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The trouble with describing PoW as "wasting energy" is that it's relative. There's only a sliver of the Sun's light that reaches the orbital plane, and the rest
by politician 3y ago
The trouble with describing PoW as "wasting energy" is that it's relative. There's only a sliver of the Sun's light that reaches the orbital plane, and the rest is wasted blasting off in other directions. Then there's all those trillions of stars in galaxies far far away wasting their hydrogen.
Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generation beyond equilibrium solar radiation, and so there is a limited power budget available to humanity for "useful" work.
Asking the question of whether someone finds it acceptable for PoW to be performed in space or on the Moon is a useful way to discuss crypto when someone just wants to make the climate change argument because it separates the concerns.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's simpler than that. For a PoW blockchain based digital economy, the energy waste would scale much faster than the growth of said economy. There's lots of energy in space, but only so much of it is accessible at any given level - I would not like 99%+ of that to be dedicated to keeping the blockchain going. Today, this may be increasing fraction of energy generation on the planet. In 50 years, this may be dedicated space satellites beaming energy from the sun. 500 years later, a Dyson swarm constructed for the sole purpose of keeping the blockchain going. Nah.
- politician 3y agoOk, “Nah” noted. But for the past billions of years, the same resources have been “wasted” throughout the entire uncountable universe. Dismantling a few planets around a few stars to build Bitcoin mining infrastructure is not remotely problematic for a K3 civilization, for instance. The argument that because humanity is wasting it it’s bad seems faulty.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe argument is that Bitcoin mining will asymptotically approach to taking all resources your civilization can access. Always stuck at 99.999...%, and only adding more 9-s. So with K3 civilization, we're not talking about dismantling a few planets - but rather dismantling the neighbourhood galaxies.