Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
it's in my head
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.
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.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Oh, you summer child. You are so naive.
Proverbs 21:19
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?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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.
If it does that in an extremely dumb and inefficient way, that's a perfectly valid reason to complain.
>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.
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).
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
Bullshit!.
Normally I would try to justify my comment, but I think my statement covers it just fine.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.