10 ms·

Now all we need to do is shutdown the gaming industry. It’s so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be playing chess or Yazee instead.

JonathanBeuys 4y ago
e2-e4
sph 4y ago
Indeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our problems, we should stop generating and using energy altogether. I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why does people complaining about "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion energy? So we can stop consuming it? It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games? Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without them and consume even less energy. Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved. We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense if you can get cheap energy, otherwise it's unprofitable. But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-voted comment on a forum. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- temp_account_32 4y ago
- mrpopo 4y ago
  > The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why? Do you think every additional watt of energy will make us happier? The countries using the most energy per capita are gulf countries like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. The population there is 10-20% residents, the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup). > Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. Again, is the middle-eastern civilization more advanced? Most of them are still monarchies. We already live in an energy-abundant society. Making more energy will not solve the underlying problems of it.
  - prvit 4y ago
    > (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup). What did they do? I mean, besides the ridiculous Guardian article claiming unrealistically low death rates among immigrant workers. (discussed on HN earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117) > the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin?
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin? I was born in one of those countries, and personally know people who have made the choice to work in these counties. Do understand that people are not choosing to be quasi slaves because their lives are better as quasi slaves. No, more often it's a choice to create better lives for their families, and sometimes rarely it's a choice by their parents to ship off one out of their seven children to generate income. This quasi slavery is only possible through the insane arbitrage generated by petrodollars, and because we only selectively choose to be morally outraged at human rights violation only when it's done by the villain of the week.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  I think you're reading the situation completely wrong here. Yes, we should make energy cheaper, cleaner and more abundant. I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact. The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value. It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable purposes; things essential to our survival both on an individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in medicine and the like). Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage. Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to accelerate our technological progress.
  - otikik 4y ago
    > I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact. Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated heat will become a problem on itself. But let’s solve the more present matters first.
- timwaagh 4y ago
  Although there are better reasons to reject crypto, energy usage for crypto has few benefits aside of speculation/gambling for material gain. In Europe, energy bills for most people have tripled so reducing energy demand is a priority right now. I think there are less harmful ways to gamble. You could try a casino perhaps or buy futures contracts on ornamental gourds.
  - sph 4y ago
    Just because it's not very useful today, it doesn't mean it's not useful ever. Reminds me of people that were sure the Internet wouldn't go anywhere in the 80s. Technologies don't have to necessarily be useful on day 1 or even 1000 to be eventually successful.
- uavals 4y ago
  1. Energy is limited. Sun’s mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 * 9e16). Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year increasing energy output by 5%. How long will it take till we use-up whole sun? ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12 solar masses) ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799 How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg) ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not sustainable even on universe’s scale. Eventually we will reach hard wall. 2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for humanity to do. 3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto heating raises energy prices for others.
jollybean 4y ago
Gaming does something i.e. entertain. Crypto does nothing. Or you could argue, it 'entertains'. But in a way that is unnecessary (it's a distraction, not entertainment), and in a manner that creates unnecessary energy costs (PoW vs PoS).
- seydor 4y ago
  people pay for nothing?
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Yes, although more concretely put, people pay for nothing of value. See [1] [2] for some more historical occurrences. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies Before you get all worked up about "crypto is better than tulips!", I'm primarily responding to your question by saying that _just because_ people are willing to pay (sometimes exorbitant amounts) for something doesn't imply it has that value.
    - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
      People will pay for something that they value but others do not. I prefer to think of value as a function of rarity and utility. I'll skip over rarity but utility can include the possibility of selling something for more than it was purchased at some time in the future. If someone pays an exorbitant amount for something it has that value to them at the time of purchasing. Whether that value is reflected in the market price or persists over time is something else though. Value is not static. Value is dynamic. You can observe this both personally and in the markets.
- dreen 4y ago
  Nah, it's just gambling but with a veneer of investing.
- santiagobasulto 4y ago
  You definitively live in the first world. As a person that lived in a third-world, dictator infested country for 3 decades, I can tell you, OWNING your own money is LIFE CHANGING. I prefer not to have games, or netflix, or anything, but have financial certainty. For you guys money is a done deal. For a HUGE part of the world, something as basic as money (or even water) is not. Try to be a little bit more empathic.
viraptor 4y ago
You're trying to compare mining farms running 24/7 with people using a single card for a probably an hour a day on average. Without actual data on the number of users, this is meaningless.
- nannal 4y ago
  Bitcoin mining compares with PC gaming at 85TWh/a vs 75TWh/a
  - viraptor 4y ago
    You're not citing your source, but it's likely "Taming the energy use of gaming computers" which is a problem: it's from 2014, it's a rough estimate, assumes that you turn off your computer only for 8h sleep, includes all the other work done on a PC if it's at all used for gaming, is based on hardware before we got massive frequency scaling, double graphics (like optimus) and before everyone moved away from CRTs... and finally before a massive exodus to laptops. (their follow up report discusses moving away from CRTs as a way to limit power usage) It's really not a good source today, it was a disputable one at the time, and doesn't even match the question - it measures gaming computers usage, not gaming usage.
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104.
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  I’m not taking the thread on a flamewar tangent. My comment did not contain any insults nor did I encourage anyone else to do so. I am pointing out with a sarcastic analogy that pre merge and post merge ethereum are not the same thing. Outwardly looking they are both ethereum but the post merge ethereum lacks the triangular incentive structure that pre merge ethereum had. I am also pointing out the hypocrisy whereby people will happy accelerate climate change for the sake of leisure but get upset when someone else accelerates climate change for the sake of utility. I am disappointed with your decision to detach this sub thread and any responses that may lead me to challenge my own perspective. I do however respect that it was done with the intention of an preventing unproductive dialogue.
  - dang 4y ago
    Flamewars run on more than just insults. (though the snark in your comment did sound insulting, when I first read it.) Attributing a stupid position to somebody else, especially on an inflammatory topic, is flamebait and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. On a second reading though, it doesn't seem worse than the comment you were replying to, so I'll reattach it. Btw, your follow-up here is a case of an interesting phenomenon I've noticed many times: people often give a better (i.e. more neutral and explicit) expression of what they originally meant, when explaining it in response to a moderation scolding. It is as if the original comment presupposed the meaning and just gave us the snark, where the follow-up spells out the actual argument. Usually the actual argument isn't obvious; that is, it's obvious to you (i.e. the original commenter) because you have it in your head already—but it isn't obvious to the rest of us. Since that's the interesting bit, it would be better to include it up front (and then you could drop the snark as well). I'm not sure if there's any way to actually use this pattern to improve the threads—short of scolding every comment, which would end up becoming background noise soon anyhow—but it's interesting how frequently it shows up.
me_me_me 4y ago
And the we are going to ban entertainment all together, only then we can produce more wealth for shareholders :)

JonathanBeuys 4y ago

e2-e4

sph 4y ago

Indeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our problems, we should stop generating and using energy altogether. I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why does people complaining about "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion energy? So we can stop consuming it? It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games? Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without them and consume even less energy. Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved. We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense if you can get cheap energy, otherwise it's unprofitable. But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-voted comment on a forum. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

temp_account_32 4y ago
mrpopo 4y ago
> The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why? Do you think every additional watt of energy will make us happier? The countries using the most energy per capita are gulf countries like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. The population there is 10-20% residents, the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup). > Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. Again, is the middle-eastern civilization more advanced? Most of them are still monarchies. We already live in an energy-abundant society. Making more energy will not solve the underlying problems of it.
- prvit 4y ago
  > (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup). What did they do? I mean, besides the ridiculous Guardian article claiming unrealistically low death rates among immigrant workers. (discussed on HN earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117) > the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin?
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin? I was born in one of those countries, and personally know people who have made the choice to work in these counties. Do understand that people are not choosing to be quasi slaves because their lives are better as quasi slaves. No, more often it's a choice to create better lives for their families, and sometimes rarely it's a choice by their parents to ship off one out of their seven children to generate income. This quasi slavery is only possible through the insane arbitrage generated by petrodollars, and because we only selectively choose to be morally outraged at human rights violation only when it's done by the villain of the week.
Aromasin 4y ago
I think you're reading the situation completely wrong here. Yes, we should make energy cheaper, cleaner and more abundant. I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact. The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value. It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable purposes; things essential to our survival both on an individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in medicine and the like). Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage. Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to accelerate our technological progress.
- otikik 4y ago
  > I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact. Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated heat will become a problem on itself. But let’s solve the more present matters first.
timwaagh 4y ago
Although there are better reasons to reject crypto, energy usage for crypto has few benefits aside of speculation/gambling for material gain. In Europe, energy bills for most people have tripled so reducing energy demand is a priority right now. I think there are less harmful ways to gamble. You could try a casino perhaps or buy futures contracts on ornamental gourds.
- sph 4y ago
  Just because it's not very useful today, it doesn't mean it's not useful ever. Reminds me of people that were sure the Internet wouldn't go anywhere in the 80s. Technologies don't have to necessarily be useful on day 1 or even 1000 to be eventually successful.
uavals 4y ago
1. Energy is limited. Sun’s mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 * 9e16). Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year increasing energy output by 5%. How long will it take till we use-up whole sun? ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12 solar masses) ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799 How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg) ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not sustainable even on universe’s scale. Eventually we will reach hard wall. 2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for humanity to do. 3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto heating raises energy prices for others.

jollybean 4y ago

Gaming does something i.e. entertain. Crypto does nothing. Or you could argue, it 'entertains'. But in a way that is unnecessary (it's a distraction, not entertainment), and in a manner that creates unnecessary energy costs (PoW vs PoS).

seydor 4y ago
people pay for nothing?
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Yes, although more concretely put, people pay for nothing of value. See [1] [2] for some more historical occurrences. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies Before you get all worked up about "crypto is better than tulips!", I'm primarily responding to your question by saying that _just because_ people are willing to pay (sometimes exorbitant amounts) for something doesn't imply it has that value.
  - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
    People will pay for something that they value but others do not. I prefer to think of value as a function of rarity and utility. I'll skip over rarity but utility can include the possibility of selling something for more than it was purchased at some time in the future. If someone pays an exorbitant amount for something it has that value to them at the time of purchasing. Whether that value is reflected in the market price or persists over time is something else though. Value is not static. Value is dynamic. You can observe this both personally and in the markets.
dreen 4y ago
Nah, it's just gambling but with a veneer of investing.
santiagobasulto 4y ago
You definitively live in the first world. As a person that lived in a third-world, dictator infested country for 3 decades, I can tell you, OWNING your own money is LIFE CHANGING. I prefer not to have games, or netflix, or anything, but have financial certainty. For you guys money is a done deal. For a HUGE part of the world, something as basic as money (or even water) is not. Try to be a little bit more empathic.

viraptor 4y ago

You're trying to compare mining farms running 24/7 with people using a single card for a probably an hour a day on average. Without actual data on the number of users, this is meaningless.

nannal 4y ago
Bitcoin mining compares with PC gaming at 85TWh/a vs 75TWh/a
- viraptor 4y ago
  You're not citing your source, but it's likely "Taming the energy use of gaming computers" which is a problem: it's from 2014, it's a rough estimate, assumes that you turn off your computer only for 8h sleep, includes all the other work done on a PC if it's at all used for gaming, is based on hardware before we got massive frequency scaling, double graphics (like optimus) and before everyone moved away from CRTs... and finally before a massive exodus to laptops. (their follow up report discusses moving away from CRTs as a way to limit power usage) It's really not a good source today, it was a disputable one at the time, and doesn't even match the question - it measures gaming computers usage, not gaming usage.

dang 4y ago

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago
I’m not taking the thread on a flamewar tangent. My comment did not contain any insults nor did I encourage anyone else to do so. I am pointing out with a sarcastic analogy that pre merge and post merge ethereum are not the same thing. Outwardly looking they are both ethereum but the post merge ethereum lacks the triangular incentive structure that pre merge ethereum had. I am also pointing out the hypocrisy whereby people will happy accelerate climate change for the sake of leisure but get upset when someone else accelerates climate change for the sake of utility. I am disappointed with your decision to detach this sub thread and any responses that may lead me to challenge my own perspective. I do however respect that it was done with the intention of an preventing unproductive dialogue.
- dang 4y ago
  Flamewars run on more than just insults. (though the snark in your comment did sound insulting, when I first read it.) Attributing a stupid position to somebody else, especially on an inflammatory topic, is flamebait and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. On a second reading though, it doesn't seem worse than the comment you were replying to, so I'll reattach it. Btw, your follow-up here is a case of an interesting phenomenon I've noticed many times: people often give a better (i.e. more neutral and explicit) expression of what they originally meant, when explaining it in response to a moderation scolding. It is as if the original comment presupposed the meaning and just gave us the snark, where the follow-up spells out the actual argument. Usually the actual argument isn't obvious; that is, it's obvious to you (i.e. the original commenter) because you have it in your head already—but it isn't obvious to the rest of us. Since that's the interesting bit, it would be better to include it up front (and then you could drop the snark as well). I'm not sure if there's any way to actually use this pattern to improve the threads—short of scolding every comment, which would end up becoming background noise soon anyhow—but it's interesting how frequently it shows up.

me_me_me 4y ago

And the we are going to ban entertainment all together, only then we can produce more wealth for shareholders :)