I propose a "proof of workout" cryptocurrency.
It will make miners fitter with no cost to the environment.
A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
431–440 of 839 posts
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure whether this is true, but I expect that electricity-from-coal for Bitcoins isn't a massive problem because doing so is simply unprofitable: the electricity costs more than the value of the Bitcoins, so it would be irrational to do. I would expect that mining has become an arbitrage market that narrows in on the cheapest possible electricity anywhere in the world, and as such is dominated by excess "free"…
Well, it's not true. Bitcoin has increased the demand for coal power in China. Bitcoin miners flocked to New York State for cheap natural gas power. Green energy is not necessarily the cheapest form of energy. If it were, it wouldn't even be _hard_ to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent climate change.
What’s your source? From what I’ve heard bitcoin mining farms in China are located in regions taking pretty much all energy from hydro.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think bitcoin is bad? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s8219SGDIjMnkzdFI2QjhwNm8... My gut instinct is that the vast majority of all computing cycles used by humanity are completely wasted on irrelevant tasks and inefficiencies.
Bitcoin is wasteful because of its energy profile not because of an arbitrary value judgement regarding how energy should be used. Rendering images is useful work. Processing transactions is useful work. With gaming computers, increasing energy costs means increasing detail and complexity in the images that can be processed. Bitcoin is wasteful because the increasing energy costs does not increase the total number of…
No, it increases the trust of the system. Is it the best solution? Perhaps not, but it is not without utility.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, we don't. Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways. When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided , the use of (harmful) energy to run…
An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support som…
>An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste.
You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going.
This is begging the question.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support som…
> “However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.” Great! I look forward to seeing your solution in action.
Nano does it in action.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not irrelevant. Crypto mining provides a very nice energy sink for inconsistent renewables to put their energy into, when that energy would have gone completely to waste. It is a subside to renewables, where they can make money on energy that would have been thrown away. It allows better managements of the peaks and troughs that commonly plague reneweable energy sources.
It's not a subsidy to renewables. Bitcoin miners don't give two shits about whether their energy is green or not. You want to help level out peaks and troughs of electricty production: Improve battery technology, don't just waste the energy generating sha256 over and over.
It is a subsidy, in that this was free energy that renewables were unable to profit from, previously.
Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time.
After: Now they get money.
The hydro plant is now making money on something that they were just throwing away, previously, and thus it is a subsidy.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who answers no isn't a fan of cryptocurrency; you're asking the wrong people. Those people are just fans of getting rich on the latest fad. Those of us who have been here since the beginning just want cryptocurrency to succeed and flourish and fulfill its roles, and we already know Bitcoin won't be the answer so we're all waiting on The One True Coin.
Looks like a True Scotsman to me ( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman )
I mean, if your thesis is something like "the embarrassing truth is that the vast majority of Scotsmen is actually people born and raised in Kazakhstan", then yes, you will get the response that Kazakhs are not true Scotsmen and there is nothing particularly fallacious about it.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#438I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…
> I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) You know that one of the major motivations for Proof of Stake is environmental, right? Proof of stake eliminates the energy waste…
Proof of stake may not involve energy costs directly but it has far worse consequences - costs are just shifted into political plane. Which is essentially what bitcoin was designed to avoid.
You do know that idea of pos is older than PoW, yet nobody cared for it exactly because you end up with financial system run by politicians - exactly where you started.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#439From the article, it sounds like it uses sharding and pruning to scale. Both are nothing new, pruning has been implemented in many crypto-currencies already, sharding is currently an area of intense development.
Quote "Vault, a cryptocurrency that lets users join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data. It also incorporates techniques that delete empty accounts that take up space"
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is wasteful because of its energy profile not because of an arbitrary value judgement regarding how energy should be used. Rendering images is useful work. Processing transactions is useful work. With gaming computers, increasing energy costs means increasing detail and complexity in the images that can be processed. Bitcoin is wasteful because the increasing energy costs does not increase the total number of…
No, it increases the trust of the system. Is it the best solution? Perhaps not, but it is not without utility.
"Increasing trust" doesn't add value if the system is already sufficiently trustworthy for the task of processing transactions. Based on that reasoning the cost should ('should' meaning: it is beneficial) increase forever because an infinite amount of energy burned is infinitely trustworthy.