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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)

#261

Post by colinmorelli »

notjtrig wrote: post #252
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 USD is backed by military might and risk of invasion, this is known as the petrodollar it currently requires a US military that uses the equivalent resources as 140 countries. If you consider 98 million barrels per year used by the military to protect 1.5 trillion USD, every million in the bank uses 65.5 gallons of oil per year.

You're really attributing the entirety of the US military's oil consumption strictly to the preservation of US currency? That's quite disingenuous. Did I miss the part where moving to cryptocurrency will eliminate the need for a military?

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

#262

Post by chris-orgmenta »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #43
alisonkisk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Universe is telling you something, and you know what it is. Why do you want to be in a mining pool, instead of buying bitcoin?

Hahaha, point taken. Mainly as an experiment to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.

Interesting thought.

Some calculations that make this sound viable (anyone able to verify?): https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/100684

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

#263

Post by bluescrn »

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

We need a way to prove the work was done using renewable energy

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

#264

Post by bluescrn »

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.

Or they generate dollars by trading and speculating but not actually creating anything. How much power is used worldwide by stock trading, HFT, etc?

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

#265

Post by willbudd »

tromp wrote: post #235
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.

> There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work And they don't have a fair distribution mechanism. They exist primarily to make their creators rich.

Those two statements capture perfectly what I think of Bitcoin too with its ridiculously deflationary block reward-halving algorithm.

Anyway, yes, I agree that 99% percent of existing cryptocurrency implementations are at least partially affected by short-sighted greed.

However, I think it's important to note that there is no technological constraint preventing the potential success of more egalitarian implementations. In that sense, it's at least disappointing to see technological potential for societal benefit being so categorically dismissed due to the flaws of early prototypes such as Bitcoin.

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

#266

Post by analog31 »

notjtrig wrote: post #252
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 USD is backed by military might and risk of invasion, this is known as the petrodollar it currently requires a US military that uses the equivalent resources as 140 countries. If you consider 98 million barrels per year used by the military to protect 1.5 trillion USD, every million in the bank uses 65.5 gallons of oil per year.

The entire economic and technology infrastructure of the world is backed up by military power. I believe we should talk about all three things: Military expenditure, energy usage, and money systems. All can be improved or made more efficient independent of the others to a substantial degree.

The things that are worth buying with bitcoins are still largely produced by the conventional economy.

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

#267

Post by another_sock »

coolestguy wrote: post #101
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.

It really is pretty bewildering how many top comments here show almost 0 understanding of the technology. How many other topics that get posted here have the same thing happening??

Most people on HN at this point are low level webdev and JIRA sweatshop people with no understanding of compsci or really much of anything.

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

#268

Post by amznthrwaway »

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

Candidly, all you’re doing is reinforcing that its a massive problem.

PoW coins are a bad design and we should switch to PoS or other responsible and efficient designs.

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

#269

Post by varajelle »

thamer wrote: post #196
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.

It really is terrible, and many enthusiasts don't seem to understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it. For so many it's just a way to make a quick buck when Elon tweets about it. To put in in numbers, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index[1] (they link to other research that arrive at similar conclusions, if not worse): the total footprint is almost 37 million tons of CO2, a single transaction acco…

Take the cost of your house, divide by the amount of time you enter your house through the door. You get the price each time you get into your house. For a 300k$ house and entering the house twice a day for 20 years that's about 20$ each time you enter your house.

Does not make sense? Of course not because dividing the amount of electricity used to mine a block by the amount of transactions also doesn't make sense.

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

#270

Post by another_sock »

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.

Not mentioned: the electricity and heating/cooling of visa office buildings, the car and plane travel for visa execs and employees, the law and military in place to maintain the environment for visa to operate, the lawyers involved in visas and their energy expenditures.
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