501–510 of 822 posts
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> It’s actually the opposite since the block reward goes down over time It is true that 10 years ago block rewards were almost 10x what they are today in terms of BTC, but by USD value new rewards are worth several orders of magnitude more today.
The block reward approaches zero so no matter what the price is in the future it will amount to zero at the end.
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It is not about spent electricity bills, it is about spent time. This is the problem that needs to be solved, how can you make the work more time consuming without beeing able to go around this with computing here: electric power.
It is impossible, because time, unlike electricity, is free.
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Where do you think the transactions included in the block come from? The miner picks them.
and now the weaseling starts. i asked a very specific question: 1. once the "leader" is "elected" 2. do they have a choice of what block to append? you said they do, which is fundamental lack of understanding of how bitcoin works.
> when the leader is elected every 10 minutes, do they get a choice of what block they append to the chain?
and the answer is yes, the miner that gets elected chooses which transactions to append to the chain. Do they pick the transactions after getting elected? No, they pick them before getting elected. In fact, it doesn't matter whether they pick the transactions before or after getting elected, because their chances of getting elected are unaffected by which transactions they picked. Therefore, it makes absolutely no difference. The fact that you think it makes a difference tells me you're very confused about the role miners have in the bitcoin network.
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Why do people keep propagating this claim that PoW is burning electricity for nothing? It directly provides security for the blockchain. I don't disagree with your arguments general direction, just with this piece of incorrect misinformation. LED was a technological innovation. Nothing says Bitcoin can't have those. If you want more light, you need more lamps and you need to spend more energy. I don't really see the…
Because "security of the blockchain" doesn't necessarily mean "good for society". Cryptocurrencies are most widely used for speculation, and then fraud, ransomware, all those very fun and pleasant things.
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3. Speculators move to yet another doge coin where the cost is still lower than the rewards. Hasn't that happened already a number of times? If everyone was still aboard the Bitcoin bandwagon, it would have stopped being profitable long ago; however you have plenty of other bandwagons to jump into. They are all technically practically interchangeable. I assume this is also the reason PoS will never work. People will…
If Bitcoin dropped PoW and miners switched to other PoW cryptocurrencies, then that would be a huge reduction in power consumption worldwide because all the other PoW coins combined probably don't have the transactions Bitcoin does. Additionally, the Lightning Network drastically cuts mining power consumption.
Whether PoS will work, I don't know. But the author didn't realize that PoW is certainly doomed. PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger. That's why Bitcoin is alr…
2. Bitcoin will decentralize more as the miners will move where electricity is cheaper and thus will cover geography of whole world hydro,thermal,solar,wind etc.. 3. Bitcoin can be the main chain and all side chains can rollup and commits. 4. The btc uses will be huge and there will be no dearth of transaction fees..
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bitcoin incentivizes the search for cheaper energy, and allows for the instant monetization of once wasted energy. That's a LOT. this whole argument of energy use... i bet most of these people would have fallen for the same energy propaganda when the internet was just getting started... "what's email?? why would you waste electricity to send an electronic mail??"
There's rarely such a thing as 'wasted energy' outside crypto. Energy can be exported (even if at low efficiency) or stored in various forms (pumping water up a mountain, hydrolisis of water to fuel hydrogen plants, etc). Unfortunately, Bitcoin, Ethereum et al are actively making these productive uses of energy un-economical, as they have worse return on investment than simply burning that energy on crypto.
There is a lot of resources getting wasted in the real life. For example I'm from East Europe and we do not have good water pipes' infrastructure and lots of water gets leaked every month.
Speaking of wasting and leaking electricity I did a quick Google search and this is what I found:
"Are your appliances leaking electricity? Some of you might not be familiar with what this means. Not only do we have more small- and medium-sized appliances than ever before, but many of these never really stop using electricity. For example, if the television has a remote, then part of the TV is always on, waiting for a signal from the remote. If there is a clock on the microwave then the microwave is always using some electricity. Experts call this usage "standby consumption" or "leaking electricity" because people are often not aware that the appliance is using electricity.
A single appliance usually leaks only a small amount of electricity each hour (see Leaking Watts Chart below). Since these appliances leak electricity whenevery they are not turned on, and since people have a lot of these appliances, the amount of leaking electricity is significant. The average household spends about $40 a year on leaking electricity. The federal government works with appliance manufacturers to reduce the amount of electricity that leaks out of new appliances[1]."
Also here is another good resource on electricity leak which is related to the first web document I linked[2].
And then how much food is getting wasted every month globally? Probably billions of dollars of food is getting thrown away every month.
[1] https://www.uwsp.edu/cnr-ap/KEEP/nres633/Pages/Unit3/Section...
[2] https://www.teachengineering.org/content/cla_/activities/cla...
Whether PoS will work, I don't know. But the author didn't realize that PoW is certainly doomed. PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger. That's why Bitcoin is alr…
>PoW miners tend to spend more and more resources on finding blocks, until the cost approaches the rewards. But the rewards go up as the cryptocurrency becomes more popular, because the price and transaction fees go up. Therefore, a PoW cryptocurrency tends to "eat the world" as it becomes bigger. Are Google and Facebook eating the world? They are processing petabytes of data on daily basis and every year there is mo…
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A positive side effect of your (1.) scenario is that it results in a surplus of renewable energy (mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest). Having a surplus of cheap green energy is probably good for the economy, though a lot more than 1% would probably be needed to see significant benefits.
> mining needs the cheapest energy and renewable energy is generally the cheapest The cheapest energy is the cheapest. It has nothing directly to do with it being renewable.
x = x
As if that's insightful. But in the spirit of HN, can you say more? My understanding is that renewables are the cheapest and will likely continue to trend in that direction, causation or not. So are you suggesting maybe there's a chance of a super inexpensive non-renewable overtaking this trend?
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> Bitcoin is already approaching 1% of global electricity consumption, if it hasn't passed that point already And this is the reason why I cannot take any climate change conversation seriously unless it includes the topic of cryptocurrencies. Whatever the promises of cryptocurrencies were, now most (all?) degenerated into a mechanism for speculation, and effectively into a self-sustaining and self-promoting mechanism…
You can't take a discussion of climate change seriously unless it specifically addresses a single-percentage problem?
What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut down because it's failing to comply with pollution regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because they can't go anywhere else because they have to run illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being paid for crimes, only that the coin exists.
I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate any other way.
And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret, because bitcoin don't care.