Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

blog.bitcoin.org.hk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#81

Post by nathan_f77 »

nate_robo wrote: post #67

Slightly off topic but would it be an advantage to use a low energy miner such as a Raspberry Pi as a bitcoin miner, or would that just be a waste of time and yield fractions of a cent / a cent per day? Admittedly little knowledge on bitcoin mining

Unfortunately, it hasn't been possible to mine Bitcoins on a regular computer (even a powerful one) for many years. If your laptop joined a mining pool in 2014, you would have earned around $0.20 USD per week, and you would spend much more than that on electricity. It's some tiny fraction of a cent now.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#82

Post by simplify »

6d6b73 wrote: post #33

"Also, one can argue that Bitcoin actually saves energy. The world’s financial system requires many resources beyond the electricity to run servers." What a bunch of crap. Bitcoin also needs servers (i.e exchanges, uses computers, routers, switches etc. )

? Your quote doesn't claim Bitcoin doesn't need servers.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#83

Post by AlexandrB »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #37
seanwilson wrote: post #22

One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it's meant to be decentralised but it doesn't look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs. Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this pre…

> Proof of stake is meant to consume less resources but then the power is then handed to people with the most money? I'm surprised nobody has caught on to the fact that the present fiat system is in essence a Proof-of-Stake one. > Coming up with a way to have a decentralised currency where everyone involved gets a fair say without consuming too many resources is a super interesting problem. Indeed. I almost wonder if…

> Indeed. I almost wonder if it can be proven that thermodynamics is in fact the only possible way to verifiably make something take considerable time and energy, i.e. actually cost in resources that we have no way of faking, especially time.

This seems intuitively correct. So much so that I'm sure there's a paper that either confirms or denies that this is the case (perhaps in information theory). I also wonder how quantum computing affects this idea.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#84

Post by nathan_f77 »

Mitchhhs wrote: post #53

Can someone explain something to me: So people mine bitcoin, which is really just validating the transactions on the network, and they get paid in bitcoin for doing so. However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash. And if the price drops doesn't this exacerbate this problem? Would love some clar…

> However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash.

This would actually cause the price of Bitcoin to increase, so that it keeps up with the cost of mining it. The miners won't sell their Bitcoin for less than the cost of electricity.

At some point, large mining operations will run their own power stations, and they'll just run on solar / hydro / geothermal power. They might even sell any surplus energy. Other miners might start paying for their electricity with Bitcoin, so the price of electricity might become directly related to the cost of mining Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#85

Post by QAPereo »

mazlix wrote: post #73
QAPereo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit? Yes.

How are you able to definitively say that's more of a waste than to gather cotton and linen and then print money?

False dichotomy... electronic transactions and bitcoin are hardly synonymous.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#86

Post by koolba »

altern8tif wrote: post #77
thisisit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was this predicted at the inception of Bitcoin? At inception? No. But Satoshi was made aware of this problem. Here's a long passage from Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold: Laszlo’s CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17…

> But Satoshi also recognized that having more computing power on the network made the network stronger as long as the people with the power, like Laszlo, wanted to see Bitcoin succeed. Not sure if I entirely agree with/understand this. Even if they do want Bitcoin to succeed, how different is it from the current capitalist system if 40% of the bitcoins are owned by 1% of the population? Doesn't the (economic) power…

> Not sure if I entirely agree with/understand this. Even if they do want Bitcoin to succeed, how different is it from the current capitalist system if 40% of the bitcoins are owned by 1% of the population?

1%? According to a Bloomberg article[1] it's 1000 people owning 40% of all bitcoins. That's about 0.000014286% of the world population. I doubt any of the are involved in mining either now either, more likely just early adopters.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitco...

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#87

Post by api »

seanwilson wrote: post #22

One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it's meant to be decentralised but it doesn't look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs. Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this pre…

PoW is inherently subject to industrial economies of scale, virtually guaranteeing an oligopoly. I saw this in the beginning and predicted that Bitcoin would evolve something like a de facto central bank.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#88

Post by symmetricsaurus »

OfficerGuac wrote: post #71
nate_robo wrote: post #67

Slightly off topic but would it be an advantage to use a low energy miner such as a Raspberry Pi as a bitcoin miner, or would that just be a waste of time and yield fractions of a cent / a cent per day? Admittedly little knowledge on bitcoin mining

Bitcoin is usually mined through mid-to-high end graphics cards. People running a pool of 6-7 of these cards per machine are seeing diminishing returns, so using a Pi wouldn't cover the electricity needed to keep it running.

Bitcoin is mined using ASICs, and not GPUs.

But, it’s true that mining using a raspberry pi would not be very useful.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#89

Post by UncleEntity »

Mitchhhs wrote: post #53

Can someone explain something to me: So people mine bitcoin, which is really just validating the transactions on the network, and they get paid in bitcoin for doing so. However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash. And if the price drops doesn't this exacerbate this problem? Would love some clar…

I think once the 21 million (or whatever, too lazy to look up the actual number) coins are produced the mining fee will adjust to compensate for the utility of verifying blocks.

Probably won't be profitable to have a whole warehouse full of nodes but I'm sure there will still be folks willing to make a couple bucks to keep the network up and running.

Re: Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

#90

Post by markkat »

seanwilson wrote: post #22

One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it's meant to be decentralised but it doesn't look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs. Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this pre…

It's also not as decentralized as intended in the white paper in regards to transaction. First sentence in the abstract: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#selection-37.4-37.173

Most people trading BTC atm are not trading BTC, but trading ownership of BTC using a traditional database.

Post reply on HN