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

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

#351

Post by psychlops »

acdha wrote: post #257
psychlops wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better currency competition is out there?

Almost all of them? It hasn’t had much impact on the real economy so clearly most people do not consider it better.

If all of them were competing then Argentina would be using the Indian Rupee or any of the many other options for their failing currency. But they don't. Fiats are tied to a specific geographic location.

If there isn't an impact on the real economy then the discussions here on how much energy is burned aren't meaningful.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] »

bitcurious wrote: post #111
jonathan-adly wrote: post #38

Power 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.

Bitcoin could be a very market-efficient means of meeting demand for money laundering, extortion, etc., and we could still declare it a useless waste.

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by lovich »

hk__2 wrote: post #184
lovich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/538/ Countries have this neat tool called violence that tends to override all security whenever humans are a linchpin

> Countries have this neat tool called violence that tends to override all security whenever humans are a linchpin That doesn’t work with distributed systems. No single country is able to shut the whole Internet down, for example.

The US is certainly capable of shutting down the internet with their control of some critical pieces of infrastructure like ICANN. They haven’t ever used it because levers like those are ones you only get to use once before other countries build an alternative, like when China shut down rare earth exports to japan years ago so countries like the US started up mines that were previously not worth it

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

#354

Post by mjburgess »

null0pointer wrote: post #306
mjburgess wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

> 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. You cannot forge history, even with 100% of the hash power. Firstly, each transaction is cryptographically signed with the keys of the sender address. Secondly, each full n…

All this depends on how many assumptions are in operation about what the state is doing to these networks, and the machines on them. In the end, it can turn all btc traffic off -- and there's no btc at all. Or it could take over the miners within its borders, which are heavily centralised, and run a different protocol.

If you own the machines and own the network you can do anything you want. Anything at all.

As far as assuming that the state hasnt taken control of the miners (unlikely, this is the easiest thing to do), by dropping communication, delaying it, observing it, etc. much can be done following the protocol, including replaying transactions etc. -- the future can be forged.

There are so many assumptions about the realworld, that do not hold up, behind cryto protocols, they're laughable. Assuming that the system will follow the protocol is itself disconnected from reality, quite literally.

The initial paper's realworld assumptions was that mining would be an at-home affair, ie., decentralised; everyone would run their own. And that networks were not own or controlled by centralised actors.

Neither is true. Mininig is incredibly centralised, as is network control. This makes it trivial for a state to pull an off switch.

Even talking about sophisticated denials of service, transaction replays, forging future transactions... all this takes place in a silly imagined scenario in which the state wants to hide what it's doing. If it didnt care, bang goes the whole thing.

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

#355

Post by FabHK »

amarant wrote: post #229
Symbiote wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

This is the relevant comparison! In another comment I asserted that I would be surprised if Blockchain doesn't use at least 2 orders of magnitude more energy per transaction than traditional banking. Seems I was off by about 5 orders of magnitude, in Blockchains favour!

Traditional banking also does a lot more than what BTC does.

BTC is about 9 orders of magnitude less efficient than the effective work it does.

Look, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a Macbook that uses 20W. It can easily verify 5 transactions per second, put them into a block, and compute the hash of it, and do some network communications.

The actual network uses 20GW, a billion times more energy, because they have thousands of nodes replicate the same work and then add PoW as a cherry on top.

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

#356

Post by acdha »

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…

> 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.

This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.

Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.

The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.

The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.

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

#357

Post by lottin »

pton_xd wrote: post #310
lottin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine. Bitcoin is neither an alternative to the international monetary system, nor a hedge. It's a joke. A gambling instrument for financially illiterate people.

> No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine. Obviously it is functional, I never said it wasn't! Inflationary systems have a lot of benefits -- they encourage consumption, erode the value of debt over time, etc. But there are downsides, too. Savings and purchasing power are destroyed over time. They encourage investment in har…

The international monetary system isn't a deflationary system per se. It can accommodate a variety of monetary policies, including deflationary policies.

As far as bitcoin being a hard asset, this isn't entirely correct either. Not only does bitcoin not generate income, but it consumes income. You see, the bitcoin network is extremely expensive to maintain, and the owners of bitcoins are the ones who bear the cost. Either they pay with fees -unlikely-, or they'll pay by losing value in their investment -most likely. There's no way around it.

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

#358

Post by FabHK »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #316
boc wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's a fair correction. Proof of Work appears to be a much, much better solution from an energy standpoint, although I'm less informed about the nitty-gritty.

Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy. Actually, there are lots of other ones, but Proof of Work is the only one that is designed to add security by requiring a lot of hashrate (which translates to a bunch of energy) to submit blocks ("mining" in proof of work) Proof of work was a brilliant innovation at the time, but as it turns out, smart people iterate on techno…

> Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy.

Nicely put. PoS is still around a million times more wasteful than the effective work it does, though.

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

#359

Post by latchkey »

manquer wrote: post #311
latchkey wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinmint operates in an old Alcoa plant in upstate NY near Canada. It runs entirely off a dam that was built to power smelting. Power that would otherwise be going to waste (the location is too remote and too expensive to transmit elsewhere). By using the power, it actually helps keep the dam running. https://www.coinmint.one/ Update: if you're going to downvote me, see below before you do so. I have been there, I ha…

> too expensive to transmit elsewhere Citation needed . It is rarely if ever too expensive to transmit electricity anywhere . We have offshore wind solar farms in remote places , there is even cross continent lines between Africa and Spain . I am deeply skeptical it is too expensive for upstate NY to transmit power when there is probably 50 million people living in metro areas within say a 750 mile radius . Every oth…

Look on a map. There is nothing (in the US) that is close to there that would consume the ~500MW of power the dam produces and sends to the plant.

The plant was shut down and nobody made an effort to direct the power elsewhere.

Transmission is insanely expensive at scale. I've seen their power bills and I talked to their head electrician who worked at the plant when it was operational. That's the best citation I can give you, sorry.

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

#360

Post by RedNifre »

hk__2 wrote: post #170
jgilias wrote: post #103

The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.

> The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous. > > Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn? As other have pointed out, Bitcoin relies on a larger and larger usage of energy by design . You could to a more energy-efficient Netflix, but you cannot do a more energy-efficient Bitcoin.

Sure you can, what is called "Proof of work" in the context of Bitcoin is actually "Proof of money lost" in the form of paid electricity. If you taxed mining at 90%, you would also reduce mining and thus electricity consumption by 90%.

(Ideally, this would be a global tax and not too high, since reducing mining too much would compromise security)

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