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Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.

You are assuming that mining for crypto is a useful thing to begin with. Not everyone agrees with you. And many here in Iceland are not enamoured with the idea that we should build more damns and loose more waterfalls so some people can get rich off speculation. Even if it is more eco friendly than people getting rich off speculation in China.

You are assuming people will stop mining if this is banned in Iceland. That's just not how it works.

Feel free to like or dislike cryptocurrency mining (I too believe it to be a waste of energy -- but that's not the point), but it's likely not going away. So you want the "green" efforts to be as cheap and efficient as possible, if you want to outcompete the less eco friendly alternatives.

Judging from your comment Im assuming you do not live in Iceland, apologies if Im wrong.

The reality is that there are only a handful of energy providers in Iceland capable of providing the energy at this scale, Landsvirkjun being the largest (by far).

These companies are either government owned or very sensitive to political realities, and will stop selling energy to mining centers if the pressure becomes strong enough.

You're right, I do not. Sure, but these companies would just relocate again?

I don't see how that fixes things at the global level (aside from them leaving Iceland and relocating somewhere else, of course).

Now they might at least be paying taxes and generating some jobs.

If it wasn't used for mining, where would the excess power go?

Why would bitcoin be harder to ban than filamentary lightbulbs? You think they can lobby harder than the transport industry that would gain from the distraction?

How do you feel about other energy intensive industries, e.g. aluminium smelting? Does Iceland not profit from selling energy to industrial customers? Why would you assume they are not doing the same with miners?

When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead. How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?

> How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?

How much banker do you need per transaction? With modern banking, most everything uses as few humans as possible (if not simply because they're slow).

> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead.

Do you happen to have any sources for this? I wasn't able to find much after a quick google search.

Is this true? If so let's see some evidence. Common sense tells me it won't be true, by some orders of magnitude.

> How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?

If we had more automation and fewer banking jobs, beef consumption would go down because the former bankers would vanish into thin air?

Crypto can't even do a single transaction using beef for energy.

> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead

Visa: 3.1 billion cards; $8.9 trillion in transactions in 2016; 65,000 transactions per second capacity.

Bitcoin is a very sad joke compared to just Visa. The global banking system is a marvel of efficiency by comparison.

Bitcoin is consuming as much electricity as the Czech Republic or Switzerland and half as much as the Netherlands.

Dollar for dollar, the global banking system is using less than 1% of the electricity that Bitcoin is.

Citation needed.

Banking provides a number of services and employs a bunch of other peoples. Sending money from a to be is just one of the things it does.

Whether you like crypto or not, other people will mine it.

Don’t the miners pay tax in your country?

Why do I keep on hearing this fallacious argument? The existence, or even the inevitability of something, does not only this something should be legalized.

Following you argument, whether you like it or not, people will commit homicide. Let’s regulate it!

> But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm, but in case it's not the cost of opportunity here is the main issue. Imagine all that computer power applied to protein folding simulation, to name a simple, useful-for-everyone task.

The comment seemed pragmatic. Coins will be mined regardless of whether it makes sense: it's better if it's done more ecologically as long as coins will be mined.

If individuals rather spend their money on mining coins that's fine, but building an entire industry spending the finite resources of the Earth dedicated to breaking pointless hashes seems pretty idiotic from a pure survival standpoint.

You have a confused view of the realities of "individuals" vs "industry".

You would think someone would have by now invented a crypto currency who’s token is a correctly folded protein.

There’s probably a rule, or law, or some such, that predicts if I do an internet search for this I will find it is already a thing.

I saw a talk by researcher in the UK who has been toying around with the concept of cryptocurrencies with useful proof-of-work schemes.

Mirror of Faye's talk slides here: https://yadi.sk/d/8ezgDZvO3PLZ6C

Sadly, the reason PoW works as a way to provide a trustless system that functions as long as 51% of the power is neutral, the solution has to be completely random and unpredictable. Otherwise the operator with the most powerful rig would outperform everyone else often enough for the system to be susceptible to bad actors.

It is not sufficient for the PoW just to be extremely hard.

> a simple, useful-for-everyone task.

... but not a profitable one, thus few will do it. Bitcoin incentivises "useful-for-everyone" tasks (mining), which makes people do it.

If you give people as much or more money for protein folding as for mining bitcoin they'll probably do that.

Yeah, and imagine if all that GPU power used by gamers was used for protein-folding.......yeah, this was sarcasm.

How is protein folding useful for everyone?

Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone? I'm assuming the results of protein folding are eventually used in the cure of disease or improvements in agriculture or something similar. At some level just the academic insights gained can be considered useful for society (which is why most countries have public funding for purely academic research, typically through Universities).

>Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone?

Answer is clearly no. Nothing benefits everyone.

I think in this context "everyone" would mean "society" or "community", not "every individual". The original proposition was that crypto-mining could be done with the proof-of-work (or whatever the logic is) having some general benefit to society beyond the pure profit motive of the individual doing the mining.

Mining bitcoin in Iceland hasn't stopped bitcoin mining in China with coal though, has it? So what does that matter?

Assuming that higher supply of Bitcoin means lower price (a dangerous assumption for anything with such a heavily speculation-driven price, I know) then that lower price should presumably mean lower production of Bitcoin in China, maybe only modestly lower.

What happens is the difficulity rate increases and the power required to mine the next coin increases and China's miners requires more coal. Iceland's clean energy has a dirty by-product.

Not necessarily. If clean energy in Iceland is cheaper than coal in China and can grow indefinitely, increasing the difficulty may push the Chinese miners out of the market, stopping all coal-using crypto-currency mining.

Not sure why they downvoted this. This is an accurate comment.

"and can grow indefinitely" It's accurate only given this flawed assumption.

It's accurate if both of its big assumptions are true, which seems unlikely given how inexpensive coal is and the relative levels of corruption and tolerance for environmental damage between China and Iceland.

Presuming the antecedant.

Clean energy can not grow indefinitely in Iceland, there is only so much water falling so many meters. There may be other methods involving steam and earth warmth that Iceland may be uniquely competitive in, but that is going to require the invention of new technologies and processes.

Well at the same time it out competes other miners, so may reduce greenhouse gas emissions on net.

Maybe this is why we haven’t heard from advanced alien civilisations: they’ve all extinguished their suns in an effort to mine the next block, thereby rapidly rendering their whole civilisation extinguished.

Of course, any sufficiently advanced civilisation that can build a Contraption to extract all the energy from s star should also be advanced enough to build a computer model complex enough to reveal the secrets of warp drive, but didn’t because they were too busy mining crypto.

But it's not higher supply, since the network enforces a limit of 1 block every 10 min.

Bitcoin does not scale, it's just people reaching for a smaller part of the pie that, for pretty purely speculative reasons, still cost a lot.

It is like people around the world paying for steam in Iceland.

YOU think that, not Icelanders. Hydropower has its major issues and thermal also has its own. So this is the classic "not in my backyard." Also, what good is it if an industry builds up, cities spring up as a results...and then it collapses?

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