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> Yes it is being wasted. Waste doesn't mean "unused", waste means "using more than necessary". Due to the hashrate arms race, tremendous amounts of power are b

by jafaku 13y ago

> Yes it is being wasted. Waste doesn't mean "unused", waste means "using more than necessary". Due to the hashrate arms race, tremendous amounts of power are being wasted doing nothing useful. Due to the arms race, it's only getting more and more efficient. > nothing useful Again with that? You are starting to sound like a troll. > Bitcoin is powered by electricity, a better currency would spend something else instead. Can't you say the same about everything? Why does Bitcoin's energy consumption bother you so much, while you have cars, factories, and everything else still using fossil fuels, coal, etc.? Is your computer running on dark matter energy or what?

ars 13y ago
> Due to the arms race, it's only getting more and more efficient. Wrong. The number of hashes is going up. But the energy consumption hasn't changed. > Again with that? You really think that calculating exact hashes is a useful activity? Please separate the action of securing the network from the action of calculating useless numbers. They are not the same thing. Yet you seem to think they are. > You are starting to sound like a troll. After a single comment? You have a pretty low bar. > Why does Bitcoin's energy consumption bother you so much ... everything else still using fossil fuels Because it could easily be better. The other things can only be better with difficulty. That makes it a waste. It might be too late to change now, but that doesn't make it good.
- jafaku 13y ago
  > You really think that calculating exact hashes is a useful activity? You think moving electrons around is a useful activity? No? Then turn off your computer, you are wasting energy!
  - UweSchmidt 13y ago
    Imagine a computation-intensive crypto-coin-mining activity somehow linked to a real-world, practical use, say, curing cancer (say, by digging through vast amounts of genetic data). Instead of paying for the computation time directly, people could work on chuncks of the problem as they wish and be rewarded with CCCs (Cancer Cure Coins) for defined partial results. Then we could say the computing ressources are not wasted.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      I heard talk of some math that said, in effect, "if the work is useful, proof of work breaks down." Not finding a link...
    - hendzen 13y ago
      This is a frequent point that comes up from people who haven't really thought through all the details of how PoW based cryptocurrencies work. A good proof of work function needs two things (among other desirable properties I will elide): 1) For some difficulty factor D, you should be able to generate an instance of the problem that takes time proportional to D to solve 2) The solution should be verifiable in time much less than D (preferably constant time) So until you can show me a foolproof way to generate protein folding problems, genetics problems, or SETI problems, etc. that have these properties (I haven't found one myself), it seems quite difficult to make a "useful" PoW. Now, theoretically, if you found a "useful" problem that had property 1, but not property 2, you could convert it into a viable PoW using efficient zero knowledge proof techniques [0], but at the moment that isn't really viable. [0] - https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf
      - UweSchmidt 13y ago
        It was just an example to clarify the criticism of "cryptocurrencies waste energy". It would be up to the cryptocurrency advocates to show such a function. On the plus side, the problem does not necessarily be "proportional to D", in fact, finding a better function would be incentivized. Since the computer cycles would produce a "real" value (curing cancer), the upper limit for these coins would be the amount of money society would spend on a cancer treatment. /speculation
- hendzen 13y ago
  You might be interested in Andrew Miller's Permacoin, a proposed Bitcoin derivative that uses PoS (Proof of Storage) to secure the network. [0] - http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf

by jafaku 13y ago

ars 13y ago

> Due to the arms race, it's only getting more and more efficient. Wrong. The number of hashes is going up. But the energy consumption hasn't changed. > Again with that? You really think that calculating exact hashes is a useful activity? Please separate the action of securing the network from the action of calculating useless numbers. They are not the same thing. Yet you seem to think they are. > You are starting to sound like a troll. After a single comment? You have a pretty low bar. > Why does Bitcoin's energy consumption bother you so much ... everything else still using fossil fuels Because it could easily be better. The other things can only be better with difficulty. That makes it a waste. It might be too late to change now, but that doesn't make it good.

jafaku 13y ago
> You really think that calculating exact hashes is a useful activity? You think moving electrons around is a useful activity? No? Then turn off your computer, you are wasting energy!
- UweSchmidt 13y ago
  Imagine a computation-intensive crypto-coin-mining activity somehow linked to a real-world, practical use, say, curing cancer (say, by digging through vast amounts of genetic data). Instead of paying for the computation time directly, people could work on chuncks of the problem as they wish and be rewarded with CCCs (Cancer Cure Coins) for defined partial results. Then we could say the computing ressources are not wasted.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I heard talk of some math that said, in effect, "if the work is useful, proof of work breaks down." Not finding a link...
  - hendzen 13y ago
    This is a frequent point that comes up from people who haven't really thought through all the details of how PoW based cryptocurrencies work. A good proof of work function needs two things (among other desirable properties I will elide): 1) For some difficulty factor D, you should be able to generate an instance of the problem that takes time proportional to D to solve 2) The solution should be verifiable in time much less than D (preferably constant time) So until you can show me a foolproof way to generate protein folding problems, genetics problems, or SETI problems, etc. that have these properties (I haven't found one myself), it seems quite difficult to make a "useful" PoW. Now, theoretically, if you found a "useful" problem that had property 1, but not property 2, you could convert it into a viable PoW using efficient zero knowledge proof techniques [0], but at the moment that isn't really viable. [0] - https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf
    - UweSchmidt 13y ago
      It was just an example to clarify the criticism of "cryptocurrencies waste energy". It would be up to the cryptocurrency advocates to show such a function. On the plus side, the problem does not necessarily be "proportional to D", in fact, finding a better function would be incentivized. Since the computer cycles would produce a "real" value (curing cancer), the upper limit for these coins would be the amount of money society would spend on a cancer treatment. /speculation
hendzen 13y ago
You might be interested in Andrew Miller's Permacoin, a proposed Bitcoin derivative that uses PoS (Proof of Storage) to secure the network. [0] - http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf