31–40 of 470 posts
With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…
With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…
I know this is pedantic, but the competition is about computational power. Energy is a significant input. Let’s not ignore the benefit that the more computational power that is spent in the competition the more secure the blockchain is from 51% attacks. Maybe 134 TWh is too high of a price for such a limited use technology such as bitcoin. Maybe we could do the same or more with the less energy intensive PoS technology that ETH 2.0 will bring to the mainstream. Blockchain is the single largest threat to banking, and that doesn’t come without a price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be better to instead store that surplus energy using methods like this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... The value of Bitcoin is purely speculative and varies wildly, at least with stored energy you always have a market that's willing to buy it from you.
Better for whom? The upfront investment is much higher. If the market buys energy from you, they give you money. You can turn bitcoin into money instantly without having to store energy. You don't care about the value of bitcoin fluctuating, you care about the instant profitability of mining vs storing the energy.
Difficult enough to find real world examples of places whose existing power demand became more economic to convert to renewable sources as a direct result of cryptomining, never mind to assume the scale of these ventures plausibly exceeds the amount of fossil fuels burned to mine Bitcoin or provide power for other activities which needed to find additional power as a result of Bitcoin mining.
Gold mining consumes 240.61 TWh per year, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Australia. Source: https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2021/11/24/the-bitcoin-gold...
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Gold as a material has many uses, not only to back currency. Comparison to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is not particularly useful.
Most of mined Gold is used as an investment vehicle or to make jewelry. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
Thanks for the link!
Investment. 46.64%
Jewelry. 36.83%
Central banks. 8.58%
Technology. 7.95%
I don’t think it’s fair to lump in jewelry with currency and investments. Much of the discussion I hear argued around cryptocurrency is in comparison to fiat currency. Investments are something again different in my opinion, though I might be convinced otherwise if I saw the those making the comparisons to, say, gold, and making cogent, nuanced points.
One of the ideas that was floated in the conversation was to setup a Bitcoin (or some other crypto) mining system that would be design to only operate on excess energy. In other words, we become export nothing or very little energy and consume the excess mining crypto.
The idea, of course, is to make more money with that energy than what the power company pays us for it. I haven't done the math. I have no clue if this is fantasy or reality. My instincts tell me it would be an exercise in futility, which is why I won't waste any time on it. I could be wrong.
The counter argument is that Bitcoin is a battery [1] so that if you live in a place like Iceland with plentiful energy, so much that even exporting it as aluminum leaves extra, then you can turn it into Bitcoin and export it that way. But most Bitcoin mining is not that. I feel like Joni Mitchell in the Big Yellow Taxi: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" [2] Why are we allowing this to happen? (Well, at…
If you use energy to move bits in a computer at the end you have heat and the result of a calculation. If that calculation was just to proof that you did the calculation, well, that doesn't sound very efficient to me but that's just my opinion.
What I'm pretty sure is that it's not a battery.
From that perspective this is great news!
With a climate crisis the last thing we needed was to make the most effective energy consumption system ever constructed. The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. No other system works so efficiently towards such goal. What's scary is that the whole thing was designed to be unstoppable. My utopian hope for the future is that we start sending rigs in orbit close to the sun. Since we only…
> The whole thing literally works on competing on consuming more energy. I know this is pedantic, but the competition is about computational power. Energy is a significant input. Let’s not ignore the benefit that the more computational power that is spent in the competition the more secure the blockchain is from 51% attacks. Maybe 134 TWh is too high of a price for such a limited use technology such as bitcoin. Maybe…
That's an interesting statement. The first question that occurred to me was: Why does banking have to be threatened? In other words, is this a solution looking for a problem?