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Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

blog.bitcoin.org.hk

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Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#121

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

markkat wrote: post #90
seanwilson wrote: post #22

One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it's meant to be decentralised but it doesn't look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs. Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this pre…

It's also not as decentralized as intended in the white paper in regards to transaction. First sentence in the abstract: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#selection-37.4-37.173 Most people trading BTC atm are not trading BTC, but trading owners…

Still bitcoin itself doesn't require the use of a financial institution or a traditional database.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#122

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

spookthesunset wrote: post #100
moneytide1 wrote: post #5

The electricity consumption is a red flag, but perhaps it could be cheaper than the cost to build and maintain Guarda/Loomis trucks that carry physical currency, energy to melt metal to mint coins, and all the costs of building brick&mortar banks (even then, bankers provide auxiliary services like loans and advisement). We are all spending time talking about it as a collective effort to determine whether or not it sh…

> but perhaps it could be cheaper than the cost to build and maintain Guarda/Loomis trucks that carry physical currency, energy to melt metal to mint coins, and all the costs of building brick&mortar banks On a per-transaction basis? I don't even need to work out the math to tell me it isn't even close. Bitcoin can at most handle 4 transactions per second. By virtue of its very design it will never get much more than…

The Lightning Network (which has just reached version 1.0 and demonstrated successful transaction) doesn't have such transaction limits.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#123

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

ballenf wrote: post #101

Why is energy consumption itself become a bad thing? I get greenhouse gas emissions being bad, but why make energy consumption itself a negative? Not to mention that "consuming" energy is somewhat a fiction: it's more so changing the entropy of a system. True consumption of energy, at the extreme, would imply sending energy into deep space (any direction other than the sun really) where it can never be recovered. Is…

Exactly. I feel that all these people complaining about bitcoin contributing to global warming would be better off focusing on implementing a global carbon tax (or cap'n'trade). That way the specific problem of greenhouse gasses gets addressed, while not interfering with the market.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#124

Post by asdgkknio »

jasode wrote: post #116
asdgkknio wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system where anyone can rent out their CPU time will result in less centralization than we see with current cloud providers. A system where anyone can mine productively will result in less centralization than we see with current cryptocurrencies. Will it result in zero centralization? No, and I wouldn't expect it to. That's most likely impossible.

>A system where anyone can rent out their CPU time will result in less centralization than we see with current cloud providers. This is an aspirational wish but not reality at the moment. Nobody including BOINC or any other decentralized grid computing endeavor has proven that economically. For your cause & effect of "less centralization" to happen, homeowners cpu would have be cost competitive with cloud services. S…

>This is an aspirational wish but not reality at the moment.

No shit. If it existed, it would be pointless to work on it.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#125

Post by tromp »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #120
tromp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it possible to create ASIC resistant algorithms? Litecoin was meant to be resistant by using scrypt but there's ASICs out for that now I believe. Making the PoW require tons of memory to solve efficiently seems the best way to attain ASIC resistance. Monero's PoW requires only 8x more than scrypt's 128KB, but Ethereum requires over 1000x more than Monero's 2MB. None of these can be instantly verified though whic…

could you not just add a ton of ram to an ASIC?

128MB is the current limit [1] for embedded DRAM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDRAM

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#126

Post by moreless »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #64
seanwilson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That highly depends on the hashing algorithm used. For Bitcoin this is SHA256, which is very well-suited for ASIC implementation. The algorithm of Ethereum was deliberately designed to be ASIC-resistant, but GPU-friendly, therefore GPUs (which are kind of a commodity) are the hardware of choice for Ethereum mining. Is it possible to create ASIC resistant algorithms? Litecoin was meant to be resistant by using scryp…

> Could you not create a protocol that constantly changes its hashing algorithm to combat ASICs? It might be interesting to combines all of the popular hash functions in a sequence. You could probably mix in some non-cryptographic hash functions in the middle as long as you use secure functions at the beginning and end of the sequence. e.g. SHA256 => MD5 => MurmurHash => BLAKE-256 You could even write an algorithm th…

Wouldn't ASICs then just implement all of them and rotate execution?

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#127

Post by nathan_f77 »

moreless wrote: post #126
nathan_f77 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you not create a protocol that constantly changes its hashing algorithm to combat ASICs? It might be interesting to combines all of the popular hash functions in a sequence. You could probably mix in some non-cryptographic hash functions in the middle as long as you use secure functions at the beginning and end of the sequence. e.g. SHA256 => MD5 => MurmurHash => BLAKE-256 You could even write an algorithm th…

Wouldn't ASICs then just implement all of them and rotate execution?

Yes. It was also a bad idea because it would be expensive to verify the proof. A good proof-of-work algorithm is very difficult to create, and very fast to verify.

After posting that comment, I discovered a far better proof-of-work called the Cuckoo Cycle:

* Blog post: http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mini... * Whitepaper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/059.pdf

It's really a genius solution. You have to fill up 2GB of RAM with random bits in order to find a specific cycle in an enormous graph. This means that even even a very slow CPU would quickly saturate the DRAM memory bandwidth, and it doesn't matter if you use a CPU, GPU, FPGA, or even an ASIC.

This means that a mobile phone with 2GB of RAM can mine just as fast as any server with 2GB of RAM. If you want to increase your mining capacity, you'll have to buy a lot of RAM (or a lot of cheap mobile phones.)

Since it is constrained by memory bandwidth, you spend most of the time just waiting for bits to arrive. This means that it uses much less electricity than other PoWs. The proof is also instantly verifiable.

There are a few cryptocurrencies that are using the Cuckoo Cycle proof-of-work such as aeternity [1], and Mimblewimble / grin [2].

[1] https://aeternity.com/

[2] https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin

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