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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#141

Post by bringtheaction »

Qub3d wrote: post #111
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of Stake is worth being highly skeptical of. The fact that most people blindly support the idea when it seems to leave fundamental questions swept under the rug is worrying. I wish I could give a further critique, but I'm not familiar enough with the subject. There have been several persuasive comments posted to HN on the brittle nature of Proof of Stake, and the lack of hard answers to basic problems. Tacking…

What is proposed here is not proof of stake. Proof of stake relies on either random selection (lottery) or wealth/age of investment(equity). This is a new beast.

The final sentence of your GP was that PoS would use even less power. Probably that is what your parent was responding to.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#142

Post by jsmthrowaway »

colordrops wrote: post #125
kiddico wrote: post #2

One of the only things I dislike about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. With the proof of chia being used in storage, does that imply a lower power cost? I'm not sure what proof of time is either... Does anyone know more about this and can clarify things?

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything. This point keeps getting brought up and is patently ridiculous. It is computing something - a hash that is not easily reproducible that prevents attackers from modifying the ledger. And there is no other known way to do this, including proof of stake. I think people who say this are just naysayers that are implying that crypto currencies have no use o…

I read someone’s estimate — rough, I’ll grant you — that mining bitcoin (just bitcoin) consumes as much total electrical energy as an entire medium-sized nation. Divide network hashrate into how much power the most efficient ASICs use, and I don’t think it’s an unfair estimate. You can’t dismiss the argument that maybe we can do better as “naysaying,” nor that there is something about cryptocurrency that the people making the argument do not understand. How many joules go into making a bitcoin block? (Really, I’m curious.)

It doesn’t take the entire output of a coal-fired generator to handle trillions in trade volume on traditional exchanges. Minting coins doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant dedicated to it. Even for newfangled cryptocurrency, the human race can handle a hundredish billion dollar market cap without using that much energy. It’s incredibly wasteful and destructive to our planet. How do you think the Chinese are throwing cheap electricity at all that mining gear? Provinces covered in solar panels? (For that matter, how do you think the Americans are?)

Literally the entire concept of mining is brute force through the SHA2 problem space for nothing (to create the currency of value; nobody is saying bitcoin is worthless). Imagine if, instead, you dumped that energy into storage or even useful computation (again: proof of work, not the currency, is useless computation), and what you could do with it. There needs to be acknowledgment that brute force cryptographic hashing is a pretty serious design flaw. We just happen to be working around it now that bitcoin is a Big Deal.

To drive this home, Bitfury is building out 30+ MW mining facilities that require immersion cooling in 3M Novec, because state-of-the-art datacenter CRACs aren’t capable of rejecting waste heat from that kind of power density. We are talking 150+ kW cabinet-equivalents, where anything over 15-20 kW per cabinet with CRAC is currently considered noteworthy. AIUI, they have to underclock their gear when relying on datacenter air. Two-phase immersion is a cool, efficient technology that will probably reimagine the datacenter and should be developed further, but machine learning and science workloads are barely starting to crack that nut. Bitcoin ran directly to the front of the line of “incredibly power-intensive workloads that we haven’t encountered in datacenter design before.” That’s good and bad.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#144

Post by woah »

SilasX wrote: post #130
mrb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. Therefore your analogy is incorrect: if the cargo capacity of a truck is increased, it will certainly impact its fuel consumption.

>But the limit in the number of transactions is not a technical limit, it's a political limit. We chose arbitrarily to set the limit to 4 million segwit weight units, however it could be changed to anything without impacting energy consumption. It's at least partly a technical limit, because there are technical issues faced by scaling the Bitcoin network to the arbitrarily large number of transactions/sec you think i…

The limits are primarily political, as there are other blockchains doing thousands of times more transactions.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#145

Post by rtpg »

xelxebar wrote: post #132
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles. AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs? I feel like China probably…

full lifecycle studies are constantly being done on all power sources, the idea of factoring in the entire process has almost always been there.

Solar energy being a great solution to power generation is backed by a lot of research, as well as a good economic situation. It's not just a bandwagon.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#146

Post by corford »

Just the fact it's Bram Cohen behind this is enough to get me excited.

Watching https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982... I love when he talks about the off by one error in Bitcoin's difficulty reset calculation and how almost all other blockchains have mindlessly copied this :)

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#147

Post by corford »

goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

He seems to have thought about this and answers a question on it here (at about 1hr8mins in): https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...

His answer is a bit hand wavy though (or maybe I'm just being slow).

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#148

Post by simplify »

codemac wrote: post #136
jwilliams wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nod - I'm coming to the conclusion that the effective store of value is the mining infrastructure. Even if it's not that explicit, they move in lock-step.

This is the exact same conclusion Marx came to about labor.

Could you expand on this?

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#149

Post by totalZero »

xelxebar wrote: post #132
goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles. AFAIK nuclear so far has the smallest fatality per kWh ratio. For certain, salt reactors need a lot more research, but so do many of these other "green" energies. Are we even clear on the full environmental impact of the various "green" energies when factoring in secondary and tertiary costs? I feel like China probably…

> I don't get why PV, wind, geothermal &c get so much more love than the various nuclear fuel cycles.

Perceived tail risk.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#150

Post by marknadal »

I met Bram just last week (and had the honor to do a lightning talk before his Chia presentation!), and I want to clear up some things that people seem confused about:

1. Power consumption. Bram brought up a good point if we take Bitcoin to its ultimate extreme, that it will be people with access to nuclear energy (aka governments) that will take over mining bitcoin, since that is the cheapest route. This does not look like a decentralized future, exactly the opposite.

2. Proof of Time. There are attacks that can happen against purely storage based proofs. Bram's brilliant addition here is a proof of time to get around those problems. I can explain more if people want. NOTE: Filecoin's "Proof of Time and Space" has nothing to do with, nor is remotely related to, Bram's.

3. Decentralized Storage. Despite Bram's prolific work in decentralized storage systems, Chia has nothing to do with storing end user data (like Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc.). The data that is stored is junk, but that is okay (see below).

4. Storage waste. One of Bram's points is that this will start an arms race to build better harddrives. If people are successful at that, this will only make Chia better, and also make storage in general cheaper for everyone. So sure, maybe the proofs are wasting storage space, but it will make storage in general more economical.

Anything else I can answer in more detail?

Here is the presentation he (and I) did at Berkeley:

https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...

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