BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

Yay, after pushing GPU prices into madness, now we push storage prices there as well!

The comparisons fall short.

- pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time

- pixels: even whitespace is important next to information

- RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.

- SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.

It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue.

* As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure?

* We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today (https://electrek.co/2017/11/08/chilean-solar-down-26-as-impo...) incredibly low bids for solar projects were submitted in Chile at 2.15c/kWh. That's insanely cheap. We're not there yet in having ubiquitous cheap clean power obviously, but neither is bitcoin "there" in being able to replace much of traditional financial infrastructure. But the point still stands: will bitcoin's energy usage still matter in the not-too-distant future?

Yes, I watched Bram's talk in Berkeley two weeks ago. It indeed runs with much lower power costs. The cost is the power to do a hard-disk seek every long once in a while, rather than to compute sha256 over and over again.

It does incentivize a buildup of physical disk drives. And if it becomes successful, it'll likely spur specialized datacenters and hardware (think specialized tape drives) to try to outcompete in space, so it might end up just as centralized as bitcoin mining.

But the power costs will be much lower.

There also is a proof-of-time component, that does computation, but it is designed to not be parallelizable, which means that throwing additional power at the problem doesn't help you as much. Instead, imagine that each participant must spend a deterministic length of time to compute a solution, and the person closest to the internet backbone wins. But this proof-of-time component is also smaller subsidiary role to the proof-of-space.

So overall, it's a hybrid proof. Bram didn't go into enough detail explaining the actual proof-of-time or space in his talk, so I'm not sure if it all works, but if it does, then you can expect it to use less power.

Proof-of-Stake should use even LESS power, though.

Market cap and GDP contribution are different things. The market cap for the USD is very very high, but we don't consider all of those dollars to count as GDP nor would it justify a comparably large power cost.