The premise is that there no more worthier causes than bitcoin beyond the grid needs. That premise is simply false. You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen. These are all applications that can flexibly use clean/cheap power when it is available instead of putting a constant load on the grid. This solution would compete with all of that. Excess grid energy is a resource that we need to use more effectively. Wasting it on bitcoin is pointless. Nobody really needs bitcoin except those living on hoarding it; which is pretty much the only thing you can do with it.
In the same way a lot carbon capture schemes use clean energy to slightly reduce (but not completely solve) the amount of CO2 added to our atmosphere. A better use of that clean energy is to completely remove the need for adding more CO2 to our energy (rather than just partially) through alternatives that make better/more efficient use of the clean energy that these capture schemes take.
> You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen.
Ideally you need something where the cost of electricity would normally dominate the capital costs of setting up the operation. Otherwise, you're better off running the process all the time, and it's not a useful grid battery.
Alternatively, something where you need to overbuild the infrastructure, perhaps to serve peak demand or for emergency availability.
Water desalination plants and hydrogen factories are expensive to build, so they don't work well here. Bitcoin mining rigs aren't free either. Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build: they meet the second criterion as, for logistic reasons, we build way more cars than are on the road at any point in time.
>Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build...
Its also logistically hard to actually get the energy back into the grid from cars. Driving around with it is fine but if you cant put the energy back into the grid at peak time you still have to over
produce more energy in total than just to cover the peak. It uses the energy which is good but it does not reduce the difference between peak demand an low demand. If that is reduced it has an overall larger impact than just to using the excess energy.
Pumping water back up into a reservoir is the most common and probably oldest way to store excess grid capacity like an actual grid batter (one that gives energy back to the grid). Ofc its not feasible in many places due to the lack of hydro power plant but there are other ways to actually store energy and deliver it back to the grid unlike the Buttcoin battery nonsense.
Water desalination and green hydrogen production using clean energy are already real applications and growing markets. The cost of the water is a function of electricity cost, investment needed to build the plants. So, being able to use cheap clean energy for that would reduce cost and make that more attractive.
With water, you tend to use the cheapest option. If you are in the middle east on the coast, far from rivers or other sources of drinking water, desalinating is pretty much the only option. Which is why that has been common for decades. With green hydrogen, what matters is the cost relative to hydrogen produced from natural gas. Both are dominated by the variable cost of the energy rather than construction cost.
Bitcoin as a green, or rather less hopelessly planet destroying thing, does not make sense because it removes energy that could be used for actually doing something more worthwhile.
The problems with water desalination and hydrogen production is that if you dont run at a somewhat constant volume you likely aren't at the financial optimum. You can do maintenance and stuff when the energy price is high but turning everything off is just likely not financially sustainable. The energy cost is just one factor. If the plant does not use any energy it still has plenty other running cost that wont stop.
We need more solutions that work like pumping water back up into a reservoir (see other reply). These solutions aren't at risk that they need to run on high energy cost anyway to stay profitable.
Desal plants need to run constantly anyway, at least in my understanding.
Desalination plants aren't really something you build for profit, they're to secure your cities clean water supply and are usually taxpayer funded infrastructure projects.
if you have some reservoir that you can top up, that's a great buffer. Pumping drinking water into the sea because your reservoir is full is not a thing as far as I know. So that implies they either don't produce enough; or they vary production as needed.
A realistic/feasible deployment would perhaps pair desalination with solar or wind (more likely on the coast). During electricity peak hours, it might be more lucrative to sell electricity to the grid and then the rest of the time top up the reservoir. I guess depending on how scarce water is, the $ per kwh earned via water might actually be larger than selling to the grid. But you get my point.
You are right that these things being funded via tax payer money, makes this kind of lateral thinking less likely. But if someone were to do this commercially, this would be a great way to make it more cost effective.
Just for the sake of anecdote, my state in Australia has both a desalination plant and a hydrogen plant, one was a government project to protect the state's water supply and the other was a private initiative to supply "green" hydrogen to steel plants and other heavy industries as they move to a different steel process.
So those are good uses of off-peak power when your local economy is already interested in having those things. The state also has some other initiatives to use the excess generation, such as residential water heating and EV charging using "smart grid" sockets that take into account the local and greater network's load and generation.
I haven’t looked at the details of the calculations but one of problems with mining is that mining hardware deprecates and therefor it needs to be used now - in two years more energy efficient hardware will render it useless.
So the idea of switching it on and off according to energy prices doesn’t really hold.
The mining hardware made by Bitmain uses the latest high-end fabrication nodes from TSMC. How much TSMC's manufacturing capacity is used by cryptocurrency is unclear; the number is hidden inside the high performance computing segment in TSMC's financial statements. But it is probably a sizeable part.
Since this model is mining with "free" power, it seems like even less efficient hardware could still be used profitably which would extend the depreciation (and reduce e-waste concerns). They might even buy used miners that are considered too inefficient by other companies.
> hoarding it; which is pretty much the only thing you can do with it
You just can't be more wrong than that! With Bitcoin you may buy narcotics, illegal guns, false passports, child pornography, order DDoS attack or even a murder!
It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation.
Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.
Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too).
So people that has the same opinion as you, I consider this opinion invalid until they come up with a solution better than bitcoin for the problems I mentined.
To be clear the problems are:
1. How to save money when government is hostile to saving money.
2. How to transfer money when it is ludicrously expensive and/or government or companies are hostile to money transferrence.
EDIT: people downvote me, but none of the answers below so far address the 2 problems I mentioned.
The closest is someone talking about solving problems with trust, but that is the whole issue, if you can't trust the central authorities and companies, who you trust?
>It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation.
>Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.
You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.
I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?
Due to fractional nature of btc to ~8 decimal places, the math is that if everyone on the globe has it, they all have 0.03 btc and coffees will cost 0.000001 btc (so to speak). It’s unlikely that the whole globe all holds it. So this whole paragraph isn’t really an issue based on your unfair claim
> You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins?
while I don't really agree with the bitcoin maxi mindset of the comment you are replying to, do you know that you can buy as little as 1 satoshi? (0.00000001 BTC). Yes, eventually all BTC will be mined (in about 2140) but considering 1 sat is currently worth 0.0006 USD, there is still quite a bit of room for very small amounts of bitcoin being widely accessible (fees being a different issue that will improve with time).
The price (and therefore value?) of satoshis rise/fall at the exact same rate as a price of a bitcoin, so I don't see how this invalidates their argument.
if you can acquire 0.0006USD worth of bitcoin then the price of bitcoin alone is not a limiting factor. Maybe if OP is talking about hundreds of years in the future and BTC is worth $1 Million+?
If the USD were completely replaced with bitcoin (ignoring long transaction times and other garbage) you'd expect approximately 1BTC for every $1.3M currently in circulation. In just a few decades even a Satoshi would be worth the equivalent of $1+.
Fiat currencies will still exist. Remember, Bitcoin is a competing asset to fiat, not a wholesale replacement. I suspect that even if central banks adopt Bitcoin as a currency reserve, their fiat will be pegged to it by some ratio only.
At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.
I think you're mostly right. As with many problems in society at the moment, the complexities have arisen because we're so eager to connect everything to the internet and make it "exist" there. Also that we're so eager to make it work globally.
I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out.
I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally.
The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust.
Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.
My conjecture is that given two economic zones of roughly equal size, the economy which requires less energy to achieve a unit of productivity will be more competitive.
Right now the game is being framed as honest crypto vs corrupt government legacy weakness, but I think an economy that must devote huge resources to maintaining the security and operational infrastructure of their currency will be at a comparative disadvantage.
The defi stuff appeals to me as enabling composable bottom up tools for interaction but trustlessness I think is a very niche attribute which adds a lot of expense and in many cases doesn't mitigate any risks.
We've been solving the problems of trust literally for millennia. For some reason bitcoin apologists pretend history never happened, and painstakingly attempt to re-create the trust systems humans have had in place, once again literally, for millennia.
We have of course not "solved" trust but our world functions only to the extent that we have and share trust. It is far more valuable than any other asset maybe
You do realize the total number of land on earth is limited, and it will get harder to buy land? Every generation will have to fight over land, and this is extremely unfair.
So is your beef against capitalism? Or the medium of exchange?
A great comparison I've heard is 'how much energy is required to mine one bitcoin's worth of gold'? I haven't seen a figure, and as gold's negative externalities are more about groundwater pollution than CO2e it wouldn't tell the whole story, but it would still be an interesting comparison.
But these same arguments could be used against gold. And yet gold serves a valuable purpose in the economy as it allows people to take more investment risks.
If gold went away as a trading instrument no one would notice. It exists, but it is not integral. Much more value is stored in the stock and bond markets and RE
Some people never lived through hyperinflation or had their entire bank accounts frozen by a desperate government. Bitcoin itself is obsolete but everyone needs cryptocurrencies in general. Protection against government stupidity is absolutely vital and it literally doesn't matter how much energy it consumes as long as it accomplishes that goal.
I agree we already have a system of money and trust. Bitcoin energy demands will scale much more than any other uses of the energy grid going forward, so our entire economy becomes slaved to preserving bitcoin. A dystopia
We do NOT have money and trust today. Every single government ever has debased their currency. Central banks cannot be trusted not to destroy your hard earned savings. A dystopia is being enslaved to the existing economic debt machine, rather than being free to trade the hardest money ever invented by humans. When folks understand this, they run to the fiat exits.
If the dollar inflates to hell, I wouldn't lose much. I'd still have my skills, to work for a living. I'd still have my house, my car, my workshop, my tools, my computers, etc. Unless it's a total collapse I'll still have my stocks, too.
Preserving my wealth in the event of the dollar rapidly losing value is not a problem for me. I'm 90% OK on that front without even trying particularly hard to do anything about it.
What would be a problem for me, is that a failing dollar might be a symptom of the US government failing, in which case society would be falling apart around me. If basic services like roads, infrastructure, fire and police, electricity and clean running water aren't working properly nationwide, it's going to interfere with my life big time. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly: e.g. my grocery store has trouble restocking because the supply chain is not running smoothly. Bitcoin doesn't help me with that type of problem at all.
I'd be better off trying to keep my government functional by promoting and voting for good policies, staying involved at the local level, and generally acting as a participant in government rather than a subject of it. Playing John Galt and pretending that I'm just going to have my own safe little bitcoin world if our government fails, so I don't care and in fact assume that it WILL fail, would be both sickeningly cynical (regarding society's outcome) and naively optimistic (regarding my own outcome).
How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?
Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.
Your "dystopian" world was the status quo for thousands of years as people used gold. You don't have to imagine how the economy would look, you could just pick up a history book.
Gold was not a universal currency, and it wasn't a currency in common use.
You could pick up a history book, and you would learn that gold was almost never used as currency because it was simply too rare, and too valuable for the amounts traded in normal commerce.
Rather, silver was the currency of choice in Europe and most of Asia, with lower-value denominations eventually showing up as coins made of less valuable metals.
Math and Energy. That's the beautiful thing. If you trust the ECDSA is secure, and you trust that SHA256 is secure - You don't need to trust the individual network participants.
If ECDSA or SHA256 were shown to be weaker than believed, they can be substituted in the bitcoin codebase (given approval of all participants, which are incentivized to ensure the computational security of the protocol).
The energy is the barrier to prevent malicious parties from rewinding history. Fundamental, understood quantities in the universe is far better than the political whims of the party in charge.
What does hyperbitcoinization look like? This infographic video provides some introduction to what this could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac (Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million)
Yes, and what will they pay the soldiers? Worthless Fiat?
Part of the debasement of the roman currency was to pay their armies. When you take that ability away from a state, how do you maintain them without unlimited funding?
I don't know if bitcoin will end all wars, but it is far closer to a peaceful coexistence than debt-based economies.
You might manage to cause an upheaval in which who runs the state changes hands, but nothing else will change for the better.
You’ll just get a new state which holds Bitcoin and issues debt based on Bitcoin in the form of promissory notes.
It’s pretty simple - just require taxes be paid in Bitcoin and use violence against those who don’t pay. Just like with other revolutionary wars, you pay generals with land and soldiers with the new currency (I.e. Bitcoin). Some of those generals will end up as a dictator or president depending on whether you are able to establish a democracy.
The state will be the ultimate HODLer just as it was with gold.
Nothing dystopian about it. Precious metals were standard currency for most of human history. It's the modern fiat currency system that's abnormal and highly inflated in value.
I'd like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don't get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-priced during such periods. If bitcoin soaks up that power, it won't be negative-priced, and other loads won't be moved to use it, and they'll use power from non-renewable sources during some other time of day.
There's all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that's one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening), etc.
> that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else.
This applies to so many things. Snapchat data center? YouTube using gigawatts to process and stream cat videos? On and on. It’s really hard to control what people do with energy. Much better to focus on ensuring its priced correctly and all it’s externalities are properly included in that price. Then we don’t have to involve ourselves in moral debates about what’s a valid or invalid use.
Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn't designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don't be surprised if people takes issue with that.
This is purely subjective. Bitcoin's spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one's care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.
That's still not the problem: Proof-of-work mining wastes energy purposefully, while any other type of data processing only does so coincidentally.
Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
But that’s not what happens. Data centers have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now we literally talk about planning gigawatt scale data centers. No “data center” took the efficiencies of Moore’s law and said “we good, we can stop making more complicated uses of computers now and just run what we already have on more efficient hardware”.
So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
Very good point – arguably many companies also just have a constant budget for their computing expenses and will buy the biggest/most boxes they can get for it.
I still do think that it's an important difference whether becoming more resource efficient is something that could be incentivized/enforced without endangering the underlying business model or whether resource waste is the business model.
No, the amount of energy "wasted" is not measured, the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule.
> the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule
That only affects who finds the next block. It will always take about 10 minutes, regardless of hashrate, energy usage, hardware efficiency, number of miners, etc. since the difficulty is adjusted to factor all of those out.
For anyone who isn't a miner (and doesn't care to become one), the only variables which matter are energy-usage and difficulty-of-51%-attack (i.e. double spending).
AFAIK the only reasons to advocate for bitcoin mining are:
- A vested interest. Since bitcoin is a zero/negative-sum game, nobody else should care about someone else's vested interest; if anything they should be opposed (in the negative case; e.g. as a waste of shared resources).
- belief that double-spending is currently unacceptably easy, and would become acceptably difficult given the increased hashrate.
Whilst I don't know of an objective 'acceptable optimum' for the difficulty of double-spending, it would take a lot to convince me that (a) there are credible threats given the current hashrate and (b) those threats would be solved by an increased hashrate. The only threats that even come close would be on the scale of nation-states, or perhaps the largest tech multinationals; yet even if we're paranoid enough to believe they could pull off an attack, I fail to see how burning even 10 times as much energy on hashing would disuade such a level of paranoia.
We might be talking past each other, the point I was disputing is that miners are incentivized to expend energy, which is not true. They are incentivized to produce hashes.
If you hold the hardware constant then hashrate correlates to energy usage obviously, but it's not quite the same thing.
Arguably. Hashrate was chosen as a proxy for compute power (which was chosen as a proxy for time). Compute power (or hashing power, now we have ASICs) is effectively a measure of energy, since the hardware cost gets amortised.
It does lead to the same thing though if you think it through: There's always a constant number of transaction space available in a 10 minute window, which is auctioned off to Bitcoin users and yields a certain sum of unclaimed mining fees. This sum is importantly unrelated to either the current hashrate or the energy efficienc in standing up that hashrate.
As long as the total hashrate is "cheaper" than that, in terms of hardware and electricity costs, there is an economic incentive for somebody to start mining (more) – so somebody will.
Literally every joule that goes into snapchat datacenters is wasted. It's not necessary, it doesn't make anything happy and it's primarily a way for a large company to harvest a lot of data on young people. Nobody wins with the way this power is used.
Bitcoin isn't designed to waste energy. It's designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate from energy. It's humans that are essentially throwing electricity at it due to the high reward for doing so. Once equilibrium is reached there is no reason to throw more energy at it.
The equilibrium is based on the hash rate difficulty which increases as more miners are added to the system. Miners can choose to jump into the system at any time with no restrictions. If a hash block is mined 'too fast' then the difficulty is increased proportionally. Of course as miners leave the network the difficulty also occasionally drops. The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. Just like how an old computer used more power for less computation so too is it possible for asics to get more efficient and there's ultimately a huge financial incentive to do so.
You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet.
Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy.
Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
> The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary.
No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
> Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud".
I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
> No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
You claim that it's possible to tell how much energy was used to produce a block minting solution given the difficulty. It is not.
If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
> If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate
True but irrelevant: The upper bound for rentability is the cost of electricity plus the capital cost of the mining equipment.
As soon as the sum of these two exceeds the expected mining reward, rational miners stop mining.
I don't doubt that there are inefficient miners out there, but I strongly suspect the majority to act according to their rational economic self-interest and not as players in an expensive technological lottery.
> it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck
Yes, but not consistently and therefore also not profitably so. The law of large numbers [1] applies.
It's true you can't predict exactly the energy used in a given block, but you can predict the energy use of blocks on average: this is not very difficult because the energy efficiency of state of the art mining hardware is known, and the difficulty is known.
You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race.
The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.
The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.
The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).
Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.
We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.
A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.
"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.
Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.
Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft!
Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would.
So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model.
I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?
"we all" references here my parents, my siblings and probably all people around me. I don't mean to use like as love, but no one complains about it.
When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet.
I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks?
I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not?
The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it
None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.
This is a remarkable regressive perspective. Nothing is 'unblockable'. If global powers decided tomorrow that bitcoin was a blight on humanity, they could effectively wipe out the network in a variety of ways; it wouldn't take very much coordinated regulation to deflate the hype to a point where the utility of crypto basically tanks for the average user (who are mostly speculators at this point). Just because a system _could_ theoretically replace fiat currencies doesn't mean it will; there's a reason fiat powers are fiat.
Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
> If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that.
You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
If what you say is true then what is the logical outcome? As you become more economically powerful due to the price of bitcoing going up, but you need to defend ever larger investment in mining and power generation infrastructure, you will either need to capture government and become the government, or go to war with government, or mobs of starving people, or militias of other bitcoin cartels.
That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
I see you stoped caring about real arguments because its to much effort for you to read through them and trying to argue against them.
Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.
Your arguments also seem deliberately wordy and full of minor inaccuracies or things that look inaccurate but are simply your opinions; you give the impression of someone who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him, then claims victory when they let him have the last word.
I brought arguments. It should be easy for you to take part in this discussion by using my arguments and showing they are wrong.
I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different.
"who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him"
I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.
Ah well, if English is not your primary language I suppose I could have been a bit harsh. I'll give one example and expand. You wrote:
>No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin.
which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments.
Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content.
Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.
I want to clarify, that i argue against Bitcoin and not against cryptocurrency. I can imagine a world with a Crypto-Euro which doesn't has any gold equivilent anymore and works on some blockchain technology but is controlled / signed through central banks (like every central bank of every european country) which would also solve the energy issue.
Your transparency argument, while flaws have been shown from the other person commenting on it, is too much transparency. No one wants to have all transactions publicly available. It could make sense to use it for public funds.
I argue against Bitcoin itself as an independent tool and the power consumption of bitcoin and i don't think we need to spend that much Energy on Bitcoin right now to do further research on blockchain and crypto currencies.
I have never thought about how to write my arguments shorter as no-one every brought it up. But online also makes it quite hard to have a common ground. I will try to be more aware of this.
> Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that.
Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups').
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives.
However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point.
People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing).
> As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available.
Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.
Snapchat data center uses as much energy as needed to extract value from Snapchat-the-product. Same goes for employee's time invested in support, development and research. If Snapchat makes money, it attracts investing resources into it until marginal cost equals marginal revenue.
Same for Bitcoin or literally any other human activity. Miners are not going to consume more energy than mined bitcoins are worth.
It seems that you're confusing allocative efficiency with cost efficiency.
Anyway, the production costs of "a Snapchat" depend on the costs of inputs and the current state of technology. Specifically they are not a function of how much a Snapchat is worth in the market. Snapchat can increase the production costs arbitrarily, for instance, by wasting energy, and they could totally decide to waste as much energy as the market price of a Snapchat would allow. How moronic would that be? This is what Bitcoin does. It's important that people understand how Bitcoin works, because once they know how stupid it is a lot of them don't want to have anything to do with it. This has been my experience so far.
I would like to add to your comment that the stupid algorithm called "mathematical puzzle" is just a brute force loop in order to find the nonce => nonsense waste of energy
This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade.
I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow.
Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere good. Meanwhile you and I if we are both reasonable can agree that both services should pay the full cost of their energy use.
Edit: I see by the downvotes that people disagree. So how is it a settled fact that Bitcoin is more wasteful than e.g. Snapchat? Yes I know Bitcoin burns electricity to secure its network. But clearly people find that useful and value that enough to actually spend the money to do that. What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
> What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
You wanna burn your own house to the ground, your problem. You live in a flat? Now it’s bigger than you.
I’m optimistic about future tech and green energy and expect PV to solve greenhouse emissions. BTC is, by design, such that allowing it to succeed would lead to an arms race that has no upper bound — build a Dyson swarm, and the entire output of Sol gets spent fighting over who can find the right random numbers that hash in the right way, and it still doesn’t end.
(Of course, civilization doesn’t last that long, because the moment energy is priced in BTC it becomes worthwhile doing anything physically possible to get a 51% double-spend attack).
I completely agree, trying to solve these kind of issues with morals really doesn't scale well at all. It's much better to just let people be greedy but put in place a system of taxation and economic incentives to guide the desired outcomes.
But does banning something do anything different? Say the USA bans Bitcoin mining due to concerns about its energy use. That doesn’t stop mining in China or elsewhere. On top of that the US now needs to set up an invasive investigation system for enforcing the ban within its own borders.
Applies just as well to YouTube cat videos or any other poor use of energy in the digital realm. Banning YouTube in the USA doesn’t mean that China won’t have data centers streaming cat videos to the USA.
Instead if the USA really was concerned about efficient use of energy and capturing the externalities it could extremely easily (in the scheme of things) work out a better pricing mechanism such as a CO2 tax, and implement it. If it were serious it would also be able to find many willing allies in Europe and elsewhere that would sign up to a multilateral treaty.
> Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-priced during such periods.
Clearly there aren't such worthwhile loads available, which is why the rates go negative in the first place.
>pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening),
Isn't this counter-productive? The middle of the day is also when the temperature is the hottest, so running AC full blast is also the most wasteful since it generates the biggest temperature gradient (and thus cooling loss).
In terms of physics, no it doesn't make sense, it would consume less energy to turn it on when you get home (or set a timer for 30 mins before you get home). However electricity is usually the most expensive during the evening, and in places that have abundant solar, the cheapest during the day.
Yes let's ignore that I'm living on the same planet as you do and it doesn't affect myself and my family.
Right?
And no we don't live in a society where this doesn't matter. You are not allowed to do with your money whatever you want.
Buying a hitman: illegal in most of the world.
And you do understand that it is hypocritical to create a ton of co2 and making farming in other countries really hard and complaining later about immigrants. Just putting it in perspective
How on Earth is comparing this to hiring a hitman reasonable?
If your point is that you can't spend money on illegal things, bitcoin is not illegal.
Also, who complained about immigrants? Where did this come from. And even if immigrants/farming had any relevance to the discussion co2 is likely to increase crop yields.
On boats with extra solar, running a dump load when batteries are full often happens by producing fresh water (desalination) or heating up water. If useful dump loads are available (pumped water?) then it's a good idea but bitcoin mining is better than nothing I guess.
However having bitcoin mining as defacto dump load would probably demotivate work needed toward creating useful dump loads. I'm also wondering what incentives bitcoin as dump load would have in less wealthy regions where purchase power is no match to compete with BTC mining.
Think of a world where most electricity is unaffordable to people, being wasted to hash some coins instead, because it's more "efficient" from a monetary standpoint.
Bitcoin mining becomes less profitable the more people do it.
At some point it gives you exactly as much as you pay for energy to mine.
So if you can store electricity in the batteries for long enough to sell it for more than pruce of purchase then you are better off investing in the battery.
But since batteries are expensive and inefficient, you might be better off investing in the wind turbine or solar panel and mine with it if you can't sell energy to the grid for more money.
It's better than battery because when demand is high it gives energy, but it doesn't have to take energy when demand is low and it keeps itself financially afloat even when there's no high demand for a long time which might kill your battery energy storage enterprise.
I know about at least one pumped storage facility that died because of that.
There are some situations where mining Bitcoin is a very good application of energy that will otherwise be wasted. Here are two that come to mind:
1. Flared gas from oil wells. Natural gas is a byproduct of extracting oil from the Earth. In the past this was vented straight to the atmosphere, which is a huge waste of energy and causes horrible air pollution. Capturing this gas isn’t useful for many applications because it happens in remote areas, but if there’s a network connection it can be harnessed for mining Bitcoin.
2. Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
Neither of these is specific to Bitcoin, because the general concept is running a computer at full load for an extended duration. Bitcoin mining just happens to be the most logical (and profitable) application of that concept at present.
I don’t mean to direct this at you individually (the sentiment is throughout these threads) - I can’t help but despair when a community of engineers lack the ability to come up with creative solutions for using surplus energy. There is always a better use of those energy sources than Bitcoin mining. Some ideas: Extracting co2 from air, electrolysis, desalination, etc.
Nobody is desalinating their own water at home using waste heat. Oil wells are often located in an area where it would make no sense to transport a bunch of water to desalinate (perhaps that's a good idea for sea-based wells though).
I don't know enough about co2 extraction or electrolysis, only that those also don't sound like things people are likely to do at home.
I have no cogent argument with your first situation (there are some subtleties there that you omit, but it's basically correct modulo other uses for the energy). The second, however, is fundamentally inaccurate:
> Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
This is incorrect because a mining-based heater will be new and use electricity as its fuel source. You can't compare with an old electric heater because a replacement will obviously be new. You can't compare with hydrocarbon heaters, because you need to convert to electricity to run a computer. That means meaning we need to compare with a new electric heater. That comparison is unfavorable, however, because it will probably be based on a heat pump. Heat pumps have efficiency much greater than 100% (usually around 200%) by takng heat from the outside air or ground.
A better example would be something like an electric oven, which typically does just use resistive heating. However, this sort of undermines the argument, since the energy spent on heating food isn't that much compared to things like residential and commercial heating.
Heat pumps are great! Unfortunately they can't be used everywhere. Check out the Wisemining Sato Boiler, it's an interesting way to augment an existing heater.
There's nothing that makes the idea specific to Bitcoin mining. That's just the implementation they chose for their first product. The idea is to recapture heat generated by computation and use it for another purpose.
Besides personal profit, using excess energy to mine for bitcoin is worse than letting it be wasted since the increased hash rate contributes to the increased difficulty which drives the cost of mining up for the entire network.
We don't have a problem that we lack Joules. What we lack is the reason for the rich to buy Joule generating capacity beyond what's absolutely necessary. And Bitcoin could provide that reason.
Negative priced power is a problem for the people who own the solar panels. They want to make a return on their investment. If the business case improves, renewable capacity will build out faster.
Adding an elastic demand sink to a peaky supply in a way that is profitable is quite interesting. Joules that are not used at all are wasted. This converts that wasted generation into cash allowing expansion of the facilities and more Joules overall.
But it's not elastic. Or rather - it can be elastic theoretically but it will never be. If you have a cheap or even negative energy generation during peak generation hours and decide, hmm, I can run some hashing meanwhile without affecting demand. Ok, but then why would you turn off during peak demand hours? Why would you turn it off at any time? Why would anyone? It's still profitable, so everyone will run hashing 24/7. Just like today.
I think a more important objection is that increased demand for solar panels and batteries for bitcoin mining pushes up prices for those (edit: if bitcoin prices are above market price for electricity).
I joke, but I also do not. The inevitable conclusion of this path with bitcoin mining is the fastest path towards creating a black hole. It's the exactly perfect incentive structure to maximize speed towards a blackhole ecological disaster.
Caveat on disaster: Unless blackholes aren't real, or they are something else entirely.
I consider a spending all these joules of energy on securing the bitcoin blockchain to be one of the most important things we can do to ensure the prosperity of the people of Earth - in the face of tyrants, fraudsters and central bankers.
This really is the right idea. Making it profitable for PoW to consume excess solar energy has the downstream effect of spinning up more demand for solar energy in general.
You can hate Bitcoin and PoW all you want, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if you banned mining rigs (good luck with that), people would just mine it at home on their spare computers or use botnets. Either way, the only way we'll ever succeed in making PoW green is to make energy production itself green. And that's a problem we'd have to solve even if Bitcoin was never invented!
Doesn't this line of thinking incentivise any form of energy production that is above breakeven at whatever the current return on mining is?
If so, then as the price of bitcoin goes up, increasing the returns to mining, we would expect to see people generating energy for mining in whatever ways they can, with no view to green credentials.
It seems exciting because it could incentivise some beneficial behaviour given current market conditions, but it isn't obvious to me why it isn't just a transient phenomenon.
Separately, aren't batteries still preferable, at least in principle, as a form of managing excess supply, because they do not throw the energy away? If so, then supporting the price of bitcoin on the basis that it provides the social good of allowing us to have expanded energy infrastructure only works until battery technology is sufficiently advanced, at which point the price would crash (to the level supported by whatever other components make bitcoin valuable), correct?
I didn't mean to suggest that PoW is sufficient to drive 100% green energy adoption. Your point about it driving any/all energy consumption is well taken. You'd need to have regulations that prohibit using non-green energy, but my point there was you'd need these regulations anyway even if Bitcoin was never invented.
The nice thing about having more solar capacity available is that you can direct it towards other uses if it's more profitable to do so (or if regulations are changed to require it). Neither is possible, though, if we don't build it out in the first place.
If the only good thing Bitcoin succeeds in doing is accelerating solar capacity rollout, I'd call the tech as a whole a win.
Cancer is still cancer whether you're eating oatmeal or candy all day. Either way, nobody wants cancer except for those who mistake an all-consuming greed inducing thing as a benign superpower.
Of course it does. Even green/renewable energy has costs. Solar farms take up a lot of land, which competes with farming, puts pressure on ecosytems, etc. Wind turbines also require land, they make noise, disrupt views and kill birds. Man-made hydro requires flooding large areas; even tapping hydro on to existing lakes creates a flooding risk downstream. Hydro also has severe geopolitical implicications (e.g. Egypt's reaction to Ethiopia damming the Nile).
The first principle of green energy is to reduce consumption as much as possible; renewable generation is a 'fallback' for unavoidable power consumption. It's similar to dealing with waste: recycling is a fallback, a far better solution is to reduce consumption.
Really? I thought the first principle of green energy was to stop polluting. There's no need to reduce consumption unless green energy tech can't meet the demand (and given advances in battery tech, I have no reason to believe it can't)
> I thought the first principle of green energy was to stop polluting
Even with such a laughably limited definition, "pollution" would include:
- Noise pollution, e.g. from wind farms, construction, etc.
- Chemical pollution, e.g. from batteries, photovoltaics, mining, etc.
- Non-recyclable waste, e.g. many wind turbine blades, structural elements, etc.
- Airbourne particulates, e.g. from transport and construction (tyres, road wear, brake wear, etc.)
These are certainly less bad than "pollution" from fossil fuels; but it would be stupid to increase them for the sake of partially-inverting SHA256 on a few inputs.
That PoW contributes to pollution is because society allows it to, not because the protocol intrinsically requires it. You can call it "stupid" all you want, but Mother Nature doesn't give two sh*ts about anyone's moralizing. Fossil fuels are bad no matter what the purpose for consuming them is (even if it's making shoes for orphans, or giving everyone free healthcare).
It's possible (and desirable!) to pass sensible regulations to require that PoW mining rigs to use only excess renewable energy, and it's possible (and desirable!) to require PoW mining to contribute taxes towards green energy roll-outs. But per my original point, trying to make it go away is a fool's errand -- that's at least as difficult as trying to ban general-purpose computing, and would cause far more problems than it would solve.
I'd like to solicit feedback on why this is, did I not explain some point clearly enough or is it just the legitimacy of it coming from ark vs a random commenter on HN?
What is our problem? The problem is creating/producing co2 is a problem for our planet. Can we agree on this?
If we agree on the co2 production problem, lets take a look at what bitcoin is doing:
It converts a lot of energy/resources of our planet into co2. It does that by the asic's someone has to create, and by far the direct energy consumption. What does bitcoin produce? It produces transaction security right?
1. That value bitcoin is creating, is basically necessary to allow bitcoin to function. Without energy consumption, no transaction. Right now, we have a system which is able to create secure transactions, its called our current financial system. Our financial system is optimized for cost, speed and trust. Trust by regulations on different levels (state, world etc.). We have a global financial system.
That financial system is not perfect but bitcoin is also not perfect right? Okay so what is the advantage of bitcoin? People say its open, i can invest in bitcoins without regulations and i can send money to people like who are in a regime (in theory). Is that true? Is Bitcoin making sure that if your country decides to stop money transactions to North Korea for good reasons, that bitcoins stop working there? No it doesn't. All those mechanism, which are there to protect the normal people more than the tax fraud people are gone in the bitcoin system.
Therefore, the big advantge Bitcoin actually delivers (unregulated financial system) will be regulated as hard as our current system as soon as it hits a relevant size. And its not even hard as long as Bitcoin doesn't have any value. It doesn't has any real value as it is not a currency, its only a crypto currency. It doesn't has a country behind it. That it works as it works right now is just due to speculations/gambling.
We have to make sure that investing in batteries, other storage options, dump load with usefullness (pre heating water, using an EV, producing hydrogen, smelting more metals on high demand time, enabling technology to flip on and off devices like washing machines) is actually more reasonable INSTEAD of having to fight the Bitcoin gambling market.
All of our datacenters are only using 80twh more energy than bitcion and all those datacenters give us as a society values like entertainment, banking, building, simulating stuff, doing research like cancer research etc. etc.
BITCOIN is the worst invention in our society so far as it is the only invention i'm aware of which has such a high impact on resource consumption with no real value to our planet :(
I know you don’t believe it has any value; my belief is it is the most valuable thing on earth, more valuable than gold, platinum and love. I believe this as passionately as you are choosing to ignore it.
Your wall of text has many misconceptions and misunderstandings about how things actually work. I implore you to let your partially formed ideas go and read some more about what is really going on here.
Why do you think it is popular if it had no real value. Why is it the biggest meme of our lifetimes? Why will it be our money for the next 500 years?
I think its currently popular because its new and highly volatile and unregulated.
Our society is quite busy with corona and while bitcoin uses a lot of energy already, the market size is still very small. Core reasons why i think we don't hear more about regulating bitcoins.
The market cap of Bitcoin is currently larger than Facebook [1]. The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is over $2 trillion, which is larger than Microsoft, Amazon, Google or silver, and nearing the market cap of Apple. I would not consider that a small market.
It is not unregulated. There have been several lawsuits brought on to the space already [2][3]. Exchanges that don't enforce AML/KYC have charges brought against them [4]. It is less regulated than the stock market, but it is by no means the wild west, at least in the US.
I think all this model says is the it's currently profitable for bitcoin miners to build their own power stations to run their miners. But if they're doing that, why would they contribute to the grid? From looking at the model it just assumes the power will go to the grid first and bitcoin miners second, even though it would always be more profitable to run the miners (by 2x to 3x). I don't see this happening without government intervention. And from the point of view of the human race even this approach involves a huge amount of extra resources going into the mining hardware, an extra cost which only really benefits the miners (extra mining doesn't even benefit bitcoin at this point). I find it extremely worrying that 'bitcoin price' is not an input to this model: it's buried in the assumptions that it basically remains as it is. Bitcoin price going up means even less incentive to contribute to the grid, bitcoin price going down means the benefits it can bring under the broken assumption miners are altruistic go down.
The only way I see this actually having a positive impact through market mechanisms is if there's a railroad fever and massive buildout of solar capacity for mining, followed shortly by a bitcoin crash which actually makes that energy available for the rest of us to use.
(Also, solar is not a great source for mining to use at the moment: mining hardware still costs an appreciable sum relative to the energy cost of running it, especially considering it depreciates quickly. So if at all possible the miners will run them constantly, not adjust to grid supply vs demand)
I'm not sure even crypto mining is profitable enough to make the cost of nuclear worthwhile (to say nothing of the risk taken on on the crypto markets between starting construction and actually getting power).
The incessant snide comments expressing nothing but dislike for Bitcoin really don’t belong on HN. Not liking Bitcoin is fine, but if you don’t have anything to add just don’t comment. Every thread about Bitcoin on HN does not a dozen comments that it’s a waste of time and energy.
It's really pretty ridiculous and frustrating. I come here for intelligent discussion, and I agree it's okay if people don't like Bitcoin, but at least take some time to learn about it if you're going to argue. It's straight up denial at this point, because Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi are securing and transacting billions of dollars every single day. It's not a question of if it works at this point, it does work! An decentralized overlay financial system has successfully been bootstrapped on top of legacy infrastructure. If you don't understand how big of a moment this is for humanity you must have your head in the sand.
I'd like to also bring up the Helium Network which is an entirely novel use of blockchain technology where Proof-of-work is done by being a LongFi transmitter and having other transmitters check each other's signals as a way to verify that it's actually up and working. Miners literally make money by running LongFi cell towers from their house. It's currently bootstrapping a LongFi cell network world wide and is already prolific in every major american city. If this technology could be applied to power generation or even cell service we could have a real decentralized network with no companies in charge.
“How corrupt and two-faced is one who claims, 'I intend to be fair and honest in my dealings with you.' What are you up to, my friend? There is really no need for this preamble. The matter will soon become plain. It should be written on your face, it should ring out immediately in your voice, and shine out at once in your eyes, as the loved one at once knows everything about his lovers from the manner of their glance. In short, a good and honest person should resemble one who smells like a goat in this respect, that anyone who comes near him is immediately aware of it whether he wishes it or not. But the mere pretence of simplicity is like an open blade. There is nothing more odious than the friendship of the wolf for the lamb; avoid this above all. A good, straightforward, and kindly person reveals these qualities in his eyes, and they will not escape you.” —Marcus Aurelius
>snide comments expressing nothing but dislike
That's because people who know a thing or two about economics ánd computer science know that all you're doing is pumping your bags. The only thing bitcon incentivizes is greed, making the rich even richer. Crypto“currencies” are pyramid slash Ponzi schemes hiding behind a veneer of sophistication. https://cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.
Thank you! I come to HN to have intelligent discussion as well, and I totally agree. If I go to Reddit it's mostly just a bunch of garbage, even with crypto fans. I do think HN is warming up to crypto, a little bit, at least, or maybe it's just that more crypto fans are speaking up here.
Anyway, like you said, crypto is already working. The network effects are real.
Also, PoW does require a lot of energy, which is a common argument, but this is energy that includes audits, transport and security of the system. For Bitcoin, that's currently over $1 trillion, which to me seems like it is worth securing.
There also do seem to be ways to use excess energy for PoW and make it more green, which seems promising. The energy can be captured anywhere on the planet and used to support the global Bitcoin network from wherever the energy is. There is so much potential in this network.
“When the Church of Scientology announces that they’ve been thinking about solar panels, why does everyone have to rush to mention that it’s a cult? Can’t we just give them credit for these good intentions and forget everything they’ve actually done?”
(Celebrity endorsements, non-functional technology, libertarian fantasies of escaping the tax man — L. Ron Hubbard would have loved Bitcoin.)
This is incredible, and exactly what Square was getting at. If bitcoin is the incentive for decentralized power generation and battery provision, hash on!
delusional, this just continues to waste resources for peoole to speculate. resources wasted, lives ruined when they get the gambling wrong. everybody cut this crap out, please.
Well there's nothing wrong with considering a store of value to keep you from being under the thumb of fiat. So there's works of art, maybe some other metals, some really unusual one-off earth property. So what you have left is crypto or gold.
So invest in gold and encourage more gold mining. Or just trust your government and hold cash. Either way, you're losing a shitload of value. Hedge a small piece of your opinion for a year, then re-evaluate in 2022. Then feel free to come back on HN in 2022 and share your opinions on the subject.
How's is bitcoin even a hedge against the dollar when it's correlated with the U.S. stock market? So many things just don't add up, like is btc a currency or an investment? Fiat currency is really the only spendable currency.
I'm a Bitcoin fan and I actually do agree, some of the narratives conflict. From my perspective it is a new asset class and the world is still figuring out what it is.
It does, so far, seem to be a risk on asset, as it didn't perform well in March 2020.
It is already storing over $1 trillion of the world's wealth though, and in this case, money talks. Yes, it might have a correction, but the S&P 500 might as well.
That said, Bitcoin's properties may change over time, and it may become more of a hedge. It does seem to have a lot of believers, and IMO, the technology is what makes it very interesting.
It has been running successfully for a decade, and we'll be able to figure out more of what it is in 2, 3, or 5 years.
I think, why not hold some, even just a little bit? IMO, people shouldn't put 100% in, and definitely don't take out any loans to do so (maybe unless you are a company, but I'm against individuals taking loans out for it). You never know, maybe some of the current narratives are correct.
> I think, why not hold some, even just a little bit?
Because that perpetuates and inflates the Pozi scheme. Any "little bit" of positive now will be more than offset during its collapse, having a larger negative effect on more people.
What other investments would you consider? To me, if there are bubbles going on, the stock market is in one as well, as is real estate, etc. I've looked at the other investments available, and they also either seem very inflated, with room to fall, or stagnant and not able to keep up with inflation.
I'd prefer to hold cash in a savings account, but the rates are so low now it just doesn't make sense to hold a lot in cash. I don't feel that safe in the stock market either.
Personally, I only consider equity and debt instruments. Other than that you have commodities (oil, gold, digital/crypto assets...) but commodities are basically speculative assets (from an investor's perspective). They require the ability to predict future prices with accuracy, which I don't think I possess. And if you're unable to predict future prices, the optimal portfolio to hold is one consisting of a total-market equity fund and a money market fund, in whatever proportions you prefer. This is known as the two-fund theorem. If you're interested in learning about "passive" investing, I can recommend 2 youtube channels: Ben Felix and the plain bagel.
Someone in Venezuela could put their money in Bitcoin to prevent against currency debasement of their native currency. They also could get their money out of the country using it.
The amount of energy spent on this is breathtaking and it really has to stop.
A single bitcoin transaction has a carbon footprint of 359.04 kgCO2 – equivalent to the carbon footprint of 795,752 VISA transactions or 59,840 hours of watching YouTube.
In all fairness I think we should consider the amount of energy spent to mine gold every year too (as well as the environmental impact), and that's just to mine it, not to mention refining, auditing, transporting, securing, etc.
The energy spent on Bitcoin includes mining, auditing, transporting, securing, etc. It is interesting, at least, to consider that mining Bitcoin is all inclusive. All the energy spent supports the global network.
I think it's worth looking into if Bitcoin actually has some benefits. I don't think this is a clear cut issue and outright statements like, "it really has to stop", IMO, isn't going to help at this time.
The amount of energy spent on complaining about how others use energy is breathtaking and it really has to stop.
What you are saying is that people are doing things with energy that you don't understand, and can't make sense of why they do it. The people that do, do understand, and think it is very sensible to do this.
There are many things in this life I do not like, however, I strongly believe that I have no place to condemn the actions of others provided they do no harm.
The argument then becomes if non-green generation of bitcoin is harmful -- I would say, yes it possibly is! That is why projects like SolarBatteryBitcoin are so important, to provide an incentive green-energy production behavior; which appears to be the main reason you don't like this technology.
I implore you to open your eyes to what is going on here. You can sit on the sidelines throwing rocks, or you can take part in the biggest change in your lifetime.
Have you checked the spreadsheet? cell C34 on the second sheet contains an input for the cost of the mining rig. Presumably that accounts for the capital cost of the miner.
Increasing bitcoin mining capacity allows the energy provider to “overbuild” solar without wasting energy.
Nope. “Free” PoW undermines the whole system. Mining has to be a sacrifice, otherwise it won’t work anymore. There is no “and I can use the resulting infrastructure for X”. Every joule of energy that goes into proof of work is a joule wasted by design. There is no free lunch.
I’m starting to think that maybe cryptocurrency is the great filter. It’s actually pretty terrifying.
Edit: we should probably have termed it proof of valueless work to make that clear. There is also nothing to stop a speculative bubble crowding out all other energy uses. Our low-growth world is very vulnerable to these schemes.
> I’m starting to think that maybe cryptocurrency is the great filter. It’s actually pretty terrifying.
Either cryptocurrency is extremely useful and the energy spent will turn out not to be wasted at all or it is a big useless energy draining scam and the whole thing will soon collapse.
I really don't see a scenario were it will still be useless or only moderately useful and consuming so much energy that the human species will slowly die off.
Who the fuck invests in bitcoin? People with too much money and the habit of gambling.
No one can tell me that there is a logical argument without flaw and a ton of assumptions that the bitcoin market is in its current state anything than gambling.
Because bitcoin is so active and new makes it so interesting for gambling :(
It's not free, because every Joule of solar energy has a cost, because solar panels are not free and have a finite lifetime.
It's a sacrfice but of something we can easily sacrifice, excess of solar energy we have no means to store but we still need to produce if we want to go 100% renewables.
It's effectively free if you have no other opportunistic use for it. For example it's free if you don't have a smart electrolyzer attached to it. If you do have one, then it's not free. (Likewise it's not free either if you have no wasted overgeneration.)
It could be the opposite: a way out through the great filter. Due to imperfection of gold or any resource-based money (symmetrical security), people can never stop fighting for it and build wasteful political hierarchies with ever-escalating arms race. Bitcoin being cheaper to secure than to steal (asymmetrical security) solves two problems: de-escalates arms race and flattens the hierarchies because now savings can be more organically spread in society. This allows redirecting a lot of energy from wars onto cooperative multi-planetary infrastructure or whatever.
A sucker is born every minute. I tell you what, I’ll go write an article showing it would have made sense to use money from selling solar power to the grid on buying a house in Austin before prices went up 30% in the past year. Why not spend all the money? Try to get this logic past a financier. This is truly laughable. I can’t wait for the update that includes February “snowvid” $9k/MWh prices. The author will think they are a genius. LOL. GTFO.
So the premise of the article is that the difficulty and inefficiency of Bitcoin is the fundamental feature that makes all this possible.
What are we waiting for then? Lets double the computation difficulty of Bitcoin's network. This will shoot up the price even further and will accelerate solar-battery-bitcoin-green combo. We just save the Earth and a lot of people become rich. Win win situation if you ask me.
A real aside and sorry for it, but it'd be great if we had a way to execute spreadsheet computation in a generalized manner/without opening a GUI. XLSX isn't (immediately) text based but I feel there should be a way to extract XLSX into a neat package that can be executed on different runtime implementations.
Can we please just invest more heavily in nuclear? My preference is thorium reactors given they are far, far less dangerous in all regards.
Given ARKs time horizon, it would be a prescient investment. There's no way in hell were going to get stable power from solar and batteries alone. The bitcoin power problem is also solved.
I'm pro nuclear, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Renewable prices have been going down fast and are not stopping, and building a new plant is expensive.
We should care about keeping the old ones operating as long as possible, but we've been hearing tales of new safer smaller easy to deploy nuclear plants designs for decades, I wouldn't hold my breath.
In the same way a lot carbon capture schemes use clean energy to slightly reduce (but not completely solve) the amount of CO2 added to our atmosphere. A better use of that clean energy is to completely remove the need for adding more CO2 to our energy (rather than just partially) through alternatives that make better/more efficient use of the clean energy that these capture schemes take.