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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale".

A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1].

Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT to allow for situations in which a limited amount of energy could be expended to either increase the hashrate further or to get closer to the limits of computation [2].

Edit 2: the more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the Universal Paperclips game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

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Arthur C. Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God

"overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

> Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

I'm sorry I didn't understand this. Could you explain?

The parent postulates that a "Nakamoto" type 2 civilization will convert all the energy of its star into heat doing bitcoin calculations. Such a star would disappear from visual light (Dyson sphere stuff). The Clarke story is about a religion that uses a computer to calculate all the names of god, bringing about the end of the universe. The story ends with stars disappearing. Both have big computers doing math that results in stars disappearing from the sky.

The joke is that rather than calculating the names of god, maybe we will end the universe by finally getting to the end of bitcoin calculations.

You need to read the short story referenced above to understand the context.

Can we please start regulating crypto currency mining? This is insane. I think it needs to be global mining regulation. Can the UN do anything else? If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency. Not ok. I know this is controversial but we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.

I would like to ask you why start with cryptocurrencies, that only account for 0.6% of world energy consumption, when we can dream big and tackle the issue once and for all by banning air travel. BOOM! In a heartbeat you are consuming -20% of world energy. Or why don't we ban actual mining? Another 10% plus reduction of unspeakable crimes perpetrated daily on vulnerable people.

Why cryptocurrencies of all the energy hungry sectors? There are way lower hanging fruits than crypto.

The difference is that air travel is at least useful.

You regulate the fiat onroads.

If miners cannot sell their coins, they can't pay the electricity bills.

Bitcoin will always be around, but with sufficient fiat blockages the value plummets.

Governments should announce that people will have a year to sell all their coins (the price will tank immediately anyway), and then buying and selling of PoW coins will be banned.

If you think "lack of electricity" is going to stop bitcoin mining, you are mistaken. You are just hoping for doom on an asset you don't understand or don't like, it's just not a good way to argue against something.

> we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.

Are you Kim Stanley Robinson? If you aren't you'll enjoy his latest novel "Ministry for the Future", which follows the line you describe and posits a post-apocalyptic future with less machine labour and more manual labour, abandonment of air travel, no meat consumption by humans, a solar array covering much of India, etc. He then proposes replacing Proof of Work with Proof of Carbon Sequestration.

---

Aside: MftF is, to me, an appalling unscientific low effort bit of propaganda (at least for the first 60 chapters) but perhaps there is a way to steelman KSR's theses.

The entire purpose of cryptocurrencies that they and their economies cannot be regulated by any government. A regulated cryptocurrency is just fiat with more steps and a contradiction in terms.

What about mining? We regulate gold / silver mining. Why not crypto mining? It consumes more energy than the gold or silver mining industries. https://coincentral.com/bitcoin-mining-trumps-gold-mining-en...

That's not going to stop organized crime or states that want to leverage influence over Bitcoin. Regulating the mining of physical materials is easier because governments can directly control the mines and regulate shipping and industries, etc. But even then, mining is full of cartels, slavery and blood money.

Unfortunately, I think the only thing that's going to stop Bitcoin mining is the laws of physics.

Do you have any reason to feel so despondent without any real evidence? There's already plenty of people mining with renewable/stranded energy sources, all mining will head this way. My prediction is that the "energy consumption" arguments against bitcoin will disappear in 5 years.

People are gonna tell us (bitcoiners) that the USD is secured by the powerful military of US behind it and we're supposed to accept it as a positive, but if we say that we're going to use electricity to secure the network with nothing but math and computation, we're instantly hated by the same people. What gives?

How can you be ok with wars and threats of violence to enforce the value of a currency, but not computation and electricity? I just don't understand it.

You are trying to brush off criticism with a red herring. The US military doesn’t secure USD... and we need to have a conversation about energy consumption and Bitcoin. We need to regulate mining for it the same way we regulate other mining on the planet. Physical or digital or still uses energy and we need to have a conversation and look at options. Not just dismiss critics for pointing out the obvious.

> The US military doesn’t secure USD

The dollar is literally backed by the extraction and sale of oil (for dollars), which itself is enforced by the largest consumer of oil in the world, the U.S. military, and they secure the trade routes with their aircraft carriers and subs. It's called the petrodollar for a reason.

I'm not dismissing criticism, I'm just questioning your line of criticism. Everyone will accept a fair regulatory regime, many of you are calling for an outright banishment, that's unacceptable.

People think if you are for controlling energy consumption and regulation of cryptocurrency mining you are against cryptocurrencies themselves. That is false.

To argue with statements like this: "If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency." just sounds disingenuous, it seems like they haven't done any research whatsoever, they just woke up to this news and got outraged.

The energy consumption in clothes dryers, transportation, christmas lights etc. all will fall under "more than most countries" category. You are just constructing a narrative based attack.

Think about it like this new energy capacity is added that is sustainable but the cryptocurrency mining part of grid keeps consuming and eating more of the grid then newly added renewable capacity it would be a wash and we wouldn't achieve sustainability commitments and be able to mitigate climate change. You can't just say well if Bitcoin mining is renewable then we are ok. What about the rest of the grid? They need some of the newly added renewable capacity as well as growth continues. TLDR if new renewable capacity added is less than growth of mining and current use of mining we get no where.

* You are talking as if there is a linear scaling of how much energy is consumed by a "miner" on the fly. This is false.

* Most renewable/stranded energy mining operations have their own energy source that is not going to be shared by someone else.

* Bitcoin's energy consumption doesn't scale with the number of transactions on each block.

* Most of the bitcoin has already been mined, the incentive to "mine aggressively" is decreasing over time.

* "What if bitcoin uses all the energy", like the top poster on this thread was talking about, they were mocking it to say that all of the energy generated by the sun will be used for mining eventually, is this a fair argument? If such extremist thinking took hold, we could use it to subdue pretty much all progress. Did we think that there will be gold miners digging up land everywhere and we won't have a place to live?

Most of the arguments against, sound like the same arguments against things like cars (vs horses). "Do you think we'll make all those roads just for cars to go on?", "Cars don't work on dirt roads, they get stuck all the time", "What if you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere?" "You will run over people and kill them in an accident" "Cars cause pollution"

Making ones own arguments is a great idea. Mocking others is not. Re-read the site rules.

"Rules for thee, but not for me"

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435464

2. "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I simply pointed them out politely. Any sneering was entirely projected!

Bitcoin energy consumption is rising as mining is more competitive and more rewards with rising price. The consumption of bitcoin mining is increasing. Can you stay calm? I am not trying to say lets give up on cryptocurrencies I am saying we need to have serious conversations about energy consumption and controlling mining energy consumption. When people get really defensive and angry it doesn't help.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

I am calm, don't patronize me.

look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440168

They straight up want destruction, without even considering merits of the new technology.

Why don’t you start looking into how much energy is consumed by worthless things like christmas lights.

This is basically what all life does.

Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself.

Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.

Not really.

Life transforms matter and energy into increasing structure and complexity.

A classic pathological life-like process is the paperclip maximizer.

The paperclip maximizer transforms matter and energy into a regular structure of low complexity.

Crypto is one step worse than the paperclip maximizer. It converts matter and energy into pseudo-random numbers.

The only structure discernible within the randomness is the mechanism that induces organic lifeforms to work on behalf of crypto.

Now let's clippyfy the universe:

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index.html

Hear hear, can I get an amen for Komolgorov?

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C... https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...

Comparing life itself to crypto is ridiculous.

It's not, unless you think that e.g. cyanobacteria causing the Great Oxidation Event were somehow objectively more useful than cryptocurrencies.

Mind you the Great Oxidation Event wiped good chunk of life back then.

Mainly because oxygen was toxic to anaerobic life and it also oxidized methane making Earth into a snowball.

For all us, uh, air breathing mammals, yes, the great oxidation event was a great deal more useful, objectively, than cryptocurrencies.

The main point is that this hunger for resources without regard for consequences is the very core of life.

We did not exist back then. And cyanobacteria did not have a great plan of creating mammals.

Note that I qualified my statement. I didn't say that the great oxygenation event was objectively useful to the moon, I said it was objectively more useful to air breathing mammals than running difficult computations to control write access to a ledger.

The random waste from cryptocurrencies just turns into heat, so I expect it opens up ~zero new possibilities. Have fun though!

How would you even define 'more usefull' in this context?

How is cryptocurrency waste heat different from bank server waste heat? Only because crypto has a dramatically worse efficiency? I guess both my crypto wallet and my bank account are products of waste heat that produce zero new possibilities.

The comparison was to oxygen.

And then I'm separately making the claim that using proof of work won't set the stage for anything interesting in the future, no matter how much heat it generates.

"Use" is always in relation to an someone's or something's end. Without knowing what the relevant ones are, the comparison fails.

Not entirely. Energy utilization is a common proxy for technological development. If a society is plowing tons of energy into crypto mining, then by definition somebody is getting utility out of it. (Which doesn't preclude it all being a Ponzi scheme, but that's another story.)

Life, the original RNA Ponzi scheme.

Makes you wonder if there are any other RNA Ponzi schemes in the universe.

Isn't crypto ridiculous too? Rai stones look objectively more sensible and they are ridiculous.

I'm not saying the technology is ridiculous, I'm just saying the overall implementation and outcomes would look like a madness to someone from the past or indeed the future.

Rai stones are less weird than they look once you learn that some super expensive art is held in freeport warehouses and stays there even when bought and sold to different owners. Valuing a painting you own but never see at millions of dollars that gets bought and sold to others who never see it isn’t that much different than saying a certain immobile Rai stone is worth X of Y.

Cryptocurrency is more ridiculous than both of the above, imo. Rai stones can be used as material, art can be looked at and enjoyed, cryptocurrency is random numbers controlling access to a ledger.

absolutely. as the far west was incredibly ridiculous. this is not a cryptocurrency issue, that is humans being humans

From the outside view of an alien observer, is there any difference to us plastering mars with solar panels for crypto mining vs plastering mars with suburban developments? Would we, had we a powerful telescope pointed at a neighbouring solar system, be able to tell the difference?

Can I be clear you cannot find a clear distinction between a made up currency and places where humans live?

I can, but I'm a human. My point was: Can an outsider discern it? If they can, would they put much meaning to it?

What? Are you saying that whether aliens can make a distinction is an important part of a decision making framework?

There is a unit named after Nakamoto [1] referring to decentralization, adding another might get confusing.

[1] https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

Love "Universal Paperclips"--'completed' it multiple times in one session. It's the core game without the fluff, uselessness at its best. You've been warned:

[0] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

I am curious how long after renewable energy displaces conventional methods combined with the predicted big reduction in pricing before heat becomes the next pollution bogey.

the cheaper it gets will just increase its use which for much of the world is a great improvement in quality of life but there is always some costs involved

Renewable energy is heat-neutral, at least the solar/wind types. The electricity is created from heat. Energy in photons that would otherwise strike the planet and become heat is turned into electrical power. In converting fast moving air to slower moving air a wind turbine extracts heat from the atmosphere and turns it into electricity. So now matter how many turbines and solar panels we build, they aren't pumping out any net heat.

I believe this holds true for hydro, but not so for geothermal as it moves net heat into the biosphere.