4 ms·

Not at all! Bitcoin is not just inefficient, it is purposefully inefficient on a colossal scale. By design, all the energy is turned into waste heat.

• zamadatix 5y ago
  "Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.
  • zbrozek 5y ago
    In those other processes the designers aim for efficiency - more useful product per entropy. In bitcoin it's exactly the opposite. That makes it unpalatable.
    • zamadatix 5y ago
      It is inefficient and unpalatable compared to traditional trust absolutely, even to some other crypto methods that try to achieve similar goals. Like I said I'm not really a fan of Bitcoin (or crypto to be honest). That being said Bitcoin doesn't aim for less product per entropy. That would literally mean you get more reward for doing the same work in the same time but less efficiently which isn't true. That doesn't mean everyone always uses the most efficient hashing method, just like not every car uses the same engine because it has the best efficiency, it just means the aim isn't towards making less product per entropy. The product may not be aligned with what you want (e.g. "very efficient way to trust a transaction") but that's back to calling the energy usage all "just for waste" because you don't personally value the output the same way as someone else (which is true of every use of energy).
    • clarkmoody 5y ago
      Bitcoin mining strives for as much efficiency as any other electronic process: ASIC chips are hitting the smallest process size available. Miners are extremely sensitive to electricity cost, so they must be efficient there. They do not compete with households for power. If Bitcoin mining were aiming to consume the most energy possible, then the hashing would be done by hand on pencil and paper.
  • leetcrew 5y ago
    maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • zamadatix 5y ago
      If 100% of the input power was given to waste heat then your computer would just be a resistance heater and not a computer. Computing information is work which requires energy (which will also eventually end up as heat in the long run, as will all energy, just not waste heat) and there is a limit on how efficiently you can compute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle. I.e. it's not possible to compute something without doing work. Waste heat in a computer is largely resistance, power conversion inefficiencies, and cooling. Heat generated by the actual computation is known as work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics) not waste heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat. The ratio of the two describes the efficiency of a machine. Since some useful work must have been done for the computation to occur then it's impossible for 100% of the energy to have been used for waste heat.
      • patrick451 5y ago
        I find myself dubious of the claim that after an hour of isolated number crunching, my GPU has done anything aside from generate heat (that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information). If only 95% of it became waste heat, where is the 5%? Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclever, then suddenly all of the heat becomes "waste".
        • NeutronStar 5y ago