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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

#231

Post by aeternum »

londons_explore wrote: post #96
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

The main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.

This doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms.

Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#232

Post by aeternum »

dralley wrote: post #68
powvans wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the environmental impact of Zoom running away with my CPU? What about Chrome? I’ve finally accepted that I have to switch to Firefox because of Chrome’s performance problems. Apple and Intel and thermals are a know problem, but Chrome is awful too. There seems to be some sort of problematic interaction between MacOS, Chrome, and Google’s software updater that triggers runaway CPU usage. See: https://mobile.twi…

A single bitcoin transaction (amortized) uses as much electricity as an entire house uses (on average) in more than 2 days. This is like saying why should a massive agricultural project worry about saving water when your uncle Steve leaves the sink running while brushing his teeth. Or complaining about a splinter while impaled on a 2x4. The scale of the inefficiency is so large as to be difficult to truly comprehend.

The per-transaction electricity measure is pretty flawed as the number of transactions per block is independent from the mining difficulty. Block size has already been increased twice (BIP 102 and then by SegWit), and can again in the future as number of bitcoin transactions scales up.

Over 75% of bitcoin miners are also now merge-mining (mining for other blockchains like RSK for example so this hash power secures not only BTC, but other currencies as well.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#234

Post by jobigoud »

kevingadd wrote: post #228
Nursie wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

In this case the storage hardware is more directly linked to the output proof. Much more hardware manufacturing would be involved.

In PoW you can lower your environmental impact by using clean electricity. For Proof of storage it would be 100% manufacturing.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#235

Post by rmtech »

I think the mistake here is that the author doesn't understand the potential of cryptocurrency so sees electricity use for crypto as a pure cost. You can see this because of comparisons to centralized services.

On coal power: It's bad to use coal to mine Bitcoin, but it's bad to use coal to provide power for any activity. Coal power should be banned outright.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#236

Post by rmtech »

Another issue is that proof-of-work may simply be inferior to other consensus mechanisms because of hardware centralization. I think the cryptocurrency world needs to solve this problem at its own pace though. Ethereum is already rapidly heading to proof-of-stake, precisely because it's seen as better on its own merits without considering energy costs.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#237

Post by simiones »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #188
simiones wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It's not trivial, but it's certainly not impossible for the US government. 2. I don't understand how fiat is a technological problem. Fiat was a solution to the problem of a fixed supply (gold-pegged) currency. Crypto is generally a step back. 3. The value of bitcoin is irrelevant to its impact on global financial systems. It can handle 7 transactions per second, while consuming more power than the Czech Republic.…

1. I don't agree, it's also a great justification for why BTC uses so much power: to protect takeover from things like the US government. 2. Fiat is a technological solution, as is Bitcoin. Really though, the dichotomy between "social" and "tech" solutions is false. Technology and society are one and the same. 3. BTC has moved billions of dollars into crypto. That crypto can be pegged in smart contracts on more appro…

1. To be clear, I'm not thinking of a 51% attack, I'm thinking of cyberattacks on the miners and exchanges, mining equipment seizures, international warrants etc.

2. I was wrong in my explanation, you're right that fiat is a (social/financial) technology and in principle crypto could be an alternative. What I was thinking of initially is that the problems of the finance system are social, not technological: the incentives in the current system (the rich keeping their richness at the expense of everyone else) are a social problem, which can't be fixed with technology. As long as the rich stay rich and powerful, they will control crypto just as well as they controlled gold and fiat before it.

3. ETH can do, what, 24 TPS? Right now there is no coin that can realistically compete with the global banking system, especially on the last mile. And I don't think PoW or PoSpace will ever get there. And PoStake doesn't seem like it has any real advantages over a trusted distributed DB, to be honest.

4. Those are quite noble goals. Probably a major difference of belief between us is that I don't believe any change towards decentralization can come from (computer) technology, I believe it must be a social movement with democratic power that moves things first and foremost - any kind of purely technological solution will easily be co-opted by the rich and powerful. In this way, crypto should look at what happened with the Internet itself, as Google and Facebook and others slowly absorbed it.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#238

Post by bouncycastle »

ForHackernews wrote: post #217
bouncycastle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or else risk that somebody else can execute a 51% attack No, they aren't motivated by that. They are motivated purely by profit. If more miners start mining, the difficulty goes up, and therefore profit goes down. So they need to keep adding more machines. The price is driving this cycle too. The current hashrate & difficulty are at their ATH levels. (Edited)

Potato/potato The bitcoin advocates like to pretend this is somehow about "securing the network" instead of pure greed, but it doesn't matter either way. Even if we take them at their word, the miners have to keep pouring in more and more energy or risk a 51% attack.

No, that's incorrect. More energy does not mean more secure, and it's a common fallacy in bitcoin.

If you read bitcoin.pdf, the security depends on the % of miners that are honest.

In a nutshell, more energy just means that the "difficulty" goes up, i.e more hashes are required, but that's nothing to do with security.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#239

Post by lwansbrough »

xiphias2 wrote: post #180
lwansbrough wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it is. How much energy does it take to store gold?

Much more than to store Bitcoin....gold takes much more space than a digital wallet.

Aside from the fact that I’d be willing to bet that all the gold in the world occupies less space than all the Bitcoin mining equipment in the world, space is a terrible measure of energy consumption. So let me spell it out for you: Bitcoin is a system designed to maximize its energy use indefinitely for as long as it exists. The cost of holding any value of Bitcoin is equivalent to the energy consumption of the entire network for as long as it exists, because that Bitcoin’s existence is only guaranteed as long as the network remains online. By contrast, if I have a gold bar sitting in a safe in my house, there’s a fixed energy cost to that, and it’s virtually zero.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#240

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Nursie wrote: post #221
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> That makes you sound actually crazy.

I don't see why this is so difficult to understand.

You have a merchant with a sterling reputation. I'm a customer. They don't know me from Adam, but they know that a lot of their customers are unreliable. Suppose the product is bespoke or controversial, so they have a lot of problems with people placing an order and then backing out and refusing to pay after the work is already done or the product is already delivered.

In a system with chargebacks, they have to eat the cost of that and pass it on to the honest customers. In a system without it, the people violating their agreement and backing out can't get their money back, and then honest customers like me don't have to pay more to cover them. So I'm willing to commit to trusting the merchant in exchange for not having to pay more. In this case forced reversibility is a cost to me, the customer.

> See for example cashiers cheques and bank transfers.

In other words, things that are de facto prohibited through inconvenience or risk. Like a website is going to get any customers if they have to drive to the bank and then mail a cashier's check. And disclosing your bank routing number would allow the merchant to withdraw more than agreed -- you then have to trust them with not the $20 purchase you're making (an acceptable risk) but the full balance of your account (not so much).

Notice that the convenient equivalent to this that might actually be usable, i.e. debit cards, is back to having chargebacks.

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