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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

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Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#131

Post by willbudd »

kevingadd wrote: post #118
willbudd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency? Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof o…

Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or earlier. Ancient technology, basically.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#132

Post by Consultant32452 »

tomxor wrote: post #108
ssss11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority. Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there a…

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#133

Post by cortesoft »

jki275 wrote: post #100
cortesoft wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically. There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.

The fed certainly generates new dollars.

Yeah, and they aren’t a ‘company’

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#134

Post by shawnz »

philjohn wrote: post #113
rcstank wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much energy is consumed by online banking? Big Tech in general? These are sincere questions.

A single bitcoin transaction uses ~ 600,000x as much energy as a single transaction on the Visa network.

Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#135

Post by kevingadd »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #119
philjohn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is the de facto cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the most popular.

It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc into those other projects before righteous public sentiment gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human impacts of what they're investing in.

The cause and effect you describe hasn't applied to significant investors in oil or coal up to this point that I'm aware of, despite the disastrous effect those two revenue sources have had on the environment. I'm not sure why Bitcoin would be significantly different when its negative externalities are effectively invisible and a bunch of the mining occurs in mystery data-centers overseas, outside of the reach of central banks.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#136

Post by varjag »

vmception wrote: post #23
varjag wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.

the same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did you mean?

Performance per watt energy was a lot worse a decade prior.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#137

Post by fifilura »

mrb wrote: post #83
edgefield0 wrote: post #59

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

Please realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year). A single dam. So, really the comparison is more a testament of how little electricity Argentina uses.

That is not just any "single" dam, but the world's second largest.

The largest dam in Sweden, which is my reference, a country where hydro is the biggest source of electricity, produces 2TWh/y.

(And sadly much of that energy now goes to heavily subsidized Facebook and Google servers because it is cool to have those companies in your town, and collect income tax from the 10-ish people that work there)

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#138

Post by lottin »

dTal wrote: post #79
ptd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?

Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.

Thank you. This is exactly it.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#139

Post by kevingadd »

shawnz wrote: post #134
philjohn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single bitcoin transaction uses ~ 600,000x as much energy as a single transaction on the Visa network.

Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).

Aren't there significant technological obstacles to raising the transaction limit, not to mention the fact that large miners have actively obstructed attempts to raise it in the past? My understanding is that we only finally got a block size increase with segwit in 2017 and that only happened after people worked around miner sabotage.

Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

#140

Post by tomxor »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #132
tomxor wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority. Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there a…

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies

That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

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