with other CO2 producers. I.e. I personally think that the CPU-cycles used for science on HPCs are much more valuable than the bitcoin mining (that's just my opinion though).
    - xur17 6y ago
      As you noted, this is just your opinion - are we going to have a person or group that decides what forms of Co2 usage are most "worthy", and adjust taxes accordingly? And let's say we do go down that path - one could certainly make the argument that Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes are much more worthy than Co2 used to search for aliens or participating in far out HPC research.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        Incentivizing stupid things (like taking on mortgage debt or over-coverage by employer health plan) is already the status quo of the tax code. > Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage?
marshmallow_12 6y ago
the way i see it is like this: bitcoin is an administrative tool to help facilitate the transfer of products more efficiently. Society invests a lot of energy in developing and maintaining such tools, for example currency and tax accountants. This is because the faster wealth can be exchanged, the faster new wealth can be created. This makes investing huge resources into inherently worthless services -like banks- worthwhile. They don't create any wealth but instead help people save time. This time is used to extract wealth from the earth and thus increase the overall quality of life. IF bitcoin helps to extract more raw products than was invested in the process of maintaining it, then it can't be criticised for waste more than the banks, for example. Edit: I am NOT merely finger pointing. A knee-jerk reaction would be to condemn btc as being entirely wasteful and therefore bad, but the reality is more nuanced.
- the_why_of_y 6y ago
  The enormous efficiency gains from transferring Bitcoins should never be underestimated! https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... At just $25.97 USD per transaction, the banks should just close up shop because they'll never be able to compete again.
casi 6y ago
if it costs $1 go buy then it is worth spending $0.99 on mining it. the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser. I am pro digital currencies in general, but we can do much better than bitcoin. That said we should avoid moral panic, it only brings division. Ultimately we are all on the same side.
- gruez 6y ago
  >the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser. this is partly counter-balanced by the block subsidy halving every 4 years.
- erikerikson 6y ago
  You mention nothing about externalities. Sure the $ books balance out but what other effects are being selected? We are all on the same side but benefits and costs are not evenly allocated.
cryptica 6y ago
Bitcoin demonstrates the importance of first-mover advantage. It's one of the worst and most inefficient cryptocurrencies in existence but because it was the first, it's the most valuable. The world would be much better off with a Proof of Stake cryptocurrency as the dominant cryptocurrency. The rhetoric is extremely resilient. The price of Bitcoin has nothing to do with the underlying technology, it's all about the social network and infrastructure which exists around it. The rhetoric concerning Bitcoin only using clean energy is BS... If Bitcoin didn't use that surplus electricity, some other useful project would have had access to even cheaper electricity. But the same can be said about most of the big tech companies in existence today. Their dominance is all about social networks, infrastructure and rhetoric.
bidirectional 6y ago
Are there interesting technical challenges related to Bitcoin mining which induce competition and innovation? I ask because I see Bitcoin mining dismissed in the same way high frequency trading is (if you have enough starting capital/connections, you get to print money). However I know enough about HFT to realise that characterisation is very unfair (plenty of firms go bust, they capture a lot less value than the people they replaced, innovation is rife), is there anything similar going on with cryptocurrency mining, or are the surface level dismissals fair?
- wmf 6y ago
  There's definitely plenty of engineering around making the chips, miner boxes, and data centers as efficient as possible. Much of that engineering may not be transferable to other fields like cloud computing though.
- marktangotango 6y ago
  There are two aspects. One is the hardware. Coin production is held nearly constant by adjusting the difficulty. Hardware evolves such that hardware from a few years ago is drastically less effective than current hardware, and the difficulty is similarly higher. This means it takes new hardware to mine effectively. With jumps in prices comes jumps in prices of the hardware. And difficulty acquiring it. Also, the economics change with the price of btc (obviously). When btc is $50k, you can mine very profitably with $.12 kw/h domestic electricity (ie your house). When btc was $10k, you'd break even or lose money. So if you can get the hardware, and get access to cheap power, yes you can print money. Neither of those are easy. That's the challenge and why it's so easily dismissed as you observe. The really provocative question is imo, how high will the price of btc go? A lot of people speculate $100-300k. That kind of price justifies a lot of capital expenditure.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  I would be much happier if there were no innovation. Instead of just wasting electricity, we are wasting lives and minds. We have teams designing custom silicon to print Bitcoin. At least it's better than them working for Google, I suppose. A "mine" is just a big warehouse full of jerry-rigged infrastructure. It will employ maybe two people and will pack up shop in an afternoon if the owners find cheaper electricity elsewhere. It doesn't provide any value to the local economy.
mtnGoat 6y ago
That’s my town! And it’s actually totally unnoticeable, 98% of people in town have no idea. The real only effect it had on most citizens were the fires that got started at a few mines, from electrical overloads. Now it’s a big pain if you want a large load of power, which makes starting a high power demand business a lot harder around here. We also have a ton of indoor pot farms, this is the best place in the country to grow indoors because power is so cheap. Since article was written a Diamond foundry opened up, pretty cool use of tons of power, and just about as useless as Bitcoin. Edit:spelling
- schmuelio 6y ago
  Diamonds aren't quite as useless as bitcoin currently. Bitcoin - as far as I'm aware - is currently mostly used for speculation. Whereas diamonds are very useful in many industrial processes which require hard materials (think cutting/grinding tools). One could argue that diamonds are considerably more useful than bitcoin, most of the world's diamond consumption is for industrial use rather than jewelry.
  - mtnGoat 6y ago
    You’re right, that was aimed at the jeweler side of the market. I think the ones being made here are industrial.
- csomar 6y ago
  > That’s my town! And it’s actually totally unnoticeable, 98% of people in town have no idea. Do you mean that the journalist over-exaggerated the story in a very heated topic to get eyeballs. I'm, for one, very surprised. /s
- Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
  Fantastic real-world viewpoint! I was beginning to wonder if all these useful / useless arguments are just exaggerated drama. In reality Bitcoin mines are extremely low-profile operations.
  - 6y ago
tromp 6y ago
Spot the error in this sentence: "By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Ripple. "
rpiguyshy 6y ago
"you could buy electricity for around 2.5 cents per kilowatt." this is a typo. they meant 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. i think its really interesting that elon musk has changed his public stance on bitcoin. originally, and for a long time, he described bitcoin as an alternative to cash but not an alternative to centralized banking because the primary purpose of money is to act as a database or tool for resource allocation. i had never thought of it that way and it intrigued me. overall he was basically dismissive of crypto. but then recently he has endorsed bitcoin, offered to buy out dogecoin investors and other things. and he hasnt elaborated on why he turned around, and joe rogan was too stupid to ask him when he came on the podcast recently.
- jrv 6y ago
  He commented a bit more here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1362600676174557186?s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1362600676174557186?s=19
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    wow thank you.
- ffggvv 6y ago
  i think tesla stock is essentially a meme and lost it’s luster so he had to do something to get the sheen back. especially to distract from news that chinese regulators were clamping down
henron 6y ago
See the founder of Coinbase fail to name a single specific way that bitcoin makes anyone better off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
the issue with btc is that it lacks any stabilising element. Mainstream services invests in other products as well. This means that even if their product fails, the entirety of their energy investment wont be lost. The flipside is that if btc turns out to be a success (i'm not saying it's even possible), it should be more efficient at being a currency.
cybert00th 6y ago
Bitcoin = snake oil - it cures what ails ya. Miners may be making money now, but let's face it, it's an intangible asset made of 1s and 0s and wholly dependent on the presence of electricity. What could possibly go wrong...
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  That definition works for major potion of USD in circulation as well. So what's your point?
underseacables 6y ago
(2018). It would be interesting to see an updated version of this article.
arbuge 6y ago
A lot has been said about fossil fuel producers not bearing the full costs of the externalities of the products they produce. I think the same now has to be said of cryptocurrency mining. Is this activity, and the vast amount of energy and resources it consumes, really something which is a net positive for society?
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Even if you disregard the massive ecological harm it does, bitcoin is still a big negative for society, due to the immense amount of crime it enables - ransomware, money laundering, scams and fraud.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    I guess by your logic the US dollar USD is also a big negative for society then.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      There is absolutely no comparison to be made there. The percentage of Bitcoin usage that is criminal is just massively, MASSIVELY bigger than the same for USD.
Animats 6y ago
That's from 2018. Apparently there was a crash around 2019.[1] A boom might be starting again. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz-soaring-bitcoin-prices-put-central-washington-electrical-utilities-on-alert/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...
bdcravens 6y ago
How many towns were transformed when water was used to power new factories during the Industrial Revolution? Detroit and the automobile revolution? San Francisco in the Gold Rush? Houston in the Oil Boom?
cletus 6y ago
I am beginning to wonder if energy is what will eventually doom Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina [1]. Another article suggests the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is equivalent to New Zealand [2]. It's not just the cost of mining new coins (which will ultimately end) but the cost of maintaining the network. The more valuable the collective Bitcoins are, the more energy you need to spend defending it against 51% attacks. To the apologists claiming there's no other good use for that energy, it's not simple. Using too much electricity can raise the price that everybody pays [3]. Miners will keep chasing cheap power but I expect, much like ArbBnB, municipalities, states and even countries will increasingly clamp down on it. The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies. Try and see ordinary people deal with a Bitcoin wallet and discover there's no recourse if a vulnerability in their computer means the contents are irreversibly stolen. I realize there are corner cases (eg sending money to and from Venezuela). There's also a lot of illegal use cases. Thing is, blockchains aren't really as immutable as pundits suggest. Bitcoin and Ethereum have had forks. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambridge%20researchers%20say%20it%20consumes,Bitcoin%20undermines%20its%20environmental%20image https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambrid.... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html#:~:text=Bitcoin%20has%20a%20carbon%20footprint,Netherlands%2C%20Cambridge%20University%20researchers%20say https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor.... [3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-miners-to-this-small-city-then-came-the-backlash https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-m...
- fearface 6y ago
  Forks don’t mutate the origin chain.
  - mortehu 6y ago
    Chains are amended, not mutated. Consensus about what new blocks to accept to the chain can change at any time. For example the chain following the original Ethereum rules is now called Ethereum Classic and its market cap is less than 0.5% of the new consensus.
geogra4 6y ago
The newer proof of stake coins solve this in a much more sane way. Proof of work is going to kill the planet
RustyRussell 6y ago
(2018)
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Wow what a waste, at least use the waste energy to heat Texan homes.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  If only energy was that easy to transport.
- kevindong 6y ago
  As it turns out, virtually all electric heating is equally efficient (in terms of electricity used per unit of heat outputted). The only difference is that with electric heating, the desired output is the heat itself. While as with computers, the desired output is some kind of audio/visual signal with heat being a generally undesired byproduct. So during college, I repurposed my desktop PC to mine crypto instead of turning on the (electric) heat in the apartment. I ended up making ~$60 worth of crypto in about 1-2 months before I stopped mining crypto because the fan noise was unbearable.
dylkil 6y ago
why is hacker news so anti crypto
lxeiqr 6y ago
In my opinion, Bitcoin's Proof of Work is the biggest downside of that cryptocurrency (mostly due to extreme power consumption of the network). Moreover, the conservative approach of its developers to new concepts means that it's quite unlikely that the situation is going to change in coming months or years. Regardless, I wonder whether there are alternatives that could significantly reduce power usage of the whole network without making it more susceptible to various attacks. I've heard of Proof of Stake (Ethereum is planning to switch to it) or alternative PoW algorithms (such as Monero's RandomX), but I'm not experienced enough to tell how would these solutions scale for a cryptocurrency as big as Bitcoin today is.
- qertoip 6y ago
  Precisely the opposite, Sir. Employing PoW to protect against Sybil attack in anonymous network is the very invention that made Bitcoin possible. Without PoW you must ID participants, which makes system trivial to regulate or shutdown (see Facebook Libra, or security fraud case against Ripple). And no, PoS isn't the answer, because PoS implies a handful of biggest exchanges control the coin, because they genuinly stake the most. If Bitcoin was PoS, Mt Gox would run Bitcoin to this day!
  - ralusek 6y ago
    Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are not too different in terms of what it would take in order to control the network. Stake and access to computing power are both just functions of being able to assemble sufficient resources so as to represent a sizable enough portion of control.
- ralusek 6y ago
  What's interesting is that all of the magic of crypto comes from: - Signed transactions being broadcast onto a p2p network - This network being visible to anyone who is interested The much less important part of crypto is exactly how the shared ledger is assembled. So long as these transactions are put together in a relatively timely manner, and no transactions are being willfully excluded, whatever mechanism used for assembling the ledger doesn't really matter that much. Proof of work is literally just a time-gated lottery for some entity to be the one that gets to say "I am submitting the next update to the ledger." They're not providing any service to the network that a single shitty chromebook couldn't provide on its own, the time-gated proof of work is literally just to arrive at a consensus. There are so many alternatives that make more sense than this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mudlus 6y ago
Perhaps Bitcoin is a decentralized consciousness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834
russh 6y ago
Thats a lot of words to say "The wrong people are making money."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
coeneedell 6y ago
So I grew up in Wenatchee, right across the river from East Wenatchee. I remember when this started in about 2016. I can't speak for east wenatchee but the downtown got a lot nicer, and people generally gut wealthier in Wenatchee. It could also be the more serious etablishment of the wine industry in the columbia river valley. Maybe it was the expansion of tourism? Or perhaps it was just that the economy of the united states at large was improving. Also all the energy in that town is hydro so if we're going to spend all this energy on bitcoin it may as well be non-emissions energy.
yourabstraction 6y ago
So many of you on here are eager to form a government committee to determine what is and isn't appropriate use of electricity. How are you going to feel when this witch hunt comes to shut down the activity that you deem useful? Maybe it'll be all the kilowatts you're drawing for an experimental ML project. Sorry, the committee just didn't see value in it! Are you really advocating to raise the barrier to experimentation and halt the pace of future technological developments? On a forum like HN nonetheless! I can think of any number of energy uses that could be classified as wasteful, are you ready to part with them? Turning your heat above 60 degrees in the winter Driving more than 10 miles a day Driving at all Owning a videogame console Spinning up too many cloud resources for an experimental startup Having a house larger than you need Having multiple cars per family Flying internationally Flying anywhere Buying a new TV, phone, laptop, or other gadget I can imagine a really horrific dystopia where an AI is given control of the Bureau of Moral Energy Use. It starts out nice enough finding low hanging fruit to reduce energy usage with minimal impact to peoples lives. And then it's a slippery slope, all the way to the final conclusion by the computer brain that the lowest energy users are DEAD HUMANS. The only holistic solution is to tax carbon at the time of production. Really, all economic externalities (pollution, garbage, aquifer use, etc.) should priced in at the point of production. It's too easy to never price it in if you punt to deal with it further downstream. I love reading HN, but every time Bitcoin comes up I feel like I'm hanging out with a bunch of virtue signaling luddites. You all need to stop being butt hurt that you missed the boat and look up at the revolution that's happening.
- tarsinge 6y ago
  Also eating meat, buying new clothes every few weeks/months, browsing inefficient websites, using social media with huge data centers to process personal data and target ads... These could be outright banned with no harm to society.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  There is such a trivial solution to this as well, set up a carbon tax or some other method that phases out all fossil fuels and charge what it costs to do this as the cost of electricity. Then at that point, who cares what you do with the power because the problem is solved. Specific laws targeting individual causes are always a useless whack a mole exercise when you can simply decentivise problems and the causes will rearrange themselves to not be problems.

203 points by edward 6y ago

eecc 6y ago

How about hooking up that excess energy to a federal grid and make that growth both permanent and sustainable? What will happen when BTC goes back into the dumpster for a couple years (if not forever)? All those tons of Carbon that could have been turned off had that hydro replaced Coal should be laid at the feet of crypto and fundie “anti-state” nutjobs

maxerickson 6y ago
It's on the grid (the article discusses the power being sold into California). Presumably the local miner operations are able to pay the producing utilities more than grid buyers are willing to pay.
- eecc 6y ago
  Oh, umm. I admit to not having read so far into the article... :(
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  Where this article is about, Wenatchee, they were for the longest time paying below wholesale, that is changing rapidly. It was even partially subsidized, the power company used to cover the costs of upgraded utilities to your site, with no contact in usage. then they realized these mines closed as fast as they opened, it cost the local power company millions. Nowadays if you want load, you gotta pay for everything and it takes years to justify, explain and build. Only new data center going in anytime soon will be a massive MSFT DC.

user-the-name 6y ago

Bitcoin is, at this point, an ecological disaster and a crime against humanity.

aokiji 6y ago

So now we are using the climate as an excuse to attack bitcoin? Weak propaganda.

maxerickson 6y ago
It's not a new development, people have been pointing out the large amount of energy consumed for quite some time.
- probably_wrong 6y ago
  The article is from March 2018. It is indeed not a new development.
giacaglia 6y ago
This attack will become more and more common
Angostura 6y ago
It uses a shocking amount of energy. Is it wrong to point this ou?
- arebop 6y ago
  Aluminum production and datacenter operations also use a shocking amount of energy. Apparently Argentina uses a lot of electricity. People complain about bitcoin specifically because they don't recognize any value and they're frustrated that other people disagree. If they were genuinely worried about environmental impact, they'd look at the externalities of electricity production & distribution in a more general way (cap & trade? carbon tax?) rather than arguing that one particularly visible use of electricity is immoral.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    We get something useful from aluminium production.

loceng 6y ago

I wonder, all 3 current comments - including by someone shadowban - aokiji (I recently learned about the "showdead" setting you can toggle on in settings) - have been downvoted, I wonder if those downvoting all have financial interest in the success of the Bitcoin MLM?

mrits 6y ago
It only took a few months for me working around bitcoin warehouses to realize I was being extremely hypocritical. Some will argue that bitcoin is important to society so the electricity use can be justified. I personally drastically reduced my stake in bitcoin though and put it in crypto that is committed to greener proof of stake algorithms.
- jakupovic 6y ago
  This is FUD. You provide your opinion based on zero evidence. Good for you, but what did that do for anyone else?
- loceng 6y ago
  Cool, at least you're trying. I think Bitcoin's structure, the way its blockchain is designed, is inherently flawed with too many unavoidable-unfixable pitfalls - along with unnecessarily transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. Consensus and use, alignment towards its adoption, can occur through democratic processes - democratically elected governments (save regulatory capture) - to use a blockchain currency/system that's transparent and prevents printing of money (or at least unknown printing of money) by nations, without transferring wealth simply due to use - without aligning people via greed, financial incentive. Edit to add: I feel showered in the glory of downvotes today.
- doomroot 6y ago
  Hfsp

seibelj 6y ago

Even if the electricity argument succeeds in harming bitcoin, luckily there are many Proof of Stake coins such as Polkadot and (soon) Ethereum that will use a fraction of the electricity. So no-coiners will have to use a different argument. They have definitely started pushing this one hard even though IMO it’s disingenuous given most BTC is mined through carbon-neutral sources like hydro and geothermal.

bob33212 6y ago
It is really interesting to see the crypto topic become so polarized. Either you think it is this amazing revolution that will be the future or you are a "No-Coiner" and you are against crypto. During the DOT COM bubble things were not this divided. There were certainly plenty of people pointing out that giving a company 100M just because they own a domain name may not end well, but it wasn't this heated. I assume this is because of social media. A lot more people have voices to point out flaws in the other side's arguments and then everyone gets echo chambered into one of two sides with the arguments that best support their side.
- Igelau 6y ago
  Social media might be an amplifier, but the vehemence with which proponents of crypto defend its legitimacy reminds me of the people who defend MLMs. If you say "hey, isn't this a pyramid scheme?" to folks who have managed to slip into a profitable tier of the... well.. pyramid, they immediately lash out with circular claims like "obviously this isn't a pyramid scheme, because those are illegal!" So yeah, everyone defending crypto is trying to bootstrap the illusion of its value as anything while simultaneously trying to un-map it from comparisons to recognizable scams. They have more dollars than they should tied to both of these dreams.
  - bob33212 6y ago
    This is what I'm talking about. You are assuming the worst intentions or at least singling out the worst actors. Because of this polarization I'm having a really hard time gauging how many people are actually scammers vs the type of person who really thought in 1999 that shoes.com would have a monopoly on shoe sales in the future.

calabroa 6y ago

Side note - we've done a lot of work in Wenatchee on their conversion to electric transit buses, which also benefit from the low cost electricity from hydro. Great little town

m00dy 6y ago
Hi Calabroa, I would like to ask a couple of questions related to the work done in Wenatchee. I couldn't get your contact info in your profile. Would you send me an email to eren@countingcarbons.co ? thanks

mgberlin 6y ago

On the one hand, we have the biggest crisis to ever face humanity, where all of our lives literally hang in the balance and daily we're seeing the effects from wildfires to cold blasts. On the other hand we have bitcoin.

elliotpage 6y ago
Well, one of those is more fun to endlessly ramble about on Reddit so of course Bitcoin will get the attention!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Let's face it, when it comes down to it humanity, on the whole, will always choose to burn the world for a quick buck.
Krasnol 6y ago
On the one hand, we have the biggest crisis to ever face humanity, where all of our lives literally hang in the balance and daily we're seeing the effects from wildfires to cold blasts. On the other hand I ate a delicious burger. What's your point?
renewiltord 6y ago
Haha no. You have the biggest crisis. You have a problem with wildfires. You have a problem with cold snaps. I have Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm not particularly helping with your problem but you never really helped with mine so it's all good.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  what , you live on another planet?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    No, but I have ways to survive all this. Even climate change will only lead to some billion deaths at worst. One in seven chance? Not a big deal for me. I'll take it.

vmception 6y ago

This should be labeled 2018 The North American crypto mining landscape and trade has evolved alot since this article, it is the most robust in the world as the hardware shifts from location to location to prevent becoming waste

moralsupply 6y ago

Bitcoin is mostly mined using excess energy, or "cheap" energy, which improves the efficiency and costs of energy production, making it surprisingly "green". Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than Gold and Silver. Bitcoin requires less energy on a per-store-of-value basis than credit cards and the banking system in general. Yet Bitcoin is frowned upon by environmentalists, as if Bitcoin was a company and they could use political power to shut it down.

vmception 6y ago
Yeah people harp on and on about the amount of energy instead of the source of energy turns out those entire countries in their favorite analogy also use a smaller amount of energy than many industries the source is more important either way
texasbigdata 6y ago
I’m a beginner but is your energy comment in perpetuity or at current point? Specially in 2734 or whatever due to the verification of Bitcoin transactions each requiring energy, as long as the transaction cost of non-Bitcoin was lower than Bitcoin in the long run (maybe the “you’re long dead” long run run) wouldn’t coin use more energy? Sorry for n00b question
dtech 6y ago
Bitcoin is not even close to a replacement of banking and debit/credit cards. If bitcoin fulfilled those roles, it would use a lot more energy than the current system because of how energy-intensive transactions are due to the required mining.
- moralsupply 6y ago
  Bitcoin can't handle the amount of transactions the banking system can handle at the moment. For it to scale to that level it requires an L2 solution (eg. Lightning), in which case energy consumption is not going to increase.
  - 6y ago

burlesona 6y ago

Title should say (2018). Good article, especially for my extended family who live in that part of WA and have been wondering what this is all about. Does anyone know if this is still holding up? I would assume that minors are currently cashing in given the price has increased so much very recently, so new mines are only just now coming online. On the other hand we should be due for an explosion of mining difficulty. I was talking about this with my wife just a few days ago actually. I think that one of the base risks to bitcoin is that as the power demand continues to skyrocket, nation states begin to ban bitcoin mining, or more harshly regulate it to control power demand. You could imagine mining shutting down in more and more countries, until there’s a “last man standing” somewhere with almost all the mining activity, and hence a highly centralized and highly vulnerable blockchain.

vmception 6y ago
Its more likely that more nation states vie for control of bitcoin mining, causing more competition over the resource and continual decentralization, much like how Iran has put a lot of support into the industry so that they dont have to use the sanctioned state-sponsored payment rails like SWIFT As bitcoin mining is mostly using clean energy or a sustainability solution for economic reasons, people should put their energy on making sure it stays that way, because nation states competing would be able to undermine the economics and make mining an actual environmental disaster instead of the imagined one people have assumed is happening
- lalaland1125 6y ago
  > As bitcoin mining is mostly using clean energy or a sustainability solution This is misleading and Bitcoin is currently an actual environmental disaster. Electricity is fungible and Bitcoin miners using green power sources are preventing the shutdown of coal power plants that would have otherwise shut down.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > misleading only because it's not a simple binary answer that people wish for. its a long answer with variables that have to be actively monitored. an annual dissertation really. even your acknowledgement of bitcoin miners using green power sources runs counter to detractor's worldview, and forces people to need to understand it better than "huh thats a lot of energy must be bad" so now we're at "wait they are green but now here is this indirect other problem when the goal post moves because I don't like how the energy is being used and I presuppose that energy is fungible" okay, yeah sure we can move the goal post a lot further and still show that its a working economic sustainability solution which can be improved when people direct their mental energy in a more nuanced way. your position is not to improve it, its to deflect towards there being no energy use at all, and that will never get you anywhere as the people that would actually have the authority to represent your wishes would look at it and come to my conclusion for example, not all the energy is fungible which is why it is being used by miners, and that's only in some of the variety cases, although a major case

sega_sai 6y ago

My take on this is the following. Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated from a point of view of benefits for society/world and then depending on this evaluation, the incentives should be updated to support things that we consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not. A few years ago Bitcoin didn't really register there, and it was okay to disregard. Now with so much energy/efforts spent there, one should ask oneselves, is it good allocation of resources? Is it good that so much cheap electricity is used for mining bitcoin? Can we think of a way of either taxing, or changing incentives, so that society benefits from this. I don't know what's the best way of changing the incentives, but it must be done in my opinion.

whimsicalism 6y ago
What if rather than taxing bitcoin, we just tax carbon usage?
- sega_sai 6y ago
  I think it is probably good to tax for Co2 production as a way of addressing global warming. I just don't think we should equate bitcoin production with other CO2 producers. I.e. I personally think that the CPU-cycles used for science on HPCs are much more valuable than the bitcoin mining (that's just my opinion though).
  - xur17 6y ago
    As you noted, this is just your opinion - are we going to have a person or group that decides what forms of Co2 usage are most "worthy", and adjust taxes accordingly? And let's say we do go down that path - one could certainly make the argument that Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes are much more worthy than Co2 used to search for aliens or participating in far out HPC research.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Incentivizing stupid things (like taking on mortgage debt or over-coverage by employer health plan) is already the status quo of the tax code. > Bitcoin usage from folks fleeing oppressive regimes Have bitcoin people (I don't know what else to call the people who want to talk about it all the time) actually convinced themselves that this is a substantial share of bitcoin usage?

marshmallow_12 6y ago

the way i see it is like this: bitcoin is an administrative tool to help facilitate the transfer of products more efficiently. Society invests a lot of energy in developing and maintaining such tools, for example currency and tax accountants. This is because the faster wealth can be exchanged, the faster new wealth can be created. This makes investing huge resources into inherently worthless services -like banks- worthwhile. They don't create any wealth but instead help people save time. This time is used to extract wealth from the earth and thus increase the overall quality of life. IF bitcoin helps to extract more raw products than was invested in the process of maintaining it, then it can't be criticised for waste more than the banks, for example. Edit: I am NOT merely finger pointing. A knee-jerk reaction would be to condemn btc as being entirely wasteful and therefore bad, but the reality is more nuanced.

the_why_of_y 6y ago
The enormous efficiency gains from transferring Bitcoins should never be underestimated! https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... At just $25.97 USD per transaction, the banks should just close up shop because they'll never be able to compete again.

casi 6y ago

if it costs $1 go buy then it is worth spending $0.99 on mining it. the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser. I am pro digital currencies in general, but we can do much better than bitcoin. That said we should avoid moral panic, it only brings division. Ultimately we are all on the same side.

gruez 6y ago
>the more expensive it becomes the more it consumes. its basically a paperclip maximiser. this is partly counter-balanced by the block subsidy halving every 4 years.
erikerikson 6y ago
You mention nothing about externalities. Sure the $ books balance out but what other effects are being selected? We are all on the same side but benefits and costs are not evenly allocated.

cryptica 6y ago

Bitcoin demonstrates the importance of first-mover advantage. It's one of the worst and most inefficient cryptocurrencies in existence but because it was the first, it's the most valuable. The world would be much better off with a Proof of Stake cryptocurrency as the dominant cryptocurrency. The rhetoric is extremely resilient. The price of Bitcoin has nothing to do with the underlying technology, it's all about the social network and infrastructure which exists around it. The rhetoric concerning Bitcoin only using clean energy is BS... If Bitcoin didn't use that surplus electricity, some other useful project would have had access to even cheaper electricity. But the same can be said about most of the big tech companies in existence today. Their dominance is all about social networks, infrastructure and rhetoric.

bidirectional 6y ago

Are there interesting technical challenges related to Bitcoin mining which induce competition and innovation? I ask because I see Bitcoin mining dismissed in the same way high frequency trading is (if you have enough starting capital/connections, you get to print money). However I know enough about HFT to realise that characterisation is very unfair (plenty of firms go bust, they capture a lot less value than the people they replaced, innovation is rife), is there anything similar going on with cryptocurrency mining, or are the surface level dismissals fair?

wmf 6y ago
There's definitely plenty of engineering around making the chips, miner boxes, and data centers as efficient as possible. Much of that engineering may not be transferable to other fields like cloud computing though.
marktangotango 6y ago
There are two aspects. One is the hardware. Coin production is held nearly constant by adjusting the difficulty. Hardware evolves such that hardware from a few years ago is drastically less effective than current hardware, and the difficulty is similarly higher. This means it takes new hardware to mine effectively. With jumps in prices comes jumps in prices of the hardware. And difficulty acquiring it. Also, the economics change with the price of btc (obviously). When btc is $50k, you can mine very profitably with $.12 kw/h domestic electricity (ie your house). When btc was $10k, you'd break even or lose money. So if you can get the hardware, and get access to cheap power, yes you can print money. Neither of those are easy. That's the challenge and why it's so easily dismissed as you observe. The really provocative question is imo, how high will the price of btc go? A lot of people speculate $100-300k. That kind of price justifies a lot of capital expenditure.
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
I would be much happier if there were no innovation. Instead of just wasting electricity, we are wasting lives and minds. We have teams designing custom silicon to print Bitcoin. At least it's better than them working for Google, I suppose. A "mine" is just a big warehouse full of jerry-rigged infrastructure. It will employ maybe two people and will pack up shop in an afternoon if the owners find cheaper electricity elsewhere. It doesn't provide any value to the local economy.

mtnGoat 6y ago

That’s my town! And it’s actually totally unnoticeable, 98% of people in town have no idea. The real only effect it had on most citizens were the fires that got started at a few mines, from electrical overloads. Now it’s a big pain if you want a large load of power, which makes starting a high power demand business a lot harder around here. We also have a ton of indoor pot farms, this is the best place in the country to grow indoors because power is so cheap. Since article was written a Diamond foundry opened up, pretty cool use of tons of power, and just about as useless as Bitcoin. Edit:spelling

schmuelio 6y ago
Diamonds aren't quite as useless as bitcoin currently. Bitcoin - as far as I'm aware - is currently mostly used for speculation. Whereas diamonds are very useful in many industrial processes which require hard materials (think cutting/grinding tools). One could argue that diamonds are considerably more useful than bitcoin, most of the world's diamond consumption is for industrial use rather than jewelry.
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  You’re right, that was aimed at the jeweler side of the market. I think the ones being made here are industrial.
csomar 6y ago
> That’s my town! And it’s actually totally unnoticeable, 98% of people in town have no idea. Do you mean that the journalist over-exaggerated the story in a very heated topic to get eyeballs. I'm, for one, very surprised. /s
Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
Fantastic real-world viewpoint! I was beginning to wonder if all these useful / useless arguments are just exaggerated drama. In reality Bitcoin mines are extremely low-profile operations.
- 6y ago

tromp 6y ago

Spot the error in this sentence: "By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Ripple. "

rpiguyshy 6y ago

"you could buy electricity for around 2.5 cents per kilowatt." this is a typo. they meant 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. i think its really interesting that elon musk has changed his public stance on bitcoin. originally, and for a long time, he described bitcoin as an alternative to cash but not an alternative to centralized banking because the primary purpose of money is to act as a database or tool for resource allocation. i had never thought of it that way and it intrigued me. overall he was basically dismissive of crypto. but then recently he has endorsed bitcoin, offered to buy out dogecoin investors and other things. and he hasnt elaborated on why he turned around, and joe rogan was too stupid to ask him when he came on the podcast recently.

jrv 6y ago
He commented a bit more here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1362600676174557186?s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1362600676174557186?s=19
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  wow thank you.
ffggvv 6y ago
i think tesla stock is essentially a meme and lost it’s luster so he had to do something to get the sheen back. especially to distract from news that chinese regulators were clamping down

henron 6y ago

See the founder of Coinbase fail to name a single specific way that bitcoin makes anyone better off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1073&v=Iiny6KBekSc.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

the issue with btc is that it lacks any stabilising element. Mainstream services invests in other products as well. This means that even if their product fails, the entirety of their energy investment wont be lost. The flipside is that if btc turns out to be a success (i'm not saying it's even possible), it should be more efficient at being a currency.

cybert00th 6y ago

Bitcoin = snake oil - it cures what ails ya. Miners may be making money now, but let's face it, it's an intangible asset made of 1s and 0s and wholly dependent on the presence of electricity. What could possibly go wrong...

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
That definition works for major potion of USD in circulation as well. So what's your point?

underseacables 6y ago

(2018). It would be interesting to see an updated version of this article.

arbuge 6y ago

A lot has been said about fossil fuel producers not bearing the full costs of the externalities of the products they produce. I think the same now has to be said of cryptocurrency mining. Is this activity, and the vast amount of energy and resources it consumes, really something which is a net positive for society?

user-the-name 6y ago
Even if you disregard the massive ecological harm it does, bitcoin is still a big negative for society, due to the immense amount of crime it enables - ransomware, money laundering, scams and fraud.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  I guess by your logic the US dollar USD is also a big negative for society then.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    There is absolutely no comparison to be made there. The percentage of Bitcoin usage that is criminal is just massively, MASSIVELY bigger than the same for USD.

Animats 6y ago

That's from 2018. Apparently there was a crash around 2019.[1] A boom might be starting again. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz-soaring-bitcoin-prices-put-central-washington-electrical-utilities-on-alert/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...

bdcravens 6y ago

How many towns were transformed when water was used to power new factories during the Industrial Revolution? Detroit and the automobile revolution? San Francisco in the Gold Rush? Houston in the Oil Boom?

cletus 6y ago

I am beginning to wonder if energy is what will eventually doom Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina [1]. Another article suggests the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is equivalent to New Zealand [2]. It's not just the cost of mining new coins (which will ultimately end) but the cost of maintaining the network. The more valuable the collective Bitcoins are, the more energy you need to spend defending it against 51% attacks. To the apologists claiming there's no other good use for that energy, it's not simple. Using too much electricity can raise the price that everybody pays [3]. Miners will keep chasing cheap power but I expect, much like ArbBnB, municipalities, states and even countries will increasingly clamp down on it. The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies. Try and see ordinary people deal with a Bitcoin wallet and discover there's no recourse if a vulnerability in their computer means the contents are irreversibly stolen. I realize there are corner cases (eg sending money to and from Venezuela). There's also a lot of illegal use cases. Thing is, blockchains aren't really as immutable as pundits suggest. Bitcoin and Ethereum have had forks. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambridge%20researchers%20say%20it%20consumes,Bitcoin%20undermines%20its%20environmental%20image https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambrid.... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html#:~:text=Bitcoin%20has%20a%20carbon%20footprint,Netherlands%2C%20Cambridge%20University%20researchers%20say https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor.... [3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-miners-to-this-small-city-then-came-the-backlash https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-m...

fearface 6y ago
Forks don’t mutate the origin chain.
- mortehu 6y ago
  Chains are amended, not mutated. Consensus about what new blocks to accept to the chain can change at any time. For example the chain following the original Ethereum rules is now called Ethereum Classic and its market cap is less than 0.5% of the new consensus.

geogra4 6y ago

The newer proof of stake coins solve this in a much more sane way. Proof of work is going to kill the planet

RustyRussell 6y ago

(2018)

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Wow what a waste, at least use the waste energy to heat Texan homes.

rawtxapp 6y ago
If only energy was that easy to transport.
kevindong 6y ago
As it turns out, virtually all electric heating is equally efficient (in terms of electricity used per unit of heat outputted). The only difference is that with electric heating, the desired output is the heat itself. While as with computers, the desired output is some kind of audio/visual signal with heat being a generally undesired byproduct. So during college, I repurposed my desktop PC to mine crypto instead of turning on the (electric) heat in the apartment. I ended up making ~$60 worth of crypto in about 1-2 months before I stopped mining crypto because the fan noise was unbearable.

dylkil 6y ago

why is hacker news so anti crypto

lxeiqr 6y ago

In my opinion, Bitcoin's Proof of Work is the biggest downside of that cryptocurrency (mostly due to extreme power consumption of the network). Moreover, the conservative approach of its developers to new concepts means that it's quite unlikely that the situation is going to change in coming months or years. Regardless, I wonder whether there are alternatives that could significantly reduce power usage of the whole network without making it more susceptible to various attacks. I've heard of Proof of Stake (Ethereum is planning to switch to it) or alternative PoW algorithms (such as Monero's RandomX), but I'm not experienced enough to tell how would these solutions scale for a cryptocurrency as big as Bitcoin today is.

qertoip 6y ago
Precisely the opposite, Sir. Employing PoW to protect against Sybil attack in anonymous network is the very invention that made Bitcoin possible. Without PoW you must ID participants, which makes system trivial to regulate or shutdown (see Facebook Libra, or security fraud case against Ripple). And no, PoS isn't the answer, because PoS implies a handful of biggest exchanges control the coin, because they genuinly stake the most. If Bitcoin was PoS, Mt Gox would run Bitcoin to this day!
- ralusek 6y ago
  Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are not too different in terms of what it would take in order to control the network. Stake and access to computing power are both just functions of being able to assemble sufficient resources so as to represent a sizable enough portion of control.
ralusek 6y ago
What's interesting is that all of the magic of crypto comes from: - Signed transactions being broadcast onto a p2p network - This network being visible to anyone who is interested The much less important part of crypto is exactly how the shared ledger is assembled. So long as these transactions are put together in a relatively timely manner, and no transactions are being willfully excluded, whatever mechanism used for assembling the ledger doesn't really matter that much. Proof of work is literally just a time-gated lottery for some entity to be the one that gets to say "I am submitting the next update to the ledger." They're not providing any service to the network that a single shitty chromebook couldn't provide on its own, the time-gated proof of work is literally just to arrive at a consensus. There are so many alternatives that make more sense than this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mudlus 6y ago

Perhaps Bitcoin is a decentralized consciousness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834

russh 6y ago

Thats a lot of words to say "The wrong people are making money."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

coeneedell 6y ago

So I grew up in Wenatchee, right across the river from East Wenatchee. I remember when this started in about 2016. I can't speak for east wenatchee but the downtown got a lot nicer, and people generally gut wealthier in Wenatchee. It could also be the more serious etablishment of the wine industry in the columbia river valley. Maybe it was the expansion of tourism? Or perhaps it was just that the economy of the united states at large was improving. Also all the energy in that town is hydro so if we're going to spend all this energy on bitcoin it may as well be non-emissions energy.

yourabstraction 6y ago

So many of you on here are eager to form a government committee to determine what is and isn't appropriate use of electricity. How are you going to feel when this witch hunt comes to shut down the activity that you deem useful? Maybe it'll be all the kilowatts you're drawing for an experimental ML project. Sorry, the committee just didn't see value in it! Are you really advocating to raise the barrier to experimentation and halt the pace of future technological developments? On a forum like HN nonetheless! I can think of any number of energy uses that could be classified as wasteful, are you ready to part with them? Turning your heat above 60 degrees in the winter Driving more than 10 miles a day Driving at all Owning a videogame console Spinning up too many cloud resources for an experimental startup Having a house larger than you need Having multiple cars per family Flying internationally Flying anywhere Buying a new TV, phone, laptop, or other gadget I can imagine a really horrific dystopia where an AI is given control of the Bureau of Moral Energy Use. It starts out nice enough finding low hanging fruit to reduce energy usage with minimal impact to peoples lives. And then it's a slippery slope, all the way to the final conclusion by the computer brain that the lowest energy users are DEAD HUMANS. The only holistic solution is to tax carbon at the time of production. Really, all economic externalities (pollution, garbage, aquifer use, etc.) should priced in at the point of production. It's too easy to never price it in if you punt to deal with it further downstream. I love reading HN, but every time Bitcoin comes up I feel like I'm hanging out with a bunch of virtue signaling luddites. You all need to stop being butt hurt that you missed the boat and look up at the revolution that's happening.

tarsinge 6y ago
Also eating meat, buying new clothes every few weeks/months, browsing inefficient websites, using social media with huge data centers to process personal data and target ads... These could be outright banned with no harm to society.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
There is such a trivial solution to this as well, set up a carbon tax or some other method that phases out all fossil fuels and charge what it costs to do this as the cost of electricity. Then at that point, who cares what you do with the power because the problem is solved. Specific laws targeting individual causes are always a useless whack a mole exercise when you can simply decentivise problems and the causes will rearrange themselves to not be problems.