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Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

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Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#251

Post by hanniabu »

alister wrote: post #44

You can't compare Bitcoin to Visa. Visa is merely a payment sytem -- a means of transfer of money that already exists. Visa is not money. Bitcoin however is money. As well as being a payment system. The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy an…

As more people use it and invest in it, the price will surely become more steady.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#254

Post by fab13n »

raverbashing wrote: post #253

I wonder what happens if/when the cost of mining becomes prohibitive This is a crash waiting to happen

It can't: regularly (every 2 weeks IIRC) the hash difficulty is ajusted, so that with the average hashing power available during the last period, a new block would be found every 10 minutes on average.

So if it becomes less profitable, some miners give up, the mining rate falls, and the difficulty is adjusted so that it becomes cheaper, hence more profitable, to mine.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#255

Post by westurner »

... Speaking of environmental externalities,

In the US, "Class C" fire extinguishers work on electrical fires:

From Fire_class#Electrical:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical

> Carbon dioxide CO2, NOVEC 1230, FM-200 and dry chemical powder extinguishers such as PKP and even baking soda are especially suited to extinguishing this sort of fire. PKP should be a last resort solution to extinguishing the fire due to its corrosive tendencies. Once electricity is shut off to the equipment involved, it will generally become an ordinary combustible fire.

> In Europe, "electrical fires" are no longer recognized as a separate class of fire as electricity itself cannot burn. The items around the electrical sources may burn. By turning the electrical source off, the fire can be fought by one of the other class of fire extinguishers [citation needed].

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#256

Post by raverbashing »

fab13n wrote: post #254
raverbashing wrote: post #253

I wonder what happens if/when the cost of mining becomes prohibitive This is a crash waiting to happen

It can't: regularly (every 2 weeks IIRC) the hash difficulty is ajusted, so that with the average hashing power available during the last period, a new block would be found every 10 minutes on average. So if it becomes less profitable, some miners give up, the mining rate falls, and the difficulty is adjusted so that it becomes cheaper, hence more profitable, to mine.

Ah I see, I was not aware the difficulty could go down as well

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#257

Post by kobeya »

SilasX wrote: post #235
kobeya wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few things that are actually useful (socially or otherwise) but don't provide economic incentive. As pointed out by others primecoin isn't really a very good example. A good application to shoot for, if there are any budding cryptographers in the audience, is a ticking timelock encryption. A set of keys known in advance, and each block solves the next key. This would let you encrypt messages into the f…

Every public goods problem is mathematical research is a case where the solutions are socially useful but not saleable. The problem (pointed out by the sibling) with primecoin was that it worked too well, such that further solutions were uninteresting and past the point of diminishing returns. Edit: See my here for a model of how NP complete problems could fill the role of you could predict difficulty in advance. The…

No the problem with primecoin is the mathematical "problem" it is solving isn't scientifically interesting.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#258

Post by WikipediasBad »

etatoby wrote: post #80
TekMol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment I did and was quickly voted to the bottom. bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards In it's current form it can't. It's already running at max capacity. No further increase in transactions per day is possible. If there will be a cryptocurrency that can handle as many transactions as Visa, it will be something else then wh…

Iota?

Correct. Glad someone has heard of it at least on hacker news.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#259

Post by Buge »

ForHackernews wrote: post #250
nunyabuizness wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's pretty easy to spend an asset that's consistently increasing in value... the real test of it's utility as money is how many businesses and people have started accepting Bitcoin recently.

Why would you ever want to spend an asset that's increasing in value? Seems like a useful currency should be mildly inflationary.

Why not dump your entire life savings into it right now?

Because there's risk, it fluctuates, there's no guarantee it will always go up. People need to decide to what degree do they want to invest and be exposed to the risk and reward. Say someone decides they want 1BTC of exposure, and are contemplating buying an item of 0.01BTC. Would that really be a big deal? Small changes in the degree of exposure shouldn't be a financial problem to worry about.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#260

Post by imnotatwork »

decentralised wrote: post #238
spiorf wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the hashing of the merkle tree to obtain the merkle root takes like 10^4 hashes for 10^3 transactions. Compared with 2^80 that is about the number of hash operations needed to find a POW block header, it it trascurable.

I'm not sure about that calculation to be honest. The merkle root is very simple to calculate and verify that's why it's so useful. The POW difficulty is in finding a hash starting with the right number of zeroes and containing the previous block header hash. Did i get this wrong?

No, you're right.

Numbers i said are my guesses, but the order of magnitude should be about that.

I don't remember exactly how many hash ops you have to do to put 1000 txes in a merkle tree, but it should be more than 1000 and less than 10000.

My point was exactly that. Computational cost of the merkle tree is negligible when confronted with the computational cost of the POW

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