16 ms·

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on com

With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only need to send a few bytes back to earth this becomes the only competitive way of doing mining. Space travel thus becomes dirt cheap. Humans are finally able to explore the solar system. But that's just a dream. Realistically, we are screwed.

AlexCoventry 5y ago
> start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun The 16-minute round-trip delay would wipe out any energy benefits, for bitcoin. Maybe you could come up with a consensus mechanism which allows people to somehow amortize recent calculations, though.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Maybe you could come up with a consensus mechanism which allows people to somehow amortize recent calculations Isn't that exactly what pooled mining is all about?
belltaco 5y ago
> start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun Does heat dissipate well in vacuum? Won't having it so close to the sun result in more heat? I guess the only way to dissipate so much heat would be via radiation. Outer space seems to be really really cold so that might help.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Dark body radiation is slow as shit and generally were gonna need a huge surface area to dissipate energy. The mechanics of heat sinking in space is amazing and terrifying.
metalliqaz 5y ago
we will choke ourselves out before that happens
Nbox9 5y ago
> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. I know this is pedantic, but the competition is about computational power. Energy is a significant input. Let’s not ignore the benefit that the more computational power that is spent in the competition the more secure the blockchain is from 51% attacks. Maybe 134 TWh is too high of a price for such a limited use technology such as bitcoin. Maybe we could do the same or more with the less energy intensive PoS technology that ETH 2.0 will bring to the mainstream. Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price.
- robomartin 5y ago
  > Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?
  - qwertygnu 5y ago
    Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canonical example of greed. There are problems with banking. In a better world, crypto can distribute the power of money. But, since it's a technology born within the system, it is instead used as a way of amassing value, and in the end only making the rich richer.
    - thathndude 5y ago
      I saw a great, pithy tweet recently, and I won’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a shot. Crypto, and Blockchain, are like little fiefdoms that are being created, and the people who create them, and in the process mine the first couple million blocks, will be the Lords. As you say, the rich getting richer. And doing it all by hijacking this message of the “little guys” banding together against the establishment.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
>> My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Dyson spheres and stellar engineering to power cryptocurrency mining rigs. I shudder at the thought.
- atrus 5y ago
  Isn't this roughly what happened in Accelerando? We split the solar system and gave everything below the asteroid belt over to the marketing bots.
  - shagie 5y ago
    Yep. It's a good book. To read it from the author's site: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Economics 2.0 in the later third of the story. > Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale. > There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  One day a swarm of self replicating probes will turn up and start building a Dyson sphere around our sun. The purpose is to power the alien equivalent of Bitcoin mining. Another storyline I came up with is this: Imagine that an alien civilisation has the ability to send electromagnetic signals faster than light by some mechanism such as a micro wormhole but not ships and such. They still want to destroy other civilisations before they become a threat. They are able to connect to some unsecured wifi networks and start posting on forums. The username: Satoshi Nakamoto
thathndude 5y ago
I have a son who is just about 10 years old, and he’s getting to the age where he’s beginning to realize how irrational our world is. We recently had a conversation discussing the fact that we could eradicate hunger and the need for clean water globally, but for a whole host of reasons we have not yet done it. He continues to probe “why“ and all I can say is, essentially, because people are greedy and unmotivated generally, and unwilling to sacrifice a modicum for others (not to mention corruption and other collective action problems). I don’t think there is an answer.
- joelbondurant0 5y ago
- chillacy 5y ago
  Adam smith wrote a short philosophy book about this back in the day about this very topic. (something like: what is worse: stubbing your toe, or a natural disaster somewhere remote which kills thousands but doesn’t affect you personally). I wouldn’t say it’s “the answer” but it is “a candidate answer”
  - thathndude 5y ago
    Yeah. The classic formulation I’ve seen of that is “would you cut off your pinky to save 100 people’s lives in China”
- frutiger 5y ago
  > and unwilling to sacrifice a modicum for others I agree with your sentiment but I have to disagree with that phrase. The vast majority* of people of people pay quite a lot of money in taxes, which ostensibly** only exist to help others. (*) I know the billionaires have their wealth as unrealized gains; I chose my words carefully (**) I know we all disagree on how that revenue should be spent, but the purpose of taxation is all the same
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    People pay taxes to avoid going to jail. Your tax return has an option to pay more for no reason. Guess how many people choose that option.
throw0101a 5y ago
> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. An observation from 2018: > imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin * https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121 https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121
geertj 5y ago
> What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. It’s only unstoppable within the game theoretic model of crypto itself, not within the larger societal context. Once Bitcoin power consumption enters the common discourse, my guess is that politicians will step in and simply outlaw PoW systems. There is no real downside for politicians. The average voter hasn’t yet invested their life savings into Bitcoin, and once PoS systems exist at scale proponents can’t use the innovation argument anymore. Especially in Europe, politicians are serious about climate and are pondering much more draconian changes than outlawing some forms of crypto.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Yes, it is a classic tragedy of the commons situation, and that is what politics - collective action - is good at fixing (at least sometimes).
  - landemva 5y ago
    Tragedy of the commons is often due to ineffective or free pricing of government regulated items. Parks look free and become an appealing place to make homeless encampments. The free market with enforceable property rights fixes this government problem. If you don't like that people run computers to play games or wash laundry or watch videos or hash strings, re-pricing electricity fixes that. Germans are experiencing this experiment with increasing electricity prices right now.
    - sjtindell 5y ago
      A good and correct counter. Perhaps the other poster meant that this (electricity consumption) has mis-priced externalities, which is probably true.
    - pnt12 5y ago
      Arguably, not all of those consumptions are equal. I'd compare that to paying a supermarket tax because it sells alcohol and alcohol is bad for the health.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arcticbull 5y ago
The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 1500 and 15000 people last year. To process 4 transactions per second. In a few years Bitcoin mining will kill way more people than the number of political dissidents it could hope to save through the magic of decentralization. [edit] Energy is not free people. Not even renewables. Making electronics isn't free. E-waste isn't free. This isn't WoW. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [3] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- colecut 5y ago
  Assuming it killed 15000 people, that is still over 8000 transactions per person killed... Nothing is perfect.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    If one person died for every 8000 transactions on the Visa network it would be nothing short of global genocide. Credit networks ran 468 billion transactions in 2020, so that would be 60 million dead. "Pobody's nerfect" hardly seems like the right response.
    - colecut 5y ago
      It is if you're being darkly cynical
      - arcticbull 5y ago
adflux 5y ago
>My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun ... Thats your utopia? How about we figure out a way to store/transfer wealth which doesnt need to perform arbitrary calculations and cause massive power consumption
- imtringued 5y ago
  Money doesn't store wealth. You make an agreement that a person in the future gives you wealth called a loan. Bitcoin investors expect the people of the future to work for them even though they made no such agreement.
- landemva 5y ago
  We have tried the other way of enforcing money. That route of using military force is well understood. Is it better?
  - adflux 5y ago
    You think crypto will make the military unnecessary? Let's see how good you are at protecting your wallet keys with a gun to your head...
    - landemva 5y ago
      Since you opened the whatabout game, have you looked at setting up time locked multi-sig? We do need a military to enforce our borders from illegal invaders.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
scottiebarnes 5y ago
Energy isn't scarce, its actually abundant. At this particular moment, clean renewable energy capacity is more scarce than fossil fuel, but there is simply far more potential energy in solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Remember, our planet is bombarded by solar rays 24/7 and will continue to receive this energy for billions of years. Human energy consumption has been exponential over time. We started by harvesting crops with our hands; then we we figured how to attach a plow to an ox, which increased our productivity, but required us to house, feed, and maintain the ox (energy). We figured out engines, electricity, interconnected computers, low earth orbit satellites; all requiring increased energy expenditure, but increasing our collective well-being and productivity. Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by addressing: 1) externalities are not captured by fossil fuel prices (you need a carbon tax for that, to fund research and to de-incentivize fossil fuel consumption), and 2) governments actively subsidize fossil fuel industries. Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by... I too enjoy whataboutism to distract folks from the environmental impact of my favorite Ponzi scheme. > Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment. If you invest in massive solar and wind plants then use that energy to roll rocks up and back down a hill forever like Sisyphus, that's just more waste. Different waste, but more waste. Any energy you spend rock-rolling is failing to de-carbonize the existing grid. Bitcoin isn't incentivized to chase renewables. It's incentivized to find the cheapest power it can get its hands on anywhere on earth and then waste it. That's why PE firms are re-opening fossil fuel plants to mine with.
  - scottiebarnes 5y ago
    It's a waste to you, but not to the people who use and value it.
    - multjoy 5y ago
tor11 5y ago
johnisgood 5y ago
We need to build ITER all around the world! :D
rasz 5y ago
>My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. My utopian idea is crypto fund with the sole purpose of hiring assassins and special operations squads to eliminate biggest mining data centers and holders. Every successful hit would inflate its own holdings thus fund further raids.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

> start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun The 16-minute round-trip delay would wipe out any energy benefits, for bitcoin. Maybe you could come up with a consensus mechanism which allows people to somehow amortize recent calculations, though.

ur-whale 5y ago
> Maybe you could come up with a consensus mechanism which allows people to somehow amortize recent calculations Isn't that exactly what pooled mining is all about?

belltaco 5y ago

> start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun Does heat dissipate well in vacuum? Won't having it so close to the sun result in more heat? I guess the only way to dissipate so much heat would be via radiation. Outer space seems to be really really cold so that might help.

aaomidi 5y ago
Dark body radiation is slow as shit and generally were gonna need a huge surface area to dissipate energy. The mechanics of heat sinking in space is amazing and terrifying.

metalliqaz 5y ago

we will choke ourselves out before that happens

Nbox9 5y ago

> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. I know this is pedantic, but the competition is about computational power. Energy is a significant input. Let’s not ignore the benefit that the more computational power that is spent in the competition the more secure the blockchain is from 51% attacks. Maybe 134 TWh is too high of a price for such a limited use technology such as bitcoin. Maybe we could do the same or more with the less energy intensive PoS technology that ETH 2.0 will bring to the mainstream. Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price.

robomartin 5y ago
> Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price. That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?
- qwertygnu 5y ago
  Yes there are lots of problems with banking. Cryptocurrency does have a reason to exist, though of course we went and fucked it all up. It can help ordinary people outmaneuver oppressive regimes. It can perform that same core functions that banks can (i.e. keeping track of and moving around money) in a public and distributed way. The banking industry (often metonymically known as "Wall Street") is literally the canonical example of greed. There are problems with banking. In a better world, crypto can distribute the power of money. But, since it's a technology born within the system, it is instead used as a way of amassing value, and in the end only making the rich richer.
  - thathndude 5y ago
    I saw a great, pithy tweet recently, and I won’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a shot. Crypto, and Blockchain, are like little fiefdoms that are being created, and the people who create them, and in the process mine the first couple million blocks, will be the Lords. As you say, the rich getting richer. And doing it all by hijacking this message of the “little guys” banding together against the establishment.

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

>> My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Dyson spheres and stellar engineering to power cryptocurrency mining rigs. I shudder at the thought.

atrus 5y ago
Isn't this roughly what happened in Accelerando? We split the solar system and gave everything below the asteroid belt over to the marketing bots.
- shagie 5y ago
  Yep. It's a good book. To read it from the author's site: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... Economics 2.0 in the later third of the story. > Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale. > There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
Negitivefrags 5y ago
One day a swarm of self replicating probes will turn up and start building a Dyson sphere around our sun. The purpose is to power the alien equivalent of Bitcoin mining. Another storyline I came up with is this: Imagine that an alien civilisation has the ability to send electromagnetic signals faster than light by some mechanism such as a micro wormhole but not ships and such. They still want to destroy other civilisations before they become a threat. They are able to connect to some unsecured wifi networks and start posting on forums. The username: Satoshi Nakamoto

thathndude 5y ago

I have a son who is just about 10 years old, and he’s getting to the age where he’s beginning to realize how irrational our world is. We recently had a conversation discussing the fact that we could eradicate hunger and the need for clean water globally, but for a whole host of reasons we have not yet done it. He continues to probe “why“ and all I can say is, essentially, because people are greedy and unmotivated generally, and unwilling to sacrifice a modicum for others (not to mention corruption and other collective action problems). I don’t think there is an answer.

joelbondurant0 5y ago
chillacy 5y ago
Adam smith wrote a short philosophy book about this back in the day about this very topic. (something like: what is worse: stubbing your toe, or a natural disaster somewhere remote which kills thousands but doesn’t affect you personally). I wouldn’t say it’s “the answer” but it is “a candidate answer”
- thathndude 5y ago
  Yeah. The classic formulation I’ve seen of that is “would you cut off your pinky to save 100 people’s lives in China”
frutiger 5y ago
> and unwilling to sacrifice a modicum for others I agree with your sentiment but I have to disagree with that phrase. The vast majority* of people of people pay quite a lot of money in taxes, which ostensibly** only exist to help others. (*) I know the billionaires have their wealth as unrealized gains; I chose my words carefully (**) I know we all disagree on how that revenue should be spent, but the purpose of taxation is all the same
- oneoff786 5y ago
  People pay taxes to avoid going to jail. Your tax return has an option to pay more for no reason. Guess how many people choose that option.

throw0101a 5y ago

> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. An observation from 2018: > imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin * https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121 https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1030225104234373121

geertj 5y ago

> What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. It’s only unstoppable within the game theoretic model of crypto itself, not within the larger societal context. Once Bitcoin power consumption enters the common discourse, my guess is that politicians will step in and simply outlaw PoW systems. There is no real downside for politicians. The average voter hasn’t yet invested their life savings into Bitcoin, and once PoS systems exist at scale proponents can’t use the innovation argument anymore. Especially in Europe, politicians are serious about climate and are pondering much more draconian changes than outlawing some forms of crypto.

FabHK 5y ago
Yes, it is a classic tragedy of the commons situation, and that is what politics - collective action - is good at fixing (at least sometimes).
- landemva 5y ago
  Tragedy of the commons is often due to ineffective or free pricing of government regulated items. Parks look free and become an appealing place to make homeless encampments. The free market with enforceable property rights fixes this government problem. If you don't like that people run computers to play games or wash laundry or watch videos or hash strings, re-pricing electricity fixes that. Germans are experiencing this experiment with increasing electricity prices right now.
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    A good and correct counter. Perhaps the other poster meant that this (electricity consumption) has mis-priced externalities, which is probably true.
  - pnt12 5y ago
    Arguably, not all of those consumptions are equal. I'd compare that to paying a supermarket tax because it sells alcohol and alcohol is bad for the health.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

arcticbull 5y ago

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 1500 and 15000 people last year. To process 4 transactions per second. In a few years Bitcoin mining will kill way more people than the number of political dissidents it could hope to save through the magic of decentralization. [edit] Energy is not free people. Not even renewables. Making electronics isn't free. E-waste isn't free. This isn't WoW. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... [3] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

colecut 5y ago
Assuming it killed 15000 people, that is still over 8000 transactions per person killed... Nothing is perfect.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  If one person died for every 8000 transactions on the Visa network it would be nothing short of global genocide. Credit networks ran 468 billion transactions in 2020, so that would be 60 million dead. "Pobody's nerfect" hardly seems like the right response.
  - colecut 5y ago
    It is if you're being darkly cynical
    - arcticbull 5y ago

adflux 5y ago

>My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun ... Thats your utopia? How about we figure out a way to store/transfer wealth which doesnt need to perform arbitrary calculations and cause massive power consumption

imtringued 5y ago
Money doesn't store wealth. You make an agreement that a person in the future gives you wealth called a loan. Bitcoin investors expect the people of the future to work for them even though they made no such agreement.
landemva 5y ago
We have tried the other way of enforcing money. That route of using military force is well understood. Is it better?
- adflux 5y ago
  You think crypto will make the military unnecessary? Let's see how good you are at protecting your wallet keys with a gun to your head...
  - landemva 5y ago
    Since you opened the whatabout game, have you looked at setting up time locked multi-sig? We do need a military to enforce our borders from illegal invaders.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

scottiebarnes 5y ago

Energy isn't scarce, its actually abundant. At this particular moment, clean renewable energy capacity is more scarce than fossil fuel, but there is simply far more potential energy in solar, wind, nuclear, etc. Remember, our planet is bombarded by solar rays 24/7 and will continue to receive this energy for billions of years. Human energy consumption has been exponential over time. We started by harvesting crops with our hands; then we we figured how to attach a plow to an ox, which increased our productivity, but required us to house, feed, and maintain the ox (energy). We figured out engines, electricity, interconnected computers, low earth orbit satellites; all requiring increased energy expenditure, but increasing our collective well-being and productivity. Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by addressing: 1) externalities are not captured by fossil fuel prices (you need a carbon tax for that, to fund research and to de-incentivize fossil fuel consumption), and 2) governments actively subsidize fossil fuel industries. Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment.

arcticbull 5y ago
> Rather than scapegoat Bitcoin for our climate crisis, start by... I too enjoy whataboutism to distract folks from the environmental impact of my favorite Ponzi scheme. > Do those things, and Bitcoin will literally subsidize and accelerate clean energy infrastructure investment. If you invest in massive solar and wind plants then use that energy to roll rocks up and back down a hill forever like Sisyphus, that's just more waste. Different waste, but more waste. Any energy you spend rock-rolling is failing to de-carbonize the existing grid. Bitcoin isn't incentivized to chase renewables. It's incentivized to find the cheapest power it can get its hands on anywhere on earth and then waste it. That's why PE firms are re-opening fossil fuel plants to mine with.
- scottiebarnes 5y ago
  It's a waste to you, but not to the people who use and value it.
  - multjoy 5y ago

tor11 5y ago

johnisgood 5y ago

We need to build ITER all around the world! :D

rasz 5y ago

>My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. My utopian idea is crypto fund with the sole purpose of hiring assassins and special operations squads to eliminate biggest mining data centers and holders. Every successful hit would inflate its own holdings thus fund further raids.