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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

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Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#111

Post by philjohn »

willbudd wrote: post #92
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is the de facto cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the most popular.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#112

Post by cosmodisk »

ssss11 wrote: post #73
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

It's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be used for much much better purposes. Another good example, albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses 1% of the world's electricity output.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#113

Post by philjohn »

rcstank wrote: post #72
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

How much energy is consumed by online banking? Big Tech in general? These are sincere questions.

A single bitcoin transaction uses ~ 600,000x as much energy as a single transaction on the Visa network.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#114

Post by kevingadd »

grifball wrote: post #91
smeyer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices. Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.

Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe. EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space

Hey, at least that way all those empty apartments and houses being held as investments will get filled up with proof of space mining nodes

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#115

Post by Symbiote »

mrb wrote: post #83
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Please realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year). A single dam. So, really the comparison is more a testament of how little electricity Argentina uses.

That is the second largest hydroelectric dam is the world.

Pick the Netherlands instead for the comparison, which has similar consumption to Argentina.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#116

Post by shawnz »

AaronFriel wrote: post #103
rcstank wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing? Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.

Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network…

Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system.

Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#117

Post by samsonradu »

jki275 wrote: post #99
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't consume any significant amount of electricity. Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with climate change. Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all. There are hundreds of others.

> the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China

Side concern but isn’t this concentration a red flag? Likely many miners are in China or Russia due to the electricity prices. Can’t they collude to execute a 51% attack?

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#118

Post by kevingadd »

willbudd wrote: post #92
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency?

Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#119

Post by blurbleblurble »

philjohn wrote: post #111
willbudd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is the de facto cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the most popular.

It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc into those other projects before righteous public sentiment gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human impacts of what they're investing in.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#120

Post by kfrzcode »

smeyer wrote: post #77
ssss11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices. Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.

Bitcoin consumes electricity and creates a store of value, fungible, and with easy global transaction methods.

Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.

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