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No, that's not moving goalposts. If Bitcoin miners waste renewable energy, the users of energy in general move to renewable later. If everybody is using renewa

• politician 5y ago
  "Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable. Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.
  • acdha 5y ago
    They explained the difference for you in the second paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used isn't linked to any sort of useful activity — it's just a function of how much competing hash capacity there is in the network. Even something like heating your house to 78℉ is a lower category of waste because you won't increase that to 120℉ or start heating the neighborhood park just because your neighbors matched you at 78℉. This is also in keeping with tons of existing regulations: you can't buy a monitor which uses 2,000W because various governments have caps for how inefficient you're allowed to be. That's far from perfect — or sufficient to deal with the climate change crisis — but it's not like it's some sort of unprecedented imposition on personal freedoms to cap inefficiency.
    • chii 5y ago
      > isn't linked to any sort of useful activity so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. There's no such objective judgement possible, since usefulness is a subjective matter. Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.
      • acdha 5y ago
        > > isn't linked to any sort of useful activity > so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. No, I understand how the system works. Bitcoin uses power as a function of the aggregate network capacity — it must to avoid a 51% attack — and that means that the power usage not coupled to the number of transactions being processed: even if Bank of America wasn't already many orders of magnitude cheaper, they wouldn't buy a mainframe they didn't have work for just to stay tied with Wells Fargo. It's the computational equivalent of Luftansa flying all of those thousands of empty flights. > Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy. This would help considerably but it's not enough: we need to radically pivot the global energy system and that will involve things like shifting where major power consumption occurs (e.g. ideally things like blast furnaces or smelters would be located near sources of hydro, geothermal, nuclear, etc. power) and getting everyone to convert to things like EVs en masse. Unfortunately those decisions take a longer timeframe than shipping a container full of cryptocurrency mining hardware to wherever the current cheapest source of power is. That adds a lot of noise to the pricing signals we need to drive business decisions, especially for major capital expenditures which require years of planning. It doesn't help if, say, Iceland adds 10GW of clean geothermal power but the price stays the same or even goes up because a bunch of miners showed up the week after it went online.
  • 1ris 5y ago
    >"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? You didn't read or you didn't understand what I said. It's waste because it's designed to create a scarcity. Not by the judgement of anyone of the usefullness. The power bitcoin uses is strictly a function of how much power is available, not what service is provides. Double the number of transaction rate: No change in power usage. Half the price of electricity: Double the power usage. This strange lack of connection between utility and resource usage makes it wastage. It might be hard to grasp, because there is nothing unlike it. > Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable. As stated above the energy consumption of bitcoin is not bad because the a decentralised ledger is objectionable, but because it's a controller (in the sense of control theory) tuned to make energy a scare resource. This is a scheme equivalent to poison every aquifer in the world to profit from the scarcity of water. It's doesn't matter if scarcity of water is useful for some apparatus, or if the task the apparatus performs is objectionable. If you want to monitor my non bitcoin energy-usage demonstrates you didn't understand is difference between utilisation of water for the sake of using it and for the sake of wasting it. Usage can be made more efficient, and new resources can cure a lack of water. In the case of wastage the wastage can by definion not become more efficient and new resources will not make it last any longer, but simply call for an increase the rate of poisoning. Even if bitcoin had any use case besides randomware, which it doesn't, even if it did solve every problem the financial world had, it would see be wasteful. While most other technology becomes more efficient with further use cases, PoW becomes more wastefull, for reasons state above. The only way to make it more efficient is to make energy less aviable to humanity, as such are the perverse incentives of this scheme.