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Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

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Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#221

Post by Nursie »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
Nursie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even legit vbendors screw up, or go bankrupt, or any number of other things. Chargeback and other consumer credit-card protections are very useful. Regulations don't prohibit irreversible transaction mechanisms, basically nobody wants them.

> Regulations don't prohibit irreversible transaction mechanisms, basically nobody wants them. Please don't just make stuff up. Point me to the credit card I can get which doesn't allow for chargebacks. I want to use it to buy things from people I trust who don't trust me, because that is an actually useful thing that some people have a legitimate reason to do.

> I want to use it to buy things from people I trust who don't trust me

1. That makes you sound actually crazy.

2. I didn't say you could get a credit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, I said the regulations don't prohibit payment mechanisms without chargebacks. See for example cashiers cheques and bank transfers. There's a reason people avoid them, and a reason popular payment methods support them.

The fact is that reversibility is a feature.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#222

Post by Nursie »

novok wrote: post #219
Nursie wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.

overall it would be significantly less, that is the point

I'm not convinced it would.

Just like PoW it makes sense to spend enough until a breakeven point. In thise case there is a direct incentive to buy as much storage as possible.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#223

Post by Nursie »

yvdriess wrote: post #169
Nursie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste

I was looking into their whitepaper trying to find a counter argument to this. My conclusion is basically this: The probability of being awarded a transaction is proportional to your reserved space 'plot' compared to the globally reserved space. Assuming it takes off, and enough 'overprovisioned' storage has been added to the pool, then it makes little sense to buy hardware just to farm storage-coins. The tiny increa…

This is the same proposition with PoW and hashes though, surely?

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#224

Post by deschutes »

dsukhin wrote: post #30

It's worth comparing Bitcoin's proof of work to other schemes of maintaining currency value to understand this in a relative sense. The Military Industrial Complex which arguably is the mechanism by which the dollar maintains its position as the global reserve currency puts out 152MtCO2/yr [1]. Without making any judgement on if this ratio is reasonable: this is 3-5x more than BTC POW but arguably also contains other…

Even if one accepts the theory of military power your argument puts forth, how is bitcoin any different? What part of reality prevents a better armed group from taking over bitcoin mines?

And for that matter, I don't accept the theory; it reeks of motivated reasoning to me.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#225

Post by Nursie »

kevingadd wrote: post #176
Nursie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a known quantity, sure, but IIRC hard drive manufacture was not necessarily a very "clean" process.

Right, but ultimately the same is true for manufacturing GPUs and ASICs. It's a problem you have to deal with for both PoW and this new proposed approach.

Sure, but that's my point, I don't think the economic incentives for proof of storage are any better.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#226

Post by godlikeNoob »

ycombinatorrio wrote: post #43

Bitcoin critics continue to assert that mining is wasteful and disproportionately damaging to the environment. Contrary to consensus thinking, we believe the impact of bitcoin mining is a net positive for the environment. Here's why: First, proof-of-work mining is critical to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin network, trustworthiness is protected by computation, and mining is what gives Bitcoin its ability to coordinate trust…

Try getting laid after giving your girlfriend a necklace made from bitcoin

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#227

Post by Nursie »

tor11 wrote: post #165
Nursie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin isn't a bank, it's a currency. You can't do that with the USD either, and you could build a banking platform on top of bitcoin to allow for chargebacks and credit lines. The point is when we're looking at comparative energy use, you can't just point at the whole banking system and compare it to Bitcoin, as if it's an apples to apples comparison, because the banking system provides an embarassment of service…

> The point is when we're looking at comparative energy use, you can't just point at the whole banking system and compare it to Bitcoin, as if it's an apples to apples comparison, because the banking system provides an embarassment of services that Bitcoin does not. this is true. bitcoin should be compared with everything required to run or "back" USD. which is a lot more energy use than most states on this planet

Even if that were the case, the US dollar serves orders of magnitudes more people.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#228

Post by kevingadd »

Nursie wrote: post #225
kevingadd wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but ultimately the same is true for manufacturing GPUs and ASICs. It's a problem you have to deal with for both PoW and this new proposed approach.

Sure, but that's my point, I don't think the economic incentives for proof of storage are any better.

How can they not be better if they remove the need to burn a bunch of power 24/7 and produce waste heat? It's replacing an ongoing cost with a fixed one. In both cases you need a hardware investment (PoW mining hardware for one, persistent storage for the other) but the proof of work system ALSO has a large ongoing energy cost in addition to hardware.

GPUs or ASICs for hashing are going to have a limited life span just like your storage hardware, too.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#229

Post by cableshaft »

Rallerbabs wrote: post #98
cableshaft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't really think we're actually in disagreement here. I pretty much share your thoughts in this comment.

Wasn't arguing. Except for whether we're in a bear or bull market. It's definitely a bull currently.

Wasn't trying to argue we weren't in a bull market right now, just not sure how long it will last. You said basically the same as I did, that it may end within a year. I hope it will last a lot longer than that, of course. Hell, I was hoping we'd be flirting with $50k 2 or 3 years ago.

It looks like it should last longer based on the institutional investment, but I also thought we had enough interest three years ago and suddenly we entered bear territory (thankfully I luckily sold some of my crypto a week before it started to drop for a downpayment on a house, but I held on to the rest for way too long, way too long meaning I never sold, and should have sold and bought back in a year or two later, in hindsight). At least I still have it now for this boom, but I could have had double or triple what I have now.

But I'm watching the market and news like a hawk in case sentiment seems to shift back to 'the sky is falling' suddenly again.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#230

Post by gyaru »

ycombinatorrio wrote: post #43

Bitcoin critics continue to assert that mining is wasteful and disproportionately damaging to the environment. Contrary to consensus thinking, we believe the impact of bitcoin mining is a net positive for the environment. Here's why: First, proof-of-work mining is critical to Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin network, trustworthiness is protected by computation, and mining is what gives Bitcoin its ability to coordinate trust…

Why did you basically copy-paste this chain of tweets: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587

or are you the same person who authored them? (doubt that)

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