121–130 of 209 posts
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Not entirely. Energy utilization is a common proxy for technological development. If a society is plowing tons of energy into crypto mining, then by definition somebody is getting utility out of it. (Which doesn't preclude it all being a Ponzi scheme, but that's another story.)
Life, the original RNA Ponzi scheme.
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This is basically what all life does. Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.
Comparing life itself to crypto is ridiculous.
I'm not saying the technology is ridiculous, I'm just saying the overall implementation and outcomes would look like a madness to someone from the past or indeed the future.
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Heat pumps are approximately three times as efficient as electric heating.
"Pumping water down hill is more efficient than pumping it sideways" The CoP of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature potential across the heat pump. Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house: the very scenario your post suggests they should be used. Heat pumps are great for increasing thermal potentials and moving heat ac…
I think most of the midwest figured this out during the recent cold snap. It turns out the cut off for my heat pump is 10F.
I'm in the process of finalizing the installation of a wood stove insert to provide backup heating during the cold months. Switching to all electric feels a little like burning cash to me.
If you're in the US, there is an incredible 26% tax credit available on stoves (wood and pellet) that are more than 75% efficient. This covers both the cost of the unit AND installation. It's good for about the next 2 years and went into effect in early Jan.
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This is basically what all life does. Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.
Comparing life itself to crypto is ridiculous.
Mind you the Great Oxidation Event wiped good chunk of life back then.
Mainly because oxygen was toxic to anaerobic life and it also oxidized methane making Earth into a snowball.
Idea to solve the crypto energy problem - sell space heaters as dual purpose crypto miners. People need space heaters. They buy them, but they also mine crypto (as a free byproduct of the space heating). The number of crypto mining space heaters out there dilute the value of dedicated mining so much that people don't bother with it anymore. Even buying the space heater to make money from mining crypto doesn't make th…
I live in an area of Canada where home heat is pretty much provided exclusively by natural gas but electricity comes mainly from nuclear and hydroelectric sources. Interesting to think about, but by firing up a miner on my graphics card at off hours I'd probably lower my overall fossil fuel consumption and make some money on the side. Anything I'm missing here?
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Heat pumps are approximately three times as efficient as electric heating.
"Pumping water down hill is more efficient than pumping it sideways" The CoP of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature potential across the heat pump. Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house: the very scenario your post suggests they should be used. Heat pumps are great for increasing thermal potentials and moving heat ac…
I heat my house with a heat pump. I live in Eastern Canada and we regularly have -20c days and I still heat my house to a comfortable level. Our pump is >=100% efficient all the way down to around -25c at which point it's less and less effective.
These pumps are extremely popular around here. We heat during the winter and cool during the summer with the same unit.
I consider our heat pumps to be our primary source of heat in our house. We only run the gas furnace if we get into sub -25c days which is not often, we had none this year.
We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale" . A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1]. Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT…
There is a unit named after Nakamoto [1] referring to decentralization, adding another might get confusing. [1] https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...
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> Bitcoin without PoW has no value Exactly. It’s broken by design. Let’s get rid of it ASAP and instead focus on blockchains that may have value without the horrible incentives of PoW. We shouldn’t keep Bitcoin alive just because it was the first successful attempt. That has been tried, it’s now clear it’s not sustainable over the long-term. We should learn the lesson and move on to a better approach.
> It’s broken by design. it's genius by design. so far nothing other than PoW was shown to work. > We shouldn’t keep Bitcoin alive just because it was the first successful attempt. you're not keeping it alive, it exists in a free market and there is demand for it. > That has been tried, it’s now clear it’s not sustainable over the long-term. not clear at all. so far looks like it's the most sustainable system of dece…
> not clear at all.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
So sustainable...
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Governments can regulate at the edge: - regulate electricity consumption - regulate bank accepting crypto-related money - regulate exchanges listing Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies, etc
This is why distributed exchanges and DeFi are important, as they eliminate the last two problems.
I'm myself in favor of cryptocurrencies (though, definitely not Bitcoin) AND for some level of regulation.
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They can't realistically block it. Normally the miners are trivial "structure in, best hash out" functions. The logic of choosing the transactions and preparing new blocks can be completely independent and distribute the work over any number of remote miners. (That's pretty much how mining pools work) The network transport would be trivial to change, or tunnel over (for example) SSH. DoS also wouldn't be likely - if…
Find where a lot of power is used. Go in with guns.
* Large energy use (lights, fans, pumps?)
* Very characteristic energy use (high, relatively invariant)
* Massive government budgets/surveillance to attack producers
* The need to move non negligible amounts of physical goods
* Moral campaigns by governments and social groups that it's bad for society
And yet the banned-market drug trade revenue is something on the order of 80 billion dollars per year or 220 million a year.
Bitcoin miners, currently:
* Large energy use (fans, HVAC, ASICs)
* Very characteristic energy use (high, relatively invariant)
* Mix of jurisdictions banning or allowing it.
* Only need about 2G / Shortwave radio worth of bandwidth to produce blocks
* Moral campaigns by governments and social groups that it's bad for society
Miner revenues need to be on the order of 10-50 million USD per year to sustain themselves. That's almost 10 times less than the failed (relatively global) "war on drugs"
Add to it that by defecting from national socialist forms of storing one's wealth, rather than just momentarily indulging in vice, one improves their position, I'd suspect your hypothetical ban won't work that well.