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Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be

Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

golemotron 5y ago
Or even "the cloud."
giantrobot 5y ago
> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations. I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.
- floatboth 5y ago
  Even worse: Bitcoin alone uses as much as the datacenter sector as a whole, not just Google.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- exit 5y ago
  energy is not wasted by proof of work, it is valuably expended to achieve the immutability of the ledger
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Sorry, this is Poe's Law territory. I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic. A blockchain doesn't need some wasteful mechanism to be immutable. Boring old cryptographic signing does the same thing. But Bitcoin et al want their ludicrous "No one can be trusted! Except all the points of trust required to make the system works of course!" system.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? Now this is probably not a good comparison, but the first thing that i thought of was something along the lines of: "Burning tires is bad for the environment, so we should burn more tires until some factors force us to stop doing that." Surely if there's a recognizably bad behavior, we should be able to stop doing it without being forced to, right? Where did the idea of being cautious in service of a potentially better future go? Why do we have such an exploitative mindset? > I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. I don't have a yacht and i don't see why people should have them either, outside of sports or transporting many people (albeit there are more efficient ways). I don't have a private jet and i don't see why people should have them either, maybe apart from transporting government officials in certain situations. Actually, planes in general are overused and people should rely more on trains, which are environmentally friendly. My "gaming rig" draws around 100-200W in total under load, with a 65W CPU and a GPU that's power limited to 50% of its total power draw for longevity purposes. My homelab servers run off of 35W CPUs with iGPUs and both of them run with a total wall draw of 100W. Honestly, outside of media production, there is no reason for overpowered devices, plus the developers of games and much other software should be more concerned about doing more with less. And i don't own a personal car, thanks to the public transportation infrastructure in my country not being crippled. I studied for both my Bachelor and Master degree in the city and never felt the need for a car due to being able to take the bus, tram or trolley bus wherever i needed to go. And even when you need a car (e.g. living in the countryside or needing to transport tools or other things), you shouldn't got for wasteful ones. In summary, the human existence is one of excess, unnecessary luxury and waste. We absolutely should address that.

golemotron 5y ago

Or even "the cloud."

giantrobot 5y ago

> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations. I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.

floatboth 5y ago
Even worse: Bitcoin alone uses as much as the datacenter sector as a whole, not just Google.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
exit 5y ago
energy is not wasted by proof of work, it is valuably expended to achieve the immutability of the ledger
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Sorry, this is Poe's Law territory. I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic. A blockchain doesn't need some wasteful mechanism to be immutable. Boring old cryptographic signing does the same thing. But Bitcoin et al want their ludicrous "No one can be trusted! Except all the points of trust required to make the system works of course!" system.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? Now this is probably not a good comparison, but the first thing that i thought of was something along the lines of: "Burning tires is bad for the environment, so we should burn more tires until some factors force us to stop doing that." Surely if there's a recognizably bad behavior, we should be able to stop doing it without being forced to, right? Where did the idea of being cautious in service of a potentially better future go? Why do we have such an exploitative mindset? > I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases. I don't have a yacht and i don't see why people should have them either, outside of sports or transporting many people (albeit there are more efficient ways). I don't have a private jet and i don't see why people should have them either, maybe apart from transporting government officials in certain situations. Actually, planes in general are overused and people should rely more on trains, which are environmentally friendly. My "gaming rig" draws around 100-200W in total under load, with a 65W CPU and a GPU that's power limited to 50% of its total power draw for longevity purposes. My homelab servers run off of 35W CPUs with iGPUs and both of them run with a total wall draw of 100W. Honestly, outside of media production, there is no reason for overpowered devices, plus the developers of games and much other software should be more concerned about doing more with less. And i don't own a personal car, thanks to the public transportation infrastructure in my country not being crippled. I studied for both my Bachelor and Master degree in the city and never felt the need for a car due to being able to take the bus, tram or trolley bus wherever i needed to go. And even when you need a car (e.g. living in the countryside or needing to transport tools or other things), you shouldn't got for wasteful ones. In summary, the human existence is one of excess, unnecessary luxury and waste. We absolutely should address that.