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Bitcoin isn't designed to waste energy. It's designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate fro

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.
    - hparadiz 6y ago
      > 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). I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
      - lxgr 6y ago
        What‘s inaccurate about my statement? I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
        hparadiz 6y ago
        You claim that it's possible to tell how much energy was used to produce a block minting solution given the difficulty. It is not. If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
        rcxdude 6y ago
        It's true you can't predict exactly the energy used in a given block, but you can predict the energy use of blocks on average: this is not very difficult because the energy efficiency of state of the art mining hardware is known, and the difficulty is known.
_Microft 6y ago
This sounds a lot like the „guns do not kill people, people kill people“ argument to me (which, for various reasons, is not a good one in my opinion)

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.
  - hparadiz 6y ago
    > 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). I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
    - lxgr 6y ago
      What‘s inaccurate about my statement? I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
      - hparadiz 6y ago
        You claim that it's possible to tell how much energy was used to produce a block minting solution given the difficulty. It is not. If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
        rcxdude 6y ago
        It's true you can't predict exactly the energy used in a given block, but you can predict the energy use of blocks on average: this is not very difficult because the energy efficiency of state of the art mining hardware is known, and the difficulty is known.

_Microft 6y ago

This sounds a lot like the „guns do not kill people, people kill people“ argument to me (which, for various reasons, is not a good one in my opinion)