Slashdot Mirror
Someone 'Accidentally' Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds (vice.com)
On Tuesday, a single user "permanently" locked down dozens of digital wallets containing nearly $300 million dollars worth of ether, the unit of exchange on the Ethereum platform, allegedly by accident. From a report: Now, some in the Ethereum community are considering the possibility of a risky network split, known as a "hard fork," to fix it. The affected wallets -- known as "multisignature" wallets because they require multiple people to sign off before funds are moved, making them popular with companies -- were all created with Parity, a popular program for digital wallets. Parity multisignature wallets experienced a bug in July that allowed a hacker to steal $32 million in funds before the Ethereum community scrambled to band together to hack back and secure the rest of the vulnerable ether.
I don't think orthogonal means what you think. You need to consume energy to waste it.
Also, heating your home with resistive heating is wasteful because heat pumps can be ~4 times more efficient (heating per energy consumed).
The mean quantity of work required to "mine" a "block" of bitcoin transactions is given by the equation W = D * 2^32, where D is the "difficulty level" (currently 1.2e12), and W is the number of hash operations. In other words, one block requires on average 5e21 hash operations.
The most efficient hash device available on the open market (and also used internally by the manufacturer for their own mining purposes) is the antminer S9 based on 16nm lithography ASICs. These have a specific energy consumption (this parameter is typically quoted as the main figure of merit for bitcoin mining systems, so is widely available for almost all mining hardware) of 60 pJ/hash.
From these figures, we can calculate an energy requirement of on average 300 GJ per block - or about 83 MWh.
A full block can contain approx 2000 transactions, giving a total energy consumption of approx 40 kWh per transaction at maximum transaction throughput (specific consumption is increased if transactions per block are reduced due to a low transaction rate).
Note that the above energy consumption figures are based on the ASICs only, and do not include power supply/distribution/conversion losses, as well as miscellaneous control devices/servers/networking. Add in these losses, and you could be looking at 45-50 kWh per transaction.