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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

#361

Post by mjburgess »

rlpb wrote: post #268
mjburgess wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you split the network, you can add your own machines, that can rewrite the history arbitrarily from the future of that split. As for "a few minutes", it depends on which one we're talking about. BTC, yes -- but disrupting the global BTC network requires only a few minutes of time. Just dump everything into unusable addresses, and watch the reaction.

> can rewrite the history arbitrarily No, you cannot do that. Transactions would still need to be signed by the corresponding owners. All you could do is reorder (and thus invalidate) some transactions, drop some transactions, or add some that weren't originally included. > Just dump everything into unusable addresses... Nope; that's not possible. You wouldn't have the signatures to do that even with 51% hashing powe…

You're right about the dumping; I was thinking more about the case where you controlled the protocol on the machines of a partitioned network (eg., so you release a new version of btc which uses exploitable crytography, etc.).

In the case of a mere 51% at scale, hijinks are still quite possible from replays, reorderings, etc.

I was more preoccupied by the case where the state's acting in its own borders with control over the network, major miners, most machines on the network -- at this point basically no gaurentees remain

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

#362

Post by hotpotamus »

lurking15 wrote: post #343
hotpotamus wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You’ve read far more into my comment than I wrote.

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

#363

Post by rspeele »

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…

> The global bitcoin system is well within rearch of a hostile state 51%'ing it

> I’ll believe it when I see it. They honestly have a better chance outlawing it and imprisoning anyone who’s ever used it.

First of all I don't think any state is currently motivated to do this. However, if I were a state agency trying to attack Bitcoin, I would start by creating my own mining pool, which of course would purport to be privately run. I would be the most efficient mining pool in the business, offering miners a slightly better cut than other mining pools since while most pool operators are trying to extract a low-margin profit, I'm willing to break even or, if necessary, run at a small loss. It would be ideally to gradually create several sock-puppet pools that appear to be in competition with one another, while in fact I control all of them.

Even with competitive payouts, it may take several years to build up my pools reputation and gain a significant share of miners. And when I start having my pools mine blocks that I'm not actually submitting to the chain (to support my double spend), pretty soon miners will notice and switch. But I only need a couple hours to cause chaos, and I may benefit from miners confusedly switching to other pools that are also under my control. If I look at the regions where I have the most miners and time to the attack to occur overnight in those areas, I may succeed. And unlike trying to 51% the network myself by throwing hardware at the problem, I won't be left with worthless SHA256 hashing machines at the end of the attempt, nor will I have to pay for power. And I don't have to outmine the entire network -- I've enlisted half of it to be on my side. The only cost is the minimal pool operating expenses (not mining, just issuing work to miners, checking their work and arranging payouts), spread over how ever many years it takes me to gain dominance.

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

#365

Post by lurking15 »

hellojesus wrote: post #234
lurking15 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weird how you discount the obvious use case espoused by the bitcoin community: an absolutely scarce digital commodity secured through energy itself

I have a hard time understanding what the value of that is in its pure form. What is the value of a scare digital commodity in and of itself?

apparently the value is $47k and counting

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

#366

Post by hollerith »

hellojesus wrote: post #234
lurking15 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weird how you discount the obvious use case espoused by the bitcoin community: an absolutely scarce digital commodity secured through energy itself

I have a hard time understanding what the value of that is in its pure form. What is the value of a scare digital commodity in and of itself?

People need a way to store money. Sometimes, the government-approved ways of doing that have severe problems.

Gold would be worth much less than it actually is if people weren't using it to store money. It is easier to store bitcoin than to store gold. (E.g., bitcoin is easier to hide from thieves than gold is.)

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

#367

Post by teachrdan »

pton_xd wrote: post #325
teachrdan wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation You are completely ignorant. I'm not saying that in a mean way, I mean it in the purest sense possible: You have no idea what you are talking about. According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary sys…

> According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems." > https://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-inflation/ That graph is charting BTC price to BTC supply inflation, not general economic inflation (which is what I'm talking about).

I apologize, I think you may be correct there.

Could you please refer me to a graph showing the relationship between BTC and inflation? Because inflation over the last 12 months is relatively low, at 3.4%, while BTC is very high, at $47,621. Then again, BTC hit a high of $65,000 back in November of 2021, when inflation rates were indeed high at 6.8%.

This seems to suggest a weak relationship at best between BTC and inflation rates.

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

#368

Post by lovich »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #331
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.

It takes both intellectual and emotional maturity to understand and accept the wisdom and power of free markets. Bitcoin is delivering what the market wants an uncensored currency outside the control of governments. This is only the beginning of the outrage over Bitcoin, wait until it does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch…

replace "Bitcoin" with "God" in this comment and it sounds like a cult leader. Since the beginning of time there have always been a group of humans who would like the ability to not follow the rules set by whatever accounts for leadership in their group. Bitcoin isn't feeding some novel desire.

And Bitcoin/crypto evangelists still havent grappled with the fact that if they ever actually succeed in becoming a real rival of fiat currencies then they are going to find out what state violence looks like when they continue not complying with regulations.

Like do you really believe if Iran/North Korea/Russia converted over their entire economy to using bitcoin to escape US regulations, that you are going to be able to continue using it without any sort of reaction from the US? Or if Chinese citizens use it en masse to completely avoid government controls, that the Chinese government will just throw up their hands and say "shucks"? You can fill in that statement with any government and a group they intend to control and have the ability to exert violence on

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

#369

Post by acdha »

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.

Oh, no argument there but that’s not the only part of fraud I’m thinking about. I’ve had a card stolen but it cost me exactly zero because their anti fraud system was able to detect that the person with the credential wasn’t buying the kinds of things I buy at places I normally shop and blocked it. That’s a LOT better than the countless stories of people making a mistake in where they sent cryptocurrency or losing control of their wallet, and not getting help other than people saying it was their fault.

My point definitely isn’t that the current system is perfect but rather that what seems to happen a lot is that people focus on one technical problem like operating a ledger and forget the surroundings. I’d definitely like to see a detailed comparison, too, but my preferred solution to all of this would be an increasingly steep carbon tax to incentivize everyone to do better.

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

#370

Post by elevaet »

digging wrote: post #235
elevaet wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence, just a hunch that the crypto enthusiast ensures us is correct. I'd love to see some actual numbers on the energy consumption of the banking industry vs. crypto. Or lets be real, let's compare the amount of energy used by the banking sector to provide the…

> And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence What evidence could I possibly provide for the claim "This article doesn't give any evidence of impact." It is very clear that crypto transactions, for example, are much less energy-efficient than USD transactions. The article could have easily mentioned that, but it didn't.

Well earlier in this same thread:

> 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.

That's about 500 000x more energy consumed per transaction by BTC than Visa. I guess it goes without saying that it's much less efficient.

For years now I encounter crypto enthusiasts have been suggesting that BTC is an improvement on the energy efficiency of traditional banking, without anything to back up this claim, and ignoring stats like the above over and over again.

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