One just has to watch Gold Rush on Discovery to see that the main cost of gold mining is burning lakes worth of diesel in order to create moonscapes of dug up land.
China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
101–110 of 325 posts
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#102Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies.
Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? It certainly has before. I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's value in competition, though. Bitcoin doesn't eliminate trust, but it does commoditize that function. Commoditization necessarily means "many producers", so there's no way to achieve that without duplication of effort - but I guarantee that one Bitcoin ASIC has a lot less environmental impact than one human.
We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.
Much less secure too
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#104Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack.
It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value elegance and efficiency can defend bitcoin with a straight face. I can only assume they have a lot of money tied up in bitcoin, because otherwise it makes no sense.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
your understanding of bitcoin is very lacking. miners never waste any energy, they spend it to acquire proof that they spent it. that proof has value and while value of the proof is larger than market value of bitcoin rewarded for the proof - miners will keep mining. also miners are not middlemen - they don't control transactions, they don't control the peer to peer network. they are there to publish the proof and ge…
Miners are literally there to skim value out of a transaction. They're middlemen. And it is a waste. There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a transaction. I get that bitcoin is designed around this waste but that's hardly an excuse.
There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure ownership of money, peer to peer exchange and immutable fiscal policy.
What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies.
Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middleman has control over the process they facilitate, miners have no control over anything but construction of blocks and how much energy they are willing to spend. you could argue miners can choose to ignore transactions coming from me (if they manage to figure out how to identify them), but it's a competition of independent parties so there will always be other miners that do not choose to ignore me. for that to be an issue big enough to call miners middlemen you'd need majority of miners to collude on something quite obvious and demonstrable, which would undermine bitcoin project itself, rendering miners' own investments in bitcoin and infrastructure worthless - not in their interest. besides, with confidential transactions this entire point will be moot.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why did they even build it there? You know what the demand is going to be in the near future and you know what capacity you're designing for. Was this built purely for mining? Because if so, the money used to build this could have been used elsewhere. People often bring this up when talking about bitcoin mining but it makes no sense to me. How can this be true (and the whole truth)? It sounds like the kind of ar…
They built it there because the river was there... you don’t choose where is hydropower. That the damm was built before the adequate power grid is operational will be totally irrelevant in a few years. Maybe they seize the opportunity to mine crypto in the meantime as a very profitable joke against crypto-investors...
Alright, but then why not build data centers there? There's other things that are not there because the power is not that cheap anymore (since there is demand by miners).
Even if it's true that they built capacity for nothing, no way that the power is just up for the grabs at almost no cost. There are always other purposes for surplus power.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value ele…
Well, you need to spend some sort of resource to ensure the integrity of your money supply.
The dollar is backed by a few million troops. Bitcoin is backed by a few million tons of coal.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#108Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
Funny and sad to see how, instead of seeing opportunities, the forum with the most open minded tech people will rather go with "SHUT IT DOWN"
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#109Commenters are applauding the environmental implications of this policy, but I’m curious why no one is considering the human side of this ban. There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies. Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? I don’t think we should be comfortable wit…
Bitcoin trading is already essentially banned in China.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value ele…
"You're quibbling over details"
CO2 emissions being wrong by a factor of a thousand is a "detail" to you? ;) My point is that the impact of proof-of-work, although real, is grossly exaggerated and appears to be more manageable than what eye-catching press titles suggest.
Another example: journalists like to claim Bitcoin emits as much CO2 as an entire country. But in fact current emissions are comparable to what a single city like Cape Town emits (28 MtCO2/yr.) Thus these sorts of statements are not so much a testament of how much Bitcoin emits, but more a testament of how little CO2 these countries emits.
"designed to waste as much energy as possible"
It is designed to use no more than what the revenues (fees+rewards) allow to purchase.
But instead of debating how big or how small Bitcoin's energy use is, I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society, and whether or not its utility justifies the costs.