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Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decid

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

jancsika 5y ago
I'm just imagining downloading a porn client which fetches 300 gigabytes of bullshit before it finally lets me watch a movie at a whopping five frames per second. And best of all, someone complaining that this is clearly a wasteful scam and being told back, "how much energy did videocassettes and magazines consume, huh?"
dagmx 5y ago
But won't each of those take up significantly more energy once they use Bitcoin than today? I.e the costs will be additive , and crypto aims to replace fiat. So crypto would need to be more efficient at the same scale as fiat to make sense. Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale better? Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing cost? Generation cost?
- chrischattin 5y ago
  No. Bitcoin network power usage isn’t related to the number of transactions.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    You're only talking about at any given moment in tjme, but Bitcoin hashing difficulty adjusts in an almost correlated way to number of transactions being performed (or more directly related to popularity at a given time) https://m.btc.com/stats/diff https://m.btc.com/stats/diff So your statement ends up being incorrect over a period of time.
sudosysgen 5y ago
What is your source according to which Christmas lights and porn use more energy than bitcoin? I fear you may seriously underestimate the energy usage of bitcoin. Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third of the electricity in cold countries with a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  You're missing the point. If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession and only allow low powered handheld consoles? If bitcoin mining actually becomes problematic, then by all means we can definitely ban it or add some sin taxes to it, and we probably will in a lot of jurisdictions. I'm actually kind of eager for that to happen, because it will force miners to actually become novel/stranded energy ventures. They'll be the capital drive that builds out energy sources that not enough humans live around to justify tapping and/or we can't economically justifying building without expensive transmission infrastructure. And once it's built out and paid off, it may be a lot easier to justify investing in building out long distance transmission infrastructure so the rest of civilization can also tap into these sources.
  - mathnmusic 5y ago
    > If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? We already legislate different pricing for different applications. Household electricity has a different price than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for certain applications is just a small extension of what we currently have.
hiq 5y ago
> Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcoin. These discussions should talk about the ratio between a certain measure of productivity (e.g. GDP generated for the country) to the energy use; energy on its own does not mean much. I'm sure worldwide food production consumes more energy than Bitcoin. Other than that, a problem with POW (at least as implemented in Bitcoin) is that technological advances won't result in less energy consumption as it's mostly a function of (price of Bitcoin, price of energy).
EGreg 5y ago
It’s actually rather straightforward. If the amount of throughput and everything else remains constant while more and more computers are in a zero-sum arms race to waste electricity to solve a useless hash problem, then it is by definition not useful except for “securing the network”. And if you can secure a network some other way, then it definitely becomes better by any arbitrary order of magnitude, assuming your utility function doesn’t place infinite value on securing 10 transactions a second with to over 99.9999% certainty and willing to waste all the world’s electricity to do it. Literally even if you value all other uses of electricity put together as 1/100000 of securing Bitcoin then in a few years banning PoW becomes the right move. But I imagine it will be like the war on drugs — impossible to totally eradicate, since mining rewards become more lucrative every year forever. Until bitcoin blackouts are frequent in the first world, msot people won’t care though. Imagine if people asked how many emails (SMTP), conversations (VOIP) or websites (HTTP) the Internet can ever handle pet second and the answer was 10, no matter how many computers joined the network. Because every time you had to make progress, everything went through one bottleneck called a miner. Would this be the topology you want to reward with ever-more-valuable rewards? Imagine if BitTorrent worked this way, and every computer would seed every file. And maximalists said that this was the ONLY AND BEST WAY.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
LordDragonfang 5y ago
>Christmas lights Well, let's see >Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year [1] >Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. [2] Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any rate. [1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countries.html https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-than-google-2021-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-u...
- plokiju 5y ago
  And that’s only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-wide
  - knorker 5y ago
    Even extremely generously scaling it up by population that still means Bitcoin uses three orders of magnitude more.
    - NhanH 5y ago
      Billion kilo is already the same magnitude as tera (it’s kilo-> mega-> giga -> tera: 1000^3). Did I miss something or is your comment factually incorrect?
      - knorker 5y ago
        No that was me. Gah, megakilowatthours. :-(
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    It's also only looking at bitcoin, which is less than half of total crypto mining by energy usage. Adding ETH alone already doubles it. Meanwhile, I'd reckon that the US accounts for the majority of Christmas lights.
jollybean 5y ago
"who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?" Our legislators and regulators, because that's their job. Just like we ban heroin, regulate over the counter drugs, and tax alcohol. Mining BTC is a waste of everyone's time. Electricity production is partly socialized - and - we're literally facing a kind of global crisis. Ban it, and let the Cryto Warriers figure out other, better ways (of which there are numerous) for allocating magic numbers.
TheDong 5y ago
There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW. PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes. Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now costs 10% of what it did before. Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So of course, it does. There's a similar proper with making things more efficient. If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas lights will use less electricity. If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less secure. I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.
- hopevillian 5y ago
  bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy. That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet most of these people would have fallen for the same energy propaganda when the internet was just getting started... "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an electronic mail??"
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    Other merit's aside, Bitcoin's incentivizing cheaper energy provides nothing new of value. All uses of energy incentivize the search for cheaper energy. Not all energy uses are optimized to increase usage over time, to cancel efficiencies. Proof of work, whatever it's merits, is anti-efficiency with respect to itself. This is a significant difference.
    - hopevillian 5y ago
      nothing new of value? I know this sounds cliche but maybe consider you dont know enough about it?
tsimionescu 5y ago
Fortunately, we have a consensus system called 'voting' that can be used to decide such things in a way that hurts the least amount of people.

Should we also ban clothes dryers, Christmas lights, porn, and video games? Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcion. If not, who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?

jancsika 5y ago

I'm just imagining downloading a porn client which fetches 300 gigabytes of bullshit before it finally lets me watch a movie at a whopping five frames per second. And best of all, someone complaining that this is clearly a wasteful scam and being told back, "how much energy did videocassettes and magazines consume, huh?"

dagmx 5y ago

But won't each of those take up significantly more energy once they use Bitcoin than today? I.e the costs will be additive , and crypto aims to replace fiat. So crypto would need to be more efficient at the same scale as fiat to make sense. Also aren't each of those used by significantly more people than Bitcoin? So the per capita use is less and they scale better? Also how are you estimating cost of porn? Viewing cost? Generation cost?

chrischattin 5y ago
No. Bitcoin network power usage isn’t related to the number of transactions.
- dagmx 5y ago
  You're only talking about at any given moment in tjme, but Bitcoin hashing difficulty adjusts in an almost correlated way to number of transactions being performed (or more directly related to popularity at a given time) https://m.btc.com/stats/diff https://m.btc.com/stats/diff So your statement ends up being incorrect over a period of time.

sudosysgen 5y ago

What is your source according to which Christmas lights and porn use more energy than bitcoin? I fear you may seriously underestimate the energy usage of bitcoin. Even clothes dryer seem to be using less energy than Bitcoin. If you run the dryer for an hour each week, you're at 12-15kWh per month, which is 1-2% of your average household energy usage in the US, Canada or the EU. Now households at most around a third of the electricity in cold countries with a decent amount of electric heating for which dryers are much less, but let's run with it. That still sets the upper bound to 0.6%, which incidentally is the same as bitcoin.

anonporridge 5y ago
You're missing the point. If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? Numbers I've seen suggest that global PC gaming alone (excluding consoles) currently uses about as much electricity as bitcoin. Should we ban that too since playing cards are readily available and use almost no energy? Maybe we can make a concession and only allow low powered handheld consoles? If bitcoin mining actually becomes problematic, then by all means we can definitely ban it or add some sin taxes to it, and we probably will in a lot of jurisdictions. I'm actually kind of eager for that to happen, because it will force miners to actually become novel/stranded energy ventures. They'll be the capital drive that builds out energy sources that not enough humans live around to justify tapping and/or we can't economically justifying building without expensive transmission infrastructure. And once it's built out and paid off, it may be a lot easier to justify investing in building out long distance transmission infrastructure so the rest of civilization can also tap into these sources.
- mathnmusic 5y ago
  > If we're going to start legislating how we're all allowed to use energy that civilization has made available, who gets to decide what's allowed? We already legislate different pricing for different applications. Household electricity has a different price than industrial usage. A 1000x price of electricity for certain applications is just a small extension of what we currently have.

hiq 5y ago

> Each of those uses significantly more energy than Bitcoin. These discussions should talk about the ratio between a certain measure of productivity (e.g. GDP generated for the country) to the energy use; energy on its own does not mean much. I'm sure worldwide food production consumes more energy than Bitcoin. Other than that, a problem with POW (at least as implemented in Bitcoin) is that technological advances won't result in less energy consumption as it's mostly a function of (price of Bitcoin, price of energy).

EGreg 5y ago

It’s actually rather straightforward. If the amount of throughput and everything else remains constant while more and more computers are in a zero-sum arms race to waste electricity to solve a useless hash problem, then it is by definition not useful except for “securing the network”. And if you can secure a network some other way, then it definitely becomes better by any arbitrary order of magnitude, assuming your utility function doesn’t place infinite value on securing 10 transactions a second with to over 99.9999% certainty and willing to waste all the world’s electricity to do it. Literally even if you value all other uses of electricity put together as 1/100000 of securing Bitcoin then in a few years banning PoW becomes the right move. But I imagine it will be like the war on drugs — impossible to totally eradicate, since mining rewards become more lucrative every year forever. Until bitcoin blackouts are frequent in the first world, msot people won’t care though. Imagine if people asked how many emails (SMTP), conversations (VOIP) or websites (HTTP) the Internet can ever handle pet second and the answer was 10, no matter how many computers joined the network. Because every time you had to make progress, everything went through one bottleneck called a miner. Would this be the topology you want to reward with ever-more-valuable rewards? Imagine if BitTorrent worked this way, and every computer would seed every file. And maximalists said that this was the ONLY AND BEST WAY.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

LordDragonfang 5y ago

>Christmas lights Well, let's see >Bright lights strung on American trees, rooftops and lawns account for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year [1] >Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. [2] Huh. That's at least the same order of magnitude, at any rate. [1] https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countries.html https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-than-google-2021-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-u...

plokiju 5y ago
And that’s only looking at US Christmas lights, not world-wide
- knorker 5y ago
  Even extremely generously scaling it up by population that still means Bitcoin uses three orders of magnitude more.
  - NhanH 5y ago
    Billion kilo is already the same magnitude as tera (it’s kilo-> mega-> giga -> tera: 1000^3). Did I miss something or is your comment factually incorrect?
    - knorker 5y ago
      No that was me. Gah, megakilowatthours. :-(
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  It's also only looking at bitcoin, which is less than half of total crypto mining by energy usage. Adding ETH alone already doubles it. Meanwhile, I'd reckon that the US accounts for the majority of Christmas lights.

jollybean 5y ago

"who gets to decide what a "good" use of electricity is?" Our legislators and regulators, because that's their job. Just like we ban heroin, regulate over the counter drugs, and tax alcohol. Mining BTC is a waste of everyone's time. Electricity production is partly socialized - and - we're literally facing a kind of global crisis. Ban it, and let the Cryto Warriers figure out other, better ways (of which there are numerous) for allocating magic numbers.

TheDong 5y ago

There is a difference between each of those uses of electricity and PoW. PoW is throwing away electricity for the sake of it, and resists getting more efficient. If the goal is for the bitcoin network to cost $1M to do a single double spend, then PoW has to use $1M worth of electricity every 10 minutes. Let's say we live in a future where we suddenly have 10x as much electricity. Due to supply and demand, electricity now costs 10% of what it did before. Dryers etc all keep using the same amount of electricity with no issue, but bitcoin has a problem: it's now really cheap to double spend unless bitcoin uses 10x as much electricity. So of course, it does. There's a similar proper with making things more efficient. If we make a christmas light more efficient (make it use an LED instead of an incandescent bulb or whatever), christmas lights will use less electricity. If we make ASICs or GPUs more efficient, then people will just have to run more of them, or else bitcoin will be less secure. I think this is a real and notable difference, and I think that's enough of a justification to consider a ban.

hopevillian 5y ago
bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy. That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet most of these people would have fallen for the same energy propaganda when the internet was just getting started... "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an electronic mail??"
- Nevermark 5y ago
  Other merit's aside, Bitcoin's incentivizing cheaper energy provides nothing new of value. All uses of energy incentivize the search for cheaper energy. Not all energy uses are optimized to increase usage over time, to cancel efficiencies. Proof of work, whatever it's merits, is anti-efficiency with respect to itself. This is a significant difference.
  - hopevillian 5y ago
    nothing new of value? I know this sounds cliche but maybe consider you dont know enough about it?

tsimionescu 5y ago

Fortunately, we have a consensus system called 'voting' that can be used to decide such things in a way that hurts the least amount of people.