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The internet eats up less energy than you might think

nytimes.com

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#61

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry P…

"Waste" is value judgement. For me, it's securing a network of decentralized transactions, so that power isn't wasted. Given my distaste for adtech and certain governments, I'd qualify their power and resource usage as a waste and that the world would be better off without them, even if the people who work in adtech or benefit from said governments would disagree.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#62
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all! Bitcoin is not just inefficient, it is purposefully inefficient on a colossal scale. By design, all the energy is turned into waste heat.

"Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#63

News sites love interesting headlines, researchers and university PR departments love being in the news, often much more than they value truth. The easiest way to get impressive research on power consumption is to use old per-unit consumption numbers to extrapolate power consumption based on today's usage (e.g. if transferring 1 GB of data took 1 kWh many years ago, just multiply "GB transferred today" with 1 kWh and…

> Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021]

That should say 2012.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#64
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream It's fundamentally impossible. Capitalism is what brought this ecological madness down on it, because of its shortsighted profit incentives. The very same system cannot fix the problem, because nothing has changed. Pointing out companies who used fossil fuels was intending to allow us as a society to realize we need to reduce co…

I fail to understand why you bring capitalism into this when it's the most efficient way of dealing with pollution, since it has a pricing mechanism for raw materials, pollution taxes, etc. I've lived in the socialism on the USSR and seen what it looked like, it's day and night compared to how free countries deal with pollution. Guess what happens when raw materials are available for free, the economy is inefficient…

I agree wholesale with you but would like to point out that in "capitalism" prices for raw materials are often so cheap as to be called free not only in lawless shithole countries (see the films "Tapped" or "Gasland" concerning shale and bottled waterwater industry), even fines for polluting are often a slap on the wrist for hugely rich corporations (who are too big to fail ...) Swiss billionaire Stephen Schmidheiny is a rare example of someone being held accountable... But more to the point "The Corporation" makes the case that it's because a change in the law during the civil war let businesses have the same rights as citizens that such oversight occurs..they have more resources than individuals and often cause speculative havoc (ie buying up properties to make a Airbnb empire)

I understand your emotion and living in Romania I see the abandoned conglomerates and am glad that period is over...however if you discount the risk of chernobilian disaster (sea of Azov etc) that the lack of media and public accountability made possible I'd wager that capitalistic societies is powers of magnitude more polluting simply because people live behind paid layers (producer->wholesalers->distributors->retailers->consumer) paying for it by living in cities, working for buisnesses serving other buisness etc) Manufactured boredom (from living in cities) ->Advertising->fashion/fads->brands-> excess packaging is also a thing and part of the problem... Then there is the fact that businesses once created to solve a problem in the most efficient way often self perpetuate and bloat with govt closing their eyes to monopolistic behaviour in the name of customer pricing

In the city I live in, you can buy food from people from the countryside, rent/property is still cheap , so if you live simply you hardly have expenses and can avoid wasting your life working away while hardly seeing your kids grow up... I understand you lived in a failed system but you shouldn't throw away the baby with the bathwater, authenticity counts, real food counts, generosity and food that is less processed or sprayed (because cost) counts

I feel having grown up in a WIERD (acronym) people there forget that the apparent sophistication is just a sheen and like the 300ml plastic bottles they constantly consume they are choking the rest of us on their garbage (ie the developed world using x times more than the rest)

I think you can see where I'm going with this...the problem with capitalism atm or the way government treats it is that it inherently needs growth, whereas the planet needs "decroissance" a french word for "ungrowth" a french politician, (Yves Cochet )I think, said something like our economy has to "ungrow" 10% per year , it's possible even without covid, but it certainly needs a whole new mindset or a drastic realisation that droughts are going to get much much worse...

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#65
post #8

This article is very light on details. I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume t…

Apple themselves claims that roughly 80% of the emissions of an iPhone comes from production; with the remainder being transit, use, and end of life recycling. As far as electronics are concerned, the best thing you can do is defer upgrading as long as possible. Interestingly enough, the same is true for cars. It’s often better to just keep using an older car until it dies from a CO2 perspective (sometimes older cars…

Could not agree more. If you halved the rate at which you replaced electronics (TV, laptop, phone, etc), you would probably do more good towards reducing CO2 production than buying an EV.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

[deleted]

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

If 100% of the input power was given to waste heat then your computer would just be a resistance heater and not a computer. Computing information is work which requires energy (which will also eventually end up as heat in the long run, as will all energy, just not waste heat) and there is a limit on how efficiently you can compute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle. I.e. it's not possible to compute something without doing work.

Waste heat in a computer is largely resistance, power conversion inefficiencies, and cooling. Heat generated by the actual computation is known as work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics) not waste heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat. The ratio of the two describes the efficiency of a machine. Since some useful work must have been done for the computation to occur then it's impossible for 100% of the energy to have been used for waste heat.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

In computers the "work" is mostly not physically impactful apart from the creation of light from a monitor, or the application of magnetism to a disk. You could say all the energy that goes to heat instead is waste, but as with mechanical devices, there's no way to be perfectly efficient. Some amount of energy loss to heat is strictly necessary to process logic.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work." You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

Yes, in the end, 100% of the energy that is consumed within a room, is not stored as potential energy, and doesn't escape as RF/light, ends up as heat.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#70
"But Bitcoin, the scientists say, is something different — and a worry. The efficiency trends elsewhere in tech are blunted because Bitcoin’s specialized software churns through ever more computing cycles as more people try to create, buy and sell digital currency."

No, increased Bitcoin usage does not increase the amount of energy needed to process transactions.

More people are mining (and thus burning more power), because it is a profitable venture if you can get best prices on hardware and lowest costs of electricity.

The least expensive electricity in the world happens to be either stolen, stranded, or hydro / geothermal.

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