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Comment by artpop | Hacker News Reader

Murdered with words. I have to admit to more than a little schadenfreude. Future generations would likely want to sent back time cops to arrest crypto miners for their egregious waste of energy.

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Most POW mining is powered by renewables, and the fraction that isn't is continuously motivated to power-optimize by innovating in either computing or power efficiency.

Any miners paying less or the same as the lowest have no motivation at all. And dirty energy (e.g. unscrubbed coal) or energy from backroom dealings (tons of mining arrangements in eastern Europe and China) will always outcompete any legitimate competitors using renewable.

That's like saying "Apple is already the biggest company in the world, they have no motivation at all to keep making new, good products." Obviously they are under continuous threat of not being the marginal best.

I believe it is important to look into other consensus algorithms that are not as energy heavy, but I don't think mining should be considered a crime. Also, it is important to remember that the detrimental cost of energy waste is dictated by how we are getting that energy. If the source of energy is clean, efficient and abundant then there is less need to ration our energy use.

Part of what attracted me to the concept of crypto-currency was the ability to conduct financial transactions in a medium that was not being inflated by central authorities. If it were accepted by more providers of goods and services, I wonder how the energy used to "mine bitcoin" would compare to the energy used to "run central bank offices?"

> Part of what attracted me to the concept of crypto-currency was the ability to conduct financial transactions in a medium that was not being inflated by central authorities.

* ahem *

http://tether.to/

Seriously? Are you sure they are worst "wasters" of energy on the planet right now? What about cars, and eating meat, and Christmas lights, and so on? Have you checked your own energy consumption today?

Not "worst" just "egregious". You made a strawman, down-votes incoming.

I had to look up "egregious", and as a foreign speaker, I am afraid I don't see a significant difference to "worst".

The argument made was that time travelers would go through the effort to punish miners, of all people.

There is a lot of other senseless wasting of energy going on theses days.

All these things get something in return. For all thats been spent on mining, we are getting 7 transactions per second in exchange. It is absurd.

While I agree with you, especially with the benefit of the hindsight, I used to spend many CPU cycles on SETI, looking for freaking aliens.

It's pretty hard to objectively judge what's a waste of energy.

My biggest concern is that a lot of crypto mining was and still is coal powered. I'd probably care less if it was all solar powered.

It seems to work well enough for at least some use cases, no matter how low the number of transactions. Further developments like Lightning Network are being worked on to enable other use cases.

I don't like if they burn coal for it, but there are also other energy sources, sometimes there is even spare energy that needs to be used somehow.

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