Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Matticus_Rex » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #90

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.

No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically. There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.

> There are no companies that generate dollars

Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.

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

#122

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #67

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.

The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.

In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding error... At the point where miners are willing to do things like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV. If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

[1] https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/russian...

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

#123

Post by kfrzcode » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

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…

The BTC market cap is around $650 billion. I don't understand your logic.

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

#124

Post by mrb » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #115

mrb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is still a single dam.

A whole country could be powered by a single dam.

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

#125

Post by kfrzcode » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #113

rcstank wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a source to cite here?

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

#126

Post by btczeus » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

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

It's called Proof of Capacity, and it's been running since 2015: https://www.burst-coin.org/

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

#127

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

rcstank wrote: post #80

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.

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.

It's unclear how much value is being created by Bitcoin vs how much is being captured/transferred from elsewhere.

Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.

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

#128

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

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.

If you google search "how much power is used by online banking" there are multiple analyses answering this question for you along with consumption estimates for Bitcoin. One pro-bitcoin one from my first 4 results attempts to estimate all the power consumption for every bank server, branch office, and ATM 24/7 around the entire globe and produces an estimate of 140TWh/yr vs bitcoin's (at the time) 32.56 TWh/yr estimate. You can compare their average transaction values for yourself to decide how favorable this comparison actually is for bitcoin.

An article I read today provides a comparison point for realtime transaction processing, Fedwire, along with its transaction volumes and server count. It's interesting to compare that with Bitcoin's volumes. The article also makes claims about the energy consumption (suggesting FAANG's energy consumption is already dwarfed by Bitcoin) but I can't manually verify those myself: https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c...

The above article estimates a best case total of 55.1 TWh/year for the major Proof of Work chains, and also provides estimates for various types of mining equipment, etc.

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

#129

Post by shawnz » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #88

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.

Companies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.

Bitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market value so you might say it always uses the smallest possible amount of energy (given the current valuation).

We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.

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

#130

Post by jonplackett » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

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.

Kind of a weird buy-in from Tesla on that basis isn’t it.