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Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn't designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don't b

by lottin 6y ago

Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn't designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don't be surprised if people takes issue with that.

erentz 6y ago
This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade. I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow. Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere good. Meanwhile you and I if we are both reasonable can agree that both services should pay the full cost of their energy use. Edit: I see by the downvotes that people disagree. So how is it a settled fact that Bitcoin is more wasteful than e.g. Snapchat? Yes I know Bitcoin burns electricity to secure its network. But clearly people find that useful and value that enough to actually spend the money to do that. What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
- ben_w 6y ago
  > What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed? You wanna burn your own house to the ground, your problem. You live in a flat? Now it’s bigger than you. I’m optimistic about future tech and green energy and expect PV to solve greenhouse emissions. BTC is, by design, such that allowing it to succeed would lead to an arms race that has no upper bound — build a Dyson swarm, and the entire output of Sol gets spent fighting over who can find the right random numbers that hash in the right way, and it still doesn’t end. (Of course, civilization doesn’t last that long, because the moment energy is priced in BTC it becomes worthwhile doing anything physically possible to get a 51% double-spend attack).
- Blumfid 6y ago
  Snapchat actually entertain people and has some kind of value. Bitcoin burns resources for a handful people. A tremendous amount. It doesn't provide jobs in comparison to snapchat and other services. And independent of snapchat: feel free to see snapchat as a resource waste but that doesn't make bitcoins better.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade. It's definitively a fact. BSC provides the same pyramid schemes and pump and dump cryptocurrencies for a fraction of the power consumption of Bitcoin.
oleganza 6y ago
Snapchat data center uses as much energy as needed to extract value from Snapchat-the-product. Same goes for employee's time invested in support, development and research. If Snapchat makes money, it attracts investing resources into it until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. Same for Bitcoin or literally any other human activity. Miners are not going to consume more energy than mined bitcoins are worth.
- lottin 6y ago
  It seems that you're confusing allocative efficiency with cost efficiency. Anyway, the production costs of "a Snapchat" depend on the costs of inputs and the current state of technology. Specifically they are not a function of how much a Snapchat is worth in the market. Snapchat can increase the production costs arbitrarily, for instance, by wasting energy, and they could totally decide to waste as much energy as the market price of a Snapchat would allow. How moronic would that be? This is what Bitcoin does. It's important that people understand how Bitcoin works, because once they know how stupid it is a lot of them don't want to have anything to do with it. This has been my experience so far.
  - danielmain 6y ago
    I would like to add to your comment that the stupid algorithm called "mathematical puzzle" is just a brute force loop in order to find the nonce => nonsense waste of energy
krageon 6y ago
Literally every joule that goes into snapchat datacenters is wasted. It's not necessary, it doesn't make anything happy and it's primarily a way for a large company to harvest a lot of data on young people. Nobody wins with the way this power is used.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  Is your comment any better?
- makotoNagano 6y ago
  You can make that argument for any piece of entertainment. why live? let's all kill ourselves, that way we won't use any energy anymore.
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    I like the way you think
  - krageon 6y ago
    You can make the argument for anything, because it's a dumb argument - perhaps the point was entirely too buried :)
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  But Snapchat has fixed computation needs. If they figure out how to run everything on 50% of the power, their emissions go down by 50%. BTC has no such property. Make it 1,000 times more efficient to compute hashes and you just hash 1,000 times faster. No change in power use.
hparadiz 6y ago
Bitcoin isn't designed to waste energy. It's designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate from energy. It's humans that are essentially throwing electricity at it due to the high reward for doing so. Once equilibrium is reached there is no reason to throw more energy at it.
- Hermio 6y ago
  Sooooo how does that equilibrium should look like which stops the energy race? Everyone can calculate bitcoins with equal effort? Or is it still an arms race on who can gather more resources (energy/asics)?
  - hparadiz 6y ago
    The equilibrium is based on the hash rate difficulty which increases as more miners are added to the system. Miners can choose to jump into the system at any time with no restrictions. If a hash block is mined 'too fast' then the difficulty is increased proportionally. Of course as miners leave the network the difficulty also occasionally drops. The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. Just like how an old computer used more power for less computation so too is it possible for asics to get more efficient and there's ultimately a huge financial incentive to do so. You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet. Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy. Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
    - lxgr 6y ago
      > The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now). > Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
csomar 6y ago
This is purely subjective. Bitcoin's spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one's care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.
- lxgr 6y ago
  That's still not the problem: Proof-of-work mining wastes energy purposefully, while any other type of data processing only does so coincidentally. Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
  - erentz 6y ago
    But that’s not what happens. Data centers have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now we literally talk about planning gigawatt scale data centers. No “data center” took the efficiencies of Moore’s law and said “we good, we can stop making more complicated uses of computers now and just run what we already have on more efficient hardware”. So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
    - lxgr 6y ago
      Very good point – arguably many companies also just have a constant budget for their computing expenses and will buy the biggest/most boxes they can get for it. I still do think that it's an important difference whether becoming more resource efficient is something that could be incentivized/enforced without endangering the underlying business model or whether resource waste is the business model.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    No, the amount of energy "wasted" is not measured, the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule.

by lottin 6y ago

erentz 6y ago

This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade. I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow. Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere good. Meanwhile you and I if we are both reasonable can agree that both services should pay the full cost of their energy use. Edit: I see by the downvotes that people disagree. So how is it a settled fact that Bitcoin is more wasteful than e.g. Snapchat? Yes I know Bitcoin burns electricity to secure its network. But clearly people find that useful and value that enough to actually spend the money to do that. What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?

ben_w 6y ago
> What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed? You wanna burn your own house to the ground, your problem. You live in a flat? Now it’s bigger than you. I’m optimistic about future tech and green energy and expect PV to solve greenhouse emissions. BTC is, by design, such that allowing it to succeed would lead to an arms race that has no upper bound — build a Dyson swarm, and the entire output of Sol gets spent fighting over who can find the right random numbers that hash in the right way, and it still doesn’t end. (Of course, civilization doesn’t last that long, because the moment energy is priced in BTC it becomes worthwhile doing anything physically possible to get a 51% double-spend attack).
Blumfid 6y ago
Snapchat actually entertain people and has some kind of value. Bitcoin burns resources for a handful people. A tremendous amount. It doesn't provide jobs in comparison to snapchat and other services. And independent of snapchat: feel free to see snapchat as a resource waste but that doesn't make bitcoins better.
imtringued 6y ago
>This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade. It's definitively a fact. BSC provides the same pyramid schemes and pump and dump cryptocurrencies for a fraction of the power consumption of Bitcoin.

oleganza 6y ago

Snapchat data center uses as much energy as needed to extract value from Snapchat-the-product. Same goes for employee's time invested in support, development and research. If Snapchat makes money, it attracts investing resources into it until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. Same for Bitcoin or literally any other human activity. Miners are not going to consume more energy than mined bitcoins are worth.

lottin 6y ago
It seems that you're confusing allocative efficiency with cost efficiency. Anyway, the production costs of "a Snapchat" depend on the costs of inputs and the current state of technology. Specifically they are not a function of how much a Snapchat is worth in the market. Snapchat can increase the production costs arbitrarily, for instance, by wasting energy, and they could totally decide to waste as much energy as the market price of a Snapchat would allow. How moronic would that be? This is what Bitcoin does. It's important that people understand how Bitcoin works, because once they know how stupid it is a lot of them don't want to have anything to do with it. This has been my experience so far.
- danielmain 6y ago
  I would like to add to your comment that the stupid algorithm called "mathematical puzzle" is just a brute force loop in order to find the nonce => nonsense waste of energy

krageon 6y ago

Literally every joule that goes into snapchat datacenters is wasted. It's not necessary, it doesn't make anything happy and it's primarily a way for a large company to harvest a lot of data on young people. Nobody wins with the way this power is used.

WanderPanda 6y ago
Is your comment any better?
makotoNagano 6y ago
You can make that argument for any piece of entertainment. why live? let's all kill ourselves, that way we won't use any energy anymore.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  I like the way you think
- krageon 6y ago
  You can make the argument for anything, because it's a dumb argument - perhaps the point was entirely too buried :)
UncleMeat 6y ago
But Snapchat has fixed computation needs. If they figure out how to run everything on 50% of the power, their emissions go down by 50%. BTC has no such property. Make it 1,000 times more efficient to compute hashes and you just hash 1,000 times faster. No change in power use.

hparadiz 6y ago

Bitcoin isn't designed to waste energy. It's designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate from energy. It's humans that are essentially throwing electricity at it due to the high reward for doing so. Once equilibrium is reached there is no reason to throw more energy at it.

Hermio 6y ago
Sooooo how does that equilibrium should look like which stops the energy race? Everyone can calculate bitcoins with equal effort? Or is it still an arms race on who can gather more resources (energy/asics)?
- hparadiz 6y ago
  The equilibrium is based on the hash rate difficulty which increases as more miners are added to the system. Miners can choose to jump into the system at any time with no restrictions. If a hash block is mined 'too fast' then the difficulty is increased proportionally. Of course as miners leave the network the difficulty also occasionally drops. The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. Just like how an old computer used more power for less computation so too is it possible for asics to get more efficient and there's ultimately a huge financial incentive to do so. You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet. Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy. Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
  - lxgr 6y ago
    > The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now). > Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.

csomar 6y ago

This is purely subjective. Bitcoin's spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one's care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.

lxgr 6y ago
That's still not the problem: Proof-of-work mining wastes energy purposefully, while any other type of data processing only does so coincidentally. Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
- erentz 6y ago
  But that’s not what happens. Data centers have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now we literally talk about planning gigawatt scale data centers. No “data center” took the efficiencies of Moore’s law and said “we good, we can stop making more complicated uses of computers now and just run what we already have on more efficient hardware”. So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
  - lxgr 6y ago
    Very good point – arguably many companies also just have a constant budget for their computing expenses and will buy the biggest/most boxes they can get for it. I still do think that it's an important difference whether becoming more resource efficient is something that could be incentivized/enforced without endangering the underlying business model or whether resource waste is the business model.
- thebean11 6y ago
  No, the amount of energy "wasted" is not measured, the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule.