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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#331

Post by rux »

keymone wrote: post #328
Iv wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.

Bitcoin’s energy use is its most valuable feature. If you think it’s an issue - you don’t understand what’s valuable in Bitcoin.

You've made this comment twice yet haven't enlightened me. I have no ideological bias - what is the value of the energy use?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#332

Post by jacobush »

keymone wrote: post #327
TeMPOraL wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? With speculation on currency (it's the primary use of Bitcoin) and theft - the latter less so, given the very high centralization of hashing power, but it was and still is common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for.

> common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for Define “common” and provide sources for your claims please.

Monero Javascript miners are common to this day.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#333

Post by keymone »

rux wrote: post #331
keymone wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin’s energy use is its most valuable feature. If you think it’s an issue - you don’t understand what’s valuable in Bitcoin.

You've made this comment twice yet haven't enlightened me. I have no ideological bias - what is the value of the energy use?

Proof of work is the only objective datapoint that can’t be faked. It has value in itself proportional to how much energy went into the proof, so it’s wrong to say something was wasted - all the energy went into producing something of value.

With proof of stake if you get out of the bunker and are presented with multiple competing chains - you can’t decide which one is genuine and which is a malicious fork. With proof of work it’s trivial and that’s where value comes from.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#334

Post by glenneroo »

puranjay wrote: post #160
lukev wrote: post #132

The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…

I don't even know what problem Bitcoin is solving anymore. I haven't seen a single website accepting Bitcoin as a payment in the last whole year.

And I have seen ever more who do such as Overstock, Microsoft, Expedia, Wikipedia, Namecheap, NewEgg. I'm sure there are more.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#335

Post by RichardHeart »

I developed something that can help reduce some of these problems. The energy used to mine a resource trends towards the value of the resource. The resource in cryptocurrencies is the block reward + fees. One can reduces pollution by paying miners only transaction fees and not inflation. One further increase savings by utilizing an existing network, and employing time locks. More hashrate is not what matters most. Hashrate from honest, non cooperative parties is what makes the system censorship and collusion resistant. It's interesting to note that the people you "defend" yourself against in sha256 hashing are only the very same people you're paying, as only they have equipment relevant to attacking. On GPU and CPU mined algos, hash rate matters more as a larger set of humans can become attackers.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#336

Post by biolurker1 »

glenneroo wrote: post #334
puranjay wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what problem Bitcoin is solving anymore. I haven't seen a single website accepting Bitcoin as a payment in the last whole year.

And I have seen ever more who do such as Overstock, Microsoft, Expedia, Wikipedia, Namecheap, NewEgg. I'm sure there are more.

you missed the news of the last couple of years with all these names dropping btc because if the high fees, a problem that could be solved but wasn't due to politics

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#337

Post by biolurker1 »

puranjay wrote: post #185
sodafountan wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about privacy). We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corp…

> We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.

this will change with satellite internet coming for the masses and will make Bitcoin really useful in war regimes

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#338

Post by reportgunner »

davidgerard wrote: post #270
reportgunner wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not really matter if it's 2 miles or 2 million miles per bitcoin transaction. You cannot stop bitcoin. Edit: You would end up burning even more if you tried to stop it.

nah, there's approaches. I meet with politicians and suggest a carbon tax on crypto exchange conversion to fiat - miners have to cash out, after all. You have to tax the clean coins too, otherwise buyers will just exchange dirtycoin for cleancoin before cashing out.

Putting new taxes in place is not free of charge.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#339

Post by tromp »

ssutch3 wrote: post #271
mrb wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible that people on HN, a technical readership, still don't understand why the energetic or computational "waste" of proof-of-work is needed. There is simply no other known way of implementing a decentralized, censorship-resistant, robust digital currency. Without PoW you lose one of these properties. Proof-of-stake doesn't work. It isn't robust. Eg. PoS cryptocurrencies can't resolved which chain is corre…

Disregarding the energy cost, couldn't a "dumb" PoW be more computationally complex than Sha256, such that a relatively larger number of computers could compete in the consensus algorithm, thereby increasing decentralization? To me, Bitcoin doesn't seem that decentralized, considering the ASIC chip manufacturers control the majority mining stake. Intel has even gotten into the game.

More complex PoW, such as a memory hard one requiring several GB of memory to solve efficiently, can lower the efficiency gap between GPUs and ASICs to about one order of magnitude, but not much less. That means that ultimately, only ASICs can mine profitably (and only if they have access to very cheap power).

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#340

Post by reportgunner »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #321
lifty wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not tax or make all energy more expensive? That way all wasteful usage will be curtailed and only the valuable use cases will be left after a while. If we do what you proposed it sounds like we should start taxing other behavior on the internet based on its usefulness to society and electricity usage.

We definitely should tax all dirty energy, and the shifting price landscape will do a lot to fix the environmental issues we're facing. That said, it's not enough - because the market isn't some NP-complete-problem-solving magic oracle. It's just a greedy optimization algorithm. It's very prone to falling into bad local optima. We know that for a fact, that's the basis of most regulations around markets. Left unatten…

Energy on it's own is not dirty or clean. You cannot test the wires in the wall to say yep, this energy is clean.

You can of course tax the energy producers, but that does not prevent fraud on it's own - see oil tankers converting gas pollutants to water and causing even more harm.

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