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The internet eats up less energy than you might think

nytimes.com

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

#81

Post by radu_floricica »

floatboth wrote: post #43

> 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…

If this were true, people would use miners to heat houses. Everywhere.

It's secured by a mix of things, including expertise, investment and yes, a large energy component. Far from a new thing.

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

#82

Post by jonas21 »

maccard wrote: post #29
ashtonkem wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree eith everything you've said, but with one caveat - the resale market for cars and consumer electronics is completely different. Everyone I know has a drawer full of old laptops/chargers/phones that were purchased new and are only destined for landfill. Meanwhile, cars get reused long after their first owner gets rid of them even if they replace them every two years.

It's kind of hard to keep a drawer full of old cars in your house.

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

#83

Post by zamadatix »

nonameiguess wrote: post #75
zamadatix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Bitcoin at all but that argument could be used for anything - "what's aggravating is that cars are literally moved by the consumption of power through wasting it on combustion in the engine", "what's aggravating is that computers are literally operated by the consumption of power to waste it on browsing HN", "what's aggravating is that TV images are literally sent by the consumption of power through…

The same argument can't be made for other goods. Bitcoin bakes the energy cost of transaction processing into the security model. Security and ownership transfer for cars and televisions relies on good old-fashioned physical locks and paper records. That has other inefficiencies, but not much energy cost. The introduction of the internal combustion engine to the world definitely involved some tradeoffs in terms of po…

The same argument can be made about other systems they just aren't as grossly inefficient as Bitcoin so it isn't (usually) worth mentioning. The energy cost of doing something is always baked in as it's impossible to do anything without using energy, the difference is simply the cost vs output ratio is shit (efficiency) not that Bitcoin has a large chunk of waste energy for a reason (decentralized consensus) nobody values.

I don't value it but obviously some do, same as some don't value individual transport over mass transit but I do. It doesn't mean a car is aggravating because it solely exists to waste energy in means a car is ridiculously inefficient. Same story with crytpocurrency.

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

#84

Post by dougSF70 »

extra88 wrote: post #52
dougSF70 wrote: post #40

I think it still eats up a ton (technical term) of unnecessary energy as we have moved from owning physical objects to digital copies of the same thing. For example music, video, etc. Before 2000 you only needed electricity to play content not store it. This question is : did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Given the absence o…

> did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Replace “electricity” with “energy” and yes, the manufacturing and distribution of physical media likely does exceed that required for digital only over a lifetime. The details vary, storing and playing files on your phone is more efficient than doing so from a magnetic drive in a desktop…

On a per song basis you are probably correct but on a total volume basis, more people have the opportunity to download and store their own copy of [insert album] vs the limited pressing of the actual physical copy of the album/cd. Per song the lifetime energy costs are lower but with a higher installed base , is it marginal?

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

#86

Post by adrianN »

radu_floricica wrote: post #81
floatboth wrote: post #43

> 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…

If this were true, people would use miners to heat houses. Everywhere. It's secured by a mix of things, including expertise, investment and yes, a large energy component. Far from a new thing.

People would use miners to heat homes only if that were cheaper than using other means of heating, such as heat pumps.

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

#87

Post by adrianN »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #3

Something that the article does not mention is that most of the large cloud providers are committed to 100% renewables when it comes to their energy usage. E.g. Google has been working on this for ages and most / all (?) of their data centers are running on clean energy. Most of the non sustainable energy consumption happens on the consumer side where most of us are dependent on grids that are also shifting to more s…

Until we have more renewable generation capacity than we need, any Watthour of renewable energy consumed at Google's datacenter is a Watthour of coal consumed somewhere else. All they do is very slightly subsidizing the buildout of more renewable generation capacity.

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

#88

Post by adrianN »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #30

Government should start legislating that non-renewable energy companies must gradually raise their prices to a level such that demand is decreased to a sustainable level. That would be an easy thing for them to do and the outcome is a must if it’s for the survival of the planet. Does anyone know why this policy has not been implemented?

It is gaining popularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price

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

#89

Post by mint2 »

radu_floricica wrote: post #81
floatboth wrote: post #43

> 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…

If this were true, people would use miners to heat houses. Everywhere. It's secured by a mix of things, including expertise, investment and yes, a large energy component. Far from a new thing.

Resistive heating is not efficient compared to heat pumps. The value obtained running the miners would have to be greater than the difference in cost between the two, and reasonably stable, for realistic people to be even started to consider it.

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

#90

Post by patrick451 »

zamadatix wrote: post #79
patrick451 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself dubious of the claim that after an hour of isolated number crunching, my GPU has done anything aside from generate heat (that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information). If only 95% of it became waste heat, where is the 5%? Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclev…

> that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information From the opening of the Wikipedia page: 'Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a cor…

> 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)

According to ctrl-f, the word computation never appears on this page. The word information never appears in this context. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat

> What you call "clever" and "unclever" are (essentially) ways of describing how entropy was changed. Another way of thinking about it is there is a very specific order to where energy needs to go and how it needs to be arranged to be "clever" and calculate something vs unclever and not have the answer to the number crunching problem.

None if this explains why the portion of heat in a clock cycle is different if we consider the clock cycle to be doing something clever. If some of the energy is not waste, it must have taken another form. What exactly is it? When we switch a transistor non-cleverly, presumably the energy never takes this form, and thus the actual switching of the transistor took more energy . Which makes no sense.

> All work will result in heat if you follow it long enough, some energy spent doing that will not go towards the amount of work done but will still end up as heat.

I'm not convinced this is true. It seems equivalent to the claim that all macroscopic objects moving through the universe will eventually stop, which I would ague is an assertion beyond science.

> Waste heat is not just "heat I ended up with at the end".

Fine, but we have to be able to point to where the other portion of energy ended up in the interim. Suppose I push black and white boulders up a hill. This leaves them with potential energy, which is somewhat less than the energy it took to get them there. We can agree that at some point in the distant future, the hill will decay, and the boulders end up back on the ground. Thus all the work eventually ended up as heat.

I can choose to arrange them randomly, or I can arrange them to create binary numbers. It seems as though you are claiming that if I create binary numbers with these boulders, the energy it took to do that is more than if I arrange them randomly. I want to understand how exactly it took more joules to do that, and where this extra energy is stored.

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