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Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

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Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#211

Post by CyberDildonics »

arcticbull wrote: post #169
wpietri wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"

Further the purpose of mining is to enable mutations to the chain as quantized into transactions. If you stop permitting mutations energy use drops to zero, ergo energy use per transaction is totally reasonable.

That's not how logic works.

That would be like saying "you need light to your math homework so we will measure how many math problems you can do per lumen of light".

The throughput of transactions is not coupled to the amount of electricity used to mine. They are two elements in the system, that doesn't mean they move proportionally in any way.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#212

Post by atweiden »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #207
atweiden wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total energy costs from PoW mining won’t rise to exceed PoW mining revenues unless miners are willing to mine at a loss. In an efficient market, one where PoW mining profits have been driven down to zero, total energy use should remain constant if market price is held constant. PoW mining energy efficiency may increase, though. The rest of your post could be read as a criticism against incomplete application of hypot…

How can efficiency increase in a way that decreases energy use? Let's say a new ASIC comes out that mines twice as efficiently, i.e. 2x less energy per calculation. Because miners can now afford to run twice the amount of ASICs on the same energy budget, this means that eventually miners are mining twice as fast. The network however needs to keep the block rate constant (6 blocks per hour in Bitcoin), so it counterac…

You said, quote:

> If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up

But in fact, if BTC holds its price, Bitcoin miners won’t increase their energy usage — unless they’re willing to mine at a loss.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#213

Post by ericjang »

BluSyn wrote: post #189
toomim wrote: post #36

As a Bitcoin miner ( https://toom.im ), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes ex…

"Energy used / total value secured" is a better measurement. "Double-spend prevented" isn't calculable. Important to remember that the energy used on mining both secures current and *PAST* transactions, that's the entire point of the block chain . I think "total value secured" captures this point. I find it frustrating that crypto-currencies are judged by their energy usage, meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are…

Do you have an estimate of energy used / total value secured ? If I am understanding correctly, an upper bound on "total value secured" would just be the total transaction volume moved in a block?

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#214

Post by howdydoo »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #147
neither_color wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are using 100% green energy, that energy can be used for something productive not providing PoW You can say the same thing about ANY activity that isn't an arbitrarily defined form of altruism. Sports? Concerts? Video games? All vast wastes of time, money, and energy that could be spent fighting poverty or feeding the poor. This betrays the intention of criticizing bitcoin's energy usage because it moves the…

But almost any other activity only benefits from getting more efficient. Compare today's efficient LED lighting technology with what was available a few decades ago. With proof-of-work on the other hand, efficiency is actively counteracted . If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up. You are also assuming that only renewable energy will be used for mining in the first place. I…

>efficient LED lighting

This isn't as clear cut as it sounds. The Jevons paradox: as enegry efficiency goes up, enegry demand goes up by more. Or, put another way: humans wasted less electricity 20 years ago with incandescent bulbs than we do now with LEDs. One could also say that LED efficiency is counteracted by tech improvements. But in reality, we may be using more energy, but we're also doing more, and doing things we couldn't have done 20 years ago.

I'm skeptical of assigning a value judgment to things that a lot of people find valuable. LEDs are used for bigger, brighter advertisements. If I don't personally like ads, does that mean energy efficient LEDs are a waste? Bitcoin mining is used to secure a ledger from attackers with the resources of a nation state. If I don't personally care about a secure ledger, does that mean mining is a waste?

And about profitability, this is important, and new within just the past few years: renewable energy is the cheapest energy. [1] Anyone mining with coal is behind the times and will be competed out of the market in due time. The more incentive people have to seek out the cheapest energy, the higher the demand for renewables will be, and the faster the world will get on board. I for one welcome this catalyst.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#215

Post by nibunabu »

LAMike wrote: post #71

If anyone wants to learn about BSV, simply Google "Florida perjury Craig Wright"

If anyone wants to learn about LAMike and other paid anti-bitcoin shills simply check this out, its a 5min read and worth your time https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com/

"Today, most crypto exchanges, prominent competitor blockchains, coin market cap aggregators, crypto news outlets, etc. are owned by the same few companies who crippled BTC (Mastercard, Pedophile Epstein etc.), and you will never find unbiased information about BSV there or almost anywhere else either because it threatens their entire investment portfolio and they need all the money they can get so they can keep on raping children.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#216

Post by intotheabyss »

rawtxapp wrote: post #86
GBiT wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see how proof of stake will work, and in FAQ is a paper about it. POS have one big problem, that you only have to buy coins once and stake them and you will get richer every day by doing nothing without any additional investment. Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized. We will see how it will works in future.

It literally codefies "the rich gets richer" deep into the protocol. While I'm pro-eth, this makes it a lot less "fair" in my opinion. With PoW, miners can't really hold on to the coins for very long, so they have to dump it to cover electricity and hardware costs which always creates supply whereas with PoS, a staker can just hold on to the coins they get forever at no cost and their share of the pie keeps getting l…

It wont be 5-10% for long. At steady state, it'll be a tug of war between staking Ether in the beaconchain, or depositing Ether into defi protocols. While it might seem like your ETH are just passively earning, actually staking 32 ETH today can be quite involved, so it's not exactly passive at the protocol layer.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#217

Post by [deleted] »

atweiden wrote: post #212
mondoveneziano wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can efficiency increase in a way that decreases energy use? Let's say a new ASIC comes out that mines twice as efficiently, i.e. 2x less energy per calculation. Because miners can now afford to run twice the amount of ASICs on the same energy budget, this means that eventually miners are mining twice as fast. The network however needs to keep the block rate constant (6 blocks per hour in Bitcoin), so it counterac…

You said, quote: > If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up But in fact, if BTC holds its price, Bitcoin miners won’t increase their energy usage — unless they’re willing to mine at a loss.

[deleted]

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#218

Post by wmf »

skybrian wrote: post #171
wpietri wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better metric would be "energy use per double-spend that was prevented." Not for a general audience. The purpose of a currency is to enable transactions. Internally, I get why people involved might fuss about the metric. But from the societal perspective it's reasonable to ask, "What does it cost per unit of value created?"

Okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't explain how to fix the problem. We need to drum up interest for a solution. The way I like to explain it is that Bitcoin is collectively giving away about $1.5 billion a month in prize money to miners. That's the root of the problem. Miners will spend up to $1.5 billion a month on electricity (mainly) and their other expenses. Currently it's about 10x Google's electricity usage.…

In one sense the solution is PoS. But Bitcoin will never ever ever adopt PoS, so we need to somehow convince hodlers and traders to switch to another cryptocurrency in a way that doesn't look like discrimination (e.g. outright banning PoW). A global carbon tax is an obvious yet oh so difficult possibility. Some kind of memetic warfare might be more feasible.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#219

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

xur17 wrote: post #175
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the suggestion to look at transaction capacity, however: - Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. - Transaction fees increase the block reward, and as a consequence, the energy that can be used for mining before it becomes unprofitable. This is currently only about 10% of the total reward miners get for mining a block on the…

> Bitcoin is operating at capacity and has shown unwillingness to adjust capacity, so the "kWh/tx" is valid for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's layer 1 is operating at capacity - different networks make different tradeoffs. Bitcoin has gone the "less change" and "more decentralization" route by keeping layer 1 small, with the goal of moving transaction volume to layer 2.

I don't buy it.

Bitcoin introduced a number of changes like SegWit that are way more complex than adjusting a constant on layer 1, plus a huge amount of complexity on layer 2 that makes using layer 2 just as complicated as (or more complicated than) using a different cryptocurrency.

Whether it leads to "more decentralization" when everyone can run their own (L1) node but a single L1 transaction costs as much as the node hardware is quite debatable IMO. By making L1 transactions unaffordable, it encourages _centralized_ solutions where IOUs are shuffled around entirely off-chain.

Re: Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

#220

Post by encryptluks2 »

baby wrote: post #190
encryptluks2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorand isn't currently decentralized. They have a list of approx 100 relays required for the network to function that they control tied to a centralized single domain.

Do you have a good source on that? This is not the first time I hear this. Btw I’ve studied the consensus protocol and it fulfills promises of decentralization so I’m wondering why they are using some single points of failure pieces (it is decentralized from a safety perspective: you can’t double spend, but it’s possible that some pieces are centralized). My guess is efficiency.

https://algorand.foundation/faq

Who manages the list of relay nodes? What about decentralization?

> Currently, the Algorand Foundation manages the official list of relay nodes...

> We are working on a model where the decisions on relay nodes will be done in a more decentralized way.

As for the centralized domain, you can look it up in the source code but essentially it gets the list of relays from a SRV record on the algorand.network domain:

_algobootstrap._tcp.mainnet.algorand.network

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