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'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

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Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#71

Post by billytetrud »

betterunix2 wrote: post #66
billytetrud wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless a majority of energy produced on Earth is being devoted to honest parties mining Bitcoin. Nope, try again

How do you know when enough computational effort / energy has been devoted to mining i.e. how do you know that there is no attacker out there who is working harder than all the honest users combined?

You can calculate how much capital an attacker would need to purchase the necessary mining equipment. When that amount of capital is more than large nations would be willing to commit, then you know it's pretty safe. Currently, the amount of capital is in the tens of billions, which is already rather out of reach for most governments to allocate for this kind of thing. Yes a government like the US could theoretically do it, but it would be incredibly difficult to make that fly politically.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#72

Post by billytetrud »

arcticbull wrote: post #32
heed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it’s a bad take, but the idea in the article he shared is, in my opinion, reasonable and doesn’t talk about BTC being a battery. It talks about crypto mining as a last resort to utilizing excess energy produced by “green” sources (wind turbine), ie energy that cannot be sold to the grid or stored in batteries.

That's not, however, what the system incentivizes. It incentivizes using the cheapest energy period. Miners are not incentivized to care even the tiniest little bit about where the energy comes from - as evidenced by them re-opening coal plants . [1] It's literally un-doing the progress we've made towards a renewable energy market. It's a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in t…

It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good.

> It's a fantasy that

It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas. Ontario wind production for example curtails 25% of it's energy on average. Please do your research before speaking with so much authority. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/more-of-a-good-thing-is-sur...

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#73

Post by billytetrud »

arcticbull wrote: post #40
shawnz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efficiency of Visa isn't comparable because it solves a completely different problem than Bitcoin. And yes, in most cases we can pay each other just fine without Bitcoin. That doesn't negate its specific usefulness. It's already well documented that you don't see the trustlessness and decentralization to be a value for you personally. If that's the case then simply don't buy any. Those who do get value from those…

Sorry its no longer that simple. It's wasting as much power as all of Switzerland and all of Austria combined. 52MT of CO2 emitted annually. 10kT of e-waste. And growing like grey goo. [1] Dormant coal facilities are now being re-activated to hash noise as fast as they can. [2] This is literally everyone's problem now and we should all do everything we can, tell everyone we can, to shut this down before it's too late…

Bitcoin isn't a country. It's ridiculous to compare bitcoin's energy usage to countries because it's international. Video gaming uses more energy than bitcoin mining, so stop parroting this BS false narrative that bitcoin is so wasteful.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#74

Post by billytetrud »

arcticbull wrote: post #45
shawnz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is commonly pointed out in these threads, that's likely only around 60% the usage of idle always-on electronics in the US. Isn't that a way more obvious low hanging fruit? Human activity uses energy, that's unavoidable.

> As is commonly pointed out in these threads, that's likely only around 60% the usage of idle always-on electronics in the US. Luckily Bitcoin mining is utterly centralized. In fact turning off a single mine in Xinjiang cut power consumption by 1/4-1/2. > Isn't that a way more obvious low hanging fruit? No. Is idle device power in the US rising? Some data shows one of the biggest sources of idle power is halogen bul…

Bitcoin solves a problem that has corrupted governments for millennia. Control over the supply of money gives central bankers the ability to steal money from the people and funnel it into paying off politicians and doing other country destroying bs. Once you understand how bitcoin will eliminate a major source of corruption in our world you'll finally understand it's value

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#75

Post by shawnz »

betterunix2 wrote: post #66
billytetrud wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless a majority of energy produced on Earth is being devoted to honest parties mining Bitcoin. Nope, try again

How do you know when enough computational effort / energy has been devoted to mining i.e. how do you know that there is no attacker out there who is working harder than all the honest users combined?

It would be easy for existing users to see how much energy the cheaters are spending based on the blocks that are getting published. A block gets published every 10 minutes on average so it wouldn't take a long time to become obvious.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#76

Post by betterunix2 »

billytetrud wrote: post #71
betterunix2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know when enough computational effort / energy has been devoted to mining i.e. how do you know that there is no attacker out there who is working harder than all the honest users combined?

You can calculate how much capital an attacker would need to purchase the necessary mining equipment. When that amount of capital is more than large nations would be willing to commit, then you know it's pretty safe. Currently, the amount of capital is in the tens of billions, which is already rather out of reach for most governments to allocate for this kind of thing. Yes a government like the US could theoretically…

That is a lot of assumptions about an attacker's means and willingness to invest in the attack. German cryptographers made that same mistake during World War II: they knew how to attack the Enigma cipher in principle, but assumed, incorrectly, that none of the allied powers would be willing to make the necessary investment. Tens of billions dollars is within reach for many governments, corporations, and even some individual people. It is not hard to imagine what might motivate an attack, whether politically (perhaps to disrupt the Western financial system once more institutional investors have take on large Bitcoin positions) or financially (imagine building a large short position in Bitcoin futures, then executing a 51% attack).

Moreover, why assume that the attacker will necessarily have to work as hard as the total work being done by honest miners, when the attacker might first try to take down the largest miners as a first step to reduce the capital investment? Blackouts in China significantly reduced the hashrate of several large mining pools recently. An attacker willing to invest tens of billions of dollars in an attack would have little difficulty sabotaging mining operations, especially given how concentrated and centralized those operations have become.

Really though, in what other context would we accept an argument that comes down to assumptions about what an attacker is willing to do? Cryptographic security demands that the attack effort grows exponentially (or super-polynomial in the case of public key cryptography) so that we can make the attack effort larger than the number of atoms on our planet (or galaxy or universe), which renders all speculation on the attacker's motives or willingness to invest an attack moot. With Bitcoin you can never make such a claim until most of the world's available energy is consumed by honest miners (the only point at which the attack is actually impossible, at least if we assume that the honest parties cannot be corrupted).

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#77

Post by betterunix2 »

shawnz wrote: post #75
betterunix2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know when enough computational effort / energy has been devoted to mining i.e. how do you know that there is no attacker out there who is working harder than all the honest users combined?

It would be easy for existing users to see how much energy the cheaters are spending based on the blocks that are getting published. A block gets published every 10 minutes on average so it wouldn't take a long time to become obvious.

So you only know how hard the honest parties must work to prevent an attack after a successful attack is detected?

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#78

Post by shawnz »

betterunix2 wrote: post #77
shawnz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be easy for existing users to see how much energy the cheaters are spending based on the blocks that are getting published. A block gets published every 10 minutes on average so it wouldn't take a long time to become obvious.

So you only know how hard the honest parties must work to prevent an attack after a successful attack is detected?

If you assume all the current mining capacity is in use, and everyone mining right now is actually dishonest and collaborating with each other as a single party (worst case), then at most you just need to match the current capacity to prevent an attack. All you need is to make sure that more than 50% of miners aren't collaborating to benefit the same party at the same time.

If you are assuming that the attackers are also hiding "dark" mining capacity, then it's harder to say what capacity you would need to stop an attack, but they would be choosing not to run that hardware at a significant opportunity cost for no reason other than to create a false sense of security.

You seem to be implying that this is a strange model but I don't think so. It's no different from how you won't know how big of a military you need until after you get attacked. Your opponents could be hiding their military capacity. Etc. It's not clear that it is possible to avoid this problem in any trustless system.

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#79

Post by arcticbull »

billytetrud wrote: post #72
arcticbull wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not, however, what the system incentivizes. It incentivizes using the cheapest energy period. Miners are not incentivized to care even the tiniest little bit about where the energy comes from - as evidenced by them re-opening coal plants . [1] It's literally un-doing the progress we've made towards a renewable energy market. It's a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in t…

It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good. > It's a fantasy that It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas. Ontario wind production for example curtails 25% of it's energy on average . Please do your research before speaking with so much…

> It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good.

Not necessarily, no. There's no free energy you can just plug into. If the energy is far-flung and remote, then you need to build infrastructure, to co-locate your miners, to build buildings, to build generators, to maintain and service these generators. If it's distributed enough, the lack of economy of scale offsets the fact that you're not paying anything for the power per se. This is self-evident in the fact these "free" energy sources aren't hooked up to the grid.

There's a real economy of scale associated with a big coal plant.

Hence: It is a fantasy that (b) ...co-locating miners there is more economical than throwing some coal onto the fire.

> It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas.

That article's title alone moots your point. "More of a good thing – is surplus renewable electricity an opportunity for early decarbonisation?"

If you use it for mining, it's not going to be used for decarbonization is it?

  The tendency is to treat this primarily as a technology problem for the power system to solve. Indeed part of the solution will lie in improvements in technology. We will need some form of energy storage to convert the excess at one time of day into necessary power system supply at another. Smart grids, especially smarter distribution systems, will be better able to manage increasing shares of renewables as well – and they too will likely have more energy storage. And finally, the growth of EVs (currently driving global battery demand) represents a huge potential source of storage and demand-side flexibility as well.
That is the solution, not hashing it away lol, which was my point.

Hence: It is a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in the wild that can't be stored in some way or transported in some way. I said can't, not isn't, not shouldn't be.

You've in fact strengthened by point because there's enough there to lead to early decarbonization!

Re: 'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

#80

Post by arcticbull »

billytetrud wrote: post #74
arcticbull wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As is commonly pointed out in these threads, that's likely only around 60% the usage of idle always-on electronics in the US. Luckily Bitcoin mining is utterly centralized. In fact turning off a single mine in Xinjiang cut power consumption by 1/4-1/2. > Isn't that a way more obvious low hanging fruit? No. Is idle device power in the US rising? Some data shows one of the biggest sources of idle power is halogen bul…

Bitcoin solves a problem that has corrupted governments for millennia. Control over the supply of money gives central bankers the ability to steal money from the people and funnel it into paying off politicians and doing other country destroying bs. Once you understand how bitcoin will eliminate a major source of corruption in our world you'll finally understand it's value

It does not. It only appears to on its face. Blockchain can only extend its trustless, decentralized and permissionless guarantees to the data on chain. These guarantees break down at the boundary between the blockchain and the real world. All the blockchain said is 1BTC=1BTC and which coins are associated with which keys. It doesn't say how much value each coin represents. Tether does that.

> Control over the supply of money gives central bankers the ability to steal money from the people and funnel it into paying off politicians and doing other country destroying bs.

Central banks don't print money and funnel it off to politicians lol. They control the money supply by deciding how much credit should be extended and at what interest rates and from time to time provide stability through buffering via purchase and sale of treasuries.

> Once you understand how bitcoin will eliminate a major source of corruption in our world you'll finally understand it's value.

It has created a whole slew of new kinds of corruption and crime, and all the existing corruption and crime remain. It's been a net add of corruption and crime.

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