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Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

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Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#261

Post by TeMPOraL »

acchow wrote: post #173
dx034 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] has a chart comparing Bitcoin energy consumption to that of the Visa payment network. Bitcoin is magnitudes higher. [1] http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

This is only Visa's datacenter costs. What about all the employees working at banks to support all these credit card holders? What about all the physical snail mail being carried around by actual vehicles and driven by humans? What about the entire debt collection system?

All you've mentioned is secondary infrastructure that facilitates the use of financial system. If ever (God forbid) Bitcoin volume rises to the scale of Visa, it'll have all those costs too. Including the snail-mail shipping of wallet hashes.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#262

Post by TeMPOraL »

zer0tonin wrote: post #239
kpcyrd wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Run your miner on green energy 2) Green energy demand increases 3) More green energy 4) Save the world

That's not exactly how it works.

Hmm... so let's try another (likely absurd) approach:

What about: the government promises bitcoins mined with solar energy will be free of tax. Solar panels bought for mining bitcoins will be half-subsidized by the govt. For the next two years, at least.

Huge solar farms spin up as everyone wants to mine as much as they can on cheap energy. Two years pass, govt says it's end of the Bitcoin subsidy; miners fold, cheap used solar panels flood the market...

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#263

Post by omellet »

whiskers08xmt wrote: post #231
angus-prune wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth comparing this against the cost of minting money. A brief search showed that the US mint used 694,462.4 gigajoules in 2011[1] (~0.2Twh). The US is ~25% of world GDP, so lets times this by 4 for a naive cost of minting across the whole world. This gives a cost of ~1Twh annually for minting the entire world's supply of money, with a total Gross world product of ~$80 trillion[2]. Bitcoin is using ~1.3Twh[3]…

This is not entirely true, as cash requires energy after it's been minted. Money transport, cashiers and gold old fashioned vaults all require energy. With that being said, PoW is definitely wasteful, and for crypto-currency to be taken serious on the world stage, another form of consensus algorithm is required. Personally I'm partial to Proof of Stake[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism

Don't cryptocurrency transactions take a lot more time & energy than, say, a credit card transaction?

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#264

Post by TeMPOraL »

sand500 wrote: post #247
PacketPaul wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.

Sounds like all the electricity spent on buying and selling stocks isn't doing any good for the planet either.

Honestly, it isn't. Personally, I see all of those energy spending as upkeep - some amount you have to waste in order for the system to work.

The difference between regular money and crypto money is that the upkeep of the former is mostly tied to physical reality and doesn't influence the value of money itself. In case of the latter, however, all that energy waste is a) completely arbitrary, and b) directly tied into the value of money (the more power you burn, the more you earn, and one party burning hard means other have to do as well, for the blockchain to stay secure).

Or in TL;DR: cryptocurrencies directly incentivize wasting energy. Regular money does not.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#265

Post by pjc50 »

austenallred wrote: post #210
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…

Consider that the alternative is all of the banking infrastructure that exists. The energy that banks and their employees consume is orders of magnitude less efficient.

Bitcoin does not replace more than a small corner of banking. It doesn't even include any loans.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#266

Post by DiThi »

mrb wrote: post #148
nodamage wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…

1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.) 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it. I have presented multiple arg…

PoS is perfectly workable, but one wouldn't switch overnight for a myriad of reasons. Ethereum will eventually be PoS for sure.

There's also systems without "mining" like iota, which has every sender verify other two transactions, so it's very scalable and has no fees. The drawback is that having no mining, all tokens were created on genesis.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#268

Post by pjc50 »

dmichulke wrote: post #178
leroman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is really the case (I am not informed enough), is that so bad in the face of global warming?

Generally speaking, any slowdown in economic activity will lead to a slowdown in global warming. The question is always: is the new equilibrium better or worse for all involved? (Think of the unemployed) I think a better metric would be $GDP / ton CO2 to see who's efficient and who's not. Unfortunately, GDP numbers are not really standardized, at least countrys' individual way of calculation GDP varies greatly.

Wikipedia have a list of the numbers, with or without PPP compensation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...

It seems the keys to doing well on that scale are:

- be a small African country without oil (low CO2/low GDP)

- be a financial services exporter (Switzerland, Ireland, UK)

The countries which are doing badly seem to be central Asian former USSR states, petro-states, China, and Zimbabwe.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#269

Post by kushankpoddar »

blattimwind wrote: post #251
kushankpoddar wrote: post #161

There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.

That point of view seems rather uninformed, because industrial and residential pricing of electricity, gas etc. are virtually unrelated, and the former doesn't include new extra taxes for renewables in any country I know.

You are going to be biased towards renewables because there is "wind" in your username.

Jokes apart, this analysis greatly substantiates that point of view: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=18851

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#270

Post by horusthecat »

notahacker wrote: post #250
a_imho wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% of the energy consumed by the world. Actually if that number is accurate, is quite shocking.

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, cryptocurrencies are [over]valued with a market cap of ~$70bn (from https://coinmarketcap.com/ ) of which BTC itself constitutes just under half. World broad money supply is estimated around $80 trillion (not including many other stores of wealth and financial instruments which are not money). So the first conclusion one could draw is that cryptocurrency is also a surprisingly h…

My off-the-cuff response is that cryptocoins behave more like a commodity more than a currency, so their value is always relative to cash, not part of global cash reserves.
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