Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 319 posts

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#161

Post by scotty79 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #144
scotty79 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'a very good point. Crypto heat use will be limited to windy cold places where some people live. Unless there are some industrial processes that might use this mild heat. Maybe poultry production? Some green houses in cold climates?

The point is that there isn't enough renewable energy for population centers right now. So every clean watt used for mining btc takes that clean watt away from somebody else. This is why reducing energy use is so powerful. Even if X% of your energy use comes from zero-emissions sources, all marginal energy use comes from carbon. The only way that btc mining can truly claim to have no impact on global emissions is if…

> The point is that there isn't enough renewable energy for population centers right now.

Even when it will be enough when renewables work at 100% it won't be enough if they give 8% of their max output because it's not that windy today.

We should have at least 10 times the capacity in renewables than we actually need to have plenty on bad days (and nights).

> The only way that btc mining can truly claim to have no impact on global emissions is if it uses zero-emission energy that otherwise couldn't be used in some other productive way.

I agree, and that won't happen until we go 100% renewables, but we can't do that without a storage, and we don't have storage, but we can go 1000% renewables instead because that's the technology we have and already it is the cheapest way of making energy. And I think next crypto boom could put us on trajectory to achieve that by utilizing every bit of energy we'll overproduce and by being a mechanism to funnel money from the pockets of Wallstreet into renewable energy production investments.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#162

Post by [deleted] »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #138
mode80 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. Bitcoin’s value is “backed” by the expectation that it will be valuable tomorrow — nothing more. It’s the same with gold. Gold’s value has nothing to do with the cost of mining it out of the ground. Rather the cost of mining it is justified on the basis of its expected value.

Its price certainly can appreciate for many reasons but that’s not my point. The price of BTC price is backstopped by the sunk cost of mining. Every time the price has fallen below the cost of production miners deactivate and the price stabilizes. If a miner’s opex goes to zero (due to cheap or free renewable energy) in the future there will be no incentive to stop mining during a crash and prices will go to $0.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#163

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

mustafa_pasi wrote: post #10

It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much infrastructure. From a purely financi…

The main infrastructure needed for a bitcoin running operation in a remote place would be:

* the mining rig itself. If there's a way to ship manufacturing product from the location, there must be a way to bring this in too. Pound for pound and liter by liter, this can't take more space or infrastructure to bring than aluminum or any other physical product I can think of.

* cooling. same as above.

* electricity. If you can manufacture aluminum, you have enough.

* small amount of on-site workers to perform critical repairs

Things you don't need:

* large custom-built machines.

* many trained/untrained workers to take care of the machines

* infrastructure that can consistently ship tons of material to and from a remote location all year round (mining rig upgrades consume much less mass/volume and can be batched to avoid shipping during rough climate seasons)

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#164

Post by hackernudes »

audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

You don't think bitcoin should be valuable. Your point is fine, but it really doesn't address the article at all!

Assuming bitcoin stays valuable, does it make sense to use bitcoin mining to augment some power projects? Like using otherwise wasted energy to mine or to mine in places where it might not be easy to transmit the electricity?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#165

Post by TheBlight »

audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

>First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition)

What is your working definition for fiat currency?

Mine is:

"Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold."

Government doesn't issue bitcoins. Stopped reading after that as you seem uneducated on the subject.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#166

Post by IMTDb »

berkes wrote: post #156
audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

'Pure waste' is very much a point of view. If you dislike porn, the entire energy to create and distribute that, is 'pure waste' in your view (last time I looked, streaming porn consumes about the same amount of energy as Bitcoin. This probably changed by now). If, like me, you dislike billboards, all those giant flaring screens, burning neon, or LCD pixels, screaming to make you buy Pepsi, is 'pure waste'. If you di…

The vast difference here is that the energy consumption required by Bitcoin is integral to its model. The stated goal is to make massive amount of otherwise useless computations.

If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we consume less electricity.

As soon as there is a new way to do bitcoin related operations using less electricity (eg: ASICS), the security of the network decreases. And everyone moves to the new model, in order to go back to consuming a lot of electricity, in order to restore trust in the network.

On a macro scale, Bitcoin has to consume lots of electricity, any possible improvement in that area needs to be wiped out by just people going back to consuming more electricity, otherwise the model fails. The whole bitcoin trust model revolves around people being ready to waste a ton energy for it. That's not the case of porn, or billboards: the energy consumption is just a side effect and not a requirement, they have value outside of the consumed electricity. Bitcoin entire value is only dependent on how much people are willing to invest in it, which roughly translates on how much electricity is wasted.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#167

Post by capableweb »

audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.

I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit.

> There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions

Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. The distinction is important, because that's why Proof of Work exists and is energy intensive in the first place.

Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#168

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Retric wrote: post #154
danboarder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By purchasing electricity with Bitcoin.

Money doesn’t buy electricity in a blackout. That’s the difference between an abstraction and the underlying reality.

It does actually, thousands in Texas had no electricity while I did. Cost me 1/5 of a Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#170

Post by capableweb »

IMTDb wrote: post #166
berkes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Pure waste' is very much a point of view. If you dislike porn, the entire energy to create and distribute that, is 'pure waste' in your view (last time I looked, streaming porn consumes about the same amount of energy as Bitcoin. This probably changed by now). If, like me, you dislike billboards, all those giant flaring screens, burning neon, or LCD pixels, screaming to make you buy Pepsi, is 'pure waste'. If you di…

The vast difference here is that the energy consumption required by Bitcoin is integral to its model. The stated goal is to make massive amount of otherwise useless computations. If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we consume less electricity. As soon as there is a new way to do…

> If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that

In a perfect world, yes. We would use less electricity if we realize we could. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that in the real world. In reality it has to make economic sense, as capitalism is "the way of life" in the western world (and many other places), otherwise it won't be thought of. We're slowly changing this.

Bitcoin is capitalism modernized, fully on the internet and on our computers. Since computers and the internet tends to multiply everything, we now have capitalism as a protocol, intensified like never before. Since being environment friendly is not a benefit for the participant in the network, it won't be a consideration.

A big fault in the protocol, and hard to see how it can be solved in Proof of Work. Luckily there are some people working on alternatives but we have yet to see if they actually work in practice on the same scale as Bitcoin.

Post reply on HN