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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

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Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#161

Post by sekai »

Why a Chinese Bitcoin mining ban is good news:

* It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin.

* It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower.

* The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization.

* It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators.

* BTC itself isn't banned, OTC demand will stay, causing a premium. This means some mining will likely continue in smaller, less obvious operations outside the reach of the state. Everything about that is healthy for the network.

* The biggest source of Bitcoin blocks won't be behind the biggest firewall of the globe anymore.

* The article mentions a phasing out, so the two-week difficulty adjustment period can more than likely gracefully handle this.

* Although a lot of Bitcoin mining is done with hydropower in China, it also has a significant share of cheap coal-powered mining. This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#162

Post by Nursie »

sekai wrote: post #161

Why a Chinese Bitcoin mining ban is good news: * It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin. * It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower. * The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization. * It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to di…

> This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.

It's not FUD if it's true, which you're implying with the first half of that there sentence...

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#163

Post by rtpg »

sekai wrote: post #161

Why a Chinese Bitcoin mining ban is good news: * It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin. * It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower. * The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization. * It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to di…

>* The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization.

I feel like you really don't get the... particulars of being a Chinese national, on multiple levels

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#164

Post by soVeryTired »

PycptN2MH wrote: post #149
soVeryTired wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robust against what?

Threats to national sovereignty such as invasion.

I don't really see how protection against invasion helps you maintain a fiat currency. I don't think an army is either necessary or sufficient. These just seem like two different issues.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#165

Post by saalweachter »

m-i-l wrote: post #124
jayd16 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.

There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible perc…

Do the numbers in that article, uhhh, add up?

The article estimates the total number of ATMs at 3 million, with an average daily power consumption of 5Wh, for a total yearly power consumption of 13Twh. Except if I punch [3 million * 5Wh * 365.25 to terawatt-hours] into the Google, I get 0.0055TWh. If I assume the author meant to type 5kWh as the average daily power consumption, you get 5.5TWh, which is closer, but still not the stated quantity.

[EDIT: OK, so I if I punch [3 million * 500W * 365.25 days to terawatt-hours] into the Google I get the 13TWh the author estimated for ATM consumption. So the author is actually assuming that the average ATM is consuming 500W?]

Likewise the numbers for how much electricity bank branches consume doesn't seem to add up (it seems like the author assumes branches consume an average of 10kW, not 10kWh/day?), and I can't replicate any of the numbers given for bank server energy consumption (just multiplying the numbers given in the article together in different ways).

Can someone else get the numbers in the original article [https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...] to add up?

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#166

Post by keymone »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #160
keymone wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. middlem…

> Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency Hold on, the response to “Bitcoin is inefficient with energy” is that efficiency doesn’t matter? That isn’t moving the goalpost so much as removing it.

you missed a word there it seems?

Edit: seems like you've edited your message. next time try to be more polite and mark your edits.

i'm not saying efficiency doesn't matter, i'm saying primary goals of bitcoin are different.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#167

Post by ThomPete »

nfin wrote: post #156
mrpopo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?) I mostly agreed with the first two bullet points, but please show me a significant country that managed to reduce their CO2 emissions with renewables. For instance, in China, where a lot of Bitcoin mining happens, the share of renewables increases in many countries, but…

I am not an expert on that field, but reading this I would say that Germany has reduced CO2 emissions: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/klima/treibhausgas-emis... Renewables are the biggest increase in new power supply in Germany.

They havent and they increased the cost of electricity. You need to factor in what they get from other countries too.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#168

Post by coretx »

kevintb wrote: post #17

Good. 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

Both gold mining & forex consumes magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin mining. Whatever the chinese rationale is, it ain't about the climate.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#169

Post by kasey_junk »

ThomPete wrote: post #153
mrpopo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?) I mostly agreed with the first two bullet points, but please show me a significant country that managed to reduce their CO2 emissions with renewables. For instance, in China, where a lot of Bitcoin mining happens, the share of renewables increases in many countries, but…

France who uses nuclear.

Nuclear is not generally seen as a renewable is it? It’s a really efficient extraction based source.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#170

Post by deelowe »

mrpopo wrote: post #141
mrb wrote: post #82

Earlier 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…

* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?) I mostly agreed with the first two bullet points, but please show me a significant country that managed to reduce their CO2 emissions with renewables. For instance, in China, where a lot of Bitcoin mining happens, the share of renewables increases in many countries, but…

The US led the world in overall reduction of CO2 emissions in 2017 mostly due to the deployment of cheap renewables with an overall reduction of 0.9%.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36953

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