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The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

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Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#31

This strikes me as hysterical. Bitcoin miners tend to co-locate with the cheapest sources of electricity, which tend to be places where electricity is abundant and hard to export. Like hydro power, geothermal, and flare gas at refineries. To assume they're using the same mix of power generating processes as average, or as everyone else, doesn't make any sense. They aren't. They're effectively finding a financial mean…

Yes. Bitcoin is actually the most efficient driver of greener energy production and transmission. It aligns the interest state actors have in developing such a costly infrastructure (aiming at recouping costs strategically, politically, socially and even financially over the long term) with the interest private entities have in getting access to cheap energy now (aiming at profiting from it over a much shorter timespan).

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#32
Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3].

Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about our inability to generate clean energy while ignoring our ability to generate clean energy.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#33

To counter the whataboutisms abounding in the comments thread here, I will start a comment tree differently. How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?

I don't know anything about proof-of-stake but Chia by the inventor of bittorrent (Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time by using extra commodity hard drive space instead of special-purpose CPU cycles: https://www.chia.net/

Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#34

Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about…

On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else, like replacing coal plants...

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#35
post #7

How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?

Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week.

https://chia.net/

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#36

Food for thought: 65% of bitcoin mining occurs in China [1], China is still building nuclear reactors [2], there are millions of tonnes of uranium reserves on the planet [3]. Just focusing on PoW via nuclear power production, we can power the Bitcoin blockchain for centuries, if not millenia, on clean nuclear energy. This hand-wringing about Bitcoin PoW is hysterically overblown, and amounts to a proxy argument about…

On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else , like replacing coal plants...

We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, if we were not doing Bitcoin, we could use that nuclear power for something else , like replacing coal plants...

We have so much uranium that we can do Bitcoin AND everything else.

Is that actually happening? Is it on track to happen?

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#39
post #35
post #7

How are non-proof of work algorithms doing?

Chia (by bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen) uses Proof of Space/Time and is specifically billed as a scalable, energy-efficient alternative with the same Nakamoto guarantees as Bitcoin. Their mainnet has been out for a month and the network is growing like 35% week over week. https://chia.net/

Interesting, and its contract language is LISP-like!

https://chialisp.com/

Re: The ecological disaster that is Bitcoin

#40
post #19
post #6

I wonder how much energy is used by just the cafeterias combined in all of the federal reserve's many offices.

That. Then, add all the energy consumed by the 24/7 monitoring and safeguarding of every single one of those facilities, and for good measure add to each cost line the energy cost of the whole chain of processes that selects, sets up and maintains enough of both humans and machines to accomplish that task at scale.

Our comments and questions along these lines don't seem to be too popular. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in the industry I'm in with my own locally unique thoughts and conclusions. It's very tiring.
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