81–90 of 214 posts
I'd like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don't get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-pric…
Can we please just invest more heavily in nuclear? My preference is thorium reactors given they are far, far less dangerous in all regards. Given ARKs time horizon, it would be a prescient investment. There's no way in hell were going to get stable power from solar and batteries alone. The bitcoin power problem is also solved.
True, non-existent reactors are the least dangerous of all, just like components that aren't there are the most reliable.
Increasing bitcoin mining capacity allows the energy provider to “overbuild” solar without wasting energy. Nope. “Free” PoW undermines the whole system. Mining has to be a sacrifice, otherwise it won’t work anymore. There is no “and I can use the resulting infrastructure for X”. Every joule of energy that goes into proof of work is a joule wasted by design . There is no free lunch. I’m starting to think that maybe cr…
It's not free, because every Joule of solar energy has a cost, because solar panels are not free and have a finite lifetime. It's a sacrfice but of something we can easily sacrifice, excess of solar energy we have no means to store but we still need to produce if we want to go 100% renewables.
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> The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now). > Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
> No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now). I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
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On boats with extra solar, running a dump load when batteries are full often happens by producing fresh water (desalination) or heating up water. If useful dump loads are available (pumped water?) then it's a good idea but bitcoin mining is better than nothing I guess. However having bitcoin mining as defacto dump load would probably demotivate work needed toward creating useful dump loads. I'm also wondering what in…
Independently of this, bitcoin will never run on just dump load energy.
If a lot of miners mine on mostly dump load energy, minig on anything else becomes uncompetitive.
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> No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now). I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
What‘s inaccurate about my statement? I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
I'd like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don't get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-pric…
I think a more important objection is that increased demand for solar panels and batteries for bitcoin mining pushes up prices for those (edit: if bitcoin prices are above market price for electricity). It'd be "can't buu GPUs" all over again.
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Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn't designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don't be surprised if people takes issue with that.
This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade. I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow. Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere goo…
It's definitively a fact. BSC provides the same pyramid schemes and pump and dump cryptocurrencies for a fraction of the power consumption of Bitcoin.
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What‘s inaccurate about my statement? I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
You claim that it's possible to tell how much energy was used to produce a block minting solution given the difficulty. It is not. If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was use…
True but irrelevant: The upper bound for rentability is the cost of electricity plus the capital cost of the mining equipment.
As soon as the sum of these two exceeds the expected mining reward, rational miners stop mining.
I don't doubt that there are inefficient miners out there, but I strongly suspect the majority to act according to their rational economic self-interest and not as players in an expensive technological lottery.
> it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck
Yes, but not consistently and therefore also not profitably so. The law of large numbers [1] applies.
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You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race. The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening. The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical…
None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.
Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?