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A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regula

by jude- 5y ago

A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Why 100% renewables? Biofuel is renewable but also emits lots of carbon and air pollution. Nuclear is not considered renewable but is low carbon and clean air. Seems like the the term allows undue wiggle room. Might want to require that it be generated with energy that emits less than 50 gCO2-eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis or something more specific.
- jude- 5y ago
  Please don't be daft. You know what I meant.
  - acidburnNSA 5y ago
    Didn't mean to be daft. It's a word with lots wrapped up in it. 100% clean is a better term IMHO.
semicolon_storm 5y ago
I thought one of the touted benefits of bitcoin (and other DeFi) is the resistance to regulations? Sort of seems counterproductive to say that regulation will fix the issues with the currency that's supposed to resist regulation.
- jude- 5y ago
  Nonsense. PoW exists in the real world and had negative externalities. Of course it's subject to regulation.
ffggvv 5y ago
how would they do that practically? would require a huge surveillance state with constant monitoring to make sure you’re not mining on non allowed power
- jude- 5y ago
  Mining rigs already require tremendous amounts of power, and there are already laws on the books that allow the government to know what you're doing with that power (i.e. for safety and environmental reasons). You can easily determine which power sinks are mining rigs, and require them to use only excess renewable power, or off-grid renewable power (it's pretty easy to tell if you're using off-grid fossil fuels with satellite imagery -- you can't hide the CO2). Governments can easily enforce this -- simply require all blocks to be signed by a government-issued keypair to attests to the green-ness of the power used to produce them, and require exchanges under its jurisdiction to deny, limit, or tax the sale of non-green coins.
hudon 5y ago
“Runs fine” doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient. If we can get whatever value out of a payment system with 1 wind turbine instead of 10,000, the former is obviously a better choice. And right now it’s not obvious that PoW provides anything that other technologies can’t. Bitcoin itself has shown that when PoW doesn’t produce the results people want, developers can just release code that makes users ignore the most work chain... so the system ends up just as political as any other money system, and PoW is just a clever trick to fool investors into thinking there’s some magic “decentralization” going on.
- jude- 5y ago
  If all it's using is surplus green energy (something regulators can enforce), then efficiency isn't a concern. That energy was wasted either way. Re: PoW, the thing it does provide that no other tech can't is Sybil-resistant open-membership replicated state machines. Anyone can join in deciding state transitions because the barrier to entry (access to mining tech and electricity) is decoupled from the system's operation -- there are no protocol-defined gate keepers. Sybil-resistance comes from the fact that votes on the next epoch of state transitions comes from an irreversible expenditure on the voter's part (i.e. you can't vote for 2 conflicting blocks in PoW without having 2x the mining power). Making the system process state transitions at a fixed pace under these two constraints is the scientific breakthrough that PoW contributes.
  - hudon 5y ago
    Of course you can mine 2 “conflicting blocks” in PoW cryptobeans, you can just tweak the clients of a fork to require negligible work for the next block and convince everyone that the most-work chain is a hostile takeover. Satoshi did not anticipate how forking clients with tweaked implementations invalidate the whole security model. This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0]. The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system. The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t. [0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

by jude- 5y ago

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Why 100% renewables? Biofuel is renewable but also emits lots of carbon and air pollution. Nuclear is not considered renewable but is low carbon and clean air. Seems like the the term allows undue wiggle room. Might want to require that it be generated with energy that emits less than 50 gCO2-eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis or something more specific.

jude- 5y ago
Please don't be daft. You know what I meant.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Didn't mean to be daft. It's a word with lots wrapped up in it. 100% clean is a better term IMHO.

semicolon_storm 5y ago

I thought one of the touted benefits of bitcoin (and other DeFi) is the resistance to regulations? Sort of seems counterproductive to say that regulation will fix the issues with the currency that's supposed to resist regulation.

jude- 5y ago
Nonsense. PoW exists in the real world and had negative externalities. Of course it's subject to regulation.

ffggvv 5y ago

how would they do that practically? would require a huge surveillance state with constant monitoring to make sure you’re not mining on non allowed power

jude- 5y ago
Mining rigs already require tremendous amounts of power, and there are already laws on the books that allow the government to know what you're doing with that power (i.e. for safety and environmental reasons). You can easily determine which power sinks are mining rigs, and require them to use only excess renewable power, or off-grid renewable power (it's pretty easy to tell if you're using off-grid fossil fuels with satellite imagery -- you can't hide the CO2). Governments can easily enforce this -- simply require all blocks to be signed by a government-issued keypair to attests to the green-ness of the power used to produce them, and require exchanges under its jurisdiction to deny, limit, or tax the sale of non-green coins.

hudon 5y ago

“Runs fine” doesn’t mean it’s energy efficient. If we can get whatever value out of a payment system with 1 wind turbine instead of 10,000, the former is obviously a better choice. And right now it’s not obvious that PoW provides anything that other technologies can’t. Bitcoin itself has shown that when PoW doesn’t produce the results people want, developers can just release code that makes users ignore the most work chain... so the system ends up just as political as any other money system, and PoW is just a clever trick to fool investors into thinking there’s some magic “decentralization” going on.

jude- 5y ago
If all it's using is surplus green energy (something regulators can enforce), then efficiency isn't a concern. That energy was wasted either way. Re: PoW, the thing it does provide that no other tech can't is Sybil-resistant open-membership replicated state machines. Anyone can join in deciding state transitions because the barrier to entry (access to mining tech and electricity) is decoupled from the system's operation -- there are no protocol-defined gate keepers. Sybil-resistance comes from the fact that votes on the next epoch of state transitions comes from an irreversible expenditure on the voter's part (i.e. you can't vote for 2 conflicting blocks in PoW without having 2x the mining power). Making the system process state transitions at a fixed pace under these two constraints is the scientific breakthrough that PoW contributes.
- hudon 5y ago
  Of course you can mine 2 “conflicting blocks” in PoW cryptobeans, you can just tweak the clients of a fork to require negligible work for the next block and convince everyone that the most-work chain is a hostile takeover. Satoshi did not anticipate how forking clients with tweaked implementations invalidate the whole security model. This is the same attack model that leads there being a public debate about “Segwit coin VS BCash”. It’s also what happened with the 2013 fork[0]. The system ends up needing politics and power games just like the current financial system. The technology is a distraction to fool intelligent engineers into thinking this system is different. It isn’t. [0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...