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Why do we have this attitude towards crypto but not towards the enormous mountain of energy required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional
by hwers 5y ago
Why do we have this attitude towards crypto but not towards the enormous mountain of energy required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional software businesses.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoefficiency
- tata71 5y ago...that's a joke, right? Have you seen the average enterprise's stack?
- user-the-name 5y agoThe worst enterprise stack you have ever seen is most likely at least a million times more efficient than bitcoin. That is not an exaggeration, and is more likely to be a severe understatement.
- agumonkey 5y agoI can't claim numbers but even if you have the fastest and leanest information system, the rest of the economy might be problematic, the human layer is really bad. I stopped counting how many time we asked people to come back another day (more car use) because the old paper+digital system is not made for high throughput. Our servers are probably super fast.. but the apps are not useful, the system is not useful, thus lots of waste above.
- user-the-name 5y agoI'm not sure I see what this has to do with what I said?
- user-the-name 5y agoExactly: Bitcoin is using as much energy as the entire country of Sweden in order to do work that could be done by a single desktop PC from 2004.
- fastball 5y agoIf the work Bitcoin is doing could be done by a single desktop PC from 2004 then... the work would be being done by a single desktop PC from 2004. But clearly it is not. Every time I see a thread on HN about crypto it makes me want to buy BTC or w/e because people are so unbelievably disingenuous on here that it probably still has a lot of steam left. The side that needs to be misleading to make their point is rarely the correct side to be on in my experience.
- infecto 5y agoAnd sadly both sides are misleading.
- user-the-name 5y agoBitcoin processes, as a maximum dictated by technological choices, 2-3 transactions per second. Each transaction is around a few hundred bytes.
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoLuckily Bitcoin has second layer systems being built on top of it, which allow it to leverage that 2-3 on-chain transactions per second to process thousands of millions more transactions off chain either through decentralized systems like Lightning or centralized custodial wallets.
- user-the-name 5y agoSecond layer solutions that do not actually work and that rely on solving unsolved problems in computer science to actually get working at scale.
- agumonkey 5y agoHonestly, even though I don't like the insane power usage of PoW cryptos, I don't like the waste of the normal economy either. There's so much waste ... but anyways that would require its own thread I guess.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoYeah there's waste everywhere, the amount of energy wasted by the over-reliance on cars in the US could probably power the entire planet. It's telling that the bitcoin defense is 99% whattaboutism – but have no fear readers, I scream into the void about those other things too.
- agumonkey 5y agoI don't think it's only whattaboutism, it's mostly that crypto is becoming a meme complaint and even whattaboutism is thrown as reflex "what about you". ps: I'm trying to go from screamer to proactive these days. I was already frugal and dropped car use, I'm also thinking into starting clubs to make more walk/bike use, recycling/upcycling repair shops and the likes. Do you have similar ideas ?
- micromacrofoot 5y agoI already do things like you mention... walk most places, reuse/repair when feasible, buying less packaged food, avoiding leisure flying (I used to travel often)... but individual impact is fairly minimal, so I've been putting more effort into supporting local political candidates who prioritize the climate. I also complain a lot at community meetings for new development in my immediate area (things like reducing parking in new buildings, including bike storage, EV charging, better public transit infrastructure)... I've found some of this stuff more fulfilling in that the impact tends to extend beyond what I'd be capable of doing alone... sometimes it's fruitless, but sometimes it works.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'm trying to skip politics because I think it's fluff and too laggy. But I'm still at theory level. Ideally I'd find a few open warehouses to set up stuff. Tools, materials, gather smart / knowledgeable people, teach and viral spread the new habits. Hopefully it will cost next to nothing and happen faster than politically impeded initiatives.
- adflux 5y agoBecause mining bitcoin alone consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. And all that for a very low amount of transactions.
- politician 5y agoIf you’re concerned with high energy requirements for a low number of transactions, just wait until you learn about FedWire!
- saddlerustle 5y agoA single aluminium smelter consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. It's not a very useful comparison.
- Retric 5y agoThat’s wildly incorrect, why would you think it’s true? Netherlands uses 108,800 GWh per yer. Global aluminum smelting is 8x that, but no single smelter comes close to producing 1/8th the worlds aluminimum.
- jamiek88 5y agoYes and that is useful work. Unlike bitcoin.
- objclxt 5y ago> A single aluminium smelter consumes more power than the entirety of the Netherlands. It's not a very useful comparison. This is patently false. The Netherlands has an aluminium smelting plant[1]. Why would you say something so obviously disproven? [1]:https://aldel.nl https://aldel.nl
- tata71 5y agoSeemed like hyperbole in order to put forth the point that NL is the size of a German neighborhood.
- snarf21 5y agoBecause crypto isn't usable and never will be. It isn't built to handle processing charges of $0.30 plus 3% on a $10 transaction and that it what it is competing with. Instead it is simply speculation and gambling and pump & dump. BTC already uses more power than several countries. Visa uses a fraction of that for a better and more functional system. And please don't say PoS. PoS is centralized by default. If you are going to be centralized, why do crypto at all?
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoSecond layer technologies are the solution to that problem. We can build systems on top of bitcoin that have some tradeoffs but allow for exponentially more transactions at lower fees. Lightning is one example of these second layer systems. Custodial wallets like Coinbase and others are a poor, but simple and easy example.
- eropple 5y agoFrom a physical or a regulatory perspective, any of those second-order systems are going to be subject to the same money-transmitting laws in place across the world. So you can reimplement the existing money-moving tools with no significant benefits to anybody except the creators of the money-moving tools, who can take a vig instead of a bank or Visa. Let's burn the planet down for that, hell yeah.
- fastball 5y agoHow is PoS centralized by default? You think ETH mining is less concentrated than ETH holding? I know scores of people who hold ETH. I know like 2 people that have tried mining it.
- _Kristijan_ 5y agoThere is not only PoS. Open Representative Voting (ORV) is a working solution: https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/ https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/
- burkaman 5y agoWe care about both. All the major cloud platforms are putting a lot of work into powering their data centers with as much renewable energy as possible, and surfacing carbon information to engineers using the platforms. See the feature Google just released, for example: https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint. It's even a somewhat mainstream topic - I'm pretty sure I've seen NYT articles about the carbon footprint of Zoom calls and Netflix streaming. It's something I personally think about a lot, and I know many others do. Here's a community of people that discuss this topic a lot if you're interested: https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/
- Rygian 5y agoBecause power spent on mining is effectively 100% wasted for no useful computation.
- fastball 5y agoExcept, ya know, it powers the decentralized currency with a market cap of $1T.
- wussboy 5y agoPerhaps that’s the part they think is not useful?
- yxwvut 5y agoA currency that is practically impossible to use as such...
- TheSmiddy 5y agoIn a disgustingly inefficient way. Global Financial System: 263.72TWh Bitcoin: 113.89TWh - GFS deposits: US$404.1 trillion Bitcoin: US$1.1 trillion - GFS energy per US$: 0.65 Wh Bitcoin energy per US$: 103.53 Wh And this is calculated just for the value of deposits, if we do it again for number of transactions it's even more scathing. https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2
- infecto 5y agoWhy can we not be critical of new inventions? Should we not be trying to make things better? To me thats like making the argument that because we have coal plants today means we should have no problem generating XY new plant because it's not worse than what we have now. BTC is old, the possibilities have been proven but I think it's totally fair that we try to get somewhere more efficient than what we have now.
- objclxt 5y ago> not towards the enormous mountain of power required to power non crypto servers as part of normal professional software business The incentives are very different, I don't think you can compare them like that. Miners and companies like Google both make more money the less power they use. However, in the case of Google power consumption is a side effect of their business. To put it another way: if you overnight doubled Google's datacenter capacity you would not double their revenues. But if you doubled a bitcoin miner's capacity there would be an immediate change in the amount of revenue being made. This means that for miners there's a very clear incentive to use whatever resources you can at your disposal, because the more power and hardware you have the more profit you can make.