So what? Surely they are paying for it.
Since the negative externalities are not accounted for, none of us are truly paying for it.
Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
141–150 of 499 posts
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#142Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
Lucky enough, we are not living in a free market. Otherwise we would all be fucked. Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make. And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.
A true free market would have plane crashes every day and Boeing being hailed for their excellent safety record.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#143I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thin…
> The "security" of any cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes
Oops, nope sorry. Most don't use PoW..
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#144I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
The difference is that crypto mining is a purely contrived exercise. BTC could just as easily be allocated based on how many trees you plant. It's arbitrary.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thin…
How would they seal the network in their borders? Why would that bring the whole thing down? Countries that shut down internet don't seem to bring that whole thing down in any sense
Cryptocurrencies are peer-to-peer systems. If you control the network they're on, you can do anything you like.
Take the peer-to-peer traffic of the cryptocurrency network of any area, prevent it from getting outside that area (ie., just block it talking to IPs outside some range) -- then to that network, you can trivially control the total hashing power.
So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, then add your machine to that network with a false history, design the network to be small enough, and your machine will out-hash the rest, and so it's history will win. Rinse-and-repeat.
It's trivial for any state to take down a cryptocurrency. There's nothing magic about it; it's an incredibly fragile system whose 'safety' relies on no one owning the network, and if that's the case, no one being able to russle-up huge amounts of electricity.
In both cases, this is false for states. So any state, if it wishes, can really do anything it likes.
The global bitcoin system is well within rearch of a hostile state 51%'ing it, even at the global level -- though the cost would be non-trivial. It would be trivial to do it in its own borders though.
As any state, of course will, if you can ever go into a shop and buy somehting with it. At that point you're imperilling a state's ability to use monetary policy to manage its economy, and that's an existential security threat. So bye bye your monopoly money tokens.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#146I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thin…
> 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system
Out hashing does not give you any extra powers. Maybe you will be able to rollback a few minutes of transactions, that is all.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#147Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
I would be with you, if bitcoin was only allowed to use carbon-free electricity. The reality is that they sometimes buy coal mines ([1]) and burn coal onsite without paying for the externalities. And that's something to be worried about. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
> And that's something to be worried about.
not even remotely in my opinion, bitcoin uses cheap electricity, and if carbon-free is cheaper like everyone proposes then it should be quickly adopted by bitcoin miners
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#148I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
> There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
This is your first mistake: the traditional banking system does not have a security model predicated on the ability to waste power. Bitcoin does, and it’s dynamic so there’s no way to waste less power which isn’t explicitly ceding control.
The second error is treat the two as comparable without recognizing that one of them is used daily by millions of people making billions of transactions, and the other has almost no real world adoption. That matters in two ways because it’s not just that bitcoin uses more power to do so much less but also that the real financial system has higher power draw for work in addition to processing transactions. For example, Visa can do on the order of tens of thousands of transactions per second versus Bitcoin’s 7 but if you are looking at how much power they use, the figures will include running a ton of anti-fraud and other support systems which Bitcoin is missing.
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#149I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres).
Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2].
[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power
#150What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?
Ethereum is using proof of stake now.