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Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#151
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking too small on the impact--China doesn't need to double spend bitcoins. What they could do is cause a loss of confidence in Bitcoin overnight and collapse the price.

How is that even remotely strategically good for China......? These miners are probably making USD or some other foreign fiat at the end of the day which adds to the supply of foreign reserves without needing to use trade... And if they're siphoning power to get around currency exchange limits moving wealth abroad then a traditional crackdown to confiscate their equipment would be much more effective (you can't exact…

A crash would save energy for China and everyone else. Miner revenue from block rewards is proportional to market price. The cost of electricity can’t exceed that or it will be unprofitable for miners.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors are very much hardened against such attacks, and of course, those were both very different situations. No need to spread FUD about the safest form of electricity in the entire world in terms of deaths per TWh. [1] It's also roughly zero carbon. You know the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, killed 4000 people in the full course of time - and we've learned a ton since then. Fukushima killed 1 person.…

Chernobyl shortened the life of a few thousand people, maybe - the estimate keeps dropping - over a 35 year time period. A few dozen were killed quickly. The rest are estimates of deaths based on increased cancer occurrences. The reason for making the distinction here, is that while some certainly can be reasonably said to have been killed by Chernobyl, and the 4k number may well be reasonable, that number is an esti…

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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#153
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors are very much hardened against such attacks, and of course, those were both very different situations. No need to spread FUD about the safest form of electricity in the entire world in terms of deaths per TWh. [1] It's also roughly zero carbon. You know the worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl, killed 4000 people in the full course of time - and we've learned a ton since then. Fukushima killed 1 person.…

Chernobyl shortened the life of a few thousand people, maybe - the estimate keeps dropping - over a 35 year time period. A few dozen were killed quickly. The rest are estimates of deaths based on increased cancer occurrences. The reason for making the distinction here, is that while some certainly can be reasonably said to have been killed by Chernobyl, and the 4k number may well be reasonable, that number is an esti…

Yep, agreed - and in particular, my understanding from the USCEAR report [1] is the majority of the cancers expected were thyroid cancer. That's the one, if you have to get cancer, you hope to get since it's over 99% curable. I went with 4000 (per UNSCEAR) because it's an up-hill battle to get folks to even hear you out if you suggest even that.

It's worth emphasizing the point that coal plants produce large quantities of radioactive waste dispersed over a wide area. Nuclear reactors simply do not do this. Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste [2].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#154
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

So point them out, please. One that is efficient on all levels.

Algorand.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#155
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is due to the construction? Just wondering nif there are any hidden runtime emissions you are refering to.

The vegetation now covered by water will start to rot and release lots of methane and other goodies. Unless it is cleared away first. This is only practical with trees though.

Even of you clear it away, you can still get plant matter from upstream.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... to appease Germany's environmentalists who saw shutting down working nuclear plants as a major win. (Yes, I know it's a different source of coal. But energy, in the age of oil tankers and thousand-mile pipelines, is fungible.)

Germany is replacing nuclear/coal with wind/solar energy: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi... (grey = wind, red = nuclear, black/brown = coal) Both nuclear and coal are shrinking since ~ 2000 and both sources of energy have been replaced by renewables since then. Currently ~40% of power produced in Germany comes from renewables. Wind energy has become #1 source of power from 0 twenty years…

Germany mix is still very dirty compared to some neighbors[0], it’s a fact that they chose politics over CO2 reduction (choosing to close all nuclear power plants overnight as a reaction to fukushima when the renewable capacity was not there and rely on coal until 2038). Wether you are pro nuclear or not it’s an environmental catastrophe.

[0]https://www.electricitymap.org/map

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#157
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always something. Did you know that nuclear-power producing France comes close to crashing the grid basically every other winter? See eg https://www.cre.fr/Actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels... for the announcement from 2019, but I remember reading articles about this at least as early as 2012.

This is because a lot of French households use electrical heating (because it was encouraged by the government to use the huge sovereign electrical capacity), so cold put a huge stress on the grid. This is not related to nuclear power per se.

It's not entirely unrelated: Nuclear plants make bad peakers, and I suspect the older plants probably also aren't too good at load-following. The French also not only get into trouble when demand is high in winter, but also when it's too hot ín the summer because they don't want to boil their rivers...

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#158
post #72

A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

Has anyone tried to calculate the energy expenditure of the fiat currency system as a comparison, ideally per "unit worth" (whatever that might be) since fiat still vastly outcapitalises cryptocurrency?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#159
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Unless I seriously misinterpreted the news, the significant chunk of hash rate cut due to this blackout is all coal. - Until hydro and other renewables cover all electricity needs, crypto mining hogging hydro just pushes other non-crypto power demands to fossil fuel.

Technically speaking, western China has a lot of renewable power and not as much demand for it as eastern China. If they were mining in western China to take advantage of lower rates, and that energy can’t be transmitted East anyways, then it might make sense (or they could just move some industry from eastern China to western China to take advantage of renewables, or get that UHV grid working so they can move renewa…

It doesn’t matter where it is used up, the point is that it is unnecessary work taking a huge amount of energy, that could be used for better things. Even using up purely renewable energy makes every other industry rely more on non-renewables, so it is a lose-lose either way.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#160
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

So point them out, please. One that is efficient on all levels.

First of all I want to preface my comment with the disclaimer that proof of stake is nonsense in many ways (vulnerable to coordinated bribery attacks - we don't know how to coordinate well enough to execute them yet but the math checks out, also plutocracy..)

However it is a pretty expedient way to get something out the door fast (it's literally the simplest form of anti-sybil you can make and a cryptocurrency is anti-sybil + consensus).

So given that we accept proof of stake as a good way to prototype different approaches then a cryptocurrency that meets you criteria is the avalanche cryptocurrency (AVAX).

The way it works is via "stochastic gossip", whenever there is a conflict (double spend or some kind of decision problem where a node is unsure what is reality) then a consensus "game" is started. The way the game works is that you sample some reasonable sample of peers in the network (say 30-40 peers) and ask them "is A or B the legal state of the world?", now an honest participant will naively believe whatever the majority decision is.

Due to how stochastic probability stuff works the network will converge if you repeat this game sufficiently often. The idea is that if the initial state is 60% think A is the correct transaction then after a few rounds (they do 17 rounds which is overkill, you get like nine nines of probability or something) the whole network will have come to that conclusion (each time you run a round of the game the majority will _probably_ grow, eventually only the byzantine nodes are still saying B and if they are not the majority then all conflicts are solved).

Now bear in mind, there are some drawbacks, if someone is stubborn or does the opposite of what they should then maybe they can have some outsized influence, but in general this works pretty well and you can have a _lot_ of nodes participate in the network (much much more than in nakomoto consensus due to the different nature of the consensus mechanism). Furthermore you get finality in 3 seconds (even with the 17 rounds) so that is also quite nice (if you want to reach VISA level of transactions...

A validator in the avalanche network doesn't need some crazy hardware either.. a raspberry pi is fine, the limitation is you need the machine to be online 80% of the time they stake for.

That is one solution. There are others. For example amoveo, which is proof of work BUT it solves the second order byzantine fault tolerance problem (also known as the "oracle problem") which means that you can account for externalities (like energy usage) and throttle the mining rewards or adjust parameters in response.

I am working on a very raw but next-gen project myself, it's called datalisp (I wrote a very bad "whitepaper" in one sitting a couple of weeks ago... it's at datalisp.is - there is a telegram channel.. we're trying to figure out a lot of hard problems and we'd rather show than tell so if the whitepaper is somewhat up your alley then there is a lot more elaborate stuff happening in the channel).

The point of what I am saying is: if we want to kill bitcoin then the simplest way is to just make a better solution and change the narrative around the whole scene. I hate all this nonsense proof of stake ponzi nonsense, if a cryptocurrency is well designed then there is no advantage from being an early adopter (i.e. we solve byzantine fault tolerance _AND_ tragedy of the commons).

Please don't shit all over those of us who want to solve hard problems in a good way just because there's a bunch of assholes trying to get rich quick.

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