Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#311

Post by 8note » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #254

lofi_lory wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

Inefficiently though.

Electric heaters are only 100% efficient at turning electricity to heat. We can do a lot better than that

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#312

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #159

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically speaking, western China has a lot of renewable power and not as much demand for it as eastern China. If they were mining in western China to take advantage of lower rates, and that energy can’t be transmitted East anyways, then it might make sense (or they could just move some industry from eastern China to western China to take advantage of renewables, or get that UHV grid working so they can move renewa…

It doesn’t matter where it is used up, the point is that it is unnecessary work taking a huge amount of energy, that could be used for better things. Even using up purely renewable energy makes every other industry rely more on non-renewables, so it is a lose-lose either way.

If energy is portable, sure. If not, then it might make sense to mine where energy is abundant and not put to better use. Eg plant a satellite with solar cells close to the sun just to do crypto currency mining? Maybe not crypto, but perhaps some other computations that don’t require too much bandwidth to transmit results.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#313

Post by wyager » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #85

oefrha wrote: post #72

A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

No scheme besides proof-of-work provides the same security guarantees as proof-of-work. Proof-of-stake, the most popular alternative, is vulnerable to attacks like “grinding” because casting conflicting votes doesn’t cost anything. The end result is a much less secure cryptosystem. Attempts to address this are still under active research, and may not be possible at all.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#314

Post by wyager » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

lofi_lory wrote: post #234

bonestamp2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good time to point out that there are energy efficient blockchains that work differently from bitcoin -- not all crypto is as power hungry (some use disk space, or memory, or even just the tokens themselves to replace bitcoin's proof of work model).

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#315

Post by New_California » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

exdsq wrote: post #292

New_California wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is to maximize immutability, not minimize energy usage. Energy expenditure is what roots Bitcoin in reality and what protects against changes (you would have to expand even more energy to change). Other blockchains are relatively easy to mutate and hence not good candidates for the World's reserve currencies.

Other blockchains using proof-of-stake over proof-of-work are not ‘relatively easy to mutate’ for any definition of easy. Can you point a single occurrence of this happening on a top 30 market cap PoS crypto, such as Cardano, Tezos, or Algorand?

Very many examples.

EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi...

Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu...

Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork.

So yes, shitcoins are definitely mutable.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#316

Post by everfree » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #256

zoshi wrote: post #89

Bitcoin's hash rate has always been volatile, and it doesn't cause problems. Look at the raw values at https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate >.

Doesn't cause problems? The average cost of a single transaction is over $50 now. The cost of a single transaction is the same as a hard drive that could store the entire bitcoin chain 4-5 times over. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

The cost of transactions is not directly related to hashrate in the way you imply.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#317

Post by wyager » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

VectorLock wrote: post #300

lofi_lory wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

Thats why the only cryptocurrency that really appeals to me now is Chia with its Proof of Space. Not zero power usage, but better, and I like the design goals and its approach.

Chia’s consensus mechanism, while probably the cleverest of non-PoW mechanisms (their white paper explains why most Proof-of-Whatever mechanisms besides proof-of-work are broken), is pretty sketchy. Their reliance on “time lords” seems to be pushing a lot of the consensus mechanism towards hyper-centralization. It’s complicated enough that I can’t spot exactly what the weak point is, but that in itself is pretty concerning.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#318

Post by aeternum » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

lofi_lory wrote: post #309

VectorLock wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats why the only cryptocurrency that really appeals to me now is Chia with its Proof of Space. Not zero power usage, but better, and I like the design goals and its approach.

I assume you mean storage space. There you run into the same problem if you scale the system. The proof still needs scarcity in whatever storage is made of. For many natural resources, the local concentration is key to viability. See phosphorus, or helium depletion. Once the reserves are gone, we cannot maintain our scale of production, as alternative extraction usually is too energy intensive to scale. Please consid…

Helium is the second most abundant element, we just need to go to space, plenty of resources there.

Every year we delay is another year worth of black holes swallowing up entire galaxies worth or resources.

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#319

Post by rebuilder » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #314

lofi_lory wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact. Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on ma…

Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

How secure is Bitcoin? How secure does it need to be? Can we put a number on any of these - are we at the optimum security level now? Are we maybe at 150%?

Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

#320

Post by lofi_lory » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #318

lofi_lory wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean storage space. There you run into the same problem if you scale the system. The proof still needs scarcity in whatever storage is made of. For many natural resources, the local concentration is key to viability. See phosphorus, or helium depletion. Once the reserves are gone, we cannot maintain our scale of production, as alternative extraction usually is too energy intensive to scale. Please consid…

Helium is the second most abundant element, we just need to go to space, plenty of resources there. Every year we delay is another year worth of black holes swallowing up entire galaxies worth or resources.

That's my point. Phosphorus is also plenty around. Yet it's practically unobtainable. We depend on phosphorus rock for our food production. There is no way around it.