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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)

#271

Post by Natfan »

bobviolier wrote: post #216
tomxor wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)... It's…

The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

To clarify, that's fifty one thousand, correct? Some countries use a period (.) as their "digit group separator"[0], and others use a comma (,).

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/110693

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

#273

Post by Nition »

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 fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin?

We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?

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

#274

Post by Natfan »

bluescrn wrote: post #263
grifball wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy.

However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.

We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.

So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

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

#275

Post by Nition »

kevingadd wrote: post #180
saltyfamiliar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural level because it's basically centralized.

That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them. Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed as not a blockchain due to being centralized?

It's near the top on all of them, but you need to Ctrl-F "XRP".

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

#276

Post by vkou »

shawnz wrote: post #116
AaronFriel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Transaction rate is the only possible way to judge the value of a monetary system.

A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get.

It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.

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

#277

Post by vkou »

varajelle wrote: post #269
thamer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, what you're saying makes no sense for a different reason. When you buy a house, you don't take $300,000 and set it on fire.

If you, after 20 years, sell that house for $600,000, does that mean that you were paid $20, each time you entered your house?

A bitcoin transaction, on the other hand, is quite literally a colossal waste of electricity, to enable an incredibly small amount of value (Settling one transaction.)

You may be able to argue that it also enables another kind of value (A bunch of bitcoin hoarders getting rich), but that's not value that's of relevance to literally anyone else in the world.

Look, you can make an argument that traditional billionaires help the world by much handwaving of invisible hands efficiently allocating resources in open markets.

What second order forms of value for the world does the existence of bitcoin speculators create?

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

#278

Post by solosoyokaze »

qeternity wrote: post #272
solosoyokaze wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close.

Just curious, what flavor koolaid do you prefer?

Not sure I understand your question. You can compare BTC to the S&P 500 yourself to see which has offered a far better return over the past decade.

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

#279

Post by Griffinsauce »

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

This kind of whataboutist counterargument is so tired and asinine. Multiple things can be bad. Bad things do not cancel each other out.

If someone is murdered in one city, that doesn't suddenly become less bad when someone else is murdered in another.

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

#280

Post by grifball »

Natfan wrote: post #274
bluescrn wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy. However, people can, and will , lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons. We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and…

It sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618

I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).

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