3 ms·

Just the other some tourist came by in a helicopter, landing in a next-door field to take some visiting friends for a flip. They'd rented the chopper for the da

Just the other some tourist came by in a helicopter, landing in a next-door field to take some visiting friends for a flip. They'd rented the chopper for the day as some sort of perverse idea of an adventure. Complete waste of energy, dumping C into the atmosphere in the cause of their inflated ego and distorted sense of entitlement, but hey... How is this any different? (Point being, there are many, many activities people engage in that are a complete waste of energy. Should PoW cryptocurrency mining be singled out for particular excoriation? Personally I'm against it for the exact reasons mentioned along with the reality that Bitcoin has failed in its mission. But let's not pretend it's the only thing we should stop doing.)

TheDong 5y ago
I've written a comment in a similar previous thread on why bitcoin / PoW's energy usage is different from other seemingly wasteful uses of energy. That was over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367100 Not to repeat it in full, but the short of it is that bitcoin's usage of energy is not for the amount of energy, but because it must expend a certain economic value of energy in order to keep the network secure. If energy becomes cheaper or more efficient, bitcoin must burn more. Bitcoin's energy usage has an adversarial relationship with efficiency. Practically every other use of energy does not have an adversarial relationship, and will accept the same total amount of cheaper energy to do the exact same work with no complaints. A helicopter will not require twice as much gas to fly the same distance if we happen to make gas twice as cheap. As a result, yes I think we should single out PoW.
saagarjha 5y ago
It's not! Everything you do wastes energy to some extent, the question is how much, and what you're getting out of it. The reason people are mad at crypto is that the benefits are marginal (I mean, it's some fraction of how our money changes hands. Some people have fun with it. I'm fine with being generous, but its benefits are super concentrated and I agree that it's not really very good at its mission of decentralizing currency or whatever) and the energy usage is massive. I mean, there are other things that use a lot of energy too: cars, planes, manufacturing, etc. but we do call them out for it, and when a company says they're committed to the environment and does some token "green" work we hold them to the same standard. The reason you just hear about cryptocurrency more here is that, well, this is a technical forum where it's a frequently encountered topic.

TheDong 5y ago

I've written a comment in a similar previous thread on why bitcoin / PoW's energy usage is different from other seemingly wasteful uses of energy. That was over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29367100 Not to repeat it in full, but the short of it is that bitcoin's usage of energy is not for the amount of energy, but because it must expend a certain economic value of energy in order to keep the network secure. If energy becomes cheaper or more efficient, bitcoin must burn more. Bitcoin's energy usage has an adversarial relationship with efficiency. Practically every other use of energy does not have an adversarial relationship, and will accept the same total amount of cheaper energy to do the exact same work with no complaints. A helicopter will not require twice as much gas to fly the same distance if we happen to make gas twice as cheap. As a result, yes I think we should single out PoW.

saagarjha 5y ago

It's not! Everything you do wastes energy to some extent, the question is how much, and what you're getting out of it. The reason people are mad at crypto is that the benefits are marginal (I mean, it's some fraction of how our money changes hands. Some people have fun with it. I'm fine with being generous, but its benefits are super concentrated and I agree that it's not really very good at its mission of decentralizing currency or whatever) and the energy usage is massive. I mean, there are other things that use a lot of energy too: cars, planes, manufacturing, etc. but we do call them out for it, and when a company says they're committed to the environment and does some token "green" work we hold them to the same standard. The reason you just hear about cryptocurrency more here is that, well, this is a technical forum where it's a frequently encountered topic.