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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#231

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

shawnz wrote: post #191
lottin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is not so much that cryptocurrencies don't replace anything as that they don't have a use case (this is something that we can observe, unlike "value" which is subjective), and therefore it could be argued they are objectively useless regardless of their actual value in the market.

Bitcoin certainly has a use case, just observe how it is being used today, every day. Not just to buy drugs online, but also for example to escape oppressive currency controls, defend against questionably ethical practices like civil forfeiture, etc. If you are saying that it doesn't have intrinsic value, then yes of course that is true, but I don't see how that makes it useless (unless you think cash is also useless…

Couldn't this be met with a proof of stake coin? I could at least tolerate a PoS cryptocurrency because it at minimum consumes orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin would.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#232

Post by danShumway »

chii wrote: post #76
amenghra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining is a race. If you have X seconds latency because you are millions of miles away, you’ll loose $Y over the long run. You can figure out the function which ties X and Y together.

if you have more mining machines because it's powered by a "free" source of energy, the latency will be beaten easily by just increasing the amount of tries you get to do.

If you spend 8 minutes getting the next chunk of information to your machine, and then another 8 minutes returning the result, it does not matter how fast your machines are or how many of them you have. You're still going to lose to the machines on earth, because the Bitcoin network on earth can already mine blocks faster than 16 minutes.

Think of it this way. Say we're running a mile long race by foot, and it takes me an average of 10 minutes to run that mile. You want to bring a car onto the track that will be able to go a mile in 15 seconds, but it's going to take you 20 minutes to get the car to the starting line.

That's how latency works. It doesn't matter how fast your machines are, by the time you've sent the information to them, by the time you've told them what they need to do, everyone else has already finished with their work and moved on to the next problem.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#233

Post by yc-kraln »

admax88q wrote: post #186

All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.

This is literally a bitcoin mining operating looking to bring a coal-burning powerplant back online. Pay attention.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#234

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

kortilla wrote: post #208
spiorf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the hypotesis that a global shared ledger under no-one's control with thermodynamical guarantee of immutability actually has some value?

There is no thermodynamic guarantee in Bitcoin.

Last I checked too, Bitcoin is not quantum safe either.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#235

Post by shawnz »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #231
shawnz wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin certainly has a use case, just observe how it is being used today, every day. Not just to buy drugs online, but also for example to escape oppressive currency controls, defend against questionably ethical practices like civil forfeiture, etc. If you are saying that it doesn't have intrinsic value, then yes of course that is true, but I don't see how that makes it useless (unless you think cash is also useless…

Couldn't this be met with a proof of stake coin? I could at least tolerate a PoS cryptocurrency because it at minimum consumes orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin would.

Hopefully. I think proof-of-stake is a promising technology but I'm not certain yet whether it can fully replace the security guarantees provided by proof-of-work. But if it can, then of course that would be excellent. Not only would it reduce the consumption of cryptocurrencies but it might even offset some of the energy usage of traditional financial instruments.

Some possible issues with proof-of-stake though are: Does the ability to borrow money to stake (since you get it back after exiting) make it too easy to conduct an attack? And, since you can't stake if you have no coins, will it be too easy for entrenched stakers to control the supply later on?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#236

Post by jude- »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #212
jude- wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin simply exists in a form where the primary purpose is to waste energy, That's just your moral judgement. The people who use and make a living off of Bitcoin certainly don't see it as a waste. > In order for the network to remain secure, it must burn copious amounts of energy. First, this does not preclude PoW from existing in a world powered 100% renewable energy. Second, I've already outlined a way to econo…

Look, I'll just say right here I do believe your heart is in the right place and you want there to be an alternative to the government run and controlled fiat. That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge. Also, to your point about greenifying Bitcoin, I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best, and con…

> you want there to be an alternative to the government run and controlled fiat.

I, uh, never said that. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency at all.

> That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge.

No thank you. Gold-mining is way more ecologically disastrous. If Bitcoin replaces gold, the environment will be better off for it -- at least you can mine Bitcoin with nothing more than solar panels and wind farms.

> I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best

One way or another, the world is going to need to move all its energy production to 100% renewables, or humanity is going to be in for a world of hurt. But, this is true with or without cryptocurrencies.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#237

Post by tshaddox »

zepto wrote: post #123
tshaddox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s highly unlikely. Surely the people mining Bitcoin would be doing something else if Bitcoin didn’t exist. Or to think of it the other way, if there was some better way of making money with electricity then the Bitcoin miners would be doing that instead.

Have you considered that they wouldn’t be trying to turn electricity into money and might be making money some other way?

Making money without using electricity? I suppose that’s not impossible, but it sounds unlikely at any appreciable scale.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#238

Post by tshaddox »

zepto wrote: post #134
tshaddox wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is obviously producing money for these miners, just like farms, mines, and factories. And wait, are you suggesting that we should also ban using electricity to create art?

Bitcoin produces money for the miners just like cigarette companies, kidnap for ransom, and muggings.

Just like those things? That sounds like a stretch. As far as I can tell, we’re talking about the externalities of the energy usage of Bitcoin miners, which are the same per unit of energy (given some generation method) as any other usage of energy. That’s not even remotely comparable to activities that directly earn money by stealing or getting people addicted.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#239

Post by kolinko »

bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

The growth in supply would not slow - in Bitcoin every two weeks you have a rebalancing of difficulty, so if miners have less hashing power the difficulty of producing each block gets lowered to keep the supply stable.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#240

Post by chii »

danShumway wrote: post #232
chii wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have more mining machines because it's powered by a "free" source of energy, the latency will be beaten easily by just increasing the amount of tries you get to do.

If you spend 8 minutes getting the next chunk of information to your machine, and then another 8 minutes returning the result, it does not matter how fast your machines are or how many of them you have. You're still going to lose to the machines on earth, because the Bitcoin network on earth can already mine blocks faster than 16 minutes. Think of it this way. Say we're running a mile long race by foot, and it takes…

but with bitcoin hashing, you're testing out random hashes to see if it works, and there's an equal chance of finding one for all parties. But if you spend more computational power, you have a higher chance of find one (because you got more tries).

Now, a satellite orbiting the sun has 8 mins of latency. Imagine if there was only 1 computer on earth, and 1 computer orbiting, and both "submit", it's the earth computer that's going to succeed first, if both finds a valid hash.

Suppose we keep the speed of the individual computers are the same - but now you double the amount of computers orbiting the sun. Now you are twice as likely to find a valid hash - even tho it still takes you 8 minutes to transfer the valid hash message to the earth network. In that 8 minutes, if somebody else on earth finds a valid hash, they will beat you. But they only have 1 machine, and so their chance of finding a valid hash _must_ be half.

So on average, the orbiting machines will get _some_ hashes through, because they get more tries. Some of their successful tries would just fail due to latency. At some point, there would be a tipping point where a large number of machines would be able to, due to sheer chance, always generate a correct hash! Now, of course, the latency will still be there, so the earth machines would have to rely on their luck to beat the 8 minute latency (which they will sometimes).

What that tippig point is - might be a very large number - is unknown to me of course...and if that tipping point is greater than 50% of the available hashing power, then you might as well just forge instead of doing it for real...

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