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Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

fortune.com

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Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#31

Post by tomjen3 »

lt wrote: post #21
masmullin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time understanding proof of stake. I haven't found any discussions that make sense to me. Do you have any good easy to understand descriptions of proof of stake you could recommend to a layman like me?

In a very simplified way, proof of work is a way to roughly uniformily distribute the block generation "queue". In a network without identities how do you prevent someone creating hundreds of accounts to have a hundred times more chance to be next in line? You give them a hard problem, and now the odds of you being next in line is proportional to your computing power, which you can't multiply effortlessly. Proof of S…

Thank you, that is a very good explanation.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#32

Post by maxerickson »

cs702 wrote: post #27
maxerickson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If the private blocks are calculated 10% faster it only takes ~10 days to go back in time 1 day). But of course this attack isn't practical, actually executing it would demonstrate that the public network was a farce.

> You don't have to match the energy burn, just the hash rate (so efficiency matters). Of course, but I don't know how anyone could be a lot more efficient that current miners, who are in a rat race to increase the efficiency of their mining operations. They probably think about energy consumption every waking hour of the day. > You also don't have to do it all at once, you just have to be faster than the network (If…

You just have to have the "higher" energy cost, you don't need to have the same blockchain. So if you are 10% faster, you can go back in time an interval t once you have burned ~10t.

This is why the demonstration would fracture Bitcoin; it would reveal the hidden mining power and second there would be a bunch of discussion of ignoring the higher cost chain and sticking with social consensus.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#33

Post by Retric »

jeremyjh wrote: post #17
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy taxes are even more regressive than sales taxes. All it would do is increase the vast wealth subsidy.

Data? According to the EPA nearly 2/3rds of electricity is consumed by businesses and industry. https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers#commercial

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aml6/pdfs&zips/RegressiveManda...

Just an example: The poorest 5 percent of households use 247 gallons of gas per year, on average. The richest 22 percent, with incomes over ten times higher, each use about four times as much.

The basic issue is as wealth increases people spend more on services which have lower energy needs than say food. A cheeseburger takes not just energy to cook much energy to manufacture. An account on the other hand uses much less energy per dollar spent.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#34

Post by jstanley »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #24
jstanley wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> miners can lower their fees This isn't how fees work. Fees are based purely on supply and demand. The payer sets their fee level when they create the transaction, and it's up to the miners which transactions they will include. Since there is always an excess of transactions, the miners typically select transactions to maximise their payoff. If miners were to "lower their fees", they'd be accepting low-fee transacti…

When energy becomes cheaper, miners can do more mining, leading to an increase in blocks. Given that people are only willing to pay so much for a transaction to complete, there is only so much demand at a certain price point. Once the supply of blocks increases, you eventually have price points where the demand no longer matches the supply. At this point a miner would lower their fee until the demand increases back t…

> a miner would lower their fee

They're not "lowering their fee". That's not how it works. They might stop mining altogether, but it can never cost more to include a transaction than not to include it, unless including it pushes out another transaction that pays a higher fee.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#36

Post by jstanley »

nonbel wrote: post #4
jstanley wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> miners can lower their fees This isn't how fees work. Fees are based purely on supply and demand. The payer sets their fee level when they create the transaction, and it's up to the miners which transactions they will include. Since there is always an excess of transactions, the miners typically select transactions to maximise their payoff. If miners were to "lower their fees", they'd be accepting low-fee transacti…

The miners must set a rough minimum fee though. If energy costs rise enough at some point the miners will need to slow/shut down unless the sum value of the fees (in whatever currency is used to pay for the energy) rise above some threshold.

They're not setting a minimum fee, they're either mining or not mining based on profitability.

There is never any financial reason to mine blocks that have empty space if there are fee-paying transactions available to put in that space.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#37

Post by mutatio »

clashmoore wrote: post #9

Has there been articles or research done on how much energy is used to coin, print, distribute, and utilize fiat currencies?

I think it's only fair to include the cost of governments and armies in these costs, i.e. the value of GBP/USD is in part secured by guns and everything that comes with it.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#38

Post by masmullin »

greiskul wrote: post #30
masmullin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does it proportionally to the amount of currency you have saved. Doesn't this have an inherent disincentive to new people joining and using the network? Sorta like the poor stay poor, the rich get rich?

Not anymore then proof of work has I think. Want to join bitcoin mining? You need to invest in mining hardware, and have access to cheap electricity.

Do you have to mine for proof of stake, or is simply owning the underlying asset enough to "generate interest on the investment?"

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#39

Post by CJefferson »

mutatio wrote: post #37
clashmoore wrote: post #9

Has there been articles or research done on how much energy is used to coin, print, distribute, and utilize fiat currencies?

I think it's only fair to include the cost of governments and armies in these costs, i.e. the value of GBP/USD is in part secured by guns and everything that comes with it.

I suspect if you tried using bitcoin in a country with no government or army, it would turn out to not be very useful either.

Re: Bitcoin Miners on Track to Use More Electricity Than All of Argentina

#40

Post by simonh »

clashmoore wrote: post #9

Has there been articles or research done on how much energy is used to coin, print, distribute, and utilize fiat currencies?

Most Fiat currency and transactions are electronic, so they cost infinitesimal amounts of energy to ‘coin’ and transactions are just simple addition and subtraction. Conversely, bitcoin cost a relatively vast amount of energy to mine, are extremely bulky to store compared to a fairly compact numeric value, and also can cost a huge amount of energy per transaction since every transaction is highly complex and is replicated across the entire network. I can’t put numbers on that, but bitcoin is horrendously complex, computationally costly and energy costly across all the aspects of its operation compared to fiat currency electronic transactions.

Physical fiat currency might be a different story, but bitcoin doesn’t address the problem of physical money so it’s not really relevant.

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