101–110 of 151 posts
FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…
Which is why Bitcoin mining is only feasible in the areas that have the lowest electricity rate?
> We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power)
How much of those inefficiencies are caused by Bitcoin? My understanding is that a substantial fraction of that inefficiency is things like "there's power loss in running power from a power plant 100s of miles away" or "converting from AC to DC power induces power loss." In other words, Bitcoin isn't converting electrical waste into useful work, it's just creating more electrical waste on top of the power it directly uses.
> A lot of Power projects get scraped due to inconsistencies in demand. Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
Are you aware that the electrical grid already manages demand in large part by telling the smelters to stop smelting for a few hours? There's no need to invent new demand to manage existing demand.
It'd be interesting if the proof of work computing at the heart of Bitcoin would do something similar to projects like SETI [0] or Folding@home [1] protein folding project that requires distributed computing. [0] https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
Hashing for say, Bitcoin, works because you're finding a hash that has certain properties (e.g., having a certain number of leading zeroes). Anyone can take the input (to the hash function) you've found and trivially test that it does indeed produce a hash with those properties. Finding the hash is hard, but testing the hash is easy.
Doing SETI/Folding work doesn't work like that. Consider Folding: every unit of work produces useful output. Every input produces equally valuable output. Additionally, the cost of producing the output is high, but the cost of verifying that output is also high.
With hashing-based PoW, everyone in the network can verify that a hash with the correct properties was produced. There's no way to say "yes, this one Folding@home worker found something unique". The work needs to be checked, which means a majority of nodes in the network need to verify the output, which means >50% of the network needs to compute the same thing again (you can't rely on less than a majority, or anyone could cheat).
This very question has been asked on stackexchange : https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/331
Summary: 1. The input need to be unpredictable. Block N is the seed for block N+1. 2. It needs to be difficult to calculate, yet trivially easy to verify. 3. Difficulty needs to be adjustable. The only idea I've ever seen that met all three of these criteria was PrimeCoin's usage of calculating certain Cunningham twin primes (which is still of unclear/tiny value).
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Every week, every month, every year, crypto is alleged to be dead and dying. And still the adoption, usage, and price goes up. It gets hyped, it falters, people stop talking for a while, and the cycle repeats itself.
Yes, you can say the same thing about any ponzi scheme, until it finally crashes.
If not, then maybe just step back and observe the chain grow block by block, day by day, unfettered, for the rest of your life.
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Inefficient compared with what? Gold requires a ton more energy. As does the existing banking system. Bitcoin uses less electricity than Christmas lights and provides a completely electric, transparent, uncensorable currency.
> Bitcoin uses less electricity than Christmas lights You could power Christmas lights for several Christmas if not a lifetime with the electricity used in a BTC transaction. Let that sink in.
People way overestimate how much energy Bitcoin uses and way underestimate how much simple things like christmas lights, video games, hockey rinks, etc. use.
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> So could Bitcoin actually be used to make the world greener? No. The value of a PoW coin is based on the wasted electricity. If mining does something useful (like heating) for a large fraction of the miners the mining difficulty will go up to adapt to such change, requiring additional mining. At the end of the amount of wasted electricity will remain the same.
I think you need to research more. A computer is actually a heater that is 100% efficient. If you actually "waste electricity" to do useless computation, you still get 100% efficient heat output. 1000W of electricity pumped through your cpu is outputting 1000W of heat as well. Maybe imagine if your logic gates in your computer is water powered. You could still drink the water after it did it's computation.
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Yes, it would be fair. However, it is not a comparison that Bitcoin even comes close to winning (Bitcoin uses orders of magnitude more energy), so you instead see takes like "you forgot to account for the energy cost of aircraft carriers!" to try to make the comparison more favorable to Bitcoin.
no, but for sure you have to take in account the amount of buildings, air-conditioning, commuters, datacenters, branches, ATMs, bad written code, exchanges. Beside that, Bitcoin probably after the 21 million were mined, should drop the energy consumption (ok, ok, it will take almost 100 years to happen), but it means that in long term, bitcoin will be consuming much less energy than now. Probably impossible to compar…
You also have to do the same thing for Bitcoin if you want the comparison to remain fair. Bitcoin doesn't magically replace the entire financial industry, so you don't want to accidentally include the costs of the things it doesn't replace (such as the bank manager who's deciding whether or not to authorize a mortgage).
There’s the fascinating example of “Nooshare”, which is an interesting proposal for embedding arbitrary Monte-Carlo simulations as the proof challenge! http://web.mit.edu/alex_c/www/nooshare.pdf It’s an elegant exploitation of the design reasons why the work must involve something like random search (for an easy to validate target). On squinting, it’s kinda like a smart contract for a compute job, where the compute j…
It could be the fact that it's not trivially easy to verify the work completed, unlike a hash.
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The idea that blockchain will change the world.
Every week, every month, every year, crypto is alleged to be dead and dying. And still the adoption, usage, and price goes up. It gets hyped, it falters, people stop talking for a while, and the cycle repeats itself.