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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)

#281

Post by hulahoof »

cosmodisk wrote: post #112
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

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.

A good idea in theory that hasn't seem to have taken off in any major way is designing a PoW that is mobile device optimised so that the consensus can be driven by idle phones that are charging etc., Major problem being how can you ensure that the miners are indeed an idle device instead of a dedicated server farm. I have a feeling PoS such as in ADA or ETH 2.0 will likely emerge as the front runner in the next decade (by usage, BTC will likely hold top spot in total market cap for a while to come)

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

#282

Post by shawnz »

vkou wrote: post #276
shawnz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not true. For example a monetary system might be valuable because it supports high transaction volumes even at a low rate, or because it has high costs to attack.

> The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it

Bitcoin isn't an economy. It is just a small part of the overall economy

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

#283

Post by AngryData »

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.

Is that any worse than our culture of disposable items that have no business being disposable? Washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers have no reason to not last 25 years, they haven't changed how they function in over 50 years. And all the smaller consumer crap that works maybe a dozen times before an irreparable part or piece fails. Or how many working cars were destroyed in cash for clunkers only to be replaced by trash that is harder to repair and maintain?

Using energy on "worthless" cryptocoins isn't great but we produce tons of other worthless shit using tons of energy and materials that will be worth nothing in just a few years without blinking an eye.

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

#284

Post by hjek »

AngryData wrote: post #283
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.

Is that any worse than our culture of disposable items that have no business being disposable? Washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers have no reason to not last 25 years, they haven't changed how they function in over 50 years. And all the smaller consumer crap that works maybe a dozen times before an irreparable part or piece fails. Or how many working cars were destroyed in cash for clunkers only to be replaced…

Agreed with your point of disposable items. Regardless of whataboutisms, the point about Bitcoin using more power than Argentina still stands.

(If person A says that traffic accidents are horrible, and person B says "Is that any worse than war?"; while B is correct, that doesn't make traffic accidents any less horrible.)

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

#285

Post by rtrdea »

yesenadam wrote: post #191
nietzsch3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again - bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system - bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the blockchain https://www…

> This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again Hi, welcome to HN. Please read the guidelines. Talking like that is nowhere near acceptable here. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment is snarky and goes against the rules

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

#286

Post by jki275 »

samsonradu wrote: post #117
jki275 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They possibly can. Nearly all of them are in China, and nearly all of them are owned by a single company that manufactures the ASIC processors that do the mining.

This is why I'm not a bitcoin maximalist and I'm not a huge fan of it. I have a suspicion that eventually it will fail.

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

#287

Post by hulahoof »

exyi wrote: post #233
vinger wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some interesting side effects.

China is relying heavily on coal power (AFAIK, can't find reliable source quickly). Iceland has clean energy, but in contrary to the popular wisdom "only" ~30% is geothermal, most is hydro. See https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/IS for more detail.

They are taking about the miners, not the grid as a whole. There are some massive operation utilising hydro setups in the middle of nowhere that were otherwise unused

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

#288

Post by dTal »

saltyfamiliar wrote: post #214
dTal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.

Sure, but if you want it to be _sound_ money, it has to backed by some kind of inherent scarcity or guarantee which implies work and energy expenditure. If you want to be able to store it on a flash drive and transfer it to a different continent with no intermediaries, that too will cost something. If it were 'fictional' enough to be free, it wouldn't be useful.

I don't think that's inherently true. What's required is trust that one hasn't fiddled the numbers, and scarcity of some token is just one way of accomplishing that. Here's a monetary system, not unlike bitcoin:

All transactions occur in the market square, at the Town Ledger. Everyone's balance is public, and every transaction is witnessed by everyone else lining up for their turn at the Ledger. Everyone keeps an eye on their balance and the balance of a few friends. The mayor locks up the Ledger at night of course, but discrepancies tend to get the mayor lynched so she keeps a very close eye on it.

The system started by tracking barters, but it got too confusing to track all the different things, so it was agreed to simply write down a number equivalent to the trade's value in chickens as determined by average exchange rate over all previous transactions - nothing special about chickens, they were just a very commonly traded good which made for well-defined exchange rates.

After a few chicken runs, the villagers agreed to abandon the chicken standard in favor of shiny meteorites that fell from the sky once every ten years. They were technically slightly inflationary, but people lost them from time to time as well so it kind of evened out. Anyway, there weren't many of them around; most transactions were in fractions of a shiny meteor-pebble. It was just a convenient reference.

And nobody had to mine anything.

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

#289

Post by jki275 »

vinger wrote: post #197
jki275 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.

They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.

Sure it is.

Chainalysis does it all the time.

Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.

If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.

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

#290

Post by hulahoof »

hjek wrote: post #284
AngryData wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that any worse than our culture of disposable items that have no business being disposable? Washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers have no reason to not last 25 years, they haven't changed how they function in over 50 years. And all the smaller consumer crap that works maybe a dozen times before an irreparable part or piece fails. Or how many working cars were destroyed in cash for clunkers only to be replaced…

Agreed with your point of disposable items. Regardless of whataboutisms, the point about Bitcoin using more power than Argentina still stands. (If person A says that traffic accidents are horrible, and person B says "Is that any worse than war?"; while B is correct, that doesn't make traffic accidents any less horrible.)

Of course not, but taken to extremes we would have nothing to compare actions to. At a certain level of abstraction we need to be able to compare at the fruit level and not apples or oranges.
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