'Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future' (grist.org)

An anonymous reader shares an article: Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people. But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power. As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called "mining") get more and more difficult -- a wrinkle designed to control the currency's supply. Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined. The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge -- an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.

Comments

Is there a way to do real work?

[drinkypoo]

Lots of computing is done, and few people complain about the energy consumption. It's only when it's computation for the sake of expensive computation that it becomes offensive. Is there any way to do some kind of real work in the process of generating this data, or would that inherently compromise the security of the system (or render it impossible?)

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Bing Tsher E]

You can always do your cryptocurrency computation only in the winter, in a northern climate, and use the heat to warm your house.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Troed]

The value of the computation is that it's what secures the immutability of the ledger.

Complaining about it is like saying the Internet wastes electricity because ... fax machines, or something.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[sunking2]

It's ok to kill puppies and kittens too as long as they make a good coat.

The real problem with what you say is there are better ways to heat your home than electricity. And if you do have to use electricity to do it even a modern heat pump is better than straight electric heating.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mobby_6kl]

The value of the computation is that it's what secures the immutability of the ledger.

Complaining about it is like saying the Internet wastes electricity because ... fax machines, or something.

If it does that in an extremely dumb and inefficient way, that's a perfectly valid reason to complain.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[reanjr]

You're building an international payment platform. That's real work.

And I don't want the algorithms for security to be compromised by a secondary purpose.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[jedidiah]

> there are better ways to heat your home than electricity

You just blew up the entire narrative there. Nice self-nuke.

Heat pumps suck. They are why people burn things instead.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[reanjr]

What are those other methods? Burning fossil fuels? Do we all have to move to geothermal areas for your plan?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[jellomizer]

The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that it growing at a rate far exceeding any sane inflation.
It has gone to stupid level. Because they are so valuable, no one will actually buy anything real with them, unless they will be the pizza guy who bought a Pizza with 20 bit coins a few years ago.

The increasing calculation cost in mining them, is happening faster then the speed computation to figure it out. In general it has became a valuable currency that only an idiot will spend. So we have massive computers which would be used to do more practical things, are crunching away hoping to get a magic number, that is worth something.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[shaitand]

It does do real work, it validates transaction chain hashes. There is something like a salt, a randomly generated string that gets puts on each one in an attempt to guess at a hash that meets the "difficulty" of the network, if it does that transaction closes the current block of transactions resulting in a new bitcoin award.

I'm more than a little skeptical of these power figures, I can't help but wonder if they are mixing up the GPU mining power requirements of other cryptocoins with the ASIC mining powering Bitcoin.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[GameboyRMH]

That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.

For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Hal_Porter]

Bitcoin is creating an anarcho capitalist paradise where you can make $87 million dealing drug and hire hitmen to take out rival drug dealers, all without leaving the house. How is that not 'real work'?

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[GameboyRMH]

You're building an international payment platform. That's real work.

There are other international payment platforms that are astronomically more energy-efficient, although they carry the downsides of having marginally higher transaction fees and being much more vulnerable to detection when used for crime.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[tipo159]

An air-to-air heat pump basically becomes an electric heater (the air is heated in the air handler using resistive elements) when the temps drop below 35-40 deg F.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[rolias]

Manufacture useful things to sell. Then you don't need to create cryptocurrency, but collect currency from somebody else in exchange for the product. What is the point of digital currency, except to create entropy and hasten the heat death of the universe?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Wycliffe]

That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.

For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.

But it's a horrible design choice. Basically, by design, it stays secure only by making the cost of mining too expensive for someone to buy enough miners to game the system and the primary expense is electricity. If someone manages to get around this limitation by say heating a stadium with the excess heat, then either they can game the system or the amount of electricity used goes up as the cost to mine drops.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

We heat our entire house with a 12kbtu heat pump. It definitely doesn't suck: it blows. But joking aside, the point is that bitcoin mining is resistive heat. It's about a third as efficient as using a heat pump. So even if you use bitcoin mining to generate heat, you're still wasting energy. And of course, there's summer.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

Nope. If your heat pump works that way, get a better heat pump. A Mitsubishi Hyper-Heat, for example, or one of the Toshiba heat pumps. These use a dual-stage process, which allows the unit to actively pump heat with air temperatures down to -17F. Our heat pump has kept our house toasty through the coldest Vermont winters, and it does not use a resistive element. If the temperature drops below -17, it just shuts off until it rises again; in that case you would need to either make up the heat loss with a resistive element, or just coast through it. If we lived in Minnesota, we'd definitely have a resistive backup, and it would run once or twice a year.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[trg83]

For my own knowledge, are you talking only of those that deal in fiat currencies?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[fahrbot-bot]

Heat pumps suck.

Heat pumps are fine when used in the appropriate places / temperature ranges. When operating in those settings, the GP was correct that they are more efficient than electrical strip heating. I live in Virginia Beach and my 3-stage, 16 SEER unit can keep my house at 72 without the auxiliary (3rd stage) strip heating elements when the outside temperature is down to just below freezing. Of course, the farther North you are, the more disappointed one will be with the Winter heat-pump performance, but even there, heat-pumps can use many alternative auxiliary heat source, like electricity, oil, gas, etc... to compensate as the outside temperature gets lower.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best heat pumps don't turn into electric heaters until -20 F

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the specification of the pump and how it was installed, but that is roughly my experience.

I rented a newly built house which had been built with heat pump, in the UK. It was fine in temperate weather, but as soon as temperatures dropped below 0C, the heat pump was unable to satisfy heat demand and switched to resistive heat. If you weren't aware of resistive backup and took care to watch the meter, you would never have known until the end of the billing period, and you'd be in for a shock of a bill.

There was a big development of new-build houses near me for social housing. Again, the government was pushing heat pumps aggressively, so they were installed. The first Winter, there was chaos, because vulnerable residents were unable to keep the houses warm, and had to go out and buy fan heaters. The after the Winter billing period, vulnerable families were hit with electricity bills of multiple £k for the Winter period. The social housing association ended up ripping out the heat pumps and replacing them with Nat gas furnaces.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[fahrbot-bot]

An air-to-air heat pump basically becomes an electric heater (the air is heated in the air handler using resistive elements) when the temps drop below 35-40 deg F.

It really depends on the efficiency of the unit, the size and insulation of the home, etc... As I mentioned in another post, I live in Virginia Beach and my 3-stage, 16 SEER unit can keep my house at 72 without the auxiliary (3rd stage) strip heating elements when the outside temperature is down to just below freezing. Even then, the auxiliary heat just cycles on/off to assist, not replace the heat-pump -- which still generates some heat, even at those temperatures (measuring the heat on the actual piping). It rarely get colder than that around here, though we've seen the low teens a few times and the aux heat stays on all the time at those temps.

In addition, heat-pumps can use other sources for auxiliary / emergency heat than electricity, like gas and oil, so the consumer has choices that may be more cost effective in colder climates.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[vtcodger]

Manufacture useful things to sell.

"useful things" What an archane 20th Century notion. This is the 21st Century man. We don't need no stinking old fashioned notions like utility.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

marginally higher transaction fees

I dunno- if I make a transaction, it's free to me, but the "9 homes" figure makes it seem pretty damn expensive: $2.65 at the average US rate of $.12/Kwh. And that's only for the power, not the hardware, connectivity, anything else. I think it's pretty hard to come up with anything nearly as expensive from a mere cost perspective- at the same rate, the US credit and debit networks would cost us well over 1% of GDP.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

An air-to-air heat pump basically becomes an electric heater (the air is heated in the air handler using resistive elements) when the temps drop below 35-40 deg F.

Which is why they only gets used in the southern USA and are worthless north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Ground-sourced heat pumps can work to lower temps but require a much bigger infrastructure investment and can be very impractical to install in existing buildings and homes compared to brand new lots.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Zocalo]

There's complaining about the computation, and there's complaining about the pointlessness of the actual computation itself. While the former is, to some extent, necessary for the design of many crypto currencies, the latter has become apparant as a design issue that (with the benefit of hindsight) really is a serious moral flaw in the whole concept. All that processing time is 100% self-serving to the currency when it could quite easily achieve the same purpose *and* do something useful that might benefit mankind as a whole.

If you want to use an arbitrary computation to secure the ledger, then why not compute something that might actually have some productive benefit like Folding@Home instead? Need to force artificial scarcity (as BTC does), then instead of periodically reducing the number of coins awarded per computational unit, increase the number of Folding@Home (or whatever) units that need to be processed in order to earn in order to mine a coin. Many crypto currency fans are touting the "more energy consumed than x countries" stats like they're some kind of badge of honour, when in reality it's just another example of mankind screwing ourselves over in the long term in the pursuit of a quick buck right now.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Barefoot Monkey]

...um, I think you completely misread GP. The phrase "EVEN a modern heat pump is better than straight electric heating" implies that GP thinks heat pumps are a very bad way to heat a home (so bad, in fact, that being worse than that is notable). You're saying that heat pumps suck, which means you're actually agreeing with that assessment.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[networkBoy]

Heat pumps have a sharp fall-off in efficiency outside of their designed temp range. I have a heat pump based HVAC and in the coldest days of winter it is unable to heat the house, because the outside air is the same temp or colder than the evaporator coil temp, leading to liquid freon hitting the compressor. Since that is a BadThing(tm) the heat pump shuts off. Resistive heaters (labeled as supplemental heat on the thermostat) then kick on. At that point mining BTC is no different from an efficiency standpoint.

Now, there are still better ways to heat, in my case I fire up the wood burning stove and use that, but still, heat pumps are not the be all end all in wide swing climates (I have the opposite problem in the hottest summer days, unable to condense the vapor back to a liquid very well).

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[zenbi]

and my 3-stage, 16 SEER unit can keep my house at 72 without the auxiliary (3rd stage) strip heating elements when the outside temperature is down to just below freezing.

• SEER stands for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio and applies only to cooling.
• HSPF stands for Heating Season Performance Factor and is basically the SEER rating for winter.

A purely resistive electric heater would have a HSPF of 1, while most heat pumps have HSPF numbers of over 8.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great article from the Big Banks and status quo-ers to keep you greenies in line. It is great. Bitcoins are killing the planet, wahhhh.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently 1 BTC requires about $5,000 in electricity to mine and there are 4 million bitcoins left to mine. So the electricity cost to mine these 4 MM coins is $20 fucking billion dollars. If that is not stupid, I don't know what is.

The cost to mine could actually be higher as the number of coins left to mine drop.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[tbannist]

The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that it growing at a rate far exceeding any sane inflation. It has gone to stupid level. Because they are so valuable, no one will actually buy anything real with them, unless they will be the pizza guy who bought a Pizza with 20 bit coins a few years ago.

Frankly, people pointed out this problem on Slashdot when Bitcoin was new. Bitcoin is deflationary by design. Deflationary currency encourages saving and never spending because the currency will generally be worth more tomorrow than what you can buy with it today.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Thud457]

I apologize for my vile slander accusing Canananadians of conspiring to use bitcoin to secretly increase global warming.
After further consideration, bitcoin is obviously an evil plot by the Big Entropy lobby to accelerate the heat death of the universe.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you are generating Imaginary Currency - which should be as bad as Imaginary Property.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[superdave80]

If natural gas furnaces are good, why not just leave the heat pumps in place, and have the furnaces kick in once it drops below a certain temperature?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "proof of work" concept is a fundamentally bad idea. A basic requirement of a currency is that it is efficient. A transaction should require as little overhead as possible.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Applehu Akbar]

Iceland could cash in on this, because not only is a lot of its geothermal energy used for district heating, but the outfall from geothermal power plants is used in the same way - a fraction of the heat is given up to generate power, but there is plenty of heat left over above the temperature of the local environment.

Would Icelanders object to all that energy production going into something like imaginary currency? 70% of the country's electricity output is already going into smelting bauxite that has been imported from thousands of miles away, a trade which is no longer as lucrative as it used to be. the country is already looking at server farms as a way of absorbing the excess power, and generating imaginary money is just one application for servers.

When you retire to San Junipero, it may not be located where you thought it was going to be.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[chuckugly]

Earth sourced (using the earth as a heat sink) heat pumps are also a thing.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[fahrbot-bot]

• SEER stands for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio and applies only to cooling.
• HSPF stands for Heating Season Performance Factor and is basically the SEER rating for winter.

Thanks for mentioning that. I actually knew that, in the back of my brain, but could only recall the SEER rating. I just looked up the HSPF rating for my unit: 10.55.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[GameboyRMH]

Mostly, yes, although there are some cryptocurrencies designed for energy-efficiency. You could also consider an MMORPG's currency system to be a more efficient example, and those can often be traded for fiat currencies.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[GameboyRMH]

It's a cost, but not a fee...you don't pay for that electricity yourself, it's a cost that's spread around to the entire network. If just the parties on either end of a BTC transaction had to pay for the entire energy cost of that transaction, hardly anyone would use BTC.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[alexander_686]

It encourages savings in financial instruments like bonds. Bonds get a little extra boast from deflation. Who holds bonds? Those people who are already wealth.

It discourages investing in equity. The hurdle rate for the Equity Risk Premium just jumps up by a little. Equities are better at weathering inflation than bonds.

So, deflation helps those who are already wealthy and encourages low risk low reward projects. It discourages the young hungry people from making big transformation projects. The general consensus is that low steady inflation is the best choice among the various options out there.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

Generate heat.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[boudie2]

As a Canadian I'd like to apologize for our name being so difficult for you to spell.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[allaunjsilverfox2]

If you want to serve a purpose AND get a monetary reward, you could use something like Gridcoin.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[fahrbot-bot]

Earth sourced (using the earth as a heat sink) heat pumps are also a thing.

Yup, I forgot to mention that, thanks. My parents had a closed-loop, ground-source heat pump installed about two years ago. The unit is very small, super quite and, apparently, works really well for both heating and cooling. Installing the in-ground piping was a bit expensive though. I have the back yard space for all that, and was interested in having one, but ground-source units (and installers) weren't readily available in my area when I had my unit replaced in 2005.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mikael]

The idea of making the computation expensive is to control the rate at which new bitcoins are created and so control "bitcoin inflation" with regard to how many bitcoins are mined per week. People used to mine bitcoins with their PC's using CPU's. Then others got clever and created GPU based mining code which was 100x faster. That gave those with SLI cards a 400x advantage. That meant the bitcoin difficulty has to be raised. Board makers like ASUS came out with motherboards with 19 PCI slots to run mining rigs with dozens of GPU's. Then new users developed ASIC based mining rigs when were even faster than GPU's and multithreaded CPU systems combined , x1000 faster. Consortiums that set up mining pools formed as well. They combined the efforts of dozens of mining rigs based on CPU's, GPU's and ASIC chips in order to eliminate duplication of effort.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[CGordy]

Iceland does cash in. I use a cloud mining service with facilities in Iceland.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mikael]

Folding@Home could always exchange their own crypto-currency for work done. Call them ProteoCoins and convert the CPU time donated into ProteoCoins.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mikael]

DopeWars on Facebook did the same.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mikael]

That would be the ultimate future cyberpunk sci-fi space colony. An entire asteroid mined first for its rare metals, then the geothermal sources tapped in order to drive quantum computer based cryptocurrency mining and a fusion reactor powered scalar weapon defense network.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[swb]

Does the Bitcoin ledger remain as computationally intensive as it is now once there are no more coins to mine? Will people bother with Bitcoin "ledger computing" once there's no coins to extract from the process?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[danudwary]

Like it or not, this is what anchors it to a real-world value.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[liquidsin]

That 1 BTC that costs $5,000 to mine is worth $13,000 USD at today's exchange rate. Good luck convincing anyone that that's a stupid investment, especially if they've already dumped the capital into mining gear.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[brantondaveperson]

Clean-burning fireboxes are better. Wood is a renewable, solar powered energy source. They're also great if the power goes out.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[randallman]

Primecoin?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Zocalo]

Yeah, I'm aware that there are some crypto currencies that are trying to do more useful stuff with all the processor cycles, or look at other approaches to coin earning "work" using the Blockchain that are not so environmentally unfriendly though excessive power consumption, such as Ethereum's concept embedding of Smart Contracts in the blockchain. The problem there is one of inertia; BTC is way out in front in the general public perception stakes (I've already seen several non-tech media articles that have used "Bitcoin" as a synonym for "crypto currency"), with ETH and LTC probably just barely on the Radar of those outside the core community that have actually done their homework. For current speculative investments in crypto currencies BTC is clearly where it's at, and many of the people doing so are more likely to be buying BTC rather than mining their own; I doubt the Winklevoss twins have mined a single coin, but their BTC are (on paper at least) supposed worth over $1b: high demand plus limited supply means ever higher prices, which increases demand... AKA "a bubble", although it's anyone's guess when it'll pop and how much of a correction there will be when it does. While I'd love to see it happen, getting a sufficiently large chunk of the mining farms and speculators to switch to a suitable existing currency like Gridcoin, let alone a brand new one launched by Folding@Home or similar as suggested by Mikael below, is probably a non-starter at this point.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[wagnerer]

You are neglecting efficiency of future processors and increasing of the solution difficulty. Definitely not a linear extrapolation.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that it growing at a rate far exceeding any sane inflation.
It has gone to stupid level.

It's desirable because it's desirable. It's like being famous for being famous.

It's the Paris Hilton of currencies.

... and about as worthwhile.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Green Mountain Bot]

Be honest: as a Canadian, you like to apologize whenever possible. And likely sometimes when you shouldn't.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[sh00z]

That's a valid reason to complain about energy required to perform transactions, but not mining.

For mining, you can be either for or against pissing away horrific amounts of energy to mine BTC, but its efficiency or inefficiency is an artificial design choice that the system must follow.

So, when the "value" of Bitcoin is assessed, why isn't it automatically devalued by the energy cost associated with creating it?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[schweini]

There's a cryptocurrency called "GridCoin" which uses BOINC project computation (that's the distributed scientific computing project) as Proof-of-work.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Trogre]

As another poster points out, there are better ways to heat your home than resistive heat. By doing to, you have a heat transfer system with a COP of 1.0.

Most homes where I live use electric heat pumps (think Air Conditioners that can work in either direction for you Americans), and their COP typically exceeds 4 (less if the temperature differential is extreme, making the compressor transfer energy up as steeper hill, so to speak).

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Pentium100]

It looks nice, however, it has multiple problems:

1. Using a separate service (Folding@Home etc) makes Bitcoin centralized an dependent on that service.

2. How easy/difficult is it to check the folding results compared to calculating them in the first place? Hash functions are nice in that in the way they are used for Bitcoin, it is very difficult to mine a block, but very easy to check the block. You could make an altcoin that uses "next x digits of Pi" as the PoW algorithm, but then every node will have to do the same calculations just to check the blocks.

3. How much space do the Folding/etc results take? Bitcoin blockchain is almost 500k blocks long, if the results took 1MB per block, it would be 500GB just for the PoW.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Trogre]

Really? How old is your heat pump?

All the ones I've seen in the past ten years briefly run the compressor in the reverse direction to prevent icing up, or have a small resistive coil in around the outdoor unit. Not sure if that's exactly what you're taking about though, since you mention the refrigerant in the compressor rather than external ice. How cold does it get there?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[magzteel]

So, when the "value" of Bitcoin is assessed, why isn't it automatically devalued by the energy cost associated with creating it?

A mining business would certainly deduct expenses when calculating net income. Their profit margin though doesn't directly affect the market value. That is driven by supply and demand.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[sexconker]

The "proof of work" concept is a fundamentally bad idea. A basic requirement of a currency is that it is efficient. A transaction should require as little overhead as possible.

Currency has no need to be "efficient". Bitcoin transactions have far less overhead than conventional currency transactions.
"Proof of work" is the onlyw ay to keep miners mining (and the blockchain running and decentralized). Ethereum's push to switch to "proof of stake" will kill it in the long run. It's effectively rent seeking.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Wycliffe]

Like it or not, this is what anchors it to a real-world value.

Yes, I realize that. But it's a horrible anchor. It means that any efficiency gains are negated, any drop in the price of electricity is negated. If the price of electricity dropped 1000% and the efficiency of processors rose by 1000%, it would mean that the amount of electricity used by bitcoin would have to increase by 1,000,000% to keep up. Using "the amount of electricity consumed" as an anchor is probably the worst anchor in the history of currencies. It's not much different than having your anchor as "the number of trees destroyed" or "the number of animals killed". Surely we can come up with a better anchor system. Almost anything would be better like "the number of dollars/hours donated to charity" or "number of rockets launched into space". At least if it was "the number of proteins folded", there would be real work being done that might benefit humanity. Gold is equally horrible as "tons of rocks processed" and also wastes valuable resources but there are plenty of ways to anchor to the real world that doesn't involve destruction of the earth.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Pentium100]

let alone a brand new one launched by Folding@Home

Bitcoin is decentralized. Folding@Home isn't. If somebody can come up with a way to do and verify Folding@Home-like tasks completely independent on any central server it may become popular.

Because if you have a central server, then mining becomes completely pointless - why waste energy calculating anything - just have the central server confirm the transactions, like it is done in banks.

Bitcoin's idea isn't "you can generate coins doing sha256", it's completely decentralized currency, not dependent on any single server or company and the mining is a way to confirm transactions without having that single server that everybody trusts. So, the algorithm used has to meet certain criteria:
1. It has to be difficult to calculate, but easy to independently verify by anyone even without special equipment.
2. The difficulty should be predictable (but not completely - there has to be some variance) and adjustable.
3. No need of a central server
4. The result has to take up as little disk space as possible.

Hash functions fit these requirements perfectly -
1.it takes a long time to find the correct data to make the block hash fit the requirements.
2.It is very easy to verify.
3.It is easy to predict how long it will take someone to find a block on average, but not possible to accurately know.
4.The difficulty is adjustable.
5.Anyone can verify the block - no nerd of a central server
6.The result is only 32 bytes long

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

Earth sourced (using the earth as a heat sink) heat pumps are also a thing.

Quite an efficient thing too... I'd love to have one.

Problem is that it costs a pile of money to install a ground sourced heat pump.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

For me, the heat pump heat is far more expensive than natural gas and I live in Texas!

Natural Gas is soooo inexpensive now that when I had to replace one of the HVAC units in my house, I elected to save a pile of cash by forgoing the heat pump option because I'd never us it. It's cheaper (for me) to heat with gas.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[b0bby]

Can the Mitsubishi Hyper-Heats or the others be used to replace a regular ducted heat pump or are they only for mini split systems? My current heat pump is getting old, and it's about 15 SEER (or was when it was installed). I know some of the ductless systems are pushing 30 SEER, but I don't know that I could use one with my system.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

IF you are paying electric and gas bills, just use natural gas for heat and skip the heat pump. Trust me, It's going to be cheaper for 99.99% of you out there.

Natural Gas prices have fallen though the floor the last ~10 years (thank you fracking) and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We literally have Natural Gas coming out our ears in the world right now. We have already developed more production than we as a world can possibly consume over the next 10 years, which was driven by the high prices of 10 years ago.

Natural Gas is CHEAPER... It's going to stay that way for a long time.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[networkBoy]

Yes it can prevent icing, but if it's too cold for the refrigerant to boil effectively then the unit has to continually reverse, killing efficiency. We hit -2C about 6 days a year tops, so my system is not designed for continuous duty in cold weather. It's about 7 years old now. Same as in summer, we have a week or two of 46C and the efficiency in cooling the house drops dramatically. That said, for the other 345 days a year it's a great system that's reliable and predictable.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[tender-matser]

The value of the computation is that it's what secures the immutability of the ledger.

Well, I was able to timestamp things by discreetly embedding their sha hash in the e-mail headers of messages I was posting to different mailing lists. That was not the purpose of the messages, I would've sent them anyway, as part of patch sets and discussion threads. Then they were replicated through dozens of mailing lists archives and hundreds of subscribers -- again, completely oblivious to my abuse of their infrastructure as an "immutable ledger".

This is of course, quite rudimentary and naive, but there are ways to implement an unassailable ledger by piggy-backing on naturally distributed things (peer-to-peer distribution protocols, instagram selfies, etc). An attacker would have then to take over the entire internet, not just over an army of cretinous dorks running their GPUs in cycles. And that would be "free" in terms of resources wasted just to secure the ledger -- a lot of resources are already spent to sent boiler plate & repetitive xml fluff back & forth; that could be put to some good use.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I understand how Bitcoin's ledger benefits from the computational resources. But it is still phenomenally expensive. And it's also why Bitcoin's value is so fragile... because since China has the majority of the cheap energy, most of the mining rigs are in China. And the Chinese government can turn it off whenever they want.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[boudie2]

Sorry about that.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[flargleblarg]

We literally have Natural Gas coming out our ears in the world right now.

I, for one, do not literally have natural gas coming out of my ears.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[blindseer]

If natural gas furnaces are good, why not just leave the heat pumps in place, and have the furnaces kick in once it drops below a certain temperature?

Because there is a cost of maintaining and operating these heat pumps that has to be borne by someone. Just the thermostat that can control two heat sources is not cheap. I have a system like this, the control unit (calling it a thermostat is almost insulting) cost $200, while a common digital programmable thermostat can be had for about $20. Even a cheap dual heat control unit is easily $100, and then you have to have the wiring for it, and pay people to install it.

I learned with my heat pump and furnace that the temperature range in which the heat pump is cheaper to operate than the natural gas is very small. This temperature range can vary greatly with the relative differences in prices of natural gas and electricity where you are, of course, but given the prices of natural gas around the world right now I have to imagine that there are few places where heat pumps are cheaper to run than natural gas.

Then there is a matter of just having the space for both the furnace and heat pump. My sister lived in an apartment where the heat pumps kept breaking down. People asked why they weren't simply replaced. The reply was that the mechanical space was too small for any kind of new unit on the market. They'd repair the heat pumps as renters complained but that didn't change the fact that the occupants had to deal with cold nights and high bills from the back up resistance heat.

In short, there's lots of reasons to not keep the heat pumps in place and all of them coming down to the costs.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of useless computing is done, like probably 95% of it is a total waste of time.

How much energy gets wasted away with peoples sloppy lazy inefficient code because memory, CPU, network bandwidth and storage is cheap? How much gets wasted with shitty Flash based ads in my browser? How much gets wasted by spam? How much gets wasted because its easier to just leave your PC on 24/7, how much energy does that useless "smart home" (pssst its just spying device to monetize you) shit waste? A F****ing lot I bet.

How many VMs in the zillions of VM farms around the world are doing nothing? I found by chance a Win 2K3 VM that ran the previous previous (yes two versions) version of our helpdesk app, sitting there, powered on, doing nothing, I've worked here over 3 years and never found a reference to this thing, or heard it mentioned, but there it is eating up resources unnoticed. There are probably a good number of hosts in our vast VM infrastructure just doing nothing because its not worth anyones time or effort to go looking for this crap and decom it..

Rah rah.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[sunking2]

Perhaps poorly worded, but the intent was that for the inevitable 'I HAVE NOW CHOICE BUT TO USE ELECTRICITY WHERE I LIVE' responses I was stating that you're better off with a modern heat pump than running your computers for heat or electric baseboard heaters.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[angel'o'sphere]

This is the dumbest thing I ever have read about heat pumps.
I should make screen shots and post it on face book.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[angel'o'sphere]

You want to tell me someone sold you the idea that a heat pump that uses air from outside of the house to heat your house is a good idea?
And you want to tell me you failed for it?
And you actually have such a heat pump?
Really?

Facepalm.

You burry pipes in the ground, 2 or 3 yards deep, deeper if it is reasonable. That is how you "heat pump" heat into your house.

An outside house AIR heat pump is basically everywhere an idiotic idea. I can not imagine in a minute of thinking where that would make sense ... but well, who am I ...

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah some of those split/ductless single room systems work very well in colder temps, but your typical 3ton/10 kW 14SEER unit coupled with an air handler to do every room in a 1800sqft house that was setup for forced air heating, will peter out at about 30F, and needs resistive electric heating or gas furnace help. I could go 16 or 18 or 20 SEER scroll compressor whizgizmo (price goes way way way the hell up) unit that works better in the cold, but its just a system of diminishing returns the colder it gets, they harder it has to work to heat a house against an increasing inside/outside temperature difference.

Western Washington (state), you cant honestly justify the extra cost of anything over 14SEER in our mild low humidity climate that sometimes dips below 30F, and doesn't much exceed 90F..

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

We literally have Natural Gas coming out our ears in the world right now.

I, for one, do not literally have natural gas coming out of my ears.

Ok, Ok.. But it does come out of another orifice or two you have...

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but natural gas would be better used in larger more efficient situations - such as power stations, or other industrial uses that extract more energy or "work" from it vs COS output compared to your not very efficient old clapped out home furnace in your old shitty house that you should knock down and replace with something new :-)

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[networkBoy]

You do realize that air conditioners are just one-way heat pumps, as are the basics of your fridge right?

Heat pumps are fantastic in temperate climates (where I live) and only at the extreme bounds of my climate do they suffer from efficiency issues.

The money saved via heat pump efficiency gains by burying pipes in my yard would take *decades* to repay the cost of said system. I looked, did the math, and thought better of it.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

$14,000 now... it was $8,000 last week or so this is some insane bubble. Won't be surprised if it hits $100,000 within six months.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[jrumney]

"Clean burning" just means they output mostly Carbon Dioxide rather than the mixture of Carbon soot particles and Carbon Monoxide that burning wood would naturally emit in an open fireplace. Last I checked, Carbon Dioxide was still a greenhouse gas.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Moochman]

Currency has no need to be "efficient". Bitcoin transactions have far less overhead than conventional currency transactions.

Not true. https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[kiminator]

The point is that Bitcoin doesn't solve any pressing problem (currencies already exist), but it's soaking up more and more computing power as miners jump on the bandwagon to make more money, aided and abetted by speculators who continue to drive the price up. Bitcoin transactions are already far more expensive in terms of their raw cost than most traditional transaction schemes.

If Bitcoin transactions were on par in terms of resource cost to more traditional transaction systems, such as credit card payments or bank account transfers, then it might have a place in financial transactions. But we're not living in that world. Instead, if the enthusiasm for Bitcoin continues, we're looking at a world where it eats up a huge fraction of total power usage to no benefit for humanity.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[kiminator]

Heat pumps, in the right conditions, can be far more efficient than furnaces. With a furnace, your efficiency will typically be around 90%-95%, depending upon how well the system is insulated. With a heat pump, you can get efficiency that is ten times that under the right conditions, meaning you may only need 10BTU of energy to transfer 100BTU of heat. The exact efficiency of the heat pump system varies greatly depending upon how it's designed, the temperature of the system it's exchanging heat with, and how efficient the transfer of heat is (e.g. if it exchanges heat with a reservoir of water it'll be more efficient than if it exchanges heat with the air).

Last year I had a heat pump system installed in my house which cut by half the power cost of heating the house in winter. There's still a furnace for backup if the temperatures dip too low (which has happened), and there's never been a situation where the heating system lacked sufficient power to keep the house heated.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

Actually, if being used for heat, the most effective place to burn Natural Gas it is locally where you need the heat.

The conversion losses between heat to electricity, followed by the transmission losses, followed by another conversion from electricity to heat are horribly inefficient overall looking at the BTU's into the plant and the BTU's heating the air in your house. Any reasonably efficient Natural Gas heater will beat the efficiency of a NG plant supplied electric option.

And, I'd like to point out that my old existing house is a whole lot more environmentally friendly as it stands than hauling it to a land fill and building a new one. Why? Because I live in Texas where we heat maybe a total of 1 month a year and MOST of the energy consumed year round is for AC followed by heating hot water and I have fairly efficient AC units and a Tank less hot water system which uses as little NG as possible.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[kiminator]

Yeah, burying pipes is great if you have large temperature swings. Even a few feet down, the temperature swings throughout the year are dampened dramatically (a few feet below the ground it's much cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the surface). But if you live in a more temperate clime, there just isn't a need for it.

Right now I pay roughly $100/mo average to heat/cool my house. It would probably cost something along the lines of $10,000 to get a system with heat exchange through buried pipes installed. If it cut my heating/cooling bill in half, then it would take some 17 years to repay, by which time the system might need expensive maintenance or replacement. And given that the temperatures don't swing all that dramatically here, cutting my bill in half might be a very generous estimate.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a flat out lie.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[kiminator]

That's precisely the way my system works. It combines a heat pump that doubles as an AC, and has a furnace for when temperatures become too low for the heat pump to operate efficiently. It also has a calculator on the thermostat to set the temperature where the system switches between gas furnace and electric heat pump based upon my gas/electricity costs.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[kiminator]

1. A heat pump is also an AC, and isn't much more expensive than a straight AC unit.

2. The heat pump is lower-cost for a good range of temperatures (mine is cheaper than a gas furnace for heating for anything above about 20F, if I recall).

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

>immutable

except when those in control of the hash power decide to change something.

Anyone thinking Bitcoin is immutable hasnt been paying attention.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[ahodgson]

Mine works to -20c supposedly, but natural gas is so cheap it doesn't make sense to run the heat pump below about 4c. If the option was resistive heating, though there's no choice, heat pump all the way.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[ahodgson]

Regrowing the wood takes the CO2 out. CO2 isn't naturally a bad thing, it's just releasing hundreds of millions of years of sequestered reserves in fossil fuels is a good way to change the climate abruptly.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

You need to study physics before calling other people idiotic. The air outside your house is quite hot even in the dead of winter—it's very unusual for it to be colder than 250 degrees kelvin. There is plenty of heat to take out of it with the right refrigerant. Burying pipes is very expensive, and then you're cooling the ground, which transfers heat much more slowly than the air, so you need a lot of pipe to have enough surface area to allow the heat you transfer out of it to be replenished. Basically it's a bit of a boondoggle in many cases. Our system is very efficient, and our heating bills are very low. Our total energy bill for the year including plug load (admittedly with 4kw of solar) is about $500.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

I don't know how to set that up. As a general rule, what they recommend is that you just have a head-end unit in the locations that you want to heat, so you might have a single unit outside and three or four head-ends inside. This requires running refrigerant lines, but it's a lot less noisy and drying than a ducted system, so it might be worth it. You can always run the refrigerant lines through the ducts... :)

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

Our house is 2400sqft. We have a single 12kbtu system and a Haiku fan over the atrium. Bedrooms run a few degrees colder than the main area. Helps to have really good insulation and a heat recovery ventilator; if we didn't have these we'd need multiple head ends.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[mellon]

No. It's just state of the art. We built the house to Passivhaus standards.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your shitty heat pump from the 70s sucks, but even the one in my older Ford Explorer moves four watts of heat for every watt of power used. Get with the times.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is, but for some reason no one ever talks about this. Render Token aims to use all that hashing power to replace Pixar-style rendering farms; Golem Network will start there but explicitly intends to cast a wider net into AI and cloud computing; CureCoin is mineable today and replaces the 'useless' proof-of-work requirement with a Folding@home client. There are probably a dozen other projects like this underway.

For all of Satoshi's genius, not bothering to do the math on the power requirements for a scaling blockchain was a profoundly stupid move. Correcting that oversight by tying cryptocurrency mining to Hollywood movies and the cure for cancer sounds reasonable to me, but it's clear the cryptocurrency world is even more unreasonable than the rest of the world.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[ChrisMaple]

Soil is not a good conductor of heat.Unless you access deep into the water table, preferably a flowing aquifer, your intended thermal sink will be a useless frozen lump.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[ChrisMaple]

Alas, no. A Coefficient Of Performance of 1.0 (resistive heating) corresponds to a HSPF of about 3.4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSPF.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Troed]

Please give an example of when "those in control of the hash power" decided to change something, and did.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[mestar]

Solving a decentralized problem with a centralized solution makes you look stupid.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[thegarbz]

You can always do your cryptocurrency computation only in the winter, in a northern climate, and use the heat to warm your house.

Horrible idea. Why would you waste energy like that when a heatpump could do it with far lower resources?

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then? So it's ok to waste cpu time with bitcoin because you work for a sloppy organization?

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[GameboyRMH]

Is it really a decentralized problem though? Centrally controlled currencies can work well, it's the only type we've been using until very recently, they're very energy-efficient and are much more difficult to steal online.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heat pumps are very efficient in their designed temp range. The key is to not use air, do the heat exchange with a water source (like a well) instead of with the air.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[bobbied]

On #2, this depends greatly on the cost of electricity and the cost of Natural gas where you are. A heat pump may work down to -20F but the question is what's cheaper to use. Hands down, where I live, it's cheaper to heat with Natural Gas all the time, regardless of the outdoor temperature. The equipment is less expensive and the cost of the energy is less.

About 10 years ago, this wasn't true, the heat pump was cheaper to run most of the time heat was needed, but now, with the huge reduction in the costs of Natural Gas and not a corresponding reduction in electric prices, gas is cheaper by a long shot.

So, what you think *was* true before, but it's not today, at least for me here in Texas.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Agripa]

Heat pumps have a sharp fall-off in efficiency outside of their designed temp range. I have a heat pump based HVAC and in the coldest days of winter it is unable to heat the house, because the outside air is the same temp or colder than the evaporator coil temp, leading to liquid freon hitting the compressor. Since that is a BadThing(tm) the heat pump shuts off. Resistive heaters (labeled as supplemental heat on the thermostat) then kick on. At that point mining BTC is no different from an efficiency standpoint.

Now, there are still better ways to heat, in my case I fire up the wood burning stove and use that, but still, heat pumps are not the be all end all in wide swing climates (I have the opposite problem in the hottest summer days, unable to condense the vapor back to a liquid very well).

I had to try explaining this to my mother when we lived in an all electric house in southern California during a particularly harsh winter where the heat pump was essentially useless. "What do you mean the heat pump is useless when it is cold outside?"

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Agripa]

If natural gas furnaces are good, why not just leave the heat pumps in place, and have the furnaces kick in once it drops below a certain temperature?

And pay for both when most of the time only one will be needed?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a mod for Moronic?

You just stated that if spending $5000 to gain $13000 is not stupid, then you don't know what is.

Clearly you don't know what is.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[lsatenstein]

Take a 100 million homes and just cover 100Watts of sustained power. What does that amount to?
You can probably power NY city for a few hours with just that consumption. Bitcoin mining normally requires around 500 to 600 Watts of power. So do the arithmetic.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Rakarra]

CO2 isn't naturally a bad thing

These days it is, just because there's so much of it that any more compounds the damage. It's like drinking two gallons of water. Another glass of water at that point becomes a bad thing no matter what.

For the next thousand years we're going to need a lot of that regrowing plant material to take CO2 out and then figure out a way to mass-sequester it in the ground so decay doesn't make it go right back into the atmosphere again.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[angel'o'sphere]

And, in your country you have no groundwater 3m below the surface?
So I conclude you life in the Sahara?

Actually I did not talk about thermal sink, but about heat source.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[angel'o'sphere]

I actually studied physics, besides computer sciense.

If you have winters where the outisd air is below freezing point regularily, like the parent implied, a heat pump that uses air is a bad idea.

It is basically always a better idea ti have the heat source underground, regardless how cold it gets.

Erm .... heat transfer inthe ground is probably 100 - 1000 times faster than in the air: water.

Perhaps you should study physics or check wikipedia for thermal capacity of water/soil and air.

Actually we did not talk about heat to be transfered out, we talked about heating, that is pumping heat from outside into the house.

No idea why you got that reversed.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[DontTrustWhatIType]

The real problem with what you say is there are better ways to heat your home than electricity. And if you do have to use electricity to do it even a modern heat pump is better than straight electric heating.

Actually, you missed the point entirely of the first question and response, since no one was asking "hey, should I start mining Bitcoins in order to heat my house?"

IF you are generating heat through computation, using it to heat your house is a significantly better solution than not. Period. Not using it, but then using a "more efficient" heat source makes things considerably worse.

The heat generated by computing is waste heat. If it is put to good use, it's a good thing. So, if you're going to create a lot of wast heat, you're doing the world a favor when you make good use of it. The problem is that "cryptocurrency" requires computationally intensive but otherwise (outside of the currency market) useless and meaningless work as proof-of-work. If that work were also socially beneficial (e.g., curing death), then using the excess heat to warm your LEED certifies Alaskan cabin would be a great thing all around.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[networkBoy]

I got even worse repayment numbers :)
Given that the average system needs a major service every 10 years (pick from the following failures: Compressor failure, leak in freon loop, thermal liquid pump failure, leak in thermal pipe loop, leak in exchanger, mechanical damage to any) and that I only see a maximum of 20 genuinely low efficency days/year the breakeven point was outside my expected life expectancy.

The nerd in me would *love* to do something like this, but there are many other vastly cheaper projects to scratch that itch with.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[angel'o'sphere]

Of courrse an AC is a heat oump.
But if one says heat pump he means a pump used for heating, not a pump used for cooling.

And the parent claimed he uses the same heat pump in summer for AC and in winter for heating.

Using the heat pump in winter for heating and using air makes on most places of the earth no sense at all ...

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[networkBoy]

I find that resistive heating (or wood stove) is needed at about 3C (I'm in an all electric house courtesy of nuclear making electricity "too cheap to meter" back in the 80's).
Sure the heat pump will work lower, but there are two issues:
1) it can't actually keep up very well with the load (meaning my delta T starts dropping from ~12C to ~8C and possibly lower)
2) because of the massive cycling it has to do there is added wear on the unit that I'd rather not have.

Again I could remedy that by installing a bigger unit (say a 5T instead of my current 3T) but *why* when it's less than 10 days a year :)

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[DontTrustWhatIType]

Is there any way to do some kind of real work in the process of generating this data[...]?

If by "real work" you mean work useful outside of the blockchain use case, the short answer: "not that we know of."

In order for the blockchain cryptocurrency ecosystem to work in a decentralized, zero-trust environment as intended, there cannot be any direction on what constitutes proof-of-work by a controlling entity (e.g., a person or organization). In order to create value in the currency and disable the ability for anyone to "print new bitcoins for free", new currency is created subsequent only to proof-of-work. (there are great videos that will explain this better than a short /. post).

How do you validate proof-of-work if there is no final arbiter or central bank? What is needed is a reliable, (somewhat) arbitrarily defined, increasing complexity task which poses a computational question with an answer which can be proved correct (or not) with few computational resources. Although we don't (and must not be able to know before hand) the "answer" to the question before hand, the class of computational problems of which we know that fit this paradigm are found in the cryptography or chaotic function realms (e.g., hashing functions).

Our current knowledge suggests that we probably wont find a class of problems that (1) is really hard to answer, (2) is really easy to check, and (3) the answers themselves are useful for solving real-world questions.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[ahodgson]

I'm in a new place, moved in last fall, and the installer evidently didn't do much setup, so I ran on heat pump only last winter. It doesn't get all that cold here, it went to -12c a couple of times. It kept up, but it had to work at it.

This year I did a full cost calc and set the cutover at +4.5c. It should save me maybe $150 bucks over the winter. Gas is so cheap I think it actually costs me almost as much to run the fan on the furnace as I spend on the gas.

I have thought about the extra cycles and wear, and might actually set that cutover higher. Considering we only need AC maybe 6 or 8 days a year, too, I'm not sure I'll even replace the heat pump when it wears out. I guess I'll see what the price of gas is, then. Carbon taxes are going up, too, though.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Ex-MislTech]

Clean power is there, its just not being utilized.

Ocean current based:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.smh.com.au/articles...

binary geothermal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

1% of jet stream could replace all forms of power on earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

1960's LFTR nuclear reactor design that fails safe passively via a freeze plug and doesn't use rods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It also will take 90% of the worlds nuclear waste and turn it into energy and produce
P-238 for space programs that need it and its running low.

The current energy "racket" is about making a small number of ppl insanely wealthy.

Some of the reason there is push back against ppl going "off grid".

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Ex-MislTech]

Also some ppl are connecting their bitcoin rigs to low cost wind power and solar power, etc.

Could see a livestock farmer using a methane digester setup.

Going to be setting up a low cost wind generator here to do it.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[sexconker]

True.

As we're seeing with Bitcoin, the "inefficiency" has done absolutely nothing to affect its value.
Further, Bitcoin is very divisible (and can be made more divisible if needed in the future). Bitcoin is a commodity (there is a fixed amount, approximately 21 million), and in practice deflationary (coins are lost over time).

The only people who complain that Bitcoin is inefficient are the speculators who want to run millions of transactions for high frequency trading. By design, Bitcoin if pegged to mine a block every 10 minutes on average. This is important because it ensures that the whole world can sync the block chain and wait for verifications. If you want to cram your transactions into these blocks and get them processed ASAP you'll pay a fee to the miners doing the work.

The difficulty of Bitcoin scales automatically to keep the 10 minute (average) time fixed. In effect, this means that Bitcoin will always be as "efficient" or "inefficient" as it needs to be to keep the 10 minute (average) block time. And that is driven by the hashing power of the network, whish is driven directly by the incentive miners have to mine. When we hit 21 million BTC, that incentive will come entirely from the transaction fees.

Thus Bitcoin's fees and efficiency are determined automatically, dynamically, and directly by its users and miners. Just like other currencies, but without manipulation by governments, central banks, etc.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't someone doing this in one of the Nordic countries? Iceland?

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we can sum this article up by saying that people are willing to pollute the environment if they can make a buck.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[PingPongBoy]

> game the system

But what's with the high price of bitcoin? Is that due to some people trying to game the system? Are some people trying to own all/the most bitcoins? I can see some billionaire(s) trying to own all bitcoin as a lark. After all, you can't take it with you.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gridcoin and Curecoin are both cryptoccurrencies that reward you for work done in BOINC and Folding@Home, so yes.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[PingPongBoy]

> x million left to mine

Well, why not just *** declare *** that all remaining coins are to be allocated and sold rather than mined? The price is high enough, for God's sake.

It should just be a matter of coding to switch to an auction of the remaining coins. What are people going to do when there are n, n-1, n-2, ..., 1 coin left to mine anyways?

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually already happened. Mining using Folding@Home was the most profitable, and plenty of people pointed their huge GPU farms to F@H to earn Curecoin/FLDC. Like, half a billion PPD and growing just because it makes the most money. They actually computed faster than Standford could make new WUs.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[PingPongBoy]

That 1 BTC that costs $5,000 to mine is worth $13,000 USD at today's exchange rate. Good luck convincing anyone that that's a stupid investment, especially if they've already dumped the capital into mining gear.

So someone is thinking "I know I could mine a bitcoin for x today but I want it bad enough to buy it for nx where n > 1."

What is that person thinking? The value of the bitcoin could go up much higher, to mx where m > n. Then profit is (m-n)x. The miner could profit at (n-1)x now or (m-1)x later.

I can see some people with spare cash trying to make a quick kill. It's probably faster than flipping houses. Then again, how long can this go on before the bubble pops?

Eventually, x goes up to the point where n approaches 1 (and m approaches n). So the speculators will probably be out of the game, but who will still be in the game? If x is prohibitively high, yet the result of the work is practically worth no more than the cost of the work, what is the point?

Bitcoin is appealing as an idea. Does the math make sense? It's surprising that people are throwing so much money into it.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

But if the source of the carbon is freshly grown wood, then burning it is considered a zero-carbon footprint use. Citizens Climate Lobby.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[jrumney]

Zero carbon footprint is like perpetual motion. It doesn't exist in reality.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[PingPongBoy]

> regrowing plant material

Simple win-win: genetically modified bitcoins that grow on trees

At any rate, computing the PoW on quantum computers or DNA computers might solve (or might exacerbate) the power usage.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Barefoot Monkey]

Thanks for clearing that up. To be honest, I don't know the first thing about heat pipes or heating in general (and it probably shows) because people rarely need heating where I live.

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[KingBenny]

i think its mainly humans that will cost us any kind of future, especially the kind thats living in a past that wont come back (barring another world war ofcourse) as after the 40s the whole world needed rebuilding, its was almost an extension of the old colonial world, where bottom-input in classic economic systems was plenty and abundant .. the golden years aint coming back, automation isnt helping either, there's simply too many mc's and not enough mics... population control OR living on the moon (lol) is the only solution unless nature blesses mankind with about 30 years of total infertility the futures already not just not green but non-existent ... and WHY do i get the impression the old world has started an offensive against bitcoin ???
is it just me, or do i suddenly hear whales wailing about it from all around the place ... nobelprize dudes and all that (i bet he didnt get one for neo-economics and new systems that would benefit the new world, shin sekai ... i love that expression so much. Asian language is so versatile , it means dead world and the new world at once actually
yea, so bitcoin is evil and PEDOPHILES !

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just saying the line between maliciousness and incompetence is very thin. Intentions are meaningless if they statistically produce the same results.

If it creates a worldwide non-government

[MikeDataLink]

controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle. A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Bing Tsher E]

There have been utopian no-government proposals in the past.

People always show up, and when enough people have arrived, they need to be governed.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[InvalidsYnc]

Will it be worth it (I mean this iteration which is a horrible drain, not knocking the concept of being detached from government)? Sounds like it is an immense drain on resources, and will only get worse, isn't that how it's designed?

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[wcrowe]

Oh, you summer child. You are so naive.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, ends do not justify the means. The cost to power 9 homes for a day per transaction in an age of electric cars no less.

You might as well just say, heck lets exchange one shitty situation to one that of an even more shittier situation in the hope that one day things will get better? is this your logic?

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[ShanghaiBill]

A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.

It is not clear this is true. In the past many countries used currencies based on gold, and that didn't really work out so well. As economies grew, and the supply of gold grew more slowly, the result was deflation, which inhibits growth. It was difficult to stimulated the economy out of recessions.

Once gold was demonetized, it became a store of value rather than a currency. Bitcoin seems headed the same way. People mostly buy bitcoins as speculation, not for use as a currency.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[squiggleslash]

The two alternatives available.

1. You can decide you're going to prioritize preventing the government from "controlling" currency, even if that means switching to a nonsensical "currency" whose value fluctuates between dramatic extremes and makes billionaires and paupers of people simply due to luck. Almost nobody ends up financially where they are due to luck. The government will continue to have the same problems you're concerned about, can still prosecute you for unfair reasons, can still benefit those with power and harm those without.

2. You can decide you're going to prioritize fixing the government by improving accountability. The currency remains more or less stable, with its value fluctuating only slightly, generally losing value by a tiny amount each year. Fewer people owe their financial status to luck. The government is less likely to prosecute you for unfair reasons, and less likely to benefit those with power and harm those without.

The Bitcoin way is (1). It's stupid, it's papering over a problem and pretending it only affects one thing. Worse, the cure is worse than the disease.

The correct thing to do is (2).

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Baron_Yam]

People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.

You get rid of the current system, it will be quickly replaced with tens of thousands of little vicious despotic governments practicing feudalism, with all the reductions in quality of life that implies.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[jellomizer]

How so?
Even in the United States the actual value of the dollar is different across different towns.
Upstate NY 2k a month can pay for a mortgage of a good size house with about an acre of property. In Downstate NY 2k a month would get you a small apartment.
Food, Fuel prices are different.

A world dollar wouldn't really do too much. as 1WD could buy 10kg of rice in one area. while in others it would get you 1kg.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[rogoshen1]

There's also tulips and land in Florida. that's the direction Bitcoin will be headed.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like how Europe wound up in the shitter for a millennium with all the warring dukedoms and duchies, and because all their resources were used for their constant fighting, there was no real technological development. It took the black plague to kill enough people to cause the nobles to not have enough backs to break to keep their power. This arguably was one of the best things for humanity in written history, since it moved Europe out of grinding poverty to the place to be in the world.

We had a nice run, both in Europe and the US, but it looks like with Russians succeeding at planting concepts like CalExit, we might wind up with a ton of feudal governments, all warring with each other, and taxing as much as they can, until people revolt or are dead.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

BitCoin is not going anywhere anytime soon. It is like how Apple made the smartphone, tablet, or MP3 player, where they grew markets that were at best niche items. BitCoin went from growing a currency to something people from China and Venezuela are using as stores of value. This means it is just starting to grow. Since the amount of coins is only going to get smaller as they get lost, BitCoins are only going to get more valuable. I wouldn't be surprised to see $100,000 a BTC in a few months, as people start taking it seriously.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Roger Wilcox]

OP's position seems perfectly philosophically valid to me. Why don't you refute his position rather than condescending on him without providing substance?

Responding in this manner makes you appear old and stupid, not wise.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Roger Wilcox]

Who said anything about no government? OP only said that a currency free of government control is a good thing.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[hipp5]

People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.

And if anyone needs proof of this, just point them to a Home Owners' Association.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Fly Swatter]

All they have to do is turn off the electricity to it's citizens. All their money is useless.

In the age where everything requires an energy efficiency rating, bitcoin is obsolete.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[toadlife]

People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone

I think some of them might imagine themselves in a world immediately post-government, where all of the benefits of civilization are still in place but none of the restrictions apply.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[larryjoe]

There have been utopian no-government proposals in the past.

People always show up, and when enough people have arrived, they need to be governed.

The problem is not directly the number of people but rather the expression of self-interest by those people. Just two people in a relationship (e.g., a marriage) are sufficient to create sufficient discord to require governmental intervention.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[tbannist]

OP's position seems perfectly philosophically valid to me. Why don't you refute his position rather than condescending on him without providing substance?

Responding in this manner makes you appear old and stupid, not wise.

Perhaps the GP's criticism was so subtle, you missed it entirely? I think you should spend more time thinking about he wrote and less time replying to things you don't understand.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Philosophical validity rarely translates into real world practicality.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[jediborg]

Except you are NEVER going to accomplish #2 unless you tear away government's control over the currency. That is its #1 power that prevents meaningful reforms from taking place (you might wonder why, but thats a BIG list, just read up on the ties between fed reserve chairmen and the companies/banks that get 0% interest loans, and remember that is the START of the rabbit hole) Also the currency now i would debate is far from stable (in all countries) with its value fluctuating widely due to the incompetence of those who are managing it. Many people owe their financial status to their circumstances of being born in to the right family (which i argue would happen less with a free market in money and no central bank) and again, this terrible system isn't going to bend to reforms until we take its greatest power away.

Forget politics, study economics. Then you'll understand both how the world works, and how politicians manipulate it for their advantage.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

>Responding in this manner makes you appear old and stupid, not wise.
Neither of those. It just makes him look like a fat GRRM-loving neckbeard.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost nobody ends up financially where they are due to luck.

Okay, the rest of it's not worth reading, either.

Re: If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll last a few weeks. Then ask the services the government provide, like clean water to drink, will stop working because the people being paid to keep the systems running stop working.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[imrahilj]

Is that what value means? How I understand value, it isn't the value of a dollar that is changing, it is the value of housing. Housing in NYC is more valuable than housing in Albany, the dollar is the same value both places. Now, it is also the case that the value of the dollar can change, but I think that is with more drastic changes. For example, I have heard that in Cuba in the past, a dollar bill was worth more (especially a new dollar) there, due to a limited supply of American currency.

Re: If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Billy the Mountain]

Yeah, people who want to try out no-government ought to check out living in Somalia for a couple of months.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

That's meaningless drivel. The "value" of a dollar is $1 if you choose to measure it in dollars, so you are saying nothing of value.

However if you measure the "value" by its ability to purchase various commodites or services, its value differs by season, time, location, ... for a variety of reasons, including supply, different taxes, demand levels, ...

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

In the first place, OP's position is a value judgment, not a logical statement. It can't be "refuted", any more than "I prefer chocolate to vanilla" can be.

In the second place, the argument has been made. It's been made approximately ten thousand times a day, ever since teenagers began to take an interest in politics. The fact that someone posts it on here, showing no signs of qualification or refinement from the sorts of fora that the rest of us *all* went through, shows that they are indeed truly "naive".

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[jellomizer]

If I lived and worked in Albany, the value for a housing in Albany is far more valuable to me, then anything in NYC where I wouldn't be.
The cost is an average of a populations values. While the Value for the Albany home is worth more then the value of an NYC for me, for the overall population, there is a collective more people with Value on NYC then with Albany. thus the Albany home cost less. However the job at Albany will also pay less then at New York City, often it is 40% less then in the Big City. But we can get by with the same or increase quality of life, with the smaller income.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[sysrammer]

And guess who will control those HOA's?
There's a percentage of people who would really love to return to feudalism.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[bobbied]

And I have no mod points to give you today... HOA's are ill conceived legal constructs which are going to be really hard to fix in the future.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[bobbied]

Yea, that will last about 2 seconds after the first guy says "Here, hold my beer!"

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[bobbied]

OP's position seems perfectly philosophically valid to me. Why don't you refute his position rather than condescending on him without providing substance?

Responding in this manner makes you appear old and stupid, not wise.

Oh you foolish young'un's are all alike... The wisdom of the old is veiled from your eyes because you don't choose to carefully consider what you are told because you still think you are wise. The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he who is wise listens to counsel.

You may leave my lawn now....

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Many people owe their financial status to their circumstances of being born in to the right family (which i argue would happen less with a free market in money and no central bank)

How would the world suddenly and exclusively using bitcoin prevent WalMart heirs, the Mars corporation heirs or real-estate heirs (e.g. the Trumps) from inheriting billions?

(Okay, "sudden" would have to be a little less extreme so that it wasn't a matter of a massive credit crunch that caused those fortunes to disappear at the time of the transition. Say that the ownership survived the transition or some other person took similar ownership).

Re: If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

CalExit has been a good idea for a long time, long before Russian influence was a thing

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

"Almost nobody ends up financially where they are due to luck"

Luck is the largest component of where people end up financially.
Who one's parents are, how much they have and pass down, how much they invest in education.
Who one meets along the road of life, people that build you up or drag you down.

Yes, hard work and intelligence are important.
But if hard work and intelligence where the most important thing, how did a buffoon like Donald Trump end up so wealthy?
And why did he end up so wealthy? Luck in the parents department.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Ungrounded Lightning]

There have been utopian no-government proposals in the past.

People always show up, and when enough people have arrived, they need to be governed.

I take issue on the "need".

But when enough people have arrived the potential power over them attracts people who are willing to use force to control them. B-b

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[thegarbz]

A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.

You have never taken an economics class have you.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

The American economic system is still feudal.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[jediborg]

It won't. Same as if we magically hit a switch and made racism disappear, there would still be inequality due to the historical racial injustices of the past. If suddenly we got rid of the Federal Reserve and had a stable currency (argue for either bitcoin, gold, or some basket commodity money, i don't really care which) then you get rid of this system that unfairly props up and bails out those who are already in the favor of the banking elite/politicians. Over time both of these magical solutions would lead to greater equality, but they wouldn't happen overnight.

to summarize what the core of the problem is: I don't mind Richy Mc. Rich inheriting billions of dollars. But when he puts all that money into an investment firm and is incompetent/irresponsible with the money and makes bad investments and ends up bankrupt a few years later, he should get kicked to the curve and go out of business like the market demands. Instead our Federal Reserve system will have him bailed out with a 0% interest loan worth millions/billions and WAY more favorable repayment terms than you or I would get, essentially making the bailout as close as possible to 'free money' as you can get. And who gets bailouts, and how much, has waaay more to do with the people involved and their political connections than it has to do with the 'financial stability' of the firm

Re: If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in Syria right now.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[dkman]

IOW: You know nothing Jon Snow.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Roger Wilcox]

Fuck you. There is no substance hidden in that post. It is 100% condescension.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[Roger Wilcox]

My point is, nobody is gonna take council from one who condescends rather than instructing.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[tbannist]

The fool only sees his own reflection in the water.

Re:If it creates a worldwide non-government

[bobbied]

My point is, nobody is gonna take council from one who condescends rather than instructing.

Teenagers don't take council from anybody but possibly their peers. In my experience, you don't outgrow this until about middle age, when you realize that you and your friends are making the same mistakes as your seniors, the very mistakes you ignored their advice on because you felt like they where condescending to your obvious bright ideas. It takes a long time to realize that saving face isn't worth having to live with your avoidable mistakes...

Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Kenja]

The only value they have, is the value you place on them. Sure, you can say the same about any currency, if you're willing to ignore governments. So you're ultra rare gold hologram charazard card might be worth a lot today (lets pretend those words make sense), but you're a fool if you think that will be the case tomorrow. Just look at Beenie Babbies.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Bing Tsher E]

Actually, more like Magic The Gathering cards.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only value they have, is the value you place on them. Sure, you can say the same about any currency, if you're willing to ignore governments. So you're ultra rare gold hologram charazard card might be worth a lot today (lets pretend those words make sense), but you're a fool if you think that will be the case tomorrow. Just look at Beenie Babbies.

Shut up, you! My Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant stockpile is paying for my kids' college!

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[MikeDataLink]

This true for all currency. It only has value because you believe it does.

Do you think in The Walking Dead the US Dollar is still used? ;-) No. You buy things with force, food, gas, sex, cigarettes, and alcohol.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[I'm New Around Here]

Actually, more like Magic The Gathering cards.

You missed a '.com' there.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[jellomizer]

My father use to work in an Auto Junk Yard. He Boss use to tell him (thus he would always tell me). "Its all junk!... Unless someone wants it, then it is merchandise!"

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Riceballsan]

Well less fake examples you could use are actual countries that fell. In short there is the collateral behind the currency being the credibility of the government or organization that creates it. Generally speaking we don't expect the map to be redrawn in our lifetime.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Pinky's Brain]

For the moment the US state has plenty of force. They let their citizens easily use bitcoin, they don't have to. They make their citizens pay taxes in US dollars, those citizens most definitely have to comply.

State fiat currencies of strong states are backed by the most fundamental value in human existence of all, survival. You obey legal tender laws, or you don't get to survive in a meaningful way. In that regard state fiat currencies are more fundamentally valuable than even commodity currencies.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[torkus]

I'm not sure referencing a fictional TV series is a completely valid proof of your point, but I do agree with it.

If you remove the 'gubermint' side of the equation to dictate value attached to currency, your fall back to where your currency needs intrinsic value. (e.g. consumables or durable AND useful goods)

Sex and force are not things which can store value - since they're not objects. Indentured hookers, servants, or mercs however WOULD be. Gold is, well, the golden standard for "real currency" except that it has rather limited value beyond "oh shiny" and scarcity. Yes, it's quite useful in many ways but something like 80-90% of it goes into non-productive things (jewelry being the large majority of all gold use).

So BTC? It certainly has scarcity - enforced by the compute-cost. That same process ensures the recording of transactions is nearly impossible to defraud. (the compute power required to to so is prohibitive to anything but a dedicated 1st world government) and the infrastructure is diversified enough that it would be quite difficult to restrict, control, or remove.

I don't think BTC will be a long-term money exchange for individuals, but I do think it will find it's place.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[nine-times]

At least you can play a game with your Pokemon cards.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[boudie2]

This true for all currency. It only has value because you believe it does.

Do you think in The Walking Dead the US Dollar is still used? ;-) No. You buy things with force, food, gas, sex, cigarettes, and alcohol.

When things go sideways, ammunition will be the new coin of the realm.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[magarity]

Indentured hookers however WOULD be

Yes but the depreciation on brand new ones is terrifying.

Re:Bitcoin is like Pokemon cards...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather compare it to gold, which has pretty much no intrinsic value either. Sure its useful for quite a few technical applications, but not a useful to warrant its price. At least in my opinion. So its more of a historic store of value, because, well we like shiny things.

Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

Greed... uh, finds a way.

Bullshit

[gurps_npc]

They have made the mistake of failing to compare. This is a common problem, especially when dealing with successful thing.

1) Bitcoin mining is expensive in energy and will continue to grow.

2) The reason bitcoin mining is necessary is that we need record keeping to prevent fraud in financial transactions.

3) Money is not new, the record keeping is also required for dollar based transaction.

4) You need to compare bitcoin energy costs to dollar energy costs, not merely look at bitcoin alone. If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

5) Conclusion, if we switch entirely from bitcoin to dollar, we will SAVE money and save energy.

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

Citation, please? I can hand someone $1000 without electricity. What numbers are you talking about?

Re:Bullshit

[MrDozR]

They also don't understand: -- Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day-- Ummm no, each mined coin might take a large amount of energy, but the transaction costs are pretty much fixed and are nowhere near as onerous.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

4) You need to compare bitcoin energy costs to dollar energy costs, not merely look at bitcoin alone. If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

[citation needed]

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to toss in literally any sort of foundation for point number 4 there? Because I question its validity.

Re:Bullshit

[CastrTroy]

To start with, there's all the costs associated with printing that stack of cash in the first place.

Re:Bullshit

[bill_mcgonigle]

Where is the economic calculation that includes the American Empire which is founded on the USD as the world reserve currency, which costs trillions of dollars a year, and including the well-accepted fact that the USG is the world's largest polluter?

This whole "we only look at first-order effects" trend in economic analysis is boring and a waste of everybody's time.

Re:Bullshit

[angel'o'sphere]

From your bank account to his bank account? Via the internet. Beyond country borders?
I doubt so.

I like to nitpick, too.

But at some point it is simply much to far out of context.

Re:Bullshit

[Opportunist]

I can also hand someone 1 bitcoin without electricity. Put a wallet with exactly 1 bc on a cheap USB stick, presto.

I kinda predict that something like this, along with a quick and easy way to verify that there is actually a bc on the stick, will surface soon.

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

Ummm no, each mined coin might take a large amount of energy, but the transaction costs are pretty much fixed and are nowhere near as onerous.

The mining takes a tremendous amount of energy (.296 Watts per GH/s), and the transaction costs are the opposite of fixed: they grow higher with every transaction, by definition.

Re:Bullshit

[zantafio]

Depending on the denomination ,the cost of printing a US dollar note is between 5.4 cents and 15.5 cents: https://www.federalreserve.gov...

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but due to the distributed nature of bitcoin, doesn't a transaction have to be duplicated across the entire network? Isn't it logical to say the bigger the network, the more power each transaction is going to take? Wouldn't that mean that the energy cost per transaction is anything but "pretty much fixed"?

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

Sorry, no, that's the equivalent of coin MINING. We are talking about the TRANSACTION costs right now.

USA Today fluff piece indicates that a Visa payment processing center uses 50,000 house-days of power every day, but they use that to process 400 million transactions per day. That works out to .000125 house-days per transaction. The numbers I have access to indicate that each BTC transaction uses 8.5 house-days per transaction.

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

Now we're adding more conditions which I clearly didn't anticipate from the GPP.

I'm sure I can find a way to meet your conditions though for less than 250 kWh... :)

But, yes, I understand that most of the conditions under which BTC excels are the primary use case. I have no problem with BTC as a hobby, but many people treat it as their current Multi-Level Marketing Project/Scheme.

Re:Bullshit

[InvalidsYnc]

I think that the power is small per transaction, but the *distribution* of that transaction is another kind of drain. Some site says that it's at about 136GB right now. Multiply that by the number of times that it is stored and transferred all over the internet, sucking up bandwidth and hard drive space. It's like someone is having a joke on us. "Hey look, watch this! I can make people use a ton of various fixed resources like Electricity, HD space and Internet bandwidth, and it will only get worse the more people use it!"

Lovely.

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

No, that's more like giving someone the permission to access to a bank account with money in it

To use the BTC, they still have to perform a transaction.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

BitCoin should include those costs, too. You can't carry out BitCoin transactions without the reliable security and infrastructure of a stable nation-state.

Re:Bullshit

[arth1]

Depending on the denomination ,the cost of printing a US dollar note is between 5.4 cents and 15.5 cents: https://www.federalreserve.gov... [federalreserve.gov]

Some things to take into consideration:
1: The cost does not scale linearly. $50,000 does not cost 50,000 times as much as $1. With bitcoin, it does scale linearly.
2: Most of the US dollars are never printed, but only exist as numbers in banks. Loro clearing houses haven't operated by sending truckloads of bank notes for a long long time.
3: This is production cost, not environmental cost. In some cases, there may be a correlation, but I do not believe this is one of them.
4: Transaction costs are enormously higher with bitcoin. If I give you $10, the cost is minimal. If I transfer $10 in bitcoin to your wallet, the computational costs are staggering.

Re:Bullshit

[ncc74656]

I can hand someone $1000 without electricity.

You can do the same with Bitcoin: make some of these, or print off a few paper wallets from here. Load them with value. Hand them off to people, who can either hand them off to other people or redeem them for their stored value.

Re:Bullshit

[I'm New Around Here]

How do you put the bitcoin wallet on the USB stick without using electricity?

Re:Bullshit

[GameboyRMH]

2) The reason bitcoin mining is necessary is that we need record keeping to prevent fraud in financial transactions.

LOLWUT? Mining and the blockchain do precisely dick to prevent fraud in financial transactions. If anything, it enables more fraud.

4) You need to compare bitcoin energy costs to dollar energy costs, not merely look at bitcoin alone. If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

5) Conclusion, if we switch entirely from bitcoin to dollar, we will SAVE money and save energy.

What comparison did you do? It seems that you pulled this information out of your ass. TFA says it takes the same amount of energy to power 9 US homes for a day to complete a BTC transaction. Traditional electronic payments require miniscule amounts of electricity, cash and cheques probably use the most when they're shipped in vehicles.

Re:Bullshit

[wyHunter]

But cash would cost nothing...of course, goods must be in the shops and you must go there, so you've got to account for transport costs.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

And how can the recipient verify you don't have another copy, which you are going to move before they have a chance?

Re:Bullshit

[Opportunist]

Unless they, too, hand the stick to the next person. Because, well, how do you "use" a bitcoin? Why, you transfer it to someone. Which is exactly what happens when you pass on the stick.

It's more like handing over cash, and if you want to wire it to someone, you first have to put it into an account. With the difference that this might actually still be faster than putting money into your account and then transferring it...

Re:Bullshit

[Opportunist]

That portion of the deal of course still needs electricity. As does any verification.

Gimme a few hours to work on the idea, I just had it, ok?

Re:Bullshit

[geekmux]

They have made the mistake of failing to compare...The reason bitcoin mining is necessary is that we need record keeping to prevent fraud in financial transactions.

And you've made the mistake that those profiting the most from financial fraud want that "problem" corrected. They don't.

...If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way...Conclusion, if we switch entirely from bitcoin to dollar, we will SAVE money and save energy.

Again, you assume those profiting from dollar transactions and energy want the "problem" of more expensive transactions corrected. They don't.

Re: Bullshit

[c6gunner]

Mining isn't separate from transactions.

There's no way to actually calculate a "per transaction" energy usage, so what they have done here is said "OK, the entire network uses X electricity per day, and on average there are Y transactions per day, therefore each transaction uses X/Y electricity."

Of course the reason the network uses so much electricity is that the vast majority of the machines on the network are competing to try and mine coins. Processing transactions is essentially just a side-business to them. Combine that with the fact that transaction volume is pretty low, and you end up with scary looking "house-days" numbers.

Re:Bullshit

[Opportunist]

Easiest way for this would probably be some kind of RasPi (or similar) device that allows you to do pretty much what you do now when trying to figure out whether a coin is genuine.

Something like this will eventually come. The details are of course still to be worked out, but eventually I'm quite convinced we'll see cheap sticks (or just for-purpose made roms holding coins) being used. All it takes is a simple way to verify that the stick/rom/whatever is genuine, and that's far from impossible with current technology.

Re:Bullshit

[Z00L00K]

The energy wasted on computing new bitcoins is growing so large that it's wasting energy that could have been used for more useful purposes.

Imagine if banks worldwide suddenly prohibited exchange between bitcoins and hard cash.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not strictly true. Cash also has a cost given that the vast majority of cash registers are now full point of sale terminals and therefore electric. Even opening the cash drawer in most shops and cafes is an electronically activated event from the POS terminal. Plus, of course, the relevant power usage when the cash is banked.

I have no idea whether that's more or less than the electricity required to process a VISA transaction, and I'm too lazy to Google it.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you research it yourself, or are you too lazy and complacent?

Re:Bullshit

[fahrbot-bot]

I can also hand someone 1 bitcoin without electricity. Put a wallet with exactly 1 bc on a cheap USB stick, presto.

Which he/she can't use (or even verify?) while the power is still out. I suppose you'd be happy getting cash in a sealed envelope with the caveat that you can't open / spend that cash until sometime later - after I've gone? (Not picking a fight, just point out a few pitfalls in the scenario.)

Re:Bullshit

[Khashishi]

Transaction costs and mining costs can't be separated because they are the same thing. The work of miners is used to verify transactions. The cost is not fixed at all. The cost basically scales with the combined computation speed of all the miners since the total transaction rate is fixed (at a fairly low value). Granted, the creators of bitcoin couldn't be expected to foresee it's popularity, but limited transaction rate is fundamentally broken.

Optimistically, the number of miners will go down once it becomes not worth it to mine anymore, and the difficulty will scale down to a point where the transaction costs are somewhat reasonable. The system may fall into some equilibrium where the transaction cost is high enough that few people want to make transactions (settling to the limit of ~1700 transactions/10 minutes) and the number of miners will fall into an equilibrium such that it's worth it to mine at the new difficulty.

Pessimistically, the whole system will crash and burn. I think this is much more likely. Maybe another crytocurrency will take its place or maybe not.

Re:Bullshit

[flux]

You must use the system to transfer the funds, to ensure the person giving you the USB stick didn't just go and spend the BC as well, in addition to "giving" it to you.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The numbers I have access to indicate that each BTC transaction uses 8.5 house-days per transaction.

Hmmm. By "the numbers I have access to" you probably mean "I know it must be bogus but I can't bother to rationalize why". Ok then.

Re:Bullshit

[ctilsie242]

You can hand someone a BTC wallet on a USB drive, but the receiver doesn't know until they process it if they have been double-spent on or not until they run the transaction, which can take days. With cash, a quick check ensures that the bills are not counterfeit or otherwise bogus, and this can be done offline.

I will say that BTC is an excellent "v1.0" crypto currency. However, there needs to be one that is far cheaper to process transactions, perhaps without having to download all 150+ gigs of a blockchain, and a better mining system, so it can handle more people getting in the game. Some added protection against 51% attacks, and some anonymity baked are a must as well. Hopefully someone can make a "v 2.0" currency which addresses BTC's shortcomings.

Re:Bullshit

[flux]

When someone gives you money, it might be fake. The same might be true for such a btcnote, but I shall claim that it's much more difficult to fake USD than btcnotes :).

In fact, you can have a 100% "genuine" btcnote, but it might be spent, and you cannot tell until you access the Bitcoin data.

So once you receive one, you should make a transaction to your account as fast as you can, and then destroy the note. Not quite the same how you deal with plain old money..

Re:Bullshit

[torkus]

I don't think you quite understand how crypto-c works.

How does that 1 BTC get into that wallet? (hint: a blockchain transaction)

Then there's the individually small but communally large cost of buying, transporting, and exchanging those USB sticks to make those transactions. AND unless you have an awful lot of trust in people, the only way to ensure that BTC remains yours would be to transact it out of that wallet and into one that only you know the private key for.

There's some exception to that where physical coins were loaded with keys for BTC but the keys aren't exposed until you do something destructive (scratch-off) but those come from the days were people in crypto didn't scam because ... well who would bother for 50c or $1?

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

I actually linked my cited source, which is the source of the "house-days" measurement.

Re:Bullshit

[gurps_npc]

Answers.

LOLWUT stupidity: Why do you think the people that invented bitcoin allow anyone to mine? Because in addition to mining coins, the exact same mining software verifies that when someone gives you a piece of software that claims to be a bit coin, it actually is a bitcoin, rather than an encrypted copy of their fan-fic story about Spock seducing Captain Kirk.

As for costs of dollar transactions, it isn't what you think. The article made the mistake of looking at the actual cost of energy per visa transaction, vs the TOTAL cost of bitcoin mining divided by the number of bitcoins transactions. Technically the actual bitcoin cost of energy per bitcoin transaction is 0, as the energy is spent on mining. You need to make a fair compairson.

To make a fair comparison you have to look at the total cost of visa transactions vs the bitcoin total, then divide each by transactions.

Total cost of VISA transactions is not just energy run by their computer but also includes every single bit of profit VISA reports, plus every single employee wage, etc. etc. etc.

To be truly fair, you should also look into economies of scale and see if VISA or bitcoin get any advantage because of their relative sizes, but that's another point entirely,

Re:Bullshit

[Anubis IV]

If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

Come again? I don't even understand what the unit of measure you're proposing means, but I can already tell you that if you want to understand the cost of transactions, we don't measure them "per $1,000 equivalent". We measure them per transaction.

According to these researchers, each Bitcoin transaction currently costs the equivalent of 9 days worth of energy for an average US household, with that number growing over time as more resources are added to the system. The average US household consumed 10,766 kWh annually in 2016, which we'll assume hasn't shifted much in the last year. The average residential price was 13.30 cents/kWh in September, which we'll assume is comparable to today. Taken together, they suggest that the average US household pays about $1431.878 annually for electricity, or about $3.92/day. As such, a single Bitcoin transaction currently costs the world $35.28 in electricity to process. Other places put the current cost closer to $72-77 per transaction.

In contrast, the cost to process a cash transaction is the amount of time it takes someone to recognize that the dollar bill is now in the seller's hand instead of mine. Or, put differently, effectively zero. That's why we can use cash to purchase everything from a stick of gum to an entire estate.

From those numbers, we can say a few things:
1) Bitcoin is (currently) unviable for small transactions. In fact, if you look at the average transaction value, you'll see that it correlates to the average transaction fee, suggesting that as fees go up, the system becomes unusable for day-to-day purchases, making it unsuitable as a cash replacement. A system only works as a cash replacement when it is capable of scaling from our smallest purchases to our largest purchases while maintaining a cost per transaction that is FAR less than the value of the transaction.

2) Transaction fees don't cover transaction costs. Note that the fees listed in that last chart are far lower than the costs listed in the earlier chart. This is an example of an externalized cost (and explains how the system can work contrary to your claim that it can't work any other way), where someone else is paying for something you're doing. In the case of Bitcoin, it's the miners who are paying the remainder of the costs for each transaction (i.e. their electric bills), but they're paying those electric bills in USD, EUR, GBP, and similar currencies, rather than BTC, which means that their electric bills don't track with fluctuations in the value of BTC. This isn't a problem when BTC valuations are high, since additional miners join in to take advantage of the imbalance (this is more or less a form of arbitrage, exchanging cheap electricity for more valuable BTC). Unfortunately, when BTC valuations slide against the other currencies this becomes a major problem for those miners. Their rigs become sunk costs that are incapable of producing a return on their value and can only be sold for a fraction of what they cost.

3) Transaction costs can exceed their benefits. If you want to buy $15 in groceries and are told every transaction has a $75 fee to confirm your purchase, you won't buy those groceries. You'll wait until you need a lot more before you make the purchase. That's both a good thing (the system discourages wasteful activity) and a bad thing (why are small transactions wasteful in the first place?). If, however, you're told that the cost to confirm the transaction is merely $7.50, you

Re:Bullshit

[GameboyRMH]

Answers.

LOLWUT stupidity: Why do you think the people that invented bitcoin allow anyone to mine? Because in addition to mining coins, the exact same mining software verifies that when someone gives you a piece of software that claims to be a bit coin, it actually is a bitcoin, rather than an encrypted copy of their fan-fic story about Spock seducing Captain Kirk.

That's not an anti-fraud measure, that's an anti-counterfeiting measure. Fraud can flourish without counterfeiting and vice-versa.

As for costs of dollar transactions, it isn't what you think. The article made the mistake of looking at the actual cost of energy per visa transaction, vs the TOTAL cost of bitcoin mining divided by the number of bitcoins transactions. Technically the actual bitcoin cost of energy per bitcoin transaction is 0, as the energy is spent on mining. You need to make a fair compairson.

To make a fair comparison you have to look at the total cost of visa transactions vs the bitcoin total, then divide each by transactions.

Total cost of VISA transactions is not just energy run by their computer but also includes every single bit of profit VISA reports, plus every single employee wage, etc. etc. etc.

To be truly fair, you should also look into economies of scale and see if VISA or bitcoin get any advantage because of their relative sizes, but that's another point entirely,

Fair points, but without all of this data I find it ludicrous to baselessly assert that a bitcoin transaction could be cheaper than a traditional electronic payment for $1000 equivalent in the face of this data about the amount of energy required just for computation in each BTC transaction.

Re:Bullshit

[Anubis IV]

...which is true regardless of which payment system you use, hence why no one bothers accounting for those transportation costs when discussing the differences between payment systems.

Re:Bullshit

[Anubis IV]

https://blockchain.info/charts...

Sorry, what were you saying?

Re:Bullshit

[Anubis IV]

I can also hand someone 1 bitcoin without electricity. Put a wallet with exactly 1 bc on a cheap USB stick, presto.

By "presto", you're referring to the way that you just managed to double the cost of that transaction, right? Because now there are two transactions: one to move the BTC to your USB wallet, and a second to move the BTC to the seller's wallet after you hand the USB drive to them. Rather than saving electricity, you just made things worse.

Re:Bullshit

[Anubis IV]

Transaction costs are NOT fixed. They grow as the system grows. Perhaps you're thinking of transaction fees? They grow too, but they don't cover all of the transaction costs.

The portion of the costs that the fees don't cover is borne by miners via their electric bills, since validating transactions is a large part of what they do when mining. They'recompensated for their efforts by receiving BTC. In practice, this is more or less a form of arbitrage as they exchange cheap electricity for valuable BTC, and it works fine when the value of BTC remains high against whatever currency they use to pay their electric bill. When the price of BTC slides against traditional currencies, however, those electric bills become outsized compared to the value gained, leaving them holding the bag with mining rigs that are significant sunk costs incapable of delivering a return on their value and that can only be sold at a fraction of what they cost.

In contrast, whether the dollar is strong or the dollar is weak, the cost to validate a cash transaction remains the same: within a rounding error of zero.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Mining is directly related to transactions.

The process of mining is creating blocks, and blocks are created out of transactions. Once a block is created and verified, it's added to the blockchain and the transactions are verified.

Re:Bullshit

[mujadaddy]

In AC's favor, it seems like they're actually just using the dollar-transaction fee and determining how much electricity it costs to make that much BTC. Not exactly the same measurement as they're purporting. Mea culpa.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things to take into consideration: 1: The cost does not scale linearly. $50,000 does not cost 50,000 times as much as $1. With bitcoin, it does scale linearly.

No, it doesn't, otherwise I could be cranking out bitcoins every day using a 5-year old GPU. Every 2,016 blocks the difficulty target is adjusted. Producing bitcoins takes increasingly MORE energy; the cost is exponential, otherwise the price (in USD) would be constant or decreasing.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I can hand someone $1000 without electricity.

You can do the same with Bitcoin: make some of these, or print off a few paper wallets from here. Load them with value. Hand them off to people, who can either hand them off to other people or redeem them for their stored value.

Don't some of these steps require electricity?

Re:Bullshit

[Trogre]

If we're taking "hand" literally then yes, the cost of producing the cash must come into it.

Not entirely without electricity, but these days it's easy to just "hand" over money at home with your online banking and a couple of milliwatt-hours of electricity.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, when you pass over the stick it's like handing your banking password. Until that person changes the password (transfers the funds to another bitcoin address) you can still drain the account out from underneath them. Do you trust that the guy with the USB stick hasn't kept a copy of the key?

Re:Bullshit

[dissy]

If instead of a USB stick one used something easily readable by a smart phone, the verification part could likely be fully streamlined and automated.
There are plenty of places online you can feed in a wallet hash to query the balance from the blockchain.

I'm just not sure what hardware would be suitable.

Programmable NFC tags I've used hold anywhere from a few bytes up to a couple kb, which wouldn't be enough.

Even things like QR or blot codes weren't really intended to hold a hundred or more KB, not to mention that would be one heck of a QR code!

I suppose for smartphones that support OTG/USB, going with a flash drive would be OK, but it's a bit clunky still.

But scan the root of the removable drive for wallet.dat, verify the checksum, get the hash, and submit to some of those balance checking services. Some basic sanity checking on differing results to show a warning or something would also be useful.

There's got to be a better type of hardware that functions as block storage and can be used with a USB interface and something else more fitting for a mobile to talk to...

Re:Bullshit

[Wintermute__]

Also how do you know your USB stick has the only copy? You don't. That is why you must use a Transaction to transfer the coin into another wallet, that you trust is secure because you created it. And now we're right back where we started. Because the same guy that just gave you that USB stick in exchange for something can go right on giving out copies of it over and over again. And you can "verify" them all you want, and they will all show that that wallet contains that coin. Until one of his dupes (or himself) decides to transfer that coin out.

A USB stick with bitcoin wallet on it is only worth something if you can transfer it to another wallet. That is the only "verification" that is valid. And the amount of electricity consumed to do that is what the article is talking about.

Re:Bullshit

[Wintermute__]

I just heard Homer Simpson exclaim, "D'Oh!" in my head. Thanks for the laugh!

Re:Bullshit

[Moochman]

If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar.

Um, NO.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You need electricity to write that info the the USB drive. You also need the hardware to do such. How much did that bitcoin just cost you?

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the reason the network uses so much electricity is that the vast majority of the machines on the network are competing to try and mine coins. Processing transactions is essentially just a side-business to them.

Of course, the design is such that the competition is equivalent to cooperation, that is, they are competing to get the answer, but they are all trying (effectively) different solutions, so there is (effectively) no overlap due to competition.

Secondly, Mining IS processing transactions, yes there might be some fees in processing to be gained, but there is no way to separate mining from processing transactions, they are the same thing in BTC.

Personally, I think they should have made it so that there wasn't a limit to the number of transactions in a block, and that there wasn't a sliding scale limiting the total number of BTC. Yes, you would end up with inflation, but it would be controlled by transaction speed, additionally, this would reduce the need for transaction fees as there wouldn't be competition for validation (as the cost of adding a transaction to a block would be zero). Then again, this would prevent this bubble we are currently in that gets all the headlines, so it would fail as an advertising vehicle for cryptocurrencies.

Re:Bullshit

[wyHunter]

Not really. If e-commerce parcels are driven to neighborhoods on a truck where many are delivered in the same area, versus everyone in the neighborhood driving to the shopping center, there's less fuel actually used by ecommerce parcels.

No, it won't.

[aardvarkjoe]

No, it won't "cost us our clean-energy future." As the article points out itself, the growth rate in the energy cost of bitcoin is unsustainable. Eventually bitcoin transactions are going to become more and more infeasible.

I can't see how anyone expects that Bitcoin will be able to maintain its value if you can't transfer it to other people. And if its value goes down, then so will the demand for energy to keep it running.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its going to be hilarious when bitcoin transactions must be cleared in large blocks that aggregate a bunch of transactions that will be cleared on a separate "dollar" based system. Stupid.

Re:No, it won't.

[Opportunist]

This is actually going to be interesting should bitcoins ever start to slide a bit more than they did, people notice that they can't get rid of them because the transfer itself already takes insane amounts of times and people (who are already nervous as all hell considering the investment) start to panic.

I'll bring the popcorn.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, once the energy usage of the Bitcoin network drops substantially, expect a new and innovative bitcoin business to emerge from the ailing mining sector, promising to help people divest from bitcoin multiple times!

Re:No, it won't.

[atrex]

Assuming that bitcoin's energy costs are unsustainable, as things currently stand, is pretty much a given.
But, technological advances in processing power and efficiency may extend the longevity of the network. Effectively we have two progressive curves working against each other: the curve that makes it harder and harder to mine new bitcoins and process transactions, and the curve of technological innovation and advancement.

There's also the possibility that before the system becomes too untenable that it is forked/transferred/reissued/whatever into a more efficient structure/algorithm while maintaining it's value and reliability. I believe we've already seen some efforts in this regard.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

With Bitcoin: with the addition of side chains and lightning network, that should not be a problem.... transactions will not be in the blockchain

With Bitcoin Cash: The the blocksize will keep increasing and it should not be a problem either...

Re:No, it won't.

[upl8n87447]

In the meantime, it's generating wealth for people as they use tons of energy, thereby raising the cost of energy for everyone not mining bitcoin... *eye roll*

I think we need an 'energy' guzzler tax for those individuals / companies that are using more than a moderate share of energy and raising the cost for the rest of us. The benefit being, mining bitcoin becomes more cost prohibitive.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

The growth rate of the energy cost of bitcoin is largely unrelated to transaction cost of bitcoin. The energy cost of bitcoin is solely determined by the competition of miners trying to mine bitcoin. If the energy cost becomes too expensive, miners will exit and the difficulty to mine will decrease, bringing the energy cost down with it, until a balance is reached.

The cost of transactions is solely determined by how many transactions there are and how many transactions can be fit on a block. Fees aren't in any way affected by the energy cost. It's the other way around actually; the more transactions there are, the more fees increase (as users compete to have theirs processed first), creating increased incentive to mine, driving the energy cost up.

Re:No, it won't.

[omfglearntoplay]

Computing power will keep getting more powerful. Won't the power problems keep getting reduced?

Re:No, it won't.

[brantondaveperson]

Up to a point, this is true. Bitcoins are already mined by dedicated hashing machines, containing hardware whose express and only purpose is to calculate SHA-256 hashes as fast as possible. Today, the fastest of these machines is capable of 10,000 mega-hashes per joule of power consumed (from this page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Min...).

I'm a little skeptical of this number, since it's an order of magnitude larger than everything else on the same page, and I haven't found any independent sources confirming it, but in any case, once you've put your hashing process into specialised hardware, the only thing that'll make it faster is pretty much a smaller process size on your silicon. I can't see this being done just for the purpose of mining bitcoins.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

as it happens, bit coin investment came up over thanksgiving and the discussion reinforced the concerns of a relative who had done so. On attempting to sell out was notified that it would take something like two weeks to complete.

Bit coin is of benefit for the crime consortium that founded it, but like all ponzi schemes it is of limited benefit to anyone else.

Re:No, it won't.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

What's fun is that almost no one will be able to cash out their position, because only so many transactions can take place in a single block.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, fortunately Bitcoin was never the end. It was just the beginning. Where Bitcoin hasn't succeeded or for problems it didn't solve others have been hard at working solving them. ZCash brings anonymity. Dash is working on the scaling problem and the fee issue so that when it gets to a point where it becomes an issue for the crypto currency it's already been resolved.

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually going to be interesting should bitcoins ever start to slide a bit more than they did, people notice that they can't get rid of them because the transfer itself already takes insane amounts of times and people (who are already nervous as all hell considering the investment) start to panic.

I'll bring the popcorn.

I saw a news report of a combined outtage of the two largest exchanges a couple weeks ago. Smelled like a market-freeze-by-overlords kind of thing to my conspiracy theorizing mind. One can presume the similar tactics used with traditional stock exchanges relating to panic situations might transfer eventually to the bitcoin realm. Again, if it hasn't happened at least once already.

Re:No, it won't.

[mestar]

Er, no.

Efficiency of the hashing hardware does not decrease the electricity used. It only increases the total number of miners that can mine profitably.

Re:No, it won't.

[mestar]

It looks like you are not aware of the fact that bitcoin to dollar transactions are not actually recorded in the bitcoin blocks at all. Those are internal bitcoin exchanges' transactions.

Re:No, it won't.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Only if you store your bitcoin in the exchanges' wallets. Which seems to mean there's a chance yours will be among the next $61M loss. I doubt the Winklevoss twins leave their money so exposed.

And besides, if I understand correctly, the dollar-bitcoin transactions do require a record - otherwise how does the purchaser acquire the bitcoin?

Re:No, it won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that the exchanges can only convert bitcoins to cash by buying the bitcoins with the cash they have on hand. Once the exchanges run out of cash you won't be able to cash out your bitcoins using the exchanges at all.

Of course, given the nature of many of these exchanges, my guess is the people running them will just disappear with whatever cash they have on hand once things really start going south.

Greed kills everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Greed really is the plague of the new humanity. Once and indispensable personnality trait for survival in the savage, barbarian world we evolved from, it has now become the cancer of civilization.

Problem is, it is so deeply entrenched in our genetic make-up that we'll fight it in vain for thousands, if not millions of years to come, if our species lasts that long.

Re:Greed kills everything

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it isn't. And there is no "new" humanity.

Re:Greed kills everything

[Bing Tsher E]

Greed is what drove Intel to produce the i4004 microprocessor.

Re:Greed kills everything

[jedidiah]

Greed and self-interest pretty much has driven everything we've done since crawling out of caves. You are alive right now because of greed. You have a cushy western lifestyle because of greed.

Re:Greed kills everything

[geekmux]

Greed really is the plague of the new humanity. Once and indispensable personnality trait for survival in the savage, barbarian world we evolved from, it has now become the cancer of civilization.

I agree. We must Solve for Greed. Otherwise, we will perish.

Problem is, it is so deeply entrenched in our genetic make-up that we'll fight it in vain for thousands, if not millions of years to come, if our species lasts that long.

Our species won't last that long. The machines that Greed will ultimately create will ironically put us out of our misery long before then.

Sadly, we probably deserve nothing less.

Re:Greed kills everything

[geekmux]

Greed is what drove Intel to produce the i4004 microprocessor.

The universe has long proven the value of balance. Greed can be sustained for long periods of time as long as it sustains a finite and reasonable limit.

The greed we now have today is ruthless obscene greed. The kind of greed that knows no bounds. The kind of greed that drives billionaires to need to become trillionaires. The kind of greed that ultimately created the massive imbalance of wealth and power in the world today, which cannot be sustained.

We will eventually be consumed by it. Eat the Rich will become more than a proverb.

Re:Greed kills everything

[Anonymous Coward]

And lots of people died just today because of greed.

How about we go with 'excessive' greed being a problem? Then we can spend our time arguing about the definition of excessive.

Re:Greed kills everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your input, Gecko.

Re:Greed kills everything

[headbulb]

No it's not.
Don't confuse a reasonable wanting with unreasonable wanting.

Mining is a one-off capital cost

[agulliford]

Soon mining will stop. End of problem.

Re:Mining is a one-off capital cost

[Anonymous Coward]

The energy cost of mining and of processing transactions without mining is absolutely identical. The only difference is how many bitcoins are awarded for each block.

Re:Mining is a one-off capital cost

[torkus]

Mining is a one-off capital (hardware/infra) plus run rate (electricity, maint, cooling, internet, support). Just ask anyone who runs a datacenter.

Mining won't stop until all BTC is mined and then moves to a POS model instead of POW.

However, that one-off capital cost gets diminishing returns as the overall compute power grows around you. The value of BTC may go up (as it has) and that will change the multiplier for your income vs. depreciation and run-rate costs.

Any worse than modern web?

[HideyoshiJP]

Is it any worse than the sheer amount of horsepower it takes to load a page on any modern web site? In addition to all the scripts that load from a thousand third party domains for tracking and embeds, you have all the responsive design code and giant images. It may not be much for one PC, but when you consider how many machines are out there grinding away parsing web sites, it adds up. The end result still doesn't present much more meat and potatoes information than the web of yore.

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it any worse than the sheer amount of horsepower it takes to load a page on any modern web site?

Yes.

"Which means it would take about 435 years to mine a single bitcoin." (On a normal consumer PC rather than specialized coin farms.)

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[GameboyRMH]

Depending on how many people load a particular browser-bogging page, one page may use more energy overall than any one BTC transaction...hey, that's a good argument for getting companies to slim down their websites! Do it for the environment!

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[trg83]

I did the calculations when BTC was at $4500. It would have taken me one month to pay for the miner, which could have then produced one BTC per month for $67 worth of electricity. Two things kept me from moving forward: 1.) availability of extra power circuits in my unfinished basement area, 2.) fear of a collapse in BTC

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[omfglearntoplay]

It is a real concern, I mean it should be. And they should do it for the mental health of the people. Slow computers make people crazy... slow websites are some of the worst.

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[Anonymous Coward]

...which could have then produced one BTC per month for $67 worth of electricity.

But, as the AC's link pointed out, that coin per month will decrease as the difficulty increases.

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[torkus]

Yes, much. It's also much, MUCH more specialized.

The compute power required is so vast that BTC has long since moved to ASICs and the larger (largest?) individual mining machine contains close to 200 of them.

A top end CPU gets ~20-30 MHash/sec and the top end GPUs with custom firmware etc. getting ~500 MHash/s.
The top end modern ASIC miner (Antminer S9) is rated at 14THash/s or 14,000,000 MHash/s - something like a million times more than a CPU.

Power efficiency is similar. 0.1 MHash/J for CPU, 1-2MHash/J for GPU and 10,000MHash/J for the Antminer S9.

Re:Any worse than modern web?

[trg83]

Of course, but his link is a total non sequitur because it's completely focused on CPU-mining of BitCoin, which has become absurd. You can go flying with thousands of helium balloons, but that doesn't make it the right solution to your travel needs.

Yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

More demand for the energy company`s mean more profit. Let`s hope they will turn that into renewable`s sources.......

bitcoin / clean energy

[doctorvo]

And why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?

Re:bitcoin / clean energy

[Alan R Light]

Exactly. When figuring out the impact of Bitcoin on energy use, don't forget to include all the energy use it displaces, and its potential for load balancing.

In a mature system Bitcoin can actually HELP clean energy by absorbing excess power during peak production. Use it to provide heat at little cost (or even be paid to heat one's home) in polar regions (need to colonize Antarctica, though). Perhaps in the Himalayas too. When there is more wind power than a locale can handle, or more solar power due to a sunny day in one region, absorb excess power by turning on the miners; then turn most of them off again when energy is needed elsewhere. It will help if local electricity is priced according to demand, so that the miners will know when is a good time to turn on and off. Since the network is global, load balancing can occur on a global scale, and allow solar, wind, and other intermittent sources of power to be more profitable.

Also don't forget that current gold extraction not only uses energy but also is often environmentally destructive - and of course, Bitcoin will displace many office workers and allow them to transfer their productivity to non-financial sectors. If Bitcoin can displace gold mining it will be doing the world a favor, and keep in mind that all those displaced office workers use energy too - both at home and at the office.

Re:bitcoin / clean energy

[ncc74656]

And why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?

...or get more efficient? The miners I bought a few years ago draw several times' more power than the miners you can buy today; their power draw is such that it no longer makes sense to run them for their primary purpose. I fired one up for a bit last year just to use it as a space heater; unlike a purpose-built space heater, it somewhat offsets the cost of its operation. :)

Re:bitcoin / clean energy

[GameboyRMH]

Same reason anything else can't, inertia and/or upgrade costs. But it's a gigantic waste of energy either way, and won't be a moot point until we have an excess of renewable electricity generation.

Re:bitcoin / clean energy

[atrex]

I think the argument is that bitcoin energy demand is growing faster than clean energy solutions can provide it.

On the other hand, bitcoin's demand for energy could actually drive the entire energy market to innovate more and faster.

An increased demand on a stable supply means prices go up. If energy prices go up then corps see more profit in researching, advancing, and building out new energy production solutions. Now, not all of those solutions might be clean (though there is significant public pressure for them to be so), but, if energy demand was a flat constant then we would see far less build out of new power plants because the return on investment would not only be lower, but by increasing the supply they would actually lower the price.

Re:bitcoin / clean energy

[doctorvo]

I think the argument is that bitcoin energy demand is growing faster than clean energy solutions can provide it.

Given what a small fraction Bitcoin mining is in terms of overall energy consumption and growth, that simply says that clean energy solutions don't scale. You can't blame Bitcoin for that.

Exponential

[14erCleaner]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I love working in the power industry

[Anonymous Coward]

You fuckers never stop consuming.

That does not sound plausible

[angel'o'sphere]

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day
Sorry, we all know that mining is energy intensive, and transactions are not that cheap ...

But the number above makes no sense at all.

Re:That does not sound plausible

[mujadaddy]

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

The above link is mind-blowing.

Re:That does not sound plausible

[ewibble]

Yes it makes sense, although I have not done the calculations.

There is a lot of mining going on and relatively few transactions.

Re:That does not sound plausible

[grumbel5969]

Average transaction fee for Bitcoin is currently around $6, but peaked at $19 just a month ago. If you compare that to the amount of electricity that you can buy for that money, it seems a pretty close match.

Re:That does not sound plausible

[Muros]

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day
Sorry, we all know that mining is energy intensive, and transactions are not that cheap ...

But the number above makes no sense at all.

A lot of the numbers in the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) make no sense. 31 terawatt hours per year is slightly less than 85 gigawatt hours per day, but it is apparently increasing at a rate of 450 gigawatt hours per day?

Re:That does not sound plausible

[torkus]

Mind-blowingly alarmist maybe.

Bitcoin mining represents .14% of global energy consumption at a cost of $1.5M USD while producing BTC worth $10M USD. (well, based on their info) And a 700% ROI (minus capex) is pretty sweet.

So bitcoin is a rounding error.

The USA along consumes a bit under 300TWh/yr for *street lighting* vs ~30TWh for bitcoin globally. Interesting? Sure. Mind-blowing? Not to me at least.

Re:That does not sound plausible

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually, it does not. Not even for a country like USA where electricity is super cheap.

You want to tell me, 9 households together pay $9 in a month?+

Ha, ha ha

Re:That does not sound plausible

[angel'o'sphere]

The story is about the cost of transactions.
Not about the mining costs. Or did I miss a point?

Scale says differently

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia says annual world electrical consumption is 21,777 TW-h per year. (21,776,088,770,300 per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption). The article says, without any justification or sourcing, that there is 31 TW-h per year used in bitcoin mining. This is .14% of annual production. (Not 14%, fourteen hundredths of a percent).

Something tells me there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to curbing electrical use to reduce carbon footprints. (Not to mention no mention of how much of that production has carbon footprint and how much is renewables).

One should learn math before calling out about skies falling.

Re:Scale says differently

[GameboyRMH]

More than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption being used on a horrifically inefficient and wholly unnecessary digital currency should indeed make us shit ourselves. Thank you for helping to make clear just how severe the problem is.

Re:Scale says differently

[Anonymous Coward]

No, slightly more than 1/10,000th, but way less than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption. And again, the article cited no sources and just asserted it as bare fact, with no reference as to how the number was arrived.

And if you're looking at horrifically inefficient and unnecessary uses of electricity, start with Slashdot. Then tackle gaming. Survive trying to kill those and you can think about restricting what people do with their resources.

And if 1/10,000th of anything is severe enough to induce an environmental crisis, the earth would not have survived until now. So you're more than welcome to chill about a non-story. My best candidate is that it was a starving writer or a state actor looking to disinform.

Re:Scale says differently

[GameboyRMH]

No, slightly more than 1/10,000th, but way less than 1/1000th of world electrical consumption. And again, the article cited no sources and just asserted it as bare fact, with no reference as to how the number was arrived.

Are you disputing the 0.14% number? If not, check your math. 0.14x1000=140. It's well over a 1/1000th, it's about 1/714th to be more precise. Here is how the energy consumption was calculated:

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

https://digiconomist.net/bitco...

And if you're looking at horrifically inefficient and unnecessary uses of electricity, start with Slashdot. Then tackle gaming. Survive trying to kill those and you can think about restricting what people do with their resources.

Now here some numbers are being pulled out of thin air, and it's you who's doing it. But we can make educated guesses. So why would you guess a relatively lightweight site like Slashdot might use more energy than a system that pegs data centers full of GPUs and ASICs 24/7/365?

Gaming worldwide could indeed approach the total energy usage of the BitCoin network. But I don't think it's as bad because it's less wasteful. It's not crunching on insanely difficult math problems just for the sake of running a digital currency whose only notable advantage over much more efficient payment systems is an ability to jump through legal loopholes. Most of that energy goes directly into making games look good for people's enjoyment.

Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[sycodon]

More and more people are using Rube Goldberg logical arguments to derive some kind of statement that X is Bad.

The argument usually has an excessive number of premises, each premise depending on the previous, and bordering on, if not explicitly, being a non sequitur.

Somewhere, someone probably has created a proof that shows that the likelihood of an argument being correct diminishes with the number of premises it requires.

Re:Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[Lost Race]

Somewhere, someone probably has created a proof that shows that the likelihood of an argument being correct diminishes with the number of premises it requires.

Ockham?

Re:Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[trg83]

If I understood correctly, his was a philosophical assertion, not a proof. For most of us, the empirical wisdom of it is unmistakable anyway.

Re:Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[Anonymous Coward]

There are an infinite number of incorrect and invalid or unsound arguments with no premises, or a single premise, or few premises, competing with correct, valid and sound arguments with any number of premises. Personally, I don't see how the number of premises could affect the likelihood of an argument being correct, and I think it might be easier to prove the assertion false, that the number of premises has no correllation or appreciable effect on the likelihood of an argument's validity, soundness. Yet the assertion has merit even if it is false.

Re:Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "correct".

Of course an argument fails if one of its required premises is incorrect. That's inherent in the concept of "premise". And in most cases, there are many more premises to the argument than those that are being openly acknowledged.

In this case, I would direct your attention to the (implied) premise that "if it weren't for Bitcoin, all this energy wouldn't be being used."

Re:Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[slack_justyb]

Just saying, but I think that was the joke.

Return to Gold Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why we can't return to a gold-based currency. The most productive use of resources in any gold-like currency (and bitcoin qualifies since it must be 'mined') is the expansion of the money supply through mining. This is not a good use of resources.

I'd like to see a comparison

[Opportunist]

Could we get this compared to the amount of power used for computers standing around in offices being idle because the tasks they run don't even use 5% of the CPU's power 99% of the time, and how those offices could lower the power footprint by way more than the bitcoin miners use?

Could we then also see the power footprint of the global light pollution, especially during times like Christmas where everyone feels the urge to put enough light into his garden to divert planes because they think you're the airport?

Just to have a perspective, ya know?

Yes, it's the usual whataboutism. In the end, though, if you're really worried about power consumption and the transition away from fossil fuel, I'm pretty sure we have bigger fish to fry than bitcoins.

That's Matt 7:3 for you Bible guys.

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[sls1j]

When computers are running at 5% of CPU then they automatically scale down its power consumption. If you were to use the "idle" CPU cycles you would would cause the computer to use significantly more power.

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[Opportunist]

Yes, we're not talking about much electricity per CPU.

But we're talking about millions of CPUs.

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

When computers are running at 5% of CPU then they automatically scale down its power consumption. If you were to use the "idle" CPU cycles you would would cause the computer to use significantly more power.

Yeah the "wasted cycles" argument stopped being a thing years ago. Back in the day running stuff like SETI@Home cost you nothing if your computer was going to be one all day anyhow but that hasn't been true in some time, nowadays you are having to pay some cost for volunteering that CPU time.

I'll take unintended consequences for $10k, Alex

[SlaveToTheGrind]

<eom>

As soon as mining chips arms race slows down

[Anonymous Coward]

We will use bitcoin mining as a heat source in our homes.

What story?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick calculation, 31 terawatt hours = 31000000000 kWH, which at $.11/kWH is $3,410,000,000.00.

What's the capitalization of Bitcoin? Right now, $214,387,059,190.00

So the claimed electricity cost is a tolerable 1.5% of capitalization...

From the Wikipedia, which link I don't care to post, the top 37 electricity consuming countries use about 19,000 TWh/a. Bitcoin maybe responsible for .16% of worldwide electricity consumption, if I'm still doing math right?

This is not a big deal. Not even a story. Please, go report on something real.

Re:What story?

[arth1]

So the claimed electricity cost is a tolerable 1.5% of capitalization...

That's assuming that Bitcoin is in addition to created capital, and not just a shift in investments. A charge of 1.5% to move investments is high.

Re:What story?

[GameboyRMH]

You call that a non-story?

Re:What story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin maybe responsible for .16% of worldwide electricity consumption, if I'm still doing math right?

This is not a big deal. Not even a story. Please, go report on something real.

So. Is it problem if it's 0.32% next year? 0.64% the year after? 5% in 5 years? When is it a problem?

Transferring paper money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if anyone has calculated the cost of shipping paper money and gold? It still happens quite a bit from what I understand, to back electronic transactions.

Re:Transferring paper money?

[greenwow]

Or even just the cost of depositing cash. We pay 30 cents per hundred minimum to Bank of America to get them to accept our cash. Otherwise, they scream at us and call the police to have us thrown out. My boss thinks it's wrong for BoA to refuse to accept cash, but the local police that gave him a bloody nose disagree.

Notice I said minimum. They'll usually charge 30 cents to count a single $100 bill. If you have smaller bills, and especially change, they'll steal even more from your cash as a fee.

Proof of space

[Idou]

The summary seems to spend a lot of time lamenting and whining when there appears to be a straightforward solution: proof of space

Filecoin appears to be taking this route. So if you care about this issue, use something like Filecoin instead of something like Bitcoin.

Re:Proof of space

[Anonymous Coward]

Very few people actually care about the functionality of BitCoin. Most are just interested in jumping on the get-rich-quick bandwagon.

Fundamental Error

[ytene]

I *think* there may be a fundamental error with the article linked by the OP. The author of that article, Eric Holthaus, argues that because the value of Bitcoins is increasing due to speculation, so of course more and more people will jump in to the task of mining new Bitcoins.

Except of course that can't happen forever, thanks to the design of Bitcoin. As this page explains quite nicely...

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Con...

there is actually a finite limit to the number of Bitcoins that will ever be created. To quote the explainer,

"Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.) The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence is not expected to exceed 21 million.[2] Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value "21 million" are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number."

So, in other words, although in theory the folks who mine new blocks are going to continue to get paid in Bitcoins, the value they receive will dimish to tiny fractions. Eventually we should get to the point where we continue to need new blocks to host transactions, but miners will receive virtually nothing for their efforts - certainly far less in value terms than the cost of the electricity required to solve the math problems.

That may be why we're seeing a peak in activity now - i.e. whilst the cost-benefit favours mining. The moment that balance tips the other way, we're likely to see significant changes in both mining activity and the perceived value of Bitcoins.

And for those unwilling to open the link, the analysis predicts [with reasonable give-or-take accuracy] that Bitcoin will hit the limit by 2024, when miners will be paid approx 6.5 Bitcoins per block.

As at today, miners are paid 12.5 Bitcoins per mined block. This is set to halve come 2021 [down to 6.25 per block] so we might see negative pressure on Bitcoin value when that happens.

But, based on what I've read, the linked article might be missing a few key points...

Re:Fundamental Error

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if mining rewards hit 0, transactions costs are paid to the miner.

What about Solar coins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily Bitcoin- but I think the author is forgetting that 'Green' powered crypto is also growing in popularity.

You generate coins using a solar array, and trade those coins for currency. Its similar to how selling excessive power back to the powergrid works now, except the coin cuts out the middleman...
I could see this sparking a grassroots movement for going 'Green'

Re:What about Solar coins?

[Howitzer86]

How big does the array need to be before it can power a cluster big enough to recoup your investment in the array, cluster, and the land upon which it all resides?

And can it scale with the increasing cost of mining bitcoin?

Bitcoin creators are stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

They know nothing about currency, or the religion of economics. Bitcoin will never replace money. Something else might, but nothing even close to resembling crypo "currency". It's a bubble that will pop and leave a lot of "investors" with nothing. There is nothing of value with bitcoin at all.

The same shifting goalposts

[Baron_Yam]

>Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.

Bitcoin was a marginally successful experiment in creating a trustless secure distributed public ledger. It was initially used for a few fun purchases, then the crazy cryptoanarchists and libertarians took up the banner and it just started getting weirder. But hey, I'm pretty sure the mining craze drove improvements in gaming video cards, so we did get that out of it before it morphed into an 'investment' pyramid scheme.

However secure the ledger itself may theoretically be... in practical use Bitcoin is about as secure as having a wad of cash hanging out the back pocket of your pants. It's only anonymous until a person can be linked to a ledger entry, and then it's the least anonymous way in the world to transfer wealth.

And Bitcoin was never going to replace money, which quickly became obvious once you looked at the scaling issues. I'm sure the original coder was well aware of that and didn't worry about it because they never expected it to grow beyond a small circle of friends using it for shits and giggles. Or not.

Bitcoin was also never going to replace money because it enforces some basic economic policies on its use that have been proven disastrous by history; the coder was obviously neither an economist nor a historian.

As an investment, Bitcoin's a lottery ticket. If you're lucky and you get in and out at the right times, Bitcoin may still make you some money - but odds are pretty good it won't. Just ask the last round of people who invested in tulips or beanie babies.

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Anonymous Coward]

Just ask the last round of people who invested in tulips or beanie babies.

Or the house-flippers in the Spring of 2008.

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Motard]

Fucking beanie babies ate all my tulips.

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Anonymous Coward]

talk about moving goal posts... all the talk about "secure distributed ledger" is recent fluff. Are you really that ignorant of the origins of bit coin? The cryptoanarchist/libertarian screed with which it was launched? The fact that a ton of bit coins were pre-mined to give all developed value to the founding crime syndicate?

Sure, they had no way of knowing for sure that it was going to gain any value, but they sure as hell *planned* for that eventuality.

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Anonymous Coward]

The tulips theory got debunked, unlike tulips, or farts, BTC is limited in supply, there is only so many in the end. Tulips and farts you can keep making more of almost forever which makes them worthless.

Economics 101?

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a load of crap. I've been doing well for years even during the downs generally speaking it's all put me way ahead of those who've utilized cash. I'm not an investor, but I do accept it and get paid in it a lot. I also spend it just like it was meant to be spent- like cash. I possess so long as I have nothing I need to buy. The vast majority of people who utilize it have done well and trying to compare it to a lottery ticket where 999 out of 1000 times you lose is just plain stupid. Anybody who looks at whats happened over the years can tell you that long term users have gained far more than any losses incured provided people didn't do the stupid thing and buy high sell low. If you bought high you should have waited a few years to sell because you'd be a millionaire today if you had even a modest amount of the crypto currency.

There are issues, but resolving them (be it anonymity), stability, scaling, or fees are all fixable. Different groups are working on different aspects. Zcash solved the anonymity aspect. Dash is supposedly working on solving some of the scaling and fee issues that Bitcoin currently has. AnyPay is solving the problems of being able to spend Bitcoin by introducing a point of sale system for other crypto currencies. We've got competition when it comes to crypto currencies and that is a good thing. While 98% of them are just junk and mere worthless forks the other 2% are genuine with demonstrated developments.

Re:The same shifting goalposts

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, but anyone who is actually using it as such is quickly getting out, if they haven't done so already. The value is unstable and fluctuates too much. Bitcoin has utterly failed as a currency.

The only people buying bitcoins are speculators who hope to sell them later for more than they paid. At some point there won't be a next sucker willing to buy them, and the whole thing will come crashing down.

BITCOIN IS ****NOT**** ANONYMOUS!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of Pete, can we stop with this blatant disinformation? Bitcoin is not only not anonymous, but once a wallet is associated with a person (which is a trivial endeavor), your transactions over all of time are known.

Also, bitcoin uses 0.00001% of the world's electricity. Building the new Mercedes Benz stadium in Atlanta took more energy than Bitcoin has taken since it came into existence, and that was just so 80,000 people could watch a bunch of emotionally stunted little boys wear spandex and chase each other around and jump on each other.

I think the world can tolerate Bitcoin...

Re:BITCOIN IS ****NOT**** ANONYMOUS!

[GameboyRMH]

You made a mistake in your calculations. Bitcoin uses 0.14~0.16% of the world's electricity, as calculated by others in this thread. That is a truly frightening number.

Also it's not that hard to maintain anonymity between a wallet and a person, thousands of black hats do it every day. Ransomware and darknet markets would not be a thing if Bitcoin were not anonymous.

STOP supporting valuations based on bullshit.

[geekmux]

How many millions of man hours are lost each day to Facebook addiction? How may YouTube data centers running 24/7/365 warehouse nothing but the digital equivalent of cat videos? How many millions have been pissed away every year by the US Mint who still mints pointless pennies at a loss?

Hard to pin the blame on bitcoin when we have so many examples of pointless waste today.

Bitcoin is a malignant development because Greed is a disease. Stop supporting valuations based on hype and bullshit. This applies to every industry. Being reasonable about valuation will likely send bitcoin values plummeting, which would curb the absurdity of the bitcoin mining addiction.

Re:STOP supporting valuations based on bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop supporting valuations based on hype and bullshit.

That's tough. I recently did a show-of-hands in a college level class. How many own stocks? 1 person raised their hand (it's college; many students never worked a day in their life). Who owns bitcoins? Four people raised their hand.

This is what the "new generation" folks are buying it seems.

Re:STOP supporting valuations based on bullshit.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

How many millions have been pissed away every year by the US Mint who still mints pointless pennies at a loss?

The US Mint isn't trying to print money to generate value. They print it to enable commerce. For instance, they don't spend $100 bills to offset costs, they do it in response to moving electronic funds, or destroying old $100 bills.

Re:STOP supporting valuations based on bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who are buying bitcoins have an opinion about the valuation.

"Bitcoin is a malignant development because Greed is a disease." - this is idiotic. You may as well try to criminalize having an opinion. How much are you willing to pay for (any item that you think has value), and why should my opinion of your spending habits matter at all? Those people buying bitcoin are making their own financial decisions, they're not making your financial decisions, and you can't make theirs.

Electric heat

[Anonymous Coward]

I heat my house with Bitcoin you insensitive clod!

A/C Demonstrates the Value of Pron

[LifesABeach]

If one thinks, one sees how foundationless this A/Câ(TM)s argument is. But hay! Being Still Born is the first thing A/Câ(TM)s have to accept.

Article is click-bait baloney

[Anonymous Coward]

The bitcoin network's energy usage is designed to peak in the early years, then level off and decline. This is all a non-issue that the author couldn't found out on his own, had he done a teeny tiny bit of research.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/

Re:Article is click-bait baloney

[Anonymous Coward]

Doh. "Could've found out on his own".

Bitcoin controllable, reality didn't follow design

[perpenso]

If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle. A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.

Its not really on a path to do so. Yes it was designed to do so but designs often lose to reality. The reality of bitcoin is that we do NOT have decentralized mining.
In 2014 a mining pool reached 50% of the hashrate, IF they made it to 51% and had bad intentions there could have been a successful attack on the blockchain.
Today Chinese mining pools control 70% of all the hashrate, that seems vulnerable to the wishes of a single government.

Bitcoin was designed so that individuals and their computers did the mining. Instead we have mining performed by exotic and expensive ASIC hardware that it under the control of only a few. Even when individuals "own" the hardware they often have it colocated somewhere where there are inexpensive fees and low cost electricity. Their bitcoin mining rig is not really under their control and may be in a different country.

I have a friend thats into Bitcoin and...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its ridiculous. I really do. I think its a bad idea, a frustrating waste of money and hardware, and honestly, a refuge for people that are desprate to find a way around bad government Economic Policy. I see a Speculation Bubble, and Electric bills skyrocketing. I see huge expenses into the tens of thousands of dollars in damaged or destroyed hardware. I wish I could talk this fellow out of this business. Its costing him several hundred times more in expenses than he is making, but he can't see that. Every time I turn around, he's pumping more money into this Crypto Currency Dumpster Fire. He wants it to be easy as possible, he doesn't want to learn a bunch of the (Linux) Precepts behind it.

Its costing him legitimate IT avenues. Everything else he rationalizes away. I think its a bad idea. I came into it with an open neutral opinion. It took a week of looking into this to see how bad it is. Yet, its full steam ahead.

Blockchain is here to stay, bitcoin not so certain

[perpenso]

To be clear, while bitcoin has many design flaws and problems and may very well be displaced by a different digital currency in the not so distant future, the blockchain is likely here to stay. But the blockchain and bitcoin are two very different things. Bitcoin is nothing more than one user of blockchain technology, blockchain technology could care less about bitcoin or any particular cryptocurrency.

Proof of Stake

[Anonymous Coward]

There are alternative consensus protocols that are far more efficient than Bitcoin's, namely Proof of Stake (PoS), which requires (relative to Bitcoin) virtually no energy. This also enables much faster block times, which contribute to a much faster confirmations. PoS, instead of requiring solving difficult mathematical problems (Proof of Work) to be solved, requires "collateral" to be put up to incentivize network participants to operate in the interest of the network.

Also in southern climates, in northern summer

[Alan R Light]

If we colonize Antarctica, not only will we be able to use the miners to heat the place during the northern summer, we can use it year round - and it would better than a heat pump because there is no heat to pump.

Re:Also in southern climates, in northern summer

[Anonymous Coward]

No need, if bitcoins keep heating the planet like they are, Antarctica will be warm.

Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

And why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?

There is not a surplus of clean energy to allocate to bitcoin. Note that as Europe shut down nuclear power plants they have had to increase their usage of coal despite their massive investment in renewables. Last year coal exports from the US to Europe doubled.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

Germans pay about $0.38/kWh. At those prices, you can't make a profit. So, Bitcoin and European coal is a red herring, trying to distract from Europe's generally broken energy policy.

Note that as Europe shut down nuclear power plants they have had to increase their usage of coal despite their massive investment in renewables. Last year coal exports from the US to Europe doubled.

And you can't blame Bitcoin for that, because Bitcoin mining has already been priced out of the European market. People mine for Bitcoins where electricity is cheap, and that's not Europe.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

Germans pay about $0.38/kWh. At those prices, you can't make a profit. So, Bitcoin and European coal is a red herring, trying to distract from Europe's generally broken energy policy.

There is no red herring, you misunderstood the point of coal being mentioned. You asked why Bitcoin can't run on clean energy. I pointed out that there would need to be a surplus of clean energy. I then offered evidence that there is such a shortage of clean energy that coal use has increased.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

I understood the point just fine, your statements simply make no economic sense.

First of all, given how expensive electricity is in Europe, there simply is not a lot of Bitcoin mining in Europe. So, any increase in coal exports to Europe cannot be attributed to Bitcoin mining. Europe imports coal because its clean energy goals are a sham.

Second, there is no such thing as a "surplus of clean energy" because energy is fungible. If only a small percentage of energy produced in Europe or the world is "clean", then that's because "clean energy" can't be produced cost effectively. Bitcoin has nothing to do with that.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

I understood the point just fine, ...

No you do not, because you falsely assume I am blaming bitcoin for the power shortage. I am pointing out the bitcoin would require a clean energy surplus, and I am pointing out that a region that is aggressively pursuing clean energy has no such surplus. Other regions that are less aggressive are also far behind.

You asked why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy?
I gave you an exact answer, because there is no surplus.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

You asked why exactly can't Bitcoin miners and networks run on clean energy? I gave you an exact answer, because there is no surplus.

Yes, and your "exact answer" is bullshit because the concept of a "clean energy surplus" is bullshit. Read my previous responses for why that concept is bullshit.

Bitcoin is simply a red herring people like you bring up to cover up the fact that "clean energy" cannot meet the energy demands of modern societies, period.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

Yes, and your "exact answer" is bullshit because the concept of a "clean energy surplus" is bullshit. Read my previous responses for why that concept is bullshit.

You are mistaken. (1) Electricity is not fungible on a global scale like fossil fuels, it is a local resource not a global resource due to transmission capabilities. (2) "Clean energy surplus" is a simple concept, it simply means generation exceeds demand. And even in the regions most aggressively pursuing renewable they are far from that point.

Bitcoin is simply a red herring people like you bring up to cover up the fact that "clean energy" cannot meet the energy demands of modern societies, period.

I did not bring up bitcoin as a contributor to the energy deficit. But to indulge this point you keep bringing up, given that we currently have a deficit, wouldn't make the deficit worse at the moment? Sure this could change as regions move to surplus, but we are not there. That is an inconvenient true not a red herring. It could also change if bitcoin moves from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, as etherium is planning to do.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

"Clean energy surplus" is a simple concept, it simply means generation exceeds demand.

You can meet any demand you have for clean energy by buying as many solar cells and batteries as you like. The reason people don't do that is simply because it's too expensive, not because there are arbitrary limitations on the amount of clean energy we can generate.

Translating that into your armchair economic terminology: there is no "clean energy surplus" because there is little demand for "clean energy" for the simple reason that "clean energy" is significantly more expensive than fossil fuel energy. Once "clean energy" becomes cheaper than fossil fuel energy, the market will meet the entire current energy demand using clean energy.

Electricity is not fungible on a global scale like fossil fuels, it is a local resource not a global resource due to transmission capabilities.

And people mine Bitcoins locally where the price of electricity is low enough. I.e., not in Europe given its current energy policies.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

"Clean energy surplus" is a simple concept, it simply means generation exceeds demand.

You can meet any demand you have for clean energy by buying as many solar cells and batteries as you like.

Really, there is some magical warehouse somewhere with millions of panels? China, with all its panel manufacturing capacity and inventory is still also using fossil fuel for electricity generation. Someday we will get there, but today, in reality we are not there yet. Hence there is no clean energy surplus to mine bitcoins on. "Why" is irrelevant. Reality is what it is and bitcoin mining is wasteful today. Hence the interest in switching from proof-or-work to proof-of-stake for digital currencies.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

Hence there is no clean energy surplus to mine bitcoins on. "Why" is irrelevant. Reality is what it is and bitcoin mining is wasteful today.

You divide the world into "wasteful" and "useful" uses of energy. Are people farming for game assets "wasteful"? Are my Christmas lights "wasteful"? How about powering virtual reality games? How about the latest OK-GO video? How about some fat guy's CPAP machine or some woman's vibrator? In the US, we don't live in a centrally planned economy. Your opinion on what is "wasteful" and what is "useful" is irrelevant. Your opinion on what is "clean" and what is "dirty" is also irrelevant. Individuals will use electricity from whatever sources for whatever purposes they like at market prices, whether you approve or not.

Hence the interest in switching from proof-or-work to proof-of-stake for digital currencies.

Whose interests? Yours? If you live in Europe, no doubt you have an "interest" in that because Bitcoin mining isn't economically feasible for you given Europe's artificially inflated electricity prices. I assure you that people in China or the US who mine Bitcoins have no interest in abandoning Bitcoin because they, unlike you, are actually making a profit.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[perpenso]

Hence the interest in switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake for digital currencies.

Whose interests? Yours? If you live in Europe, no doubt you have an "interest" in that because Bitcoin mining isn't economically feasible for you given Europe's artificially inflated electricity prices. I assure you that people in China or the US who mine Bitcoins have no interest in abandoning Bitcoin because they, unlike you, are actually making a profit.

Switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake does not mean abandoning bitcoin. It means a software update to bitcoin. As etherium is scheduled to do. Nor does it mean abandoning mining, you can mine (mint) under proof-of-stake.
In addition to wasting less energy it would also correct a current problem with bitcoin. Blockchain theory assumes decentralized mining, many individuals mining with their computers. As ASICs have replaced CPUs and GPUs for mining, bitcoin mining has become highly centralized into a handful of mining pools, one of which hit 50% of the hashrate demonstrating the plausibility of a 51% attack, and 70+% of the total hashrate is located in a single country not known for a hands off policy towards business and finance.

Re:Coal exports from the US to Europe doubled

[doctorvo]

Switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake does not mean abandoning bitcoin. It means a software update to bitcoin.

Well, and if Bitcoin users want to do that, they will do that. You're welcome to try to convince people.

In addition to wasting less energy it would also correct a current problem with bitcoin.

So, Bitcoin's future will be determined by economic, technical, and political forces, not by clean energy. The fact that that may or may not use lowering energy usage is just something that makes you happy but that hardly anybody else gives a f*ck about.

Naive extrapolation

[sjbe]

Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument.

They created a cash analog and didn't think it would be used as an investment vehicle? Then they are (as I suspected) imbeciles with little understanding of economics and less of people. Kind of like the programmers in the early days of networks that failed to secure their networks because they naively trusted other people's incentives to match their own.

Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.

It's not a replacement for money because it IS a form of money for all practical purposes. Just because it isn't a fiat currency doesn't change that fact. But like any asset (including currency) it will be used both for transactions and as a mechanism to profit directly through trading of that asset. If there is a profit to be made you can be sure someone will try to make it.

Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power

Exponential? Let's grant that for the sake of argument. Even if true it doesn't mean it is appropriate to extrapolate naively. Just because it might be experiencing fast growth today does not imply that it will continue to do so tomorrow. You have to give some reason why it MUST be expected to continue to grow at that rate which this article fails to do.

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day.

Oh bullshit. That's just preposterous on the face of it unless you are using an incredibly stupid (and faulty) form of accounting and assigning all the power costs for every computer involved in the transaction and presuming it does nothing else.

And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.

Again, I call bullshit. This sounds like hollywood accounting to me to try to scare people. I think bitcoin is kind of idiotic but I would need a LOT of serious evidence before I seriously believe this sort of outlandish claim.

Re:Naive extrapolation

[grnbrg]

I will admit to not having read the math in the article. But the power numbers stated might not be unreasonable. The Bitcoin network is currently calculating around 12 exahashes per second, and the computers that do the bulk of the heavy lifting are based on purpose built ASIC chips. They are literally incapable of doing anything but mining Bitcoin (or some other cryptocurrency that shares the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm)...

The newest ASIC miner -- the AntMiner S9 boasts an efficiency of 0.098 watts per gigahash. 12 exahashes is 12,000,000,000 gigahashes, or around 1.18 gigawatts. 24/7.

DIY Cryptocurrency Mining...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.

Re:DIY Cryptocurrency Mining...

[grnbrg]

Are you actually getting any referrals for your link spam?

Only a problem during Tulip Mania

[smprather]

This will only be a problem until the world is well populated with digital coinage. Eventually, it will cost more in fuel than it is worth to mine. I have no idea what the timeline or carbon-line looks like though. Someone should do that math. Of course, the modeling of digital-currency-to-national-currency exchange rate would have to be a WA-WA-WAG.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Bitcoin is nothing but rolling coal for autistics

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

Assisted by resistive. Pump works better to -10F

[raymorris]

The heat pump is more efficient than resistive heating down to about -10F (-23C). Many units *also* have an auxiliary resistive element that can kick in around 35F to assist in heating.

False premise

[sjbe]

If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle.

You say that as if it is somehow axiomatic. I reject your framing of the argument. If you can provide some airtight argument that government involvement in currency has some fatal flaw then please provide it and collect your Nobel prize. But frankly I don't buy the argument that bitcoin or any analog of it really fixes any problems in any form of government issued currency without creating new and potentially worse ones in the process. If you distrust governments as a philosophical position I can understand that but it doesn't automatically follow that because governments aren't perfect that a solution that doesn't involve them will necessarily be better.

Then of course there is the problem that there is absolutely no way that governments are going to allow a currency that they have no influence over. Even if government leaders honestly and earnestly wanted to not be involved with the currency the first moment there is a dip in the market there will be people screaming for the government to do something about the problem. The governments would HAVE to be involved in regulating currency even if they didn't want to. Not to mention that truly unregulated markets tend to crash and burn hard. There will never be a currency market without government regulation no matter what the mechanics of the currency might be.

Re:False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

You're both wrong. Bitcoin is backed by governments around the world, known as "organized crime families." The fact that they are not national hardly makes them any less governmental in nature. They organize, manage, and tax all areas of human activity that the "legitimate" governments have made valuable by prohibitions of one kind or another: prostitution, extortion, black markets, and so on.

Organized crime is every bit as legitimate in those areas of activity as the better-known national governments; possibly more legitimate, in that it fills needs that people genuinely express; whereas mass genocidal violence, and even "peaceful" taxation (which is always really forced expropriation) for the purposes of funding war, and the redistribution of wealth and social engineering, are actually less popular than drugs and prostitutes.

As long as there is crime, there will be organized crime, and they will back bitcoin with their considerable sovereign authority. And wherever there's a cop, there's a crime. (Thanks, Terry Pratchett, for that great saying.)

Yep. 2 year olds know that, have leaders

[raymorris]

You're absolutely right. If you've ever watched a group of two or three year old kids, one or two kids tend to be leaders/bossy. The others follow the leader(s). The same happens in any business meeting after a few minutes. It's basic human nature. Mammal nature, actually - other mammals do the same.

Even it it weren't human nature, when a bunch of people get together, conflicts happen and rules are needed to resolve and reduce conflicts. Those rules need to be enforced. Rules for large groups are also known as "laws".

There WILL be leaders, and there WILL be laws. The only question is how leaders are chosen and laws are determined. In the absence of any designed process for choosing leaders, you get the way animals do it - fighting, and the biggest, strongest guy wins.

Re:Yep. 2 year olds know that, have leaders

[Anonymous Coward]

In the absence of any designed process ..., you get the way animals do it - fighting, and the biggest, strongest guy wins.

And how would you describe our current legal system? Because from where I stand, both laws and verdicts are for sale, and I can't afford them.

Bitcoin could drive us to our clean-energy future

[mindwhip]

The fact is the increased need for computational power, which makes profit for the company (why do it if no profit), actually drives the companies to solar, wind and other "free" energy sources. If you are making $10000 a day and your only non capital cost at $1000 a day is electricity it suddenly becomes a lot more worthwhile to invest in solar panels and more efficient processors.

Not non-government but new government?

[Roger W Moore]

People always show up, and when enough people have arrived, they need to be governed.

What you say is absolutely true. However, given that Bitcoin is governed by an algorithm the question now is can governments be replaced to some extent by agreed algorithms? After all, that is what laws are at some level: an agreed upon algorithm that if you do X then Y will happen. So this is not a non-government but potentially a new type of government. Even a partial replacement in limited situations would be something rather new and untried.

Re:Not non-government but new government?

[xvan]

given that Bitcoin is governed by an algorithm

Bitcoin is not governed by an algorithm but by majority vote. You're just replacing your known tyrant for an unknown one.

In the end, dollars are needed to pay taxes

[raymorris]

> This true for all currency. It only has value because you believe it does.

At the end of the day, for most US citizens with some type of income, if you don't acquire some dollars the government will take your stuff and maybe throw you in jail. Taxes can only be paid in dollars, and most people need to pay taxes in order to avoid rather unpleasant consequences eventually. The IRS may only send letters for five years or so, but eventually they get serious. That makes dollars valuable.

Even if you personally take the risk of not paying taxes, Alice and Bob both pay taxes, so they want dollars. They'll give you stuff if you give them dollars. That makes dollars valuable to you, because you can use them to get stuff from Alice and Bob, who will use the dollars to pay their taxes.

The opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin mining increases the demand for power. Currently, clean energy production is becoming more economical than burning fossil fuel. So Bitcoin is driving innovation in energy technology, which is increasingly dominated by solar, wind, etc.

If Bitcoin busts, we'll suddenly have a surplus of clean energy at low prices, but maybe the innovation will stop. If it keeps growing, then we'll keep getting more and more solar plants etc. At some point in the future, that's bad for the Earth, but now we could still use some more generation capacity. And the load is relatively flexible. With the right kind of billing, the miners could just be forced to eat the surplus energy, when the sun is shining and the batteries are full.

Re:Bitcoin is NOT like Pokemon cards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because unlike Pokemon, there is no company who can decide how many cards get printed! If the Pokermon card were magically created once per day 1 minute, their price would much higher and would make even more sense to collect and trade then.

Clickbait may clickbait our clickbait.

[Anonymous Coward]

An anonymous reader shares an article:

Clickbait wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people. But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind clickbait could one day become. Simply put, clickbait is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, clickbait is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power. As clickbait grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more clickbait (a process called "mining") get more and more difficult -- a wrinkle designed to control the currency's supply. Today, each clickbait transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the clickbait network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined. The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge -- an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.

Facebook and friends

[Zero__Kelvin]

How many bitcoin do you want to bet that far more power gets wasted doing useless things like FB Status posting, being a twit, and the "like" than goes into bitcoin mining?

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

But electric cars will not affect the electrical needs. Right!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh they will definitely.
The author of the article would much prefer that people use electricity for electric vehicles rather than anything bitcoin related. I suspect he hates it because libertarians like shitcoin more than anything else.
And increased electrical demand from bitcoins could cost us our clean-energy future, while at the same time, electric vehicle electricity demand wouldn't, Because Reasons.

WOW!

[pubwvj]

"each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day."

That is the most mind blowing part of the entire article.

Sadly, people who've made an investment into cryptocurrencies aren't going to let something like saving the world stand in their way of making more money. That just isn't natural.

On the other hand,

[roc97007]

Wouldn't bitcoin be driving faster, lower power computing? Doesn't that help everyone, including, maybe, climate modeling?

And why do electric cars get a pass?

What! I just sold all my emu ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just my luck!

Finally got out of emu farming, no one willing to pay me 2000$ for a breeding pair of emu, and gotten into this bitcoin thing.

Now this is also unsustainable!

What can a hardworking upright scammer to do? The society is leaving me with no option other than to rob banks.

Bitcoin is a mechanism to launder dirty money

[StevenMaurer]

Nothing else,

It's used by drug cartels, for ransomware, tax evasion, massive corruption in third-world countries, human trafficking, and any other means of washing cash clean of where it came from - nearly always being profits from the economic benefits of victimization (or at the very least, allowing the mega-wealthy to pretend that they're a lot poorer than they are to as to pay a tiny fraction of their wealth compared to the poor and middle class).

The bottom will fall out of it as soon as governments pass laws to de-anonymize it, which they have every right to do.

Until then, the question is, do you want to profit from such a scheme? Probably for many, the answer is "why not"? But not from me.

Re:Bitcoin is a mechanism to launder dirty money

[DontBeAMoran]

Bitcoin is a mechanism to launder dirty money, nothing else It's used by drug cartels, for ransomware, tax evasion, massive corruption in third-world countries, human trafficking, and any other means of washing cash clean of where it came from.

Since every single fucking transaction is in the blockchain, it's the WORST possible thing you could use to do ANY of the above.

No, everything you mentioned works best with government-created fiat currencies. The serial numbers can only identify the currency itself, not who had it and not where it has been.

Re:Bitcoin is a mechanism to launder dirty money

[slshdtisctrldbysjws]

Bitcoin isn't anonymous you blowhard idiot.
Exchanges in the US are required to verify your identity.
Bitcoin can be used for anything. You have no reason to say it's only used for crime.

Actually, for those of us who aren't retarded, it's obvious that it's main use overwhelmingly is speculation.
Bitcoin was a few hundred dollars for a long time. That was it being used as currency.
Then the speculation extravaganza started. Now its $13k.

Seriously, you are a moron.

Re:Bitcoin is a mechanism to launder dirty money

[Areyoukiddingme]

No, everything you mentioned works best with government-created fiat currencies. The serial numbers can only identify the currency itself, not who had it and not where it has been.

For that, they use dusting with radioactive isotopes. Not quite as precise as bitcoin tracking, but pretty good.

Either fight it or use it

[raymorris]

> we'll fight it in vain for thousands, if not millions of years to come

That's one option. The Soviet communists decided to try fighting against greed and force people to share equally, to work hard at making great stuff, with no personal reward for themselves. It didn't work that well.

The other option is to recognize that "people want stuff, lots of stuff" as a fact, and then use that fact to accomplish worthwhile ends. In economics, there is a system designed along these lines:

The easiest way get lots of stuff (money) for yourself is to make stuff that other people want.
The more people like the stuff you make for them, the more money you get to keep.

So for example some guys named Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sergey Brin all wanted lots of money. The way to gets lots of money, in this system, is to make lots of cool stuff for other people, stuff that everybody likes. Mobile gadget stuff was popular at the time, so they all tried to make better mobile gadgets than the other guy, and get them in the hands of lots of happy users. to see who could make the best stuff. Users hated the mobile stuff Bill and his team made, so his team wasn't rewarded with money to satisfy their greed. Steve Jobs's team made stuff people liked, so their greed was quenched by them getting lots of money. Then it was time for another round, to see who could make the best stuff for the most people again. All the teams are greedy and want lots of money, so they are trying really hard to make cool stuff for us.

In politics, people are greedy for power. In one system practiced for a thousand years or so, whoever was greedy for power would kill the other people who wanted power, and whoever was alive at the moment had some power, until they got killed. In the late 1700s a different system was designed. Like most systems, there was a top leader, but he would only have *some* powers. Other powers were given to an elite group of leaders, two from each state. Still other powers were given to a broader group of community leaders. Here's the trick to this system - the president can increase his appointment power and other powers mostly by taking over powers currently held by the Senate, a bunch of really rich guys who are power hungry and won't give their power away to the president easily. So the system is designed to use the Senate's hunger for power to keep the president's hunger for power in check. When the Senate tries to increase their power, such as by trying to initiate a tax bill, the House sends them a blue slip saying "no you can't do that - that's OUR power." In order for the House to keep their power for themselves, they have to keep the Senate in check. All these checks and balances without violence - the House just sends a blue slip telling the Senate "you can't do that" - nobody gets shot. Senators have their own blue slips they use to limit the President's appointment power.

These systems recognizes that that people's greed for money and power is a fact and it's unlikely to ever change, so they use people's desire for money and power and put those desires to work doing something useful.

combine it with protein folding

[Khashishi]

It seems like you aren't the first to think of this.
https://curecoin.net/
http://www.gridcoin.us/
http://foldingcoin.net/the-coi...
I haven't bothered to look at any of these in detail, but I'm not sure if they actually use the scientific work as the proof of work, but the idea is out there.

Lottery

[ArchieBunker]

How is Bitcoin a lottery ticket? The price is climbing daily and people yelling its a bubble said that back when it was worth a small fraction. This is something brand new and nobody can predict its behavior. Had you invested a year ago you'd have over 15x your investment right now. $772 one year ago and $12,756 currently.

Re:Lottery

[Baron_Yam]

There are multiple levels of foolishness and ignorance in your post.

Maybe you're a kid, maybe you're an idiot... either way, it's really convenient to put people on a /. 'Foe' list and now I'll never again waste my time reading one of your comments!

Re:Lottery

[grnbrg]

How is Bitcoin a lottery ticket?

then

This is something brand new and nobody can predict its behavior.

I think the odds are pretty good right now in Bitcoins favour, but it's not yet a sure thing by a long shot. The current run up might well be due to wider adoption, but it is also quite likely to see a severe correction in the next year. If it does, it might recover as it has done many times in the past. Or it might not.

Re:Lottery

[ArchieBunker]

So instead of offering some intelligent conversation you choose to stick your fingers in your ears.

Re:Lottery

[Anonymous Coward]

There needs to be two intelligent people to have an intelligent conversation. The OP was insinuating that you are not one of them.

Re:Lottery

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of offering some intelligent conversation you choose to stick your fingers in your ears.

Conversation, particularly intelligence conversation, is not something one person can provide on their own, so there's not really much point in trying if it's clear that the other side isn't going to be keeping up their end. It's much like the problems of attempting to have a prolonged battle of wits with somebody who is distinctly lacking in them. (I have, however, seen a pretty decent a dick-measuring contest where one side was a woman...who won, despite her lack of equipment.)

Kings and queens, lords and ladies

[raymorris]

Did you, for moment, forget most of human history, all the kings and queens, lords and ladies and all of that?

Compare Europe a couple hundred years ago, and over the last 2,000 years, to today. It's amazing. Suddenly just recently the paupers are mostly watching HD Netflix on their giant screens, rather than dying of malnourishment as they have through most of history.

More at
https://slashdot.org/comments....

Not playing could cost you YOUR future!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't delay! Start now and win up to $200 worth of Bitcoin every hour, for free!

Disagree -- it will have the opposite effect

[UnknownSoldier]

I completely disagree with the premise and argue it will have the exact OPPOSITE effect.

With cryptocurrencies helping draining the fossil fuel reserves there is even MORE incentive to research "green energy", LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), and ZPE (Zero Point Energy).

Fossil fuels are not going to last forever. The sooner we get OFF of them and onto to renewables the better for everyone in the long term.

While last century the test was if we could produce enough energy, the challenge this century is Sustainability. Without a focus on sustainability all our efforts are for naught. We need to start looking at the long term, and not the short term.

Ironically, cryptocurrency might actually help us to shift our POV. It is _already_ re-defining the whole concept of money. It isn't a stretch to see that it just might be a catalyst for alternative energy.

If I owned Bitcoin, and even though I don't...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I owned Bitcoin, I'd keep an eye on gold. Bitcoin up massively, gold and other commodities languishing today. It's too early to tell, but what they call a "pair trade" might be setting up. Even if you own no Bitcoin you can participate in one side by buying gold; but timing is everything. The real windfall comes to those who carefully observe these things and sell or short the rising thing while buying the thing that was falling. Since gold and BTC both tap into that whole "vote against the system" mentality, they are similar but obviously not the same. I think we're still in the early stages of this, and I don't own any gold or BTC now. IMHO, it's too early to short BTC and too late to hop the train--these things are just crazy mad unpredictable. At some point though people have to realize that you can't get several hundred dollar moves up every day. This could be just like dot-com, when I was looking at dividend paying stocks with double-digit yields and scratching my head. I really wish I had had enough to make that play...

I smell a rat

[Anonymous Coward]

Government's going after Bitcoin hard now. The FED can't have competition. They're bringing in the liberal religion of climate change to fight it. So predictable, yet so effective. Suggest a link to climate change and you have your raving and frothing hoard ready to storm the castle.

Bullshit...

[jwhyche]

Bullshit!.

Normally I would try to justify my comment, but I think my statement covers it just fine.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

About the usual quality of your posts.
Limited understanding of the topic but fingers that just need to type something anyway.

Re:Bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

An yet hs post start out at +3, 60% of his posts reach +4 and 30% reach +5.

Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

No one in this thread has a fucking clue what they are talking about.

All of your premises are wrong.

No bitcoin is not anonymous.

No each transaction doesn't cost what you think it costs. When a block is mined, it covers all transactions since the last block. This article implies that sending someone a faction of a bitcoin = 1 transaction, which is ridiculous.

Look at the hashrate growth since 2011 in the graph from TFA. Exponential my ass.

I read this thread looking for some sense, but obviously TFA and all the ACs are posting out of their ass without even understanding the underlying technology.

Mindblowing.

Re:Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

> This article implies that sending someone a faction of a bitcoin = 1 transaction

That is what a transaction means, cockfag

Transaction Fees

[Dwedit]

With transaction fees over $20, there is no reason to use Bitcoin for anything other than speculation.

Re:Transaction Fees

[Anonymous Coward]

The $20 transaction fees are just morons and poorly tuned software that calculates the fee wrong. I just sent a transaction the other evening for under 50 cents and it was confirmed in minutes.

Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Breathing is the leading cause of life.

Costly

[sjbe]

I'm not about to dig into the math (just don't care that much) and I'm highly dubious of what I've read regarding power consumption but if bitcoin is truly that power hungry and inefficient then it is doomed to failure. It simply will cost more than the alternatives and that matters greatly. Sure some people can make some profits playing a game of who's the greater fool but that is a bubble that will pop sooner or later. It's just another tulip craze. It has to have some economic advantage over other currencies to be worth the bother in the long run to most people.

Basically some people are spending a huge amount of money trying to convert energy into bitcoin and bitcoin transactions in the hopes that the price will rise enough to make it worth the investment. Might work in the short run but there is a LOT of risk there.

"an energy suck..."

[thygate]

stopped reading right there

Not even wrong

[Hognoxious]

The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand

That's not even wrong. Exponential describes the relationship between two variables, like bacterial population and time, where the rate of change is proportional to the value itself. It makes no sense to say a single variable is exponential.

If something's big there's a word for that.

Our energy structure can't handle the load of BC..

[Anonymous Coward]

...but they want us all to switch to Electric cars?!

Maybe they shouldn't be trying to make us switch en-mass to Electric cars until we can generate enough clean energy to support Bitcoin miners first!

Because I'm pretty sure if Bitcon generation is holding back this 'switch to clean energy', I can't see how a load of electric vehicles will make this any better...

A Better Figure of Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

How much energy does it take to mine and refine an equivalent amount of gold? Or silver?

Argument Falls Apart

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument is based on the premise that more dirty coal plants will be created to meet energy demand. Today, renewable energy plants are cheaper to construct. In fact, countries like India are cancelling plans to construct coal plants, because solar is so cheap. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-solar-power-electricity-cancels-coal-fired-power-stations-record-low-a7751916.html

Bitcoin mining is increasing global energy demand, and accelerating the construction of renewable energy plants. Our clean energy future is still on track.

Steam just stopped accepting it

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to high volatility and transaction costs:
https://steamcommunity.com/gam...

How much...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the energy usage of a single multinational bank, including all branches, employee travel, etc?

Who The Fuck Gives A Shit?

[NicknameUnavailable]

Spread a few million dollars worth of Iron Oxide in the South Pacific and it will generate a new ice age, use less than a few million dollars worth of Iron Oxide and get a nice cool climate. Shit isn't rocket science, embrace your Humanity: the first step is to stop bitching and moaning; the second step is to do something useful. Regulating vast industries and enacting idiotic bans is not progress, it is anti-progress under the guise of "saving the planet" when we have well proven and much cheaper methods to not only reverse any warming, but to outright cool shit down so we can burn more coal if we want to. Stop being a bunch of reactionary retards lead around by globalist control freaks with financial skin in the game using you to quell their competition and gain dominance, this is not a complex problem.

It's not Bitcoin...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. it's the energy demand. Bitcoin is just the current demand vector. The basic problem to be solved is replicating the energy density and trans portability of fossil fuels in some other form. Until the massive density advantage in FF is no longer unique, expect FF to carry the day.

Re:Bitcoin controllable, reality didn't follow des

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah but 70% in one nation means the remaining 30% of the hash has the political power to survive the hardfork that counters abuse of the blockchain.

*sigh*

[Trogre]

I don't like saying "I told you so". So I won't. I'll just sit back and quietly shake my head.

This is *exactly* the future us tech-savvy people saw for bitcoin from the moment of its launch.

How about another currency

[Anonymous Coward]

We should make a new currency called carboncoin. All you have to do is mine it from the air.

Re:Hashing here to stay, Blockchain not so certain

[Anonymous Coward]

To be clear, while bitcoin has many design flaws and problems and may very well be displaced by a different digital currency in the not so distant future, the blockchain is likely here to stay. But the blockchain and bitcoin are two very different things. Bitcoin is nothing more than one user of blockchain technology, blockchain technology could care less about bitcoin or any particular cryptocurrency.

Is blockchain anything more than one user of hashing technology?

We are all mad as hatters (mad I say, maaadddddd!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Call it a sign of the insanity of the Human species that we would ever, even for a moment, consider the expenditure of energy in the production of an utterly fictitious currency. It really is utter madness. I would suggest legally banning them world-wide, but since they don't actually exist, that's a pretty difficult thing to do: Person A "believes" this (completely fictional) "blabberdood" is worth seventeen actual goats. Person B, who owns the goats also believes this and exchanges the blabberdood for his seventeen goats, even though the blabberdood doesn't exist. How do we legislate against insanity, or against the exchange of the concept of the blabberdood? It's enough to make any rational person's head hurt. Of course many of these same arguments could be said about any currency not backed directly by some kind of physical item (gold, blabberdoods, whatever).

Rx. Carbon Tax

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, the Euros are out in front here. We (USA) need to stop electing Republican presidents.

Re:Bitcoin controllable, reality didn't follow des

[Trogre]

Bitcoin was designed so that individuals and their computers did the mining. Instead we have mining performed by exotic and expensive ASIC hardware that it under the control of only a few.

If this site is still News For Nerds (and not Echo Chamber For Morons), then there won't be a single person here who didn't see that logical conclusion coming from the very start.

Nonetheless, a huge improvement!

[Anonymous Coward]

The value in Bitcoin is ultimately derived from the fact that it is a decentralised, trustless protocol. We use Bitcoin because humans cannot be trusted, because governments are quick to impose overbearing restrictions on the use of money, because central banks can be relied upon to debase or inflate any money they issue. If there was no such thing as AML, if one could open a bank account with nothing more than a public key, if money printers could be trusted to maintain a 100% gold backing long term, and if bank account records were kept completely private, then there would be much less interest in Bitcoin.

Yes, it consumes a lot of energy, but the alternative is a world of financial mass surveillance, a world of reduced freedom and greater poverty.

That may be so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. "

Still sucks less than a certain greenish-grey fiat currency that the Fed will eventually decide to trash, along with hundreds of millions of lives, for the benefit of whomever their buddies are.

This article is FUD

[mysidia]

As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called "mining") get more and more difficult

Sorry.... the article contains an outright lie, and an outright deception that traditional Banking networks don't have energy costs. The mining problem does not become more complicated or require more computing power "As bitcoin grows" (Or because) ----- the difficulty of mining scales with the available hashrate, and the current hashrate is AMPLE for the needs of the network. Instead there's an Incentive for miners to stand up additional compute as the VALUE of 1 BTC increases relative to their costs of energy.

The hashrate thus the required compute stops growing when it becomes non-profitable to turn up new mining operations due to competition. In other words: the hashrate of BTC does not grow indefinitely ---- it's totally bogus to attribute a specific amount of energy to a transaction, the mining growth reaches a plateau when standing up more miners is no longer profitable, and increase in the number of transactions in BTC would not mean that electricity usage skyrockets.

The increase in mining observed is not because Bitcoin grows among people using and transacting in it, but when MINING becomes more profitable due to the dynamics of BTC value and energy prices --- in the long run the reward from mining will drop.

Hashing tech doesn't care, people on hash do care

[Anonymous Coward]

Is blockchain anything more than one user of hashing technology?

Hashing technology could care less about bitcoin or any particular crypto coin either.
However people on hash may care about bitcoin or any other crypto coin.

$20 a transaction

[MrL0G1C]

Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.

In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee.

Transaction cost: Fail
Blockchain size: Fail
Environmental cost: Massive fail

Bitcoin is lauded for being decentralised but soon the only people willing to host the blockchain will be big businesses.

Re:$20 a transaction

[MrL0G1C]

https://blockchain.info/charts...
https://blockchain.info/charts...

So, how is bitcoin not dead now?

http://steamcommunity.com/game...

Re: Blockchain is here to stay, bitcoin not so cer

[Anonymous Coward]

>the blockchain is likely here to stay

Someone isn't old enough or educated enough to know why permissionless distributed databases failed when we tried in the 70s. Protip: its requirements for energy and infrastructure exceed anything we can make, and outpaces Moore's Law at Usain Bolt speeds. It is wholly unsustainable

Mine tailings seem to always be polluting.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Producing bitcoins takes increasingly MORE energy; the cost is exponential, otherwise the price (in USD) would be constant or decreasing.

Think of it as mine tailings, with more tailings per unit of production as the ore runs out. B-b

Anybody who is surprised by this is a moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first learned about Bitcoin and how it worked, one of the first thoughts I had was, "This is going to consume so much energy that we will never beat global warming."

If anybody, including the designers of this travesty, is surprised by this revelation, they are fucking morons who are making the world a far worse place simply by their ignorant lumbering around.

Unfortunately, I strongly feel that applies to most of the "innovators" in the technology sector. People pushing to use AI to analyze "big data" surveillance, people pushing for software-driven cars, people who think "free speech always results in better ideas", the list is long and growing.

(In case anybody is confused by the examples, here is the short version: Universal surveillance is universally bad, AI analysis of "big data" only reinforces existing power structures, software-driven cars will kill people instead of saving them, and libertarian ideas on free speech neglect centuries of research on human psychology. If you disagree with these things, you aren't thinking deeply enough about them and frankly you are part of the problem.)

One sided argument

[XSportSeeker]

I can agree with almost everything that was presented on the argument, minus the conclusion extrapolation and title.
Put simply, it's a one side analysis of costs that cryptocurrency has. Which I agree with - cryptocurrency mining and maintenance demands computational power.

Now, let's put this in perspective with the title claims: "Cost us our clean energy future".
Here's the problem I personally have with this: cryptocurrency is there replacing something - a system, a service, a trade, the embodiment of a will... something, as it's an abstract concept. And I mean cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin, Ethereum or some other application of it.

Bitcoin mining can be seen as a side effect, or a component part of the application of the concept.

So, for such a claim, we'd need to imagine - without cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin, would we be using less power as a whole? What effects other than the draw in computer power did Bitcoin had? Because, you know, mining is just part of it. What is the future of it, and it's implications.

Personally, I don't know. It could be a complete waste of time, money and power, or the beginning of something that we'll be using in the future, perhaps not in it's current form.
And it's a one sided analysis because it's not looking at the entire effect as a whole, which is admitedly hugely complicated to do. Let's pick another one sided aspect of it: Bitcoin basically fuels an entire black market economy in the dark web. What was the power consumption of the methods it replaced?

Which is to say, the title claim seems presumptuous. Most of the content is ok though.

Stretching some parallels here, but just to make myself clearer - is nuclear fusion research costing us our clean energy future too?

The simple truth is ...

[Qbertino]

... if Bitcoin is cryptographically safe, then transfer and validation at a mass scale will be so expensive that one might as well ditch the crypto part entirely and validate with simple crypto against some neutral central system.

Building something of such a digital currency including the infrastructure needed to handle it at mass scale would be cheaper faster and maybe even safer, considering how many parts of the distributed system are losing Bitcoin due to hacks and failures.

Wrong Again - Real Power Analysis Of Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has it all wrong, again.

Here's a great write-up on precisely how and why this "Bitcoin isn't green" narrative is false - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-29/about-sensationalist-bitcoin-electrical-consumption-story

"And so, um, bitcoin mining is a threat to the planet because it consumes less than 1% of all the electricity squandered by appliances and devices on stand-by? If we want to stop wasting so much energy, perhaps we should start by mandating near-zero stand-by power consumption for the hundreds of millions of devices which are not in use that are nonetheless sucking up electricity every second of every day."

Tempest in a teacup, yet again. I miss the old days when Slashdot actually would analyze statements in its articles, now its all about ad-clicks.

Basically....

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's not so much mining, as it is cryptographic wanking.

Is this true?

[HellCowboy]

"Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day."

I have trouble believing this... Can someone shed a light on this please?

Destroy it?

[ebvwfbw]

Wondering how long it'll take before governments decide it's a threat and round up all the servers (because their location isn't a secret) at the same time and destroy them. I'm talking Hillary Clinton's e-mail type destroy them (no fuckin' way you'll get it back, they're bleached good)!

Poof, all gone. "crypto currencies", which aren't really crypto currencies are gone for good.