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Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

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Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#121

Post by Syonyk »

imtringued wrote: post #116
Syonyk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It... what? If you put 1000W of electrical energy into a Bitcoin miner, you get 1000W of heat out the far end. It's the same efficiency as a resistive element space heater, just has done some work (useful or not, it's still work) on the way through. Same thing for a computer running BOINC or Folding@Home. Power goes in, heat comes out, but you've done something useful in the gap.

Congratulations, you have reduced your heating bill by $x! You can now spend $x on mining and get more Bitcoin!

I knew someone last winter, during the spike in Bitcoin prices, who had done the math and figured out that heating on some older Bitcoin miners was profitable. Not only was the value of Bitcoin produced greater than his power cost (not everyone has CA power costs), it meant he wasn't paying anything separately for heat. I think he got them for very little because they "weren't profitable to run" when they were being sold.

I typically heat my office (off grid solar shed) in the winter on waste compute - I've got a few computers in here that run Folding@Home/BOINC and I just run them if I've got surplus power. I have propane backup for the really dark grey days ("generator days" if they extend past about a day - it's cheaper to run a gallon of gas through an old generator than to radically expand my battery bank), but most of my winter heat comes from running F@H/BOINC. To the point that on a clear, sunny winter day, I have my window open and fans sucking cold air in or I'll roast in here. I can hold about 1.8kW of load no problem on a clear day.

Now that I have solar on the house, I've considered adding an old compute rig or two in there for winter heat. It's less efficient than our heat pump on warm days, but we also get some cold, grey, foggy days in which the heat pump likes to ice up badly. Normally, if the heat pump isn't keeping up with things, the thermostat will call for the backup coils (which are just big resistors) to aid, and they're the same efficiency at turning electricity into heat as a couple computers. Old Xeons aren't amazingly power efficient, but you can also get them for free or nearly so and throw compute at your preferred projects.

One can optimize for a wide variety of things - energy spent, compute performed, Bitcoin mined, minimum cost, etc. It works better, and is a lot more efficient, if you look at everything as a system and integrate it. I don't run BOINC tasks on my homeserver when we're in air conditioning season, but I light up a couple cores of them in the winter.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#122

Post by zMiller »

jcranmer wrote: post #102
zMiller wrote: post #50

FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…

> It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Which is why Bitcoin mining is only feasible in the areas that have the lowest electricity rate? > We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power) How much of those inefficiencies are caused by Bitcoin? My understanding is that a substantial fraction of that i…

> Which is why Bitcoin mining is only feasible in the areas that have the lowest electricity rate?

Nope, not where Electricity is cheapest, but where it's opportunity cost is lowest. In developed nations with a stable currency this might be high, in others that don't have the privilege of printing the world's reserve to bail out bad decisions, different story. And that's what the market is reflecting.

>My understanding is that a substantial fraction of that inefficiency is things like "there's power loss in running power from a power plant 100s of miles away" or "converting from AC to DC power induces power loss

Precisely, most Bitcoin mines are remotely located right next to the power plants, partially for this reason.

> There's no need to invent new demand to manage existing demand.

No you need demand to bring excess supply.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#123

Post by Syonyk »

mkl95 wrote: post #113
thesausageking wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your facts are wrong. The global, yearly energy use of Christmas lights is ~2x Bitcoin's energy use. People way overestimate how much energy Bitcoin uses and way underestimate how much simple things like christmas lights, video games, hockey rinks, etc. use.

That means that Christmas lights are more popular than BTC. A BTC transaction consumes as much power as the average household in more than 3 weeks. If there were as many BTC users as Christmas lights users, the consequences wouldn't be pretty.

How so?

Mining rate and therefore energy costs are based on the blockchain mining parameters, not the number of users. If there were a ton more users, you'd likely see more transactions on the Lightning network, with Lightning nodes settling out on the main Bitcoin blockchain, but it wouldn't impact energy use substantially.

About the only thing that impacts energy use at this point is the price. One can reasonably estimate that, steady state, the value of the energy used is roughly equal to the total block rewards.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#124

Post by imtringued »

pelasaco wrote: post #119
f00zz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One Bitcoin transaction would generate the CO2 equivalent to 706,765 swipes of a Visa credit card, according to Digiconomist’s closely-followed index, albeit with none of the convenience of plastic." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-26/is-bit...

Thank you for the link, but thats not the same thing. Try to transfer heavy money from Venezuela to Japan, being in Venezuela or from Ghana to Germany, being in Ghana, using your Visa credit card. Try to do it under 24 hours. The fastest way will be flying which can be easily more expensive and risky than bitcoin.

Visa doesn't use flights to transfer money so you aren't talking about the same thing.

Other cryptocurrencies that use less energy can be used to transfer money to Venezuela so Bitcoin still loses against other cryptocurrencies for fringe use cases.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#125

Post by Syonyk »

beiller wrote: post #82
Analemma_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For about the zillionth time, space heating with Bitcoin mining is about one-quarter as energy-efficient as using an actual heat pump and so the “we can heat buildings with it!” argument does not actually excuse the massive energy use at all.

I commented above but from my understanding heat pumps are worse than baseboard electric heaters when the temperature outside is below zero celsius (assume the air is exchanged outside) because the fins start to ice over due to condensation and it's why no heat pumps are used in so many countries that are cold. But I have only researched a bit would appreciate any expert opinions!

The 0C limit was true in the 80s, but isn't nearly as true now. My unit, which is far from a top of the line heat pump, holds a COP >1 down to about -15F, or -26C.

However, you're correct about coils icing up. That impacts some regions more than others. I'm in a fairly dry high desert climate, and our coils don't ice up unless we have fog (at which point, yes, they ice badly). There are defrost cycles that reverse the unit and melt the ice, but it is a problem in climates where it tends very humid in the winter.

However, there are a lot of places where it works fine, and one can always use a dual fuel setup, where a heat pump is used down to whatever temperature it starts having problems, then switch over to something else (gas fired furnaces are the usual backing option) in the extreme cold. You still get the energy savings of the heat pump while it works well, but can keep a house warm down to quite chilly temperatures.

Of course, if it gets really cold, a ground source unit becomes worth looking at (heat exchange with the ground, either via a deep well or a bunch of coils under the yard).

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#126

Post by zMiller »

chatbot2 wrote: post #90
zMiller wrote: post #50

FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…

The solution for the excess supply issue is energy storage, not mining bitcoin. I've worked in clean energy for years, and no energy expert is advocating digital currency mining + increased energy production as a method for meeting demand peaks.

- While storage is part of the infrastructure, it not the solution -> Not feasible for a large set of energy sources and often falls to the same pitfalls of bringing new power online (remoteness, capacity, etc..).

- Actually Bitcoin mining is being adopted by renewable providers as very good solution to offset intermittence and wasted excess.

- Further something like Natural gas flaring is something that cannot be stored but can largely routed through mining setups. Which is being adopted at scale.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#127

Post by dang »

ridethebike wrote: post #7

Am I correct to assume that this is Bargaining stage of grief?

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#128

Post by zMiller »

schoen wrote: post #76
zMiller wrote: post #50

FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…

The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more. > Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply…

> The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more.

This is true and is a function of context and locale. That's the point. Opportunity cost.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#129

Post by soheil »

bastawhiz wrote: post #103
soheil wrote: post #22

It'd be interesting if the proof of work computing at the heart of Bitcoin would do something similar to projects like SETI [0] or Folding@home [1] protein folding project that requires distributed computing. [0] https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

They can't be used for proof of work. Hashing for say, Bitcoin, works because you're finding a hash that has certain properties (e.g., having a certain number of leading zeroes). Anyone can take the input (to the hash function) you've found and trivially test that it does indeed produce a hash with those properties. Finding the hash is hard, but testing the hash is easy. Doing SETI/Folding work doesn't work like that…

Take SETI for example. If you find an earth like planetoid in a very precise region of sky which takes a long time to sift through pictures of the sky to find then you can just give the coordinates of that point for other nodes to verify. This could be the PoW algorithm.

Re: Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

#130

Post by zMiller »

_Microft wrote: post #61
zMiller wrote: post #50

FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…

How low does the energy price have to be that someone could currently expect to profitably mine Bitcoin on commodity hardware? (I read "without permission" that one cannot expect to have specialized hardware available as import of mining rigs could be regulated).

It's a question of opportunity cost of electricity, not absolute numbers:

- You live in a place where the "cost" of mining = Electricity + Amortized cost of mining rig.

- Someone else lives in a place where "cost" of mining = (Electricity + Amortized Blackmarket Rig Cost) - (5% Inflation per month - 30% reduction in remittance fee -etc..)

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