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I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

chc 13y ago
How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.
- Crito 13y ago
  There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive. You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.
  - SkynetSystems 13y ago
    And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?
- heydenberk 13y ago
  Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    Could you explain this a little more, I'm having a hard time seeing how it applies to mining.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tromp 13y ago
  You get around it by slowing down the computation with memory latencies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wal...
WizzleKake 13y ago
Define non-negligible and show us some numbers. Mining is supposed to be difficult.
- bbosh 13y ago
  Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). That's about 3,285 thousand metric tonnes per year, or about the entire annual CO2 output of a country such as Papua New Guinea.
  - WizzleKake 13y ago
    > the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. You lost me. What?
    - bbosh 13y ago
      A new block gets mined every 10 minutes, each with a 25BTC bounty. That's 600 * 25 * 6 * 24 = $2,160,000 per day. No rational person would spend more in electricity than the reward, hence the 1-to-1 conversion. (In fact, miners do spend more than they earn, collectively.)
    - wlesieutre 13y ago
      That's based on the idea that if bitcoin mining is profitable, more people will get in on it until it eventually becomes break even with the cost of doing it. This is of course a big simplification, and neglects things like the upfront cost of building the mining equipment.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - vertex-four 13y ago
antonios 13y ago
Here you go: http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ 100% Proof of stake, 1 minute blocks, no mining.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  And not a clone of Bitcoin and thus no reason to presume it's not full of bugs and security exploits. Bitcoin is king for a reason, it's survived the scrutiny; any alt coin that chooses to do a complete rewrite is in for a long hard road to come anywhere close to the trust Bitcoin has earned.
- zerorbit 13y ago
  Isn't that a pyramid scheme? To have any nxt, you need to buy it from someone else.
  - jabgrabdthrow 13y ago
    Is precious metal a pyramid scheme? o.O
raverbashing 13y ago
Here's the thing You replace a "dumb heat generator" with a dogcoin miner. That is: turn down the heating in your place and let the computer heat it up a bit.
- christianmann 13y ago
  Heh, that works in the winter but not in North American summers.
- Crito 13y ago
  While a dogecoin miner is almost exactly as efficient an electrical heater as a standard resistive electrical heater, they are both less efficient than heat pumps (or in specific cases, such as heating a single person without having to first heat a very large and cold room, they are both less efficient than radiative electric heaters). And of course electric heating is typically more expensive than natural gas, fuel oil, coal, municipal steam, etc... If you are turning down the natural gas and turning up the electric heaters, you are burning through money.
- Phlarp 13y ago
  The problem isn't individual rigs in private dwellings; it's that entire data centers are being built purely to mine crypto currencies. At that scale heat dissipation itself becomes an energy expending task.
infruset 13y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xgd8v/those_words_by_satoshi_nakamoto/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xgd8v/those_words_...
tromp 13y ago
From the README of my "Cuckoo Cycle" Proof-of-Work at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo : Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little power. Cuckoo Cycle represents a breakthrough in three important ways: 1) it performs only one very cheap siphash computation for about 3.3 random accesses to memory, 2) its memory requirement can be set arbitrarily and doesn't allow for any time-memory trade-off. 3) verification of the proof of work is instant, requiring 1 sha256 and 42 siphash computations. Runtime in Cuckoo Cycle is completely dominated by memory latency. It promotes the use of commodity general-purpose hardware over custom designed single-purpose hardware. Other features: 4) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph. 5) it has a natural notion of (base) difficulty, namely the number of edges in the graph; above about 60% of size, a 42-cycle is almost guaranteed, but below 50% the probability starts to fall sharply. 6) running time for the current implementation on high end x86 is under 24s/GB single-threaded, and under 3s/GB for 12 threads. 7) making cuckoo use a significant fraction of the typical memory of a botnet computer will send it into swap-hell, and likely alert its owner.
- rthomas6 13y ago
  I'd be on board. Now we have to build it, and more importantly, build a community around it.
- gus_massa 13y ago
  The next complain will be that the cryptocurrencies are so memory intensive that the RAM production is a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions. What's the defense against someone with a lot of money that can buy an ASIC farm or a memory farm or a whatever farm that is needed for the computation? How much money should the chip builders charge for that? How many energy can be used in the production of the critical item? Essentially, if 50 BCT cost ~$25000, to create them you must just burn ~$25000 of petrol, i.e. 250 barrels. If you burn only 200 barrels, someone will find a faster method burning 201 that is still profitable. (You can choice to burn them during mining, or during the chips fabrication, or during the chip design, or any combination of them.)
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I wonder if the energy spent moving/securing bitcoin is more or less than the energy we spend moving/securing cash/credit. Driving armored trucks full of cash and coins around isn't free. Nor is it free to keep the regular banking system's electronic infrastructure running.
- iLoch 13y ago
  Not a whole lot of energy spent writing a key to a USB stick and putting it in a safety deposit box.
- jjarmusch 13y ago
  That's not a remotely fair comparison, as Bitcoin is capable of processing a grand total of 7 transactions per second, globally. That's not a typo. Seven. For the whole damned BTC network. That quantity of transactions would easily be handled by a single, small server.
glomph 13y ago
Part of what makes the 'difficulty' difficult is the energy cost. If you lose that you lose some of the safety of the network.
johnny635 13y ago
But energy is money. The more money, the more energy.
maaku 13y ago
Energy consumption is precisely what gives proof of work its utility. It provides the economic cost to overturning ledger commitments which is at the core of bitcoin's security guarantees.
hnolable 13y ago
Ripple's consensus algorithm pretty much has this licked. https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-ripples-consensus-as-compared-with-bitcoins-proo http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-th... - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the-exact-consensus-protocol-ripple-uses http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the...
- justinjlynn 13y ago
  I'm Ripple Labs' Head of Tech Ops and I have to say I think it's amazing. Additionally, there's a program Ripple Labs are running which grants XRP for computing power donated to World Community Grid. So if you want to spend computing power you can, while doing some good. https://www.computingforgood.org/ https://www.computingforgood.org/
pmorici 13y ago
Even though it is the dead of winter and we just had a major snow storm role though my furnace hasn't turned on in days. My mining equipment provides sufficient heat to keep my house warm on it's own.
- ubercow13 13y ago
  Have you tried to calculate whether you make more money from mining than you would save by switching to a more cost effective way of heating your home, without electricity?
  - pmorici 13y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your question. My mining equipment is profitable on it's own the fact that it totally eliminates my need to burn natural gas to heat my house is just an extra fringe benefit to the tune of $100 /month in the winter months.
    - richbradshaw 13y ago
      The assumption is that heating with gas/wood/coal whatever is cheaper than heating with electricity - is the profit made from mining including that - your point stands though.
SunboX 13y ago
Stop E-Mail-Spam. This would be a huge energy saver.
josh-wrale 13y ago
I would like to see folded coins.. That is, protein folding. I'm definitely not qualified to suggest this, but it seems like proteins are kind of like hash values in their one way process structure.. I wonder if protein foldings are finite in number like bitcoins?

chc 13y ago

How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.

Crito 13y ago
There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive. You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.
- SkynetSystems 13y ago
  And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?
heydenberk 13y ago
Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  Could you explain this a little more, I'm having a hard time seeing how it applies to mining.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tromp 13y ago
You get around it by slowing down the computation with memory latencies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wal...

WizzleKake 13y ago

Define non-negligible and show us some numbers. Mining is supposed to be difficult.

bbosh 13y ago
Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). That's about 3,285 thousand metric tonnes per year, or about the entire annual CO2 output of a country such as Papua New Guinea.
- WizzleKake 13y ago
  > the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. You lost me. What?
  - bbosh 13y ago
    A new block gets mined every 10 minutes, each with a 25BTC bounty. That's 600 * 25 * 6 * 24 = $2,160,000 per day. No rational person would spend more in electricity than the reward, hence the 1-to-1 conversion. (In fact, miners do spend more than they earn, collectively.)
  - wlesieutre 13y ago
    That's based on the idea that if bitcoin mining is profitable, more people will get in on it until it eventually becomes break even with the cost of doing it. This is of course a big simplification, and neglects things like the upfront cost of building the mining equipment.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - vertex-four 13y ago

antonios 13y ago

Here you go: http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ 100% Proof of stake, 1 minute blocks, no mining.

gnaritas 13y ago
And not a clone of Bitcoin and thus no reason to presume it's not full of bugs and security exploits. Bitcoin is king for a reason, it's survived the scrutiny; any alt coin that chooses to do a complete rewrite is in for a long hard road to come anywhere close to the trust Bitcoin has earned.
zerorbit 13y ago
Isn't that a pyramid scheme? To have any nxt, you need to buy it from someone else.
- jabgrabdthrow 13y ago
  Is precious metal a pyramid scheme? o.O

raverbashing 13y ago

Here's the thing You replace a "dumb heat generator" with a dogcoin miner. That is: turn down the heating in your place and let the computer heat it up a bit.

christianmann 13y ago
Heh, that works in the winter but not in North American summers.
Crito 13y ago
While a dogecoin miner is almost exactly as efficient an electrical heater as a standard resistive electrical heater, they are both less efficient than heat pumps (or in specific cases, such as heating a single person without having to first heat a very large and cold room, they are both less efficient than radiative electric heaters). And of course electric heating is typically more expensive than natural gas, fuel oil, coal, municipal steam, etc... If you are turning down the natural gas and turning up the electric heaters, you are burning through money.
Phlarp 13y ago
The problem isn't individual rigs in private dwellings; it's that entire data centers are being built purely to mine crypto currencies. At that scale heat dissipation itself becomes an energy expending task.

infruset 13y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xgd8v/those_words_by_satoshi_nakamoto/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xgd8v/those_words_...

tromp 13y ago

From the README of my "Cuckoo Cycle" Proof-of-Work at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo : Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little power. Cuckoo Cycle represents a breakthrough in three important ways: 1) it performs only one very cheap siphash computation for about 3.3 random accesses to memory, 2) its memory requirement can be set arbitrarily and doesn't allow for any time-memory trade-off. 3) verification of the proof of work is instant, requiring 1 sha256 and 42 siphash computations. Runtime in Cuckoo Cycle is completely dominated by memory latency. It promotes the use of commodity general-purpose hardware over custom designed single-purpose hardware. Other features: 4) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph. 5) it has a natural notion of (base) difficulty, namely the number of edges in the graph; above about 60% of size, a 42-cycle is almost guaranteed, but below 50% the probability starts to fall sharply. 6) running time for the current implementation on high end x86 is under 24s/GB single-threaded, and under 3s/GB for 12 threads. 7) making cuckoo use a significant fraction of the typical memory of a botnet computer will send it into swap-hell, and likely alert its owner.

rthomas6 13y ago
I'd be on board. Now we have to build it, and more importantly, build a community around it.
gus_massa 13y ago
The next complain will be that the cryptocurrencies are so memory intensive that the RAM production is a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions. What's the defense against someone with a lot of money that can buy an ASIC farm or a memory farm or a whatever farm that is needed for the computation? How much money should the chip builders charge for that? How many energy can be used in the production of the critical item? Essentially, if 50 BCT cost ~$25000, to create them you must just burn ~$25000 of petrol, i.e. 250 barrels. If you burn only 200 barrels, someone will find a faster method burning 201 that is still profitable. (You can choice to burn them during mining, or during the chips fabrication, or during the chip design, or any combination of them.)

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I wonder if the energy spent moving/securing bitcoin is more or less than the energy we spend moving/securing cash/credit. Driving armored trucks full of cash and coins around isn't free. Nor is it free to keep the regular banking system's electronic infrastructure running.

iLoch 13y ago
Not a whole lot of energy spent writing a key to a USB stick and putting it in a safety deposit box.
jjarmusch 13y ago
That's not a remotely fair comparison, as Bitcoin is capable of processing a grand total of 7 transactions per second, globally. That's not a typo. Seven. For the whole damned BTC network. That quantity of transactions would easily be handled by a single, small server.

glomph 13y ago

Part of what makes the 'difficulty' difficult is the energy cost. If you lose that you lose some of the safety of the network.

johnny635 13y ago

But energy is money. The more money, the more energy.

maaku 13y ago

Energy consumption is precisely what gives proof of work its utility. It provides the economic cost to overturning ledger commitments which is at the core of bitcoin's security guarantees.

hnolable 13y ago

Ripple's consensus algorithm pretty much has this licked. https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-ripples-consensus-as-compared-with-bitcoins-proo http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-th... - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the-exact-consensus-protocol-ripple-uses http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the...

justinjlynn 13y ago
I'm Ripple Labs' Head of Tech Ops and I have to say I think it's amazing. Additionally, there's a program Ripple Labs are running which grants XRP for computing power donated to World Community Grid. So if you want to spend computing power you can, while doing some good. https://www.computingforgood.org/ https://www.computingforgood.org/

pmorici 13y ago

Even though it is the dead of winter and we just had a major snow storm role though my furnace hasn't turned on in days. My mining equipment provides sufficient heat to keep my house warm on it's own.

ubercow13 13y ago
Have you tried to calculate whether you make more money from mining than you would save by switching to a more cost effective way of heating your home, without electricity?
- pmorici 13y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your question. My mining equipment is profitable on it's own the fact that it totally eliminates my need to burn natural gas to heat my house is just an extra fringe benefit to the tune of $100 /month in the winter months.
  - richbradshaw 13y ago
    The assumption is that heating with gas/wood/coal whatever is cheaper than heating with electricity - is the profit made from mining including that - your point stands though.

SunboX 13y ago

Stop E-Mail-Spam. This would be a huge energy saver.

josh-wrale 13y ago

I would like to see folded coins.. That is, protein folding. I'm definitely not qualified to suggest this, but it seems like proteins are kind of like hash values in their one way process structure.. I wonder if protein foldings are finite in number like bitcoins?