10 ms·

I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold

by caf 6y ago

I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).

arcticbull 6y ago
About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals. The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things. What a disaster.
- CTDOCodebases 6y ago
  The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
  - tsss 6y ago
    It does so with the same efficiency as a Rube Goldberg machine moves a marble from one place to another.
    - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
      Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
      - salawat 6y ago
        I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
        gruez 6y ago
        >I"ll hire a few guys with guns A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns. >plus auditors https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight-on-auditor-ernst-young-11593286933 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
        arcticbull 6y ago
        How's that Tether transparency report looking :) ahh, here it is. [1] [1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlement_agreement_-_execution_version.b-t_signed-c2_oag_signed.pdf https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    What if we had 1000x the power being used to confirm transactions? 1,000,000x the power? At some point we aren't achieving anything. The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.
    - Siira 6y ago
      Yes, alternatives that work for rich, powerful people.
      - knorthfield 6y ago
        These people buying power stations aren't rich? One of the issues with crypto currency is that we're replacing one elite with another. As John Oliver says Cryptocurrency is everything you don't understand about finance combined with everything you don't understand about computers. That new, even eliter, elite is probably no more moral or ethical than the old. It's not like cryptocurrency is more accessible. Maybe it will become so but I still have to fork out a lot of money to buy Bitcoin. It's just the fees get paid to different people. Not entirely sure how it's better. It is different though, I'll give you that.
        jessaustin 6y ago
        Bitcoin is like any other infinitely divisible asset. You can buy as much or as little as you want.
  - berdario 6y ago
    The nonce used as input of the mining hash function IS random (or rather, arbitrary). Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet
    - Siira 6y ago
      You’re just deflecting. Your argument is as invalid as “mutations are random so evolution is false.” Randomness in an algorithm does not mean the algorithm is non-converging.
      - berdario 6y ago
        I never said anything about converging or not. My GP's post simply points out that having repeated computations with arbitrary input is wasteful. "Your argument is as invalid as..." ROTFL Wake me up when Bitcoin moves to a PoS consensus (Btw, I recommend whoever is reading to also steer clear of PoS coins... If you want to invest, look elsewhere)
- throwaway271818 6y ago
  Where did you get the 100g of e-waste figure from btw? Is that, roughly speaking, the e-waste mass of storage/txn * total number of nodes?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Digiconomist [1]. I should have linked it up top, my bad. Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2]. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X
    - throwaway271818 6y ago
      Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years. The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)
      - ta988 6y ago
        But is it recycled? From what I understand it cannot be reused as a device, it has to be reprocessed to extract metals and such. So the value is pretty low and losses are high.
    - celticninja 6y ago
      This is a better index and not run by someone with an axe to grind https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        The number you link is 43% higher.
- roenxi 6y ago
  There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.
  - malka 6y ago
    "a trusted party" does not exist at scale.
    - o-__-o 6y ago
      Including with Bitcoin, since 51% ownership of hash rate is simply a function of who has the most pooled resources (read: money)
    - webinvest 6y ago
      One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation. It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns). It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap. Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.
      - minikites 6y ago
        Is this a press release?
- CTDOCodebases 6y ago
  Once the gold is extracted how much energy is spent to transport it, turn it into jewellery and store/protect it throughout its lifetime?
- AustinDev 6y ago
  Gold mining btc mining isn’t the best comparison. For your 5X number. You’ve still got to ship and store the gold which undoubtedly has additional environmental costs.
imtringued 6y ago
Jewelry is a surprisingly big chunk of global gold demand. Yes it is ultimately meaningless other than to impress other humans, however this meaningless activity is part of human nature. We derive joy from it. Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.
- CTDOCodebases 6y ago
  It could be argued that people are flocking to Bitcoin not to increase wealth but to preserve it over a long period of time. I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter. Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
  - etripe 6y ago
    > To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive. Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
    - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
      I wasn’t referring to fiat currency since that is a terrible store of value. It is guaranteed to have less buying power in the future. What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
ballenf 6y ago
Maybe humans were created by an ET life as mining/purifying beings whose sole purpose is to be dropped on planets and left alone for a few millennia to do their thing. The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.

by caf 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals. The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things. What a disaster.

CTDOCodebases 6y ago
The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
- tsss 6y ago
  It does so with the same efficiency as a Rube Goldberg machine moves a marble from one place to another.
  - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
    Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
    - salawat 6y ago
      I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
      - gruez 6y ago
        >I"ll hire a few guys with guns A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns. >plus auditors https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight-on-auditor-ernst-young-11593286933 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
        arcticbull 6y ago
        How's that Tether transparency report looking :) ahh, here it is. [1] [1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlement_agreement_-_execution_version.b-t_signed-c2_oag_signed.pdf https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  What if we had 1000x the power being used to confirm transactions? 1,000,000x the power? At some point we aren't achieving anything. The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.
  - Siira 6y ago
    Yes, alternatives that work for rich, powerful people.
    - knorthfield 6y ago
      These people buying power stations aren't rich? One of the issues with crypto currency is that we're replacing one elite with another. As John Oliver says Cryptocurrency is everything you don't understand about finance combined with everything you don't understand about computers. That new, even eliter, elite is probably no more moral or ethical than the old. It's not like cryptocurrency is more accessible. Maybe it will become so but I still have to fork out a lot of money to buy Bitcoin. It's just the fees get paid to different people. Not entirely sure how it's better. It is different though, I'll give you that.
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        Bitcoin is like any other infinitely divisible asset. You can buy as much or as little as you want.
- berdario 6y ago
  The nonce used as input of the mining hash function IS random (or rather, arbitrary). Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet
  - Siira 6y ago
    You’re just deflecting. Your argument is as invalid as “mutations are random so evolution is false.” Randomness in an algorithm does not mean the algorithm is non-converging.
    - berdario 6y ago
      I never said anything about converging or not. My GP's post simply points out that having repeated computations with arbitrary input is wasteful. "Your argument is as invalid as..." ROTFL Wake me up when Bitcoin moves to a PoS consensus (Btw, I recommend whoever is reading to also steer clear of PoS coins... If you want to invest, look elsewhere)
throwaway271818 6y ago
Where did you get the 100g of e-waste figure from btw? Is that, roughly speaking, the e-waste mass of storage/txn * total number of nodes?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Digiconomist [1]. I should have linked it up top, my bad. Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2]. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X
  - throwaway271818 6y ago
    Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years. The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)
    - ta988 6y ago
      But is it recycled? From what I understand it cannot be reused as a device, it has to be reprocessed to extract metals and such. So the value is pretty low and losses are high.
  - celticninja 6y ago
    This is a better index and not run by someone with an axe to grind https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      The number you link is 43% higher.
roenxi 6y ago
There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.
- malka 6y ago
  "a trusted party" does not exist at scale.
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    Including with Bitcoin, since 51% ownership of hash rate is simply a function of who has the most pooled resources (read: money)
  - webinvest 6y ago
    One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation. It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns). It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap. Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.
    - minikites 6y ago
      Is this a press release?
CTDOCodebases 6y ago
Once the gold is extracted how much energy is spent to transport it, turn it into jewellery and store/protect it throughout its lifetime?
AustinDev 6y ago
Gold mining btc mining isn’t the best comparison. For your 5X number. You’ve still got to ship and store the gold which undoubtedly has additional environmental costs.

imtringued 6y ago

Jewelry is a surprisingly big chunk of global gold demand. Yes it is ultimately meaningless other than to impress other humans, however this meaningless activity is part of human nature. We derive joy from it. Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.

CTDOCodebases 6y ago
It could be argued that people are flocking to Bitcoin not to increase wealth but to preserve it over a long period of time. I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter. Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
- etripe 6y ago
  > To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive. Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
  - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
    I wasn’t referring to fiat currency since that is a terrible store of value. It is guaranteed to have less buying power in the future. What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?

ballenf 6y ago

Maybe humans were created by an ET life as mining/purifying beings whose sole purpose is to be dropped on planets and left alone for a few millennia to do their thing. The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.