391–400 of 499 posts
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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.
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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…
While you're not incorrect about the flaws of regulation, none of what you said is an argument for laissez-faire.
It's only through the indoctrination of young impressionable minds by the state that people become persuaded by arguments the state should intrude into things.
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…
Most of traditional banking is about financing, not about money transfer. The risk estimation and risk control are the tough parts of financing, and I don't see how on-chain computation is a good fit for that risk modeling.
So, "What's the energy cost of the combined Visa and Mastercard networks" is a much better benchmark than "What's the combined energy cost of the traditional banking system?"
One big energy use I optimized was daily risk calculation for exotic books. Say an Australian insurance company sold a bunch of life insurance in Japan. They want to cap their losses on $5 billion USD notional (maybe 2,500 policies, each for $2 million) over the next 30 years, and they want to cap their losses at $1.5 billion AUD. This extremely bespoke, not something the bank can offload to another entity, so the bank is pretty much stuck with this re-insurance on its books for the next 30 years. How much does the bank need to keep on-hand in case this goes sour? To answer that question, every day the bank needs to run Monte Carlo simulations to cover shifts in the Japanese life expectancy curve and shifts in the JPY/AUD exchange rate over the next 30 years.
It turns out that for some of these exotic options contracts, just compute cost for calculating risk exposure over the lifetime of the trade can end up being a noticeable percentage of the profit from the trade.
Sure, you could pull some of that simulation compute on-chain in smart contracts, but what does a DAO do when it has insufficient reserves to cover its outstanding obligations? I guess you need a diverse enough DAO so its risk exposures are sufficiently uncorrelated, but that means that it needs to do vastly more computation to calculate its current exposure every time someone asks the DAO to enter into an obligation. Either all miners need to redundantly run these calculations, or you push them off-chain.
If you push the risk calculations off-chain, then you're back to the energy consumption being very different than the traditional banking system.
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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.
Transactions in 2023:
Bitcoin: 174310000
Ethereum: 583530000
Visa: 212600000000
Bitcoin: 167.8 TWh/yr
Ethereum: 0.0067479963 TWh/yr
Visa: 197.57 TWh/yr (2021?)
Bitcoin: 962.652745 kWh
Ethereum: 0.011564 kWh
Visa: 0.929304 kWh
Bitcoin on the other hand is 3 orders of magnitude worse than visa on a per-transaction basis. I suspect both Bitcoin and Ethereum also transact more value in USD per transaction (if you're willing to consider funny crypto money at spot prices) on average, than Visa, by virtue of them having a much higher transaction fee which is also borne by the address making the transaction.
If you don't consider Ethereum transactions to be "effective work" than this isn't a relevant metric of course, but I'm curious how you're arriving at your figure.
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There is no single fix, of course. In situations like this you prioritize... you cut the larger things that have the least value per amount of energy used. Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems.
> Ending crypto mining is the easiest no-brainer in the history of energy systems. Ending any profit-generating activity is incredibly difficult. I suspect you're not referring to ending it, but allowing it to be transferred offshore and losing the ability to regulate it. But if it's banned in the US, good luck getting every other country on earth to ban it in solidarity.
Attack the supply side, attack the demand side: tax it, regulate it, cap it, replace it. All of these can reduce the mining so they are all useful.
edit: to answer your idea that they will just move...
If these other places were as good or better for mining than where they are now, they'd already have moved. If you make them move to a worse mining situation, that's just proof that what you're doing is working.
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Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient
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…
I knew it!
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Have you looked on a map? The plant is right next to the largest power line between the USA and Canada, right between Ottawa and Montreal. A (presumably) new-ish wind farm is on the New York state side. Have you read their website? "With 435MW of transformer capacity at its Massena complex" — that is the amount they can draw from the grid, not the generating capacity of any nearby power plant. The plant is here: http…
I'm keenly aware of their operations as my last company looked into hosting in their facility and I know people who have hosted there too. I have also physically been there. Too bad HN doesn't allow photos, I've got some good ones. The map shows what I'm talking about very clearly... all of the power is either used for the local Alcoa plants (there are several) or gets exported elsewhere. There is little usage for th…
I won't discuss this further.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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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.)
Any sufficiently large state actor can simply buy a zero day exploit to try and remotely get into a target computer and then steal the pk of the wallet. There are mitigation techniques such as multiparty signing and hardware based keys/wallets, but nothing is perfect. And the most secured active users of it are likely already on gov radar.
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…
This argument is nonsense though. The energy that is used to secure the bitcoin network is spent. It can't be recovered later.
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…
> 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…
This doesn't make sense. The power is used to secure the network. Your first mistake here is you must think of Bitcoin as useless and any use of power is a waste. Just to help you, if BTC was useless it would be worth $0 traditional banking dollars, as this is not the case your whole premise is a waste.