BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia • Hacker News Board

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#241

Post by lightedman » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 3:49 PM UTC

kenpomeroy wrote: post #233

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.

"It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works."

Bitcoin as of right now uses over 5000x the energy of a credit card transaction. That's a flat-out waste that none of your suggestions could ameliorate - at a rate of ~325,000 homes worth of power per year and rising. It really sounds like you don't understand how Bitcoin works, nor how blatantly wasteful it is.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#242

Post by ojr » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

it is not for nothing but for wealth protection, it is impossible to do a DDOS attack because you have to burn energy as a collateral, people will exploit anything when it comes to money so this is the only fair one

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#243

Post by root_axis » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

kenpomeroy wrote: post #233

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.

Banks are not going anywhere regardless of what happens with bitcoin. Physically printed money is not going anywhere; people need to be able to buy and sell when the power is out or the internet is down, bitcoin is something new, it will not replace existing financial infrastructure.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#244

Post by teekert » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

If you think it's for nothing you don't understand bitcoin. If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless. Moreover, banks also burn energy. Arguably Bitcoin is potentially even more green than other carriers of value because it can be completely produced from natural resources such as wind and sun, whereas mining gold or other precious metals often requires more damaging techniques.

Can it be improved: Yes, wholeheartedly, for me BTC died a little when I wanted to give the money for a beer back in BTC to a friend, as we used to do in the old days... but soon I realized that the transfer cost is 2 times the cost of a beer. Somethings has to change.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#245

Post by obmelvin » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

cellularmitosis wrote: post #234

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

How many megawatts are being consumed by electric heaters up north? Replacing those heaters with GPUs seems to be a “green” mining strategy.

while computers give off heat, they are terribly inefficient creators of heat and in no way make a good replacement for dedicated electric heaters

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#246

Post by teekert » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:38 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #239

kenpomeroy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like you really understand how Bitcoin works. If Bitcoin were to become widely adopted and supplant traditional financial institutions, the environmental impact would be enormously net positive. Sure, it takes energy to confirm transactions. But, we could massively decrease energy consumption by eliminating the need for: bank buildings, armored vehicles, physically printing money, etc.

I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC. People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed. Pe…

The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity, both paying and receiving are as simple as scanning a QR code, many people already do that when paying with the European Ideal system. As for safety, central storage with insurance and a police that understands cyber crime will still have a role in a BTC(-like) economy.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#247

Post by jancsika » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

The incentives seem designed to make it not-so-profitable to have big rigs with lots of hard-drive space. That design seems to be an effort to keep the mining fairly decentralized so that it happens across a greater number of commodity machines.

But if available drive space and, as Bram says in his talk, even unallocated space, can be efficiently leveraged to back this cryptocurrency, this suddenly creates an incentive for the companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or even Symantec to start doing shenanigans in the background in order to mine Chia coins on billions of machines.

The only thing currently stopping them is the egregious resource-usage of extant POW-based cryptocurrencies. Plus, there are already cases where all those companies take advantage of users resources like screen real estate, installers, usage data, etc., when the resource usage is minimal (or, in some cases with Windows 10, even above minimal).

So if you make a fungible cryptocurrency that consumes less power and targets commodity machines, aren't you essentially asking the big players to battle it out to control the unused space across billions of machines? Imagine the annoying oscillation between browsers for default primacy, except that battle is now between language vendors, os vendors, device vendors, etc.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#248

Post by te_chris » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #244

mangecoeur wrote: post #204

I work in energy efficiency, so bitcoin makes me cry. Any sane clean energy transition plan requires significant savings (no you can't just build a bunch of PV). But while we are killing ourselves trying to get people to adopt green buildings and low energy appliances, along comes Bitcoin where people just burn energy for nothing.

If you think it's for nothing you don't understand bitcoin. If it would require no energy to create Bitcoin it would be completely useless. Moreover, banks also burn energy. Arguably Bitcoin is potentially even more green than other carriers of value because it can be completely produced from natural resources such as wind and sun, whereas mining gold or other precious metals often requires more damaging techniques.…

The parent commenter literally discounted your 'even more green' argument in his comment but you still made it as a rebuttal? Ye gods.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#249

Post by derefr » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

mankyd wrote: post #238

cellularmitosis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many megawatts are being consumed by electric heaters up north? Replacing those heaters with GPUs seems to be a “green” mining strategy.

All you're suggesting is replacing an electric heater with ... an electric heater. That's not "green". It is perhaps more practical, assuming one considers crypto-mining practical, but not green.

It’s green if the 1:1 conversion of a “useless” heater into a money-generating heater, partially displaces the logistics pipeline of the US Mint, no? No matter how efficient it is to dig up/farm materials and process them into coins and bills, it can’t be 100% efficient.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#250

Post by simias » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #246

simias wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that at all. The idea that everybody would walk around with their own hardware wallet and sign transactions directly when buying bread seems as likely to me as having the average public drop facebook chat for IRC. People want simplicity, people want convenience. People don't want to risk losing their life savings because they get scammed or because their secret keys become compromised or destroyed. Pe…

The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity, both paying and receiving are as simple as scanning a QR code, many people already do that when paying with the European Ideal system. As for safety, central storage with insurance and a police that understands cyber crime will still have a role in a BTC(-like) economy.

>The wallet app I use is the very definition of simplicity

Simpler and more convenient than Visa? What if I buy something online and the other party scams me by not delivering the goods?

There's more to the economy as a distributed ledger. If bitcoin was to replace fiat entirely it'd still need 3rd parties to settle disputes, provide insurance, distribute the risks etc... In other word banks, or "central storage with insurance" as you prefer to call them.

The cost of the PoW algorithm is on top of all of that, not an alternative to it. It's not the problem it's solving.

PoW is there to solve the "distributed ledger without trust" issue. Except that if you end up having to trust your bitcoins to a "central storage with insurance" anyway I'm not sure I see the added value over the current solution.