7 ms·

I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.

detaro 6y ago
I've seen a bunch of artists jump on https://www.hicetnunc.xyz https://www.hicetnunc.xyz (which uses Tezos, which apparently is a Proof-of-Stake chain?) after the "wait, ETH uses how much energy?!" shock.
- ddeyar 6y ago
  It is LPoS. It means you're able to delegate your validation rights. So you don't need to run a node to participate in the staking process, you just delegate to a baker. And It's self amending. Every 3-4 months a proposal with upgrades will undergo a voting phase. All bakers are able to vote on this to accept or reject the proposal. The source code is written in a purely functional language on which formal verification is applied.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production. It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW
- onion2k 6y ago
  You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning, etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam, etc). There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batteries or gravity storage or something, or it could be sold to neighbouring energy users, or it could be used in the grid and other more polluting sources could be scaled down instead.
  - nandhinianand 6y ago
    > There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity.. For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and alternatives are still in research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage) .. so in theory there's a system that can be built around the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and pros).
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    What I’ve generally heard about nuclear and the grid in general is that it’s cost-ineffective to build out generation capacity to meet peak demand and that nuclear power is relatively bad at meeting fluctuations in demand. Sure, you could use batteries or whatever to store/use the power that the grid currently doesn’t need. You could also build aluminum processing plants or arc furnaces or whatever. Cryptocurrencies would be interesting because the mined cryptocurrency could used to reduce rates to consumers.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Or just stop the proof of work stuff. Just an idea.
- root_axis 6y ago
  It's a bad idea because the energy used is worse than wasted since all it does is contribute to an increase in the mining difficulty for the entire network, thus worsening the environmental impact. It's actually better for the environment to leave that energy completely unused rather than use it for mining bitcoins.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    This isn’t necessarily true: if the subsidies spread clean power generation then the percentage of miners that have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time. Also, since this would make relatively clean power sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil generation capacity.
    - root_axis 6y ago
      They're not "subsidies", they're just profits earned from selling what was mined, nothing useful happened, it simply makes the blockchain needlessly more expensive for everyone because a nuclear power plant is dumping hashing power into the network. Green energy doesn't change the fundamental nature of PoW, it inevitably expands to consume all available energy because the more energy you can burn the more money you can make.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        The important part is that the profits from mining are used to reduce rates: so it’s subsidizing the power costs for the customers as well as offsetting the capital investment into the powerplant.
        root_axis 6y ago
        Any reduction in rates would drive up the costs for everyone else. The capital investment required to construct a nuclear plant utterly dwarfs anything that could possibly be earned by mining.
      - nandhinianand 6y ago
- timoth3y 6y ago
  This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part of grid management. For example a factory will agree to decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower rates. Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline. For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that equipment sit idle except when there is an oversupply of electricity.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I was thinking that if you built for peak load, you could reduce the idle time to four hours or so a day.
  - prox 6y ago
    Another way to change this : Could crypto not make useful calculations instead of useless calculations? Like protein folding for example?
    - distances 6y ago
      Like Folding@home? No crypto needed.
    - gxon 6y ago
      https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-cant-we-design-a-bitcoin-that-does-useful-work https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-cant-w...
- gxon 6y ago
  You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready. For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out. I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck. This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.
- pwm 6y ago
  Yup, this idea has already been explored, eg. here is an example of environmentally net-positive way of mining: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitcoin-mining-is-being-touted-as-a-solution-to-gas-flaring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...
  - erosenbe0 6y ago
    I don't see it as a net positive unless you believe high energy cost crypto is of high value to society. You have a large environmental impact in building out and maintaining a mining facility and transport infrastructure thereto, as well as the ongoing waste all the way down to the food put into the pieholes of the humans running the facility.
    - pwm 6y ago
      Net positive means the benefits, ie. eliminating huge amounts of CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, outweighs the costs, ie. your list of capex+opex. Turning gas flares into miners is both ingenious and objectively net positive.
andreskytt 6y ago
Or, there’s an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy and no fancy tech.
- anonymoushn 6y ago
  Yeah, you could plausibly just transfer these things by having each owner sign an attestation of the new owner's public key. But since it looks like this junk will happen on a publicly accessible slow computer/database, I'm just hoping it happens on e.g. Solana instead of Ethereum.
  - kolinko 6y ago
    Signing attestation by itself wouldn’t work because of double spending. You would need either a centralised database of who owns what or a blockchain.
- anonporridge 6y ago
  Uh...no? These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless without some significant proof of violence and hyper censorship ability enforcing copyright protection. The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self enforcing digital scarcity.
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    Some company can run a DB to record spends. Why trust a third party? Well with any crypto linked to real world outcomes you need it trust a third party. Be that tether or some NFT hustler.
    - anonporridge 6y ago
      Because if I'm a rich person wanting to spend stupid amounts of money on some 'original' work of digital art, I don't want to trust a third party store the ownership records that could easily be corrupted. The ownership record in a public blockchain can't be corrupted.

detaro 6y ago

I've seen a bunch of artists jump on https://www.hicetnunc.xyz https://www.hicetnunc.xyz (which uses Tezos, which apparently is a Proof-of-Stake chain?) after the "wait, ETH uses how much energy?!" shock.

ddeyar 6y ago
It is LPoS. It means you're able to delegate your validation rights. So you don't need to run a node to participate in the staking process, you just delegate to a baker. And It's self amending. Every 3-4 months a proposal with upgrades will undergo a voting phase. All bakers are able to vote on this to accept or reject the proposal. The source code is written in a purely functional language on which formal verification is applied.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production. It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW

onion2k 6y ago
You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning, etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam, etc). There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batteries or gravity storage or something, or it could be sold to neighbouring energy users, or it could be used in the grid and other more polluting sources could be scaled down instead.
- nandhinianand 6y ago
  > There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity.. For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and alternatives are still in research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage) .. so in theory there's a system that can be built around the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and pros).
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  What I’ve generally heard about nuclear and the grid in general is that it’s cost-ineffective to build out generation capacity to meet peak demand and that nuclear power is relatively bad at meeting fluctuations in demand. Sure, you could use batteries or whatever to store/use the power that the grid currently doesn’t need. You could also build aluminum processing plants or arc furnaces or whatever. Cryptocurrencies would be interesting because the mined cryptocurrency could used to reduce rates to consumers.
arcticbull 6y ago
Or just stop the proof of work stuff. Just an idea.
root_axis 6y ago
It's a bad idea because the energy used is worse than wasted since all it does is contribute to an increase in the mining difficulty for the entire network, thus worsening the environmental impact. It's actually better for the environment to leave that energy completely unused rather than use it for mining bitcoins.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  This isn’t necessarily true: if the subsidies spread clean power generation then the percentage of miners that have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time. Also, since this would make relatively clean power sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil generation capacity.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    They're not "subsidies", they're just profits earned from selling what was mined, nothing useful happened, it simply makes the blockchain needlessly more expensive for everyone because a nuclear power plant is dumping hashing power into the network. Green energy doesn't change the fundamental nature of PoW, it inevitably expands to consume all available energy because the more energy you can burn the more money you can make.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The important part is that the profits from mining are used to reduce rates: so it’s subsidizing the power costs for the customers as well as offsetting the capital investment into the powerplant.
      - root_axis 6y ago
        Any reduction in rates would drive up the costs for everyone else. The capital investment required to construct a nuclear plant utterly dwarfs anything that could possibly be earned by mining.
    - nandhinianand 6y ago
timoth3y 6y ago
This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part of grid management. For example a factory will agree to decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower rates. Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline. For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that equipment sit idle except when there is an oversupply of electricity.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  I was thinking that if you built for peak load, you could reduce the idle time to four hours or so a day.
- prox 6y ago
  Another way to change this : Could crypto not make useful calculations instead of useless calculations? Like protein folding for example?
  - distances 6y ago
    Like Folding@home? No crypto needed.
  - gxon 6y ago
    https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-cant-we-design-a-bitcoin-that-does-useful-work https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-cant-w...
gxon 6y ago
You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready. For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out. I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck. This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.
pwm 6y ago
Yup, this idea has already been explored, eg. here is an example of environmentally net-positive way of mining: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitcoin-mining-is-being-touted-as-a-solution-to-gas-flaring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...
- erosenbe0 6y ago
  I don't see it as a net positive unless you believe high energy cost crypto is of high value to society. You have a large environmental impact in building out and maintaining a mining facility and transport infrastructure thereto, as well as the ongoing waste all the way down to the food put into the pieholes of the humans running the facility.
  - pwm 6y ago
    Net positive means the benefits, ie. eliminating huge amounts of CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, outweighs the costs, ie. your list of capex+opex. Turning gas flares into miners is both ingenious and objectively net positive.

andreskytt 6y ago

Or, there’s an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy and no fancy tech.

anonymoushn 6y ago
Yeah, you could plausibly just transfer these things by having each owner sign an attestation of the new owner's public key. But since it looks like this junk will happen on a publicly accessible slow computer/database, I'm just hoping it happens on e.g. Solana instead of Ethereum.
- kolinko 6y ago
  Signing attestation by itself wouldn’t work because of double spending. You would need either a centralised database of who owns what or a blockchain.
anonporridge 6y ago
Uh...no? These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless without some significant proof of violence and hyper censorship ability enforcing copyright protection. The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self enforcing digital scarcity.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Some company can run a DB to record spends. Why trust a third party? Well with any crypto linked to real world outcomes you need it trust a third party. Be that tether or some NFT hustler.
  - anonporridge 6y ago
    Because if I'm a rich person wanting to spend stupid amounts of money on some 'original' work of digital art, I don't want to trust a third party store the ownership records that could easily be corrupted. The ownership record in a public blockchain can't be corrupted.