51–60 of 91 posts
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define non-negligible and show us some numbers. Mining is supposed to be difficult.
Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). Th…
I have some first-gen ASIC miners and electricity is 20% of revenues at the current price and difficulty. The current-gen miners that are contributing to most of the increase in hash power are even more efficient and many large scale operations have cheap electricity.
If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / su…
There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented.
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.
Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-th... - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the...
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
I wonder if the energy spent moving/securing bitcoin is more or less than the energy we spend moving/securing cash/credit. Driving armored trucks full of cash and coins around isn't free. Nor is it free to keep the regular banking system's electronic infrastructure running.
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
Define non-negligible and show us some numbers. Mining is supposed to be difficult.
I would estimate the current network (25Ph/s) averages around 2-5W per Gh/s, leading to 50-125MW total power use. bbosh in this thread is off by an order of magnitude.