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Invest in your responses more, or are you truthfully thinking that cryptocurrencies are responsible for climate change?
by tifadg1 6y ago
Invest in your responses more, or are you truthfully thinking that cryptocurrencies are responsible for climate change?
- dgellow 6y agoProof of Work does and will contribute in non-significant way. That’s exactly what the incentives are. It’s by design.
- ric2b 6y agoThe incentive is to produce proof of work, not energy wasted. That's why miners use highly specialized and efficient machines and not just any random computer that draws a lot of power.
- xbar 6y agoYou cannot have ever been in a room doing mining. Your phone is highly specialized and efficient. Coin mining is a noise parade and heat monstrosity that grows up to the limit of how much power it can draw at affordable rates. I have run billion dollar datacenters. They are dwarfed by small mining operations in their heat production and power consumption.
- ric2b 6y agoI don't understand how what you said is in disagreement with my claims. Yes, miners try to use their machines as much as possible, like any other business, but they still try to it as efficiently as they can. Undervolting chips to increase efficiency is quite common, for example. And my phone is not very specialized at all, when compared to a mining ASIC.
- dgellow 6y agoThat’s because you stop at the first level instead of exploring the effects of 2nd, 3rd, nth order. Or you do not understand the business side of miners. Miners make money by generating hashes. The more computing power the more hashing power you have. The value of expected rewards determines how much you will be willing to spend on the mining operation. Let’s say you have a gain of 10% efficiency, meaning you spend 10% less on your expenses while winning the same number of rewards. So what is your incentive? Is it to stay like this and be happy that you saved some energy? Of course not, you will spend these extra 10% to gain more rewards. And now your competition also has to up their game. By design, the higher Bitcoin price is, the more energy is worth spending on Proof of Work. More efficient hardware doesn’t change that fact. It’s by design not sustainable.
- ric2b 6y agoNone of what you said is special about mining. If a factory increases efficiency by 10% it will simply produce more of whatever it makes as long as there's demand for it. And then other factories have to up their game. Also the higher the price of the product the factory produces, the more it is worth spending extra resources producing it. And of course this isn't limited to factories, it's true for businesses in general. What is special about mining is that energy is just about the only resource it uses, so it's more obvious, while a factory might be bottle-necked by other resources like floor space and a software company might be bottle-necked by how many programmers it can hire/manage. Miners are similarly limited by how much mining hardware they have or are capable of managing.
- user-the-name 6y agoThey use over 0.1% of the world's energy at the moment, and growing rapidly. All the climate savings that Tesla advertises themselves as having achieved over the lifetime of the company, Bitcoin cancels out in a month. Bitcoin is currently closing in on having the carbon emissions of the Gulf War oil fires at their peak.
- lupire 6y agoTesla isn't saving much energy, apparently. Manufacturing and then repairing a luxury car uses a lot of energy.
- user-the-name 6y agoThis is an often-repeated bit of anti-environmental propaganda, which is not particularly true.
- xbar 6y agoWithout any doubt.