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Bitcoin Mining Now Accounts For Almost One Percent of the World's Energy Consumption (theoutline.com)
It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining -- aka, donating one's computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a chance to win some free crypto -- uses a lot of electricity. Companies involved in large-scale mining operations know that this is a problem, and they've tried to employ various solutions for making the process more energy efficient. But, according to testimony provided by Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, no matter what you do to make cryptocurrency mining harware greener, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall network's flabbergasting energy consumption. From a report: Instead, Narayanan told the committee, the only thing that really determines how much energy Bitcoin uses is its price. "If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used," he told the committee. "Little else matters. In particular, the increasing energy efficiency of mining hardware has essentially no impact on energy consumption." In his testimony, Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day (in May, estimates of Bitcoin power consumption were about half of that). He adds that when you've got a computer racing with all its might to earn a free Bitcoin, it's going to be running hot as hell, which means you're probably using even more electricity to keep the computer cool so it doesn't die and/or burn down your entire mining center, which probably makes the overall cost associated with mining even higher.
After the upcoming cryptocurrency crash, small energy sources all over the place will be freed up for local use. Graphics cards are already becoming available again.
I can fix this problem with just 1.21 gigawatts and my flux capacitor.
Great!
"It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining -- aka, donating one's computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a chance to win some free crypto -- uses a lot of electricity." Not quite. No one is using their computer to mine bitcoin. That hasn't been profitable in many years. People are using dedicated highly specialized hardware that can do nothing else except mine, ASIC, application specific integrated circuit. This isn't really donating your computer power since these ASICs can do absolutely nothing else. "Computing power" implies something a little more general purpose.
First: "Gigawatt" is not a quantity, it's a rate. You don't use "gigawatts each day". You probably mean GWh (gigawatt-hours).
Anyway, there are really two inputs to the mining equation. The first is electricity cost per hour of mining operation and the second is cryptocurrency value produced per hour of mining operation.
Making mining more efficient will *increase* mining activity, at least until the market adjusts. (Because, the value of cryptocurrency produced per hour is directly influenced by how much mining hardware is in use network-wide). More efficient mining equipment reduces the electricity cost, therefore mining is more profitable, therefore it is done more. In no way would making mining equipment more efficient make the network use less electricity.
Besides, there's a fundamental limit at work here... the reason that mining is electrically and computationally expensive is explicitly intended. The only reason the network works is because it is expensive and time-consuming to mine. That's the security mechanism that makes the thing work, and the core concept behind the blockchain.
People are starving as people grow tulips instead of food. Meanwhile in crypto land precious rare earth metals have been wasted producing gpus and asics to feed the money factories, which will be useless when the difficulty rises again.
Bitcoin is as fake as the economy it is based ion.
And this guy is easily identifiable thru his little footprints.
Please do not enlighten him, he will only use it against you.
CAP === 'disguise'
If the world got its energy as cheap as the BTC miners must be getting it for, the whole world could run on the budget of CA.
let's keep the crypto, it's way more energy efficient than all parasitic banks
Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day
I've been searching all my life, and I have yet to find a single news article from any source that manages to discuss the fundamental physical concepts of energy, power and time without erroneously jumbling them all together.
What does this mean?
It uses 5GW? Or it uses 5GWh per day?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
After the upcoming cryptocurrency crash, small energy sources all over the place will be freed up for local use. Graphics cards are already becoming available again.
Graphics card have not been able to mine bitcoin for many years. GPUs are only able to mine some alternative cryptocurrencies. And as these "alts" get popular they sometimes follow the bitcoin path and end up being mined by ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) hardware. GPU mining is relatively insignificant compared to bitcoin mining.
The "other" significant cryptocurrency, ethereum, one that GPUs were able to profitably mine this last year, is planning on moving from a proof-of-work scheme to a proof-of-stake scheme for maintaining its block chain and rewarding the miners/forgers who do so. This is in part to avoid the power demands but also to allow ordinary users to help maintain the blockchain with ordinary computers.
Right now bitcoin has deviated from its design and its security has been compromised by not having ordinary people maintain the blockchain with ordinary computers, by no longer having a decentralized system. By evolving to an ASIC system mining has become more centralized, both in terms of large commercial operations where a 51% cartel is more plausible and geographically by have the vast majority of mining located in a single country. A country not known for a hands off approach to economic matters.
That's 1 degree on your thermostat.
Electricity is not the only form of energy....
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin
vastly more energy needed than visa. vastly less transactions than visa.
Mmmm global warming to create nothing.
In a given pace of hardware, performance does not scale linearly with electricity consumed. Higher clocks consume progressively more energy. So a producer will pick a clock such that the performance boost of the last bump exactly matched the marginal increase of electric consumption. However a sustainable operation needs an average marginal cost far below that to pay for fixed and capital costs.
And this also ignore difference proof systems a crypto can use.
If Climate change wasn't a worry the this topic wouldn't even be worth discussing. Unfortunately it is and cryptocurrency mining is just making things slightly worst
Really really?
I mean I mean really really?
Most gold that is mined is not used. It's just stored.
What resources are used to mine the ~80% of gold which is not used?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How much does traditional banking use combined? That's a lot of debit machines running...
I can transfer money from my bank to anyone else in the UK with a bank account quickly and for free. I can withdraw cash from thousands of cash machines for free. I can buy from millions of merchants for free.
Bitcoin - Free? Fast? Energy efficient? Decentralised?
No, no, no and no (blockchain size).
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
because there's nobody we can trust. What a sad, sad commentary on our society.
Making computing more greener or efficient can't change fundamentals for competition to get the next few coins. Ditto if same model is used for transactions, though maybe not the same.
Same with any other cryptocurrency using similar distributed model becoming popular!
Greenland Ice is already breaking apart. Irreversible damages are happening each year that now passes.
Can we round up all the journalists who cannot keep "energy" and "power flow" straight? Actually, find out which ones actually understand the notion of "first derivative", and to be really squishy-soft generous, they'd only have to get examples of change-over-time, which are most of them in journalism. Economics is riddled with them, and then there's climatology.
Anyway, round 'em all up and redirect them to a more appropriate profession, perhaps shoe sales or real estate development. Because if you can't understand that "five gigawatts" is a rate of energy flow (per second) and cannot be combined with the words "per day", you should not be writing for newspapers.
Oh, and you can't comment on climatology issues in any way unless you can explain "second derivative" clearly, and not just with time-based examples. This would not rule out lots of people on the other (wrong) side of the debate from myself, but it would mean at least the debates were not hopelessly stupid.
Exactly. There is literally no way that that number is correct; in fact there is literally no way to derive a number at all, so any number asserted is bullshit.
... you can't send tulip bulbs over the Internet.
How about comparing the wars and suffering financed by bankers with this magic fiat money?
Fiat money saved Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram from closing.
Impersonating me? Get a life already, freak!!!
APK
P.S.=> Unbelievable anyone wastes their life & time the way you do impersonating me & for what? Does it STOP me from posting?? No... apk
You are most likely paying a monthly subscription for your bank account. And your cards? Also, merchants accepting your cards probably have to pay 2% on each transaction - of course, you are the one paying in then end. You are probably spending 2% of your yearly income on bank fees and it is not âoefreeâ.
You literally don't know how to use the word literally.
Do the math
Can you say "AGW"? Sure you can.
While I don't actually think AGW is more than a manufactured emergency (it could have been solved with nuclear power 40 years ago, and could still be solved within a couple decades by a combination of nuclear baseload and solar peakload), 1% of our energy usage is a helluvalot of CO2 created for no useful purpose....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What the hell is "five gigawatts per day"? Is that like 120 gigawatt-hours?
Regardless of the amount spent for the convenience, the money goes to folks that prefer corporate interests over human interests.
I'm curious if anyone has compared the cost in energy to mine an equivalent amount of gold from the ground til it's minted as a coin to the amount to generate an equivalent BTC. Or Platinum. Or Silver. That's ignoring that Gold has uses besides as a store of value or even lesser as a means of exchange. Just converting all the digging and processing work to watts makes my head spin (I barely passed Algebra). Any numbers out there? thx!
Creating an artificial resource that is based on an actual resource or resources where you need more and more actual resources to produce a smaller and smaller amount of artificial resources is self-defeating.
Then try transphere money from UK with your bank, and then the same way back, and check how long that takes _in days_ and how much it costs. ... or bitcoin.
There are reasons for moneygram western union and transferwise
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used
Block difficulty is already used to self-regulate the timing of blocks. Difficulty correlates with energy use, and it's a proxy for the market value of the coins themselves. So if the effective difficulty is double, that means the value of the block reward in $USD is roughly double, tracking the energy needed.
This suggests an interesting secondary regulation level - the block reward could be inversely proportional to the difficulty. What this would mean is that if the energy needs double then the coins per block halves, so the total $USD value of each block is always about the same.
The layers of regulation therefore would then work like this: as the coin value increased, mining becomes more profitable, and more people mine. This then causes blocks to be generated too fast. So, the block difficulty is raised. However, the new part here is that the block reward also drops now, so that profitability drops as well. That means miners reduce their amount of mining (or inefficient miners are pushed out of the market). This then slows block production, so the difficulty is lowered again, erasing the energy-sucking effect of the coin price spike. With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.
Well they complain about 1% of energy used by bitcoin but do not recommend people to stay at home because tourism uselessly spends 8% of energy.
You just have to say "gigawatts" period. A gigawatt is a rate of power consumption. Saying "gigawatts per day" is like saying "miles per hour per day" - it makes no sense and it's not clear whether you mean gigawatts, continuously, or maybe you mean gigawatt-hours per day.
1%, think about that, of 7+ billion on earth it's using 1% of the energy to generate itself, and it's not like it's solving or doing anything, just junk math to award a digital token. Distributed ledgers will change the world and are great, but this is senseless waste when an equally secure non-'mined' digital currency could be made with all the same qualities(finite, independent, uncorruptible ).
Have you ever had a bank account? First off any bank or financial institution is required by law to reveal any service charges attached to any transactions they provide. The FDIC insures personal bank deposits up to $250,000. Cryptocurrency operates without any regulations or regulatory requirements. Some hacks your bitcoins then you have no recourse to either tracking or recovery of the stolen bitcoins.
"there are reasons for moneygram western union and transferwise ... or bitcoin."
Yes these services are for people who do not have or want a bank account and these alternatives all have fees attached. And banks for go charging any transaction fees if you maintain a certain balance in your account. It's usually around $5000. And even if you cannot meet that requirement you can still conduct transactions without incurring any costs. Banks and Credit Unions attach no costs to e-payment transactions. If your bank or credit unit is charging for these type of transactions find another bank or credit union. And I can transfer money directly from my bank account to any financial institution or individual that accepts such transfers. I do not pay any transaction fees but depending on your account balance the transactions charges for transferring money are low and you usually have a choice depending on when you want the money to get to it's final location. Within 24 hours, 1 - Business day, or 3- Business days are usually your options. Playing the great bitcoin pyramid scheme is a sucker bet. There is nothing protecting you from losing every single penny you have spent. If your only using it because you want to remain anonymous than that's your business. But I will let you in on a little secret. Unless you are moving around millions of dollars with questionable transactions no one gives two shits about anything you do whether you are standing in the middle of the street shouting out the inequities in life or hiding in your parents basement. All this talk about anonymity is just another way for some people to believe their lives are noteworthy enough for anyone to care about there dreary lives.
> Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day
5GW/day is about 57.9K Joules per second per second, which represents a rate of change of power consumption. If this is true then by the end of the year most of the worlds electricity is going to be used for "mining" Bitcoin!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Bitcoin is as fake as the economy it is based ion.
Bitcoin is fake BECAUSE it is not based on any economy!
For any currency that is based on an economy ("fiat currency") , its value as a currency is as good as its central bank is good at figuring out the total value, month after month, of the goods and services that currency trades for and adjusting the money supply to match. Bitcoin is not working as a currency because now that all coins that are mineable with realistically available amounts of energy have already been mined, its supply has become fixed. This has caused it to disappear from circulation as people use it as a virtual investment rather than a currency.
This means 75% of all food he eats is imported, which in turn means
the GBP he pays for the food must be converted to EUR, for which someone pays the bank 4% which means
3% of his food bill goes to the bank AND
the country has to export the value of that food (mostly through soliciting foreign investment in over-priced property and the bank takes 4% of that to convert the EUR back to GBP - SO
The bank gets 6% of the value of the food he eats ON TOP OF the 2% it takes when he pays for the food.
And the clever thing (from the bank's point of view) is: this also applies to pretty much everything else he buys except the rent - but of course, if he has a mortgage, the bank is probably taking about 5% of that as interest too.
But never fear, the government is probably taking 20% VAT on most stuff he buys AND 30% in income tax and national Insurance on what he is paid.
So, in summary:
If he lives in the UK, he is (financially) stuffed, regardless of Bitcoins! (Takes one to know one). But, don't worry, it will be way worse after Brexit, when he will pay WTO tariffs of, on average 50% tax on anything he even thinks of buying. Get the facts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svwslRDTyzU&t=3s
Disclaimer: If I was a Russian troll, all the above figures would be even worse!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous waste of energy. There is an energy business conspiracy theory lurking here somewhere.
Greed is the root of all evil.
It should be variable. Bitcoin inflates over 10 millions dollars a day in new bitcoin (1800 bitcoin) and almost 4 Billion Dollars a year of new bitcoin. All this article tells me that 10 million dollars a day buys 1% of the world's energy consumption for the day.
Bitcoin is as fake as the economy it is based ion.
Bitcoin is fake BECAUSE it is not based on any economy!
Any currency is worth what you can buy with it. And therefore, Bitcoin is most definitely not fake, because you can indeed buy stuff with it, including other currencies on Forex. It is harder to find vendors who accept Bitcoin, but they do exist.
Once I heard an expert on NPR say that Bitcoin is a collective hallucination that some abstract concept has some kind of value. But he then pointed out that all currencies are a collective hallucination that some abstract concept has some kind of value.
For any currency that is based on an economy ("fiat currency") , its value as a currency is as good as its central bank is good at figuring out the total value, month after month, of the goods and services that currency trades for and adjusting the money supply to match.
I think you're confusing monetary value with monetary policy. Central banks control money supply by printing or removing currency from the market, or adjusting interest rates. They don't determine the value that money trades for in goods and services. The market does that.
And fiat currency is based on the faith and credit of the issuer (i.e., the central bank) not the economy in which it is used. That just means a $100 bill printed by the government will remain worth $100. What that $100 can buy for you can, and does, fluctuate.
Bitcoin is not working as a currency because now that all coins that are mineable with realistically available amounts of energy have already been mined, its supply has become fixed. This has caused it to disappear from circulation as people use it as a virtual investment rather than a currency.
You have a point. Bitcoin, unlike other currencies, is not being used to nearly the same extent as other currencies for investing and commerce. Nobody is issuing stock certificates, bonds, mortgages, or other financial instruments denominated in Bitcoin. (There is a futures market for it, but even that's in USD.) Rather, Bitcoin itself is the investment. But it is also true for all currencies that only a fraction of outstanding units are exchanged regularly. The remainder are sitting somewhere, in bank accounts, business equity, real estate, and other assets.
Disclosure: IANAE. I welcome correction.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Is there any human invention that will not be used to mess up our planet?! Even effing space exploration, the most noble of pursuits, is descending into an extreme sport for bored billionaires.
Bitcoin is constantly disappointing its fans as a currency because the wildly fluctuating daily price dissuades merchants from using it. A currency is supposed to buy about the same today as it did yesterday. Long-term changes in value are acceptable to currency users so long as the day-to-day fluctuations are reasonable.
Other cryptos attract some merchant interest in their early stages, when new coins are easy to mint. But as soon as the mining effort required starts ramping up, users begin hoarding the coin because it's "going up." As soon as his happens, merchants stop taking it as currency.
Now for the big picture: after this happens to Bitcoin and then the next two or so popular replacements, merchants initially interested in crypto find themselves right back where they started: an endless proliferation of new currencies whose value is God knows what. Why bother with crypto for transactions when there is no single standard that works well and has a constant value?
You are wrong. Banks do charge transactions fees. Every payment to a merchant has transaction fees associated with it. International payments also incur transaction fees. Sometimes, payments to other banks also incur fees. Finally, you probably pay a subscription to your bank for your accounts, your cards and website access.
Much more energy is used for porn distribution, storage and consumption. Plenty of other non-essential human things too.
bitcoin doesn't matter; if the energy wasn't used for that it'd be used for something else
except you'll note that article states a much smaller amount of electricity used by Bitcoin than the sensational nonsense of this article.
Claiming 1 percent of is bullshit, a lie
the overhyped energy consumption claims against bitcoin have been debunked already.
it's a fool's investment vehicle, and very il-liquid so not a "money", and I wouldn't waste the power mining since it could go to near zero in a heartbeat...
but it doesn't take that much power, IEEE spectrum article decrying the waste says it might take as much as Denmark by 2020...
tiny power consumption
I wonder what the upper bound is. 1% is not bad. A small price to pay if it really frees us from financial tyranny. Let's not pretend that there's not cost to fiat currency. Please. Everything has cost. Let's be honest. I still think decentralized and independent is way better, not tied to national interests. But I should let the naysayers keep going. That way I can buy it up on the cheap.
He's referring to the UK, where all banks provide fast domestic transfers and atm withdrawals...
Most consumer bank accounts are also free, so chances are this guy is not paying anything for the services he describes.
Business bank accounts often charge fees, and there are some premium accounts which give you additional services for a fee, but the basic standard bank accounts are free.
Merchants paying a fee to accept cards is normal, taking cash is not free either... It costs money to have stocks of small change, it costs to transport your takings to the bank, plus the risk of theft or losses. In many cases, the 2% card fee is actually cheaper than the cost of accepting cash and there aren't many alternatives to these two. It's a cost of doing business.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Greedy fucks that donâ(TM)t mind screwing the rest of us.
Anyone can see real value. How does it feed you when hungry.how many tomatoes can it be traded for.what value (other uses does it have?) Does it give you pleasure like a new car?
Bitcoin disapers without power .
Ask rothschild how much bitcoin he has.
Fiat dollar can be traded for gold and silver? The Wiz floats dollar on myth.
FUD
I feel like most of these comments / responses are probably from trolls, either to be inflammatory, or perhaps funded by traditional reserve banks. Yeah, gold. But the first comparison I thought of was: traditional banks. There must be tens of thousands of them globally, and many of them probably have multiple data centers, they definitely all have many office spaces and branches. I really doubt bitcoin consumes a tenth as many resources. I saw someone mentioning GPUs being available 'after the crash'. I thought ASIC chips have been used for like 5 or 7 years? Bitcoin is a great idea compared to gold, and especially what people think of now as 'cash', even if it ends up using as much energy as both - though it's certainly far from it. The 2 major concerns I have about bitcoin are: 1) the transaction fees got way too high. 2) finite number of coins(so actually there is NO [technical] inflation{what those people are incorrectly observing is dollar inflation}). I've seen talk about a 2020 fork that will double the number of coins. I feel like those couple of bitcoin derivatives, like bitcoin-cash, were like testing the waters of forking. They seemed to fail. I don't see how you could ever get such a decentralized crowd to form a critical mass of accepting any particular fork. And have a feeling the lack of inflation(due to finite number of coins) could end up causing a problem.Pretty sure inflation needs to be built in - it's at least like a flat tax on rich people (better than no tax, and better than what happens in reality {expensive accountants that actually find ways for them[rich people] to pay a lower percentage of tax than not-rich people}).
not a real article
If you're paying a monthly subscription for your bank account, that's your perplexing choice. There are tons of credit unions who'll pay you interest every month to open a free checking account.
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He's referring to the UK, where all banks provide fast domestic transfers and atm withdrawals...
Most consumer bank accounts are also free, so chances are this guy is not paying anything for the services he describes.
Business bank accounts often charge fees, and there are some premium accounts which give you additional services for a fee, but the basic standard bank accounts are free.
Merchants paying a fee to accept cards is normal, taking cash is not free either... It costs money to have stocks of small change, it costs to transport your takings to the bank, plus the risk of theft or losses. In many cases, the 2% card fee is actually cheaper than the cost of accepting cash and there aren't many alternatives to these two. It's a cost of doing business.
I do not know the UK market but over here in Belgium many banks charge for it - up to 150 EUR / year.
(https://www.expatica.com/be/finance/Banks-in-Belgium_741553.html)
I also understand that card payments could be simpler and cheaper, but especially for larger businesses. A bank study I was reading focused on how much working time you save by replacing cash payments with cards. (I apologize for the lack of reference) They were not writing that, while you could save x minutes daily for each employee handling cash, for many small businesses, this would not translate into any real savings, as in many cases they could not reduce their staff or pay them a little less for that anyway. (and I have also been at large businesses where saving 1/2 hour daily for field employees was not considered useful for the same reason)
Finally, bank account fraud exists and there are many cases where banks won't reimburse customers who got cheated. (ATM fraud, invoice fraud, etc)
Good. To break the consensus algorithm, an adversary would need to gather more than 1% of the planets power consumption, as well as the hardware to run. It is utterly infeasible that anyone could do so. Bitcoin is the safest store of value humanity has ever conceived of.
No commodity that constantly rises in value can be used as a currency.
Cryptocoin don't constantly rise in value, they constantly jump madly around like giant random number generator (due to a too weird and completely unregulated market - that last part is the whole point of their decentralized system).
This make them hard (or more precisely: risky) to hoard, as in keeping them as an investment.
This don't prevent them to be used as form of payment (more precisely: a payment-over-internet-without-a-central-autority <- the whole point of their invention).
You use which ever way you want to convert you stable fiat USD into bitcoins (e.g.: you might be using a coin processor like bitpayment, but you might as well be trading them on IRC), and the marchant your buying stuff from will use which ever stuff he wants to convert them into their local stable EUR (usually some payment processor. Let's say coinbase this time, for the sake of variation).
You use only stable USD.
The marchant only use stable EUR.
the volatile BTC are only used during the transaction.
The fact that these BTC were valued at some completely different exchange rate yesterday, and will tomorrow exchange at yet another completely random rate, depending on the ups and down of that crazy market doesn't absolutely affect neither of you.
It only concerns those who are into actually trading them (payment processors, exchange platforms, traders that inversts into them, etc.)
It's still useful as a payment system over internet, and unlike old-school internet payment, there isn't a single or a few company that act as central chokepoint (unlike Visa, MasterCard, Paypal), in theory there isn't a central Bitcoin Inc. (though in practice, some mining pools are dangerously close to be able to achieve that).
It's a bit similar to what systems like SEPA/IBAN have achieved between banks (and the various system that rely on that, like the swiss Twint) : as long as both endpoint follow the same protocol, you're free to choose any endpoint of your liking, and so do the merchant. (You don't need to both be registered at paypal, or both use MasterCard).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
People who want to use bitcoin as MONEY have no problem, there's no need to invent a new coin for that.
Thing is close to no one is interested in actually using bitcoin (or any other crypto coin) as currency outside of certain people doing activities that are by and large illegal. Virtually all the interest in bitcoin is speculation in one form or another including a healthy dose of pump and dump and other fraud. Bitcoin isn't widely used as currency and is in no obvious danger of that changing any time soon.
Looks like poor retarded Alexander Peter Kowalski is mad that someone is reposting some of his antisemitic rants.
In the days of solar power and renewable resources are we really wasting THIS much energy just to make fake money? How much lazier can we get as a species? Get off your dead butts and actually EARN a living. Quit sitting around and letting everyone else do the work for you, ditch this crypto mining and use that electricity for other things that actually produce something worthwhile for society. I mean imagine how many stupid people we could sterilize with that....
The voices in my head don't like you
Have you tried to buy a GPU lately? The shelves are bare. Perhaps the big guns are using ASIC, but joe hacker is building motherboards with six nvidia cards.
... With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.
Read up on control theory... It is equilibrium or oscillation (bounded or unbounded).
(Admittedly a complete guess. I haven't attempted an expected return calculation where for instance a a one in 50 million chance for a $100 million lottery has an expected return of $2)
I have friends that regularly buy lotto tickets. I wish they would do something else with their money. Buying crypto would probably be better than lotto? How about stock options since they are just throwing their money away? How about that inflated normal stock that keeps growing because of "greater fool"?
A friend who has bought lotto for 30 years at the rate of $10 a week / $500 a year would have saved $15000 (without interest) in 30 years. That could be $50,000 with even a low return like an S&P index fund.
4% Get real, I pay 1% currency spread+fee, big businesses will pay far less. And I try to purchase locally grown food. Your figures are pie in the sky.
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Ps, when I want to look at exchange rates I look at:
https://www.oanda.com/currency...
That's inter-bank rates, look at the spreads. Big businesses will get closer to this than anything you mentioned.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.