Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power • Hacker News Board

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#341

Post by lurking15 » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #174

lurking15 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable

On this scale? Easily detected and killed. Just check their power bill. It has gotten completely out of hand. What was intended to be run on personal computers has become a juggernaut of rampant egregious resource consumption.

> Easily detected and killed. Just check their power bill.

except that bitcoin doesn't inherently require any fixed amount of energy and that's why there's a difficulty adjustment, of course this fact seems to go over most people's heads and suggests to me they don't actually understand it

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#342

Post by FabHK » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

patricius wrote: post #253

acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tr…

Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for. The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2…

> thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.

Except, in good old libertarian fashion, they tend not to pay for it. First, the vast majority of the around $100 it costs to process a BTC transaction comes not from explicit fees, but from (invisible) money supply increase (the mining reward). That still neglects the environmental externalities, which are probably in the $30+ region.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#343

Post by lurking15 » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #152

lurking15 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable

Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.

You're arguing that it's a poison (it isn't) but even worse you're proposing a cure that's far worse. So "go after them" in other words would mean: construct a global authoritarian surveillance apparatus that hunts down energy consumers?

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#344

Post by FabHK » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #92

digging wrote: post #57

I'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…

Yes. PoW blockchains: energy efficient, secure, supporting a highly valuable crypto currency - pick any two.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#345

Post by pcthrowaway » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #140

55555 wrote: post #79

There's an argument to be made for crypto to be used to turn power that wouldn't otherwise be economical / linked to the grid / used into money, which can then be turned back into power (in a purely economic sense) later. For example wave energy could power GPUs in the middle of the ocean, with no need to then transmit electricity to shore. Solar could be captured in the middle of the desert. Some oil rigs are mining…

The energy market already works like this today (sans blockchain), any multinational provider is doing energy arbitrage across different markets and energy sources (electrical production, natural gas, etc)

Actually, the idea of a bitcoin operation in the middle of a desert is maybe the only decent defense of its waste of energy I've heard.

Someone harvesting solar power in the middle of the desert doesn't have to connect to any other energy grids to conduct mining, so in theory it's not driving up costs for other consumers or wasting energy that could be used for literally anything else.

It'd still be a waste of the solar panels and resources though, and the setup would certainly involve some externalities with other impact. And realistically the overwhelming majority of mining operations are not doing this, so it's just smoke and mirrors by people arguing in bad faith.

But I'd have much less of a problem with bitcoin if all its mining came from remote locations that would see no development otherwise, using energy harvested from the environment.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#346

Post by lurking15 » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

malermeister wrote: post #133

lurking15 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable

You can't engineer your way out of a social dilemma. If the government says "anyone caught using bitcoin goes to jail" and actually puts effort into enforcing it, all the fancy engineering in the world isn't going to help you, unless you never want to actually use it in the real world.

But if bitcoin can operate in China now where it's been repeatedly banned and the network chugs along completely uninterrupted it seems like a stretch that governments (of which the entire world would have to band together) have any say here.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#347

Post by infamouscow » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

stanleykm wrote: post #206

infamouscow wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not a free market. Those same regulators also give tax breaks to large inefficient corporations and tell small businesses they must close down for arbitrary intangible public health reasons, while the large corporations can remain open. In both examples, it's the regulators whom are detrimental to society, not the free market. Virtually everyone that champions regulations are not for regulation, but for i…

The free market cant solve big societal issues we are staring down the barrel of. We need coordination at the highest levels of human civilization and not some handy wavey hope a million monkeys will reach the answer.

You might want to prepare for the worst then.

That's probably not what you were expecting, but if that's really the case, it probably doesn't help that society is hyper-polarized. It also doesn't help that the main political opponent in the next election is being railroaded by the court system.

If the idea is to unify and coordinate to solve problems, alienating and demonizing 70M voters and half of the country is not the way to do so. The message half the country hears and thinks is: when push comes to shove, the other half prefer crushing political competition by any means necessary rather than find common ground and work together. Those are the rules one side is playing by, and it shouldn't be a surprise when the other side does the same, or takes their ball and goes home.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#348

Post by lurking15 » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:51 PM UTC

Bitbitcowurgh wrote: post #196

lurking15 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you except that most, if not all, off-chain networks are still based on-chain and have mechanisms for being a relatively secure way for exchanging day-to-day without having to settle on-chain for every transaction

Imagine a world were someone with a private key could send money transparently to someone else by just signing the transaction publicly. Suddenly you don't need PoW anymore. The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. Nothing more. And for that it needs 2% of total US Power usage...

Except the whole point of bitcoin is that it's a scarce commodity enforced through power consumption (something that's a limiting factor to adversaries)

> The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain.

which is how you constrain supply in a decentralized way with an independent time-keeping mechanism

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#349

Post by webignition » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

fifilura wrote: post #337

webignition wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK, a small town in Wiltshire. The town I live in is bisected by a MOD railway and, from what I understand, permission was never granted for whatever was needed to supply natural gas on my side of the tracks. This rules out some of the more common traditional heating systems found in these parts. We bought the house ~two years ago. The building itself was (and still is) quite sound but was a wreck in terms…

Thank you for answering! Yeah there are lots of reasons to not get a heat pump, floor heating is one of them. And your gp post was not unreasonable, and food for discussion. But what part for your setup would you replace with GPU heating?

For my setup, absolutely none of it! Wholly incompatible with what I have.

My original question was purely hypothetical and not a practical consideration for me or, probably, anyone else.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#350

Post by rspeele » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

hippich wrote: post #203

acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tr…

Just in case, there are solutions to scale transactions count outside "7 per second", where these "7 per second" transactions are used to settle a larger set of transactions happening on the layer 2. Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it…

> Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it is not obviously energy hungry service, it is part of what everyone is paying 2-3% in credit card processing fees.

The design of credit cards does suck for fraud. I go to a website to buy a product, I put in my card number, exp date, CVV, and it turns out that site was actually compromised and some attacker got my card info. Now I have to cancel it and get a new card. It would be way better if what I entered on that vendor's site was a one-time authorization code, not the full information with which the attacker can spend from my card at other places.

Crypto is better in this regard since I never transmit my secret information to the vendor! But crypto is also worse, in that, if I do send a transaction to the wrong place (for example, because the vendor's website was compromised and told me the attacker's address to send to), I'm screwed. And if my electronic device is compromised and my private key stolen I'm really screwed.

Ultimately even though crypto has a technically better design, since it also has no support department and no dispute resolution I'm at higher risk. I've never lost money from a stolen credit card. You're right that I pay for that in the 2-3% processing fees... but it's not like Bitcoin is feeless, either.