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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

131–140 of 325 posts

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#131
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…

You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value ele…

It's not quibbling over details. Bitcoin miners often place their mining farms near power plants and consume electricity that would've been wasted otherwise. A lot of it comes from renewable sources.

At the present moment network users are collectively paying about $700 000 a day in tx fees, so clearly the network itself creates value.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an engineer so maybe someone else will have to chime in but i doubt the radial heat from a GPU is enough to heat an element which in turn can flash water to steam. Surely you cant get the density needed before the GPU's themselves burst in to flames?

Yes but we're talking about thousands of GPUs here and each one radiating 70ºC

Again, probably need a physicist or engineer to figure out if that's enough to get water to the 500-600 degrees typically used in steam driven turbines.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#133

From an energy-consumption standpoint, I'm not too surprised at this. They have better uses for their mostly-non-renewable power generation. This will probably continue the push towards bitcoin mining in places with stable renewables (like hydro and geothermal). That being said, I just found https://www.coindesk.com/norway-ends-power-tax-subsidy-for-b... , which makes me wonder if current prices would be able to supp…

mining bitcoin with renewables is still a waste. You are now wasting renewable energy instead of nonrenewable energy. Both which despite the wording are limited.

"Waste" means you have no use for it. Yet some people are willing to pay for the Bitcoin, they obviously see some use for it... the fact that you don't or can't even imagine what use that might be doesn't make it a "waste".

Let's say you go to such place with cheap electricity, start your own business, use that cheap electricity and produce something. If you cannot generate the same profit with your product as the bitcoin miners, then that's a waste. You just wasted electricity on your business that could otherwise be used to mine bitcoins and turn them into more dollars - more value for somebody.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#134
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…

You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value ele…

> the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still")

It would be good if it were actually and deliberately properly designed this way to create an arms race of "who can get more general-purpose computing power for less" because it would accelerate technology development with this Red Queen effect...

Unfortunately they've missed the "general purpose part" - most mining todays is done by special-purpose hardware made for mining only, and improving it is generally useless for CPU / GPU / TPU design.

I'd fully support a similar coin that would be mine-able on GPU / TPU / other-general-matrix-multiplication-hardware because it would lead to a race decreasing the price of hardware that can run large neural networks :)

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#135
post #69
post #17

Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8

there are few things on this planet that are less wasteful and more useful/important for our civilization than bitcoin. it's the first time in history we've been able to express and implement monetary value and security thereof in terms of pure energy without any middlemen.

This is such utter nonsense. There are a whole class of middlemen!

And decentralised currency is not useful or important, unless you've got some sort of decentralisation fetish, which most people don't.

This is honestly one of the most inflated, ridiculous claims I've ever seen in the cryptocurrency space. A space which is already riddled with ridiculous, overblown claims!

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#136
post #124
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.

There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible perc…

Bitcoin also provides very, very few of the features of the global banking system, which does a lot more than run transactions!

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#137
post #118
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing opportunities doesn't mean plucking out and leaving your critical eye at the door.

Agree, point still stands though. There's pros and cons to everything. Why focus on the latter?

Do y'all just expect people to put their head in the sand, accept your currency of the future and accept their stupidity when compared to the crypto-Evangelists? I'm in a position where being able to make fast and cheap transactions between countries would benefit me, I don't even care for anonymous. Can I use crypto for that without a massive overhead? No, I can't. Should I stop focusing on the fact that I can't? If I understood your beef, you'd suggest I do just that. Ignore the fact that it's not delivering on the promise and just focus on the pros of the system.

I'm sick and tired of this anti-con attitude. I've been encountering it a lot while talking to people about their ideas, especially from those that can't hold their idea together.

As a product builder, I meet with a lot of people who pitch me their ideas and I decide if I help them build it or not. Now, I do spend a lot of times before actually building the product to understand what problem the customers solve and what solution they chose. That means asking a lot of questions and asking a lot of why. I've had a lot of clients become defensive and giving me the pros and cons to everything so why focus on the latter speech. This is before we even start building the product.

Asking for input on how something works, and they become defensive that I'm a pessimist...

I've had three outcomes from this: * first is a group of people that will not work with me anymore, will tell their friends not to work with me and none of which I've heard a lot about after we discussed; * second is a group of people that went with my analysis and most of them are still my customers and refer me to their network; * third is a group of people that pivoted based on my analysis and work with me with open ears and trust; these are the customers that give me the best return on investment and the best referrals.

While I agree that when someone showcases an achievement, it's rather bad to focus on the cons; when analysing a technology, a cult and or something that combines both of these, especially when it gets shoved down your throat every once in a while, I think we can assume a default not-interested position. I think it's in the people presenting the benefits to focus on the benefits, and the people that they want to convince to hang on as tight as they can to what they feel this technology is not solving for them.

Anyway, sorry about the unstructured rant, I just feel like this 'why focus on the latter?' attitude is damaging for products, for technologies and society in general. Don't focus on the good, or the bad, focus on whatever needs to be in focus to solve your current query...

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#138
post #135
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are few things on this planet that are less wasteful and more useful/important for our civilization than bitcoin. it's the first time in history we've been able to express and implement monetary value and security thereof in terms of pure energy without any middlemen.

This is such utter nonsense. There are a whole class of middlemen! And decentralised currency is not useful or important, unless you've got some sort of decentralisation fetish, which most people don't. This is honestly one of the most inflated, ridiculous claims I've ever seen in the cryptocurrency space. A space which is already riddled with ridiculous, overblown claims!

as you don't provide any elaboration to your claims i'll just disregard them as ungrounded and/or irrelevant. try again.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#139

Genuine question. Would it be possible for mining facilities to harness the heat from the miners and use it on steam turbines to generate power that'll be used by the miners?

I doubt the corrosion and maintenance problems would be worth it. Most steam turbines operate on superheated steam, I vaguely recall 1200°C and 100 atmospheres of pressure being a working starting point for a lot of problems in college. Low pressure turbines are a thing, but that's not where you get most of the power. They're often, as much as anything, in place to draw down energy in the steam before sending it to the condenser.

https://www.steamtablesonline.com/

To get steam at 70°C you would have to draw a vacuum on the system. I see this ending expensively.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#140
post #124
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.

There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible perc…

do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts? because entire banking system exists on a premise that there is an army behind every fiat currency, so it's not really honest to exclude that from communication.

bitcoin security on the other hand is backed purely by energy spent by miners.

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