Bitcoin as a Battery

You're spot on, in fact, the superposition is key. You see, bitcoin is actually a time machine. Every block entangles itself with a coordinate in spacetime. This allows anyone in the future to relive any moment in the past by just entering the block number they want to visit.

Unfortunately, this same architecture gave birth to both artificial intelligence because of the way it mimics DNA, and a black hole. The inevitable faith of a configuration of matter permeating all spacetime is the end of the universe.

Thank you bitcoin, the worst ecological disaster, like, ever!

At least we got AI and a Blackhole.

You had me there!

It's interesting how your comment hasn't been flagged into the ground and garnered a response from dang. I guess sarcastic flamebait is OK when it agrees with the HN hivemind.

(meanwhile, my comment will be flagged in 3... 2... 1...)

I wish I could give this comment HackerNews Gold.

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party.

Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.

They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.

Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically.

I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.

I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.

I believe that this will follow the usual technobubble pattern, pump energy (money) until it blows, gather the remaining working bits on the ground afterwards and come back in 10 years.

Trusted third parties:

1. Those who wrote the encryption and understand the math (very small %).

2. Those who write the software powering the blockchain (small %)

3. Those who write the wallet software you use to use the blockchain (small %)

4. Those who build the software you use on the same platform you use your wallet.

5. The operating system you use implementing all of the above.

6. The hardware you use implementing all of the above.

Yeah, tons of no trust....

> Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.

Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so.

I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time.

There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed?

There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments.

It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved?

But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.

Actual batteries would be a better choice than consuming the energy at the time it is created. Investing in better transmission infrastructure would increase this benefit.

The vast difference here is that the energy consumption required by Bitcoin is integral to its model. The stated goal is to make massive amount of otherwise useless computations.

If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we consume less electricity.

As soon as there is a new way to do bitcoin related operations using less electricity (eg: ASICS), the security of the network decreases. And everyone moves to the new model, in order to go back to consuming a lot of electricity, in order to restore trust in the network.

On a macro scale, Bitcoin has to consume lots of electricity, any possible improvement in that area needs to be wiped out by just people going back to consuming more electricity, otherwise the model fails. The whole bitcoin trust model revolves around people being ready to waste a ton energy for it. That's not the case of porn, or billboards: the energy consumption is just a side effect and not a requirement, they have value outside of the consumed electricity. Bitcoin entire value is only dependent on how much people are willing to invest in it, which roughly translates on how much electricity is wasted.

A waste by most societal measures. Purely imaginary point backed by nothing that is easily defrauded and highly volatile. With no societal or personal value. And we've chosen to burn gigawatts of energy on this foolish game. Its easy to see it as enormous waste.

yes 'pure waste'

Now 1. a bad billboard doesn't make bad btc better. Neither does everything else you mentioned.

2. there is a margin of difference on how much enjoyment and entertainment something like porn makes vs. btc does.

If we would need to cut down on a lot of things to reduce co2, i would argue that btc would be much much further up the list then porn.

A fiat currency is any currency that isn't backed by a commodity, i.e. it's not redeemable for a certain quantity of the commodity by the issuer, and bitcoin falls squarely into this category.

how would you quality VISA and Tesla accepting bitcoin ? does it qualify as asset tranfer or currency ? (open question)

I think of the government part as largely an accident; my definition of fiat money is “money that has value solely because the transacting parties say it has, and not intrinsic uses” - historically the way to get people to agree something intrinsically value-less has value was by government decree, but there are lots of exceptions. I think of the Yapannese rei stones as fiat money, for example (though there is some question about them having inherent value). Basically any money that isn’t commodity money (or directly redeemable for commodities) is a fiat money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

> Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.

That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold.

Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline or food.

That assumes that someone is willing to accept Bitcoins as a payment.

> You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity, you just get more security.

Specifically, more security for the next block, only. Once that block is mined, the process starts all over again for the next block.

The energy usage reset button is pressed as soon as each block is mined. No energy is "stored".

Idiotic all the way. If aluminum can be perceived as a battery, then everything else can be. "Poop as a Battery (PaaB)" (am I the first to use this?)(no I won't DDG it).

In that sense, Bill Gatess "Reinvented Toilet" does kinda the same. People pee and poop, sewage is processed and is converted to clean water and can produce energy [0]. Thus PaaB(!?)

[0]: https://www.elitereaders.com/waterless-toilet-system-generat...

Yes, to me this response seems intuitive if you know anything about bitcoin and PoW blockchains. The original article seems based on misconceptions.

I find it strange that even people at a prominent firm like Union Square Ventures are perpetuating such misconceptions.

Yes. Energy spent on Bitcoin is energy not spent on something else, even in a world where everything is powered by renewable energy. We do not live in a world where everything is renewable, and renewable energy spent on Bitcoin means whatever non-renewable power is being used elsewhere instead of being eliminated. It is also a myth that renewables have no negative environmental impact: metals have to be mined/smelted/etc., chemicals of various kinds are used, and there is waste from the manufacturing processes. Ideally we would be working towards more efficient technologies that use less energy to accomplish whatever task (and for the most part we have been doing that).

All energy generation is bad for the environment, just more or less bad. Solar cells and wind power might be "renewable", but it requires a lot of metals and material to build (and also energy), they disturb natural habitat etc. They are much better than coal, oil and gas, but they are not harmless. It's better to avoid using energy if possible than using renewable energy.

Not the energy consumption in itself, but the amount of heat and physical electronic waste generated certainly is.

Yes, because those renewables could be powering people's homes and productive equipment, or powering conventional payment systems with plenty capacity left over. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but plenty of crypto exists that doesn't need this much power.

Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power, then it'd be much less of a concern.

I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.

Proof of work will always be an expensive way to secure a ledger, with little in the way of real advantages.

"Distributed" sounds nice, but it isn't really that valuable in the end.

Sorry but that's BS, It absolutely requires the energy. If it would be running on a privet computer still then anyone with such a computer could double spend which would make it useless regardless of success.

It would work in the sense that you've be able to add more transactions to the chain. But it'd also be very easy for somebody to double spend.

This is false. Bitcoin’s value is “backed” by the expectation that it will be valuable tomorrow — nothing more. It’s the same with gold. Gold’s value has nothing to do with the cost of mining it out of the ground. Rather the cost of mining it is justified on the basis of its expected value.

Bitcoins price is basically unrelated to the energy used. Right now, it is an independent currency at best and a speculation object at worst. Energy spent is only useful in so far as that no single entity can take over the network; for all other purposes, bitcoin could run on a single 10 year old GPU.

The post is making the free-market argument:

> In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin is actually one of the greatest financial incentives to transition the world to clean energy.

without bothering to explain why any one point they highlight would beget any one outcome claimed by the post. In fact, there are some backwards incentives that are missed. An example would be their claim with regards to Great American Mining: rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for capturing lost methane, what's to stop producers from diverting existing gas production towards mining right now, putting demand pressure on existing supplies and driving up gas production (and leaks, etc.) rather than just capturing and processing leaked gas?

There's nothing. There's no incentive for existing gas facilities to fix their leaks when they can just pipe their existing output into bitcoin, drive up demand for gas, and therefore justify more drilling (and more inevitable leaks that they won't have any incentive to fix).

> Bitcoin isn’t bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is very, very good for the environment. The University of Cambridge reported at over 75% of miners use renewable energy and now there are solutions to turn methane emissions into mining as well.

This doesn't mean anything. Or worse, it means 25% of a phantom industry makes use of dirty power, So whatever Bitcoin imposes on the world in power usage (130 Terawatt-hours of energy - https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...), 25% of that, or about 0.15% of global power production, leverages dirty fuels. If all mining ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially from dirty power usage coming down and more clean energy supply being directed back into productive work.

Thanks for hearing my rant.

I can't really follow the logic in this article – maybe I don't get it?

The article states that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy and as miners want to maximize profit, they want cheap energy. This is good for renewables as that is cheaper than other forms of energy generation.

Doesn't everyone want cheap energy, like factories or heavy industry? Are Bitcoin miners really more eager to push for clean energy than other industries?

The whole arguments sounds like "we need to use up more energy so there's more incentive to produce additional, clean energy".

Having an open mind but is good but make sure your brain doesn't fall out of its skull. Just because a mining operation produces methane gas and it is better to burn this gas at the site and turn it into carbon dioxide because it is the lesser of green house gasses shouldn't mean you can sell this as a carbon offset since there is still a net contribution.

"Bitcoin isn’t bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is very, very good for the environment."

wish I could downvote.

I was told the existing financial system uses more power than Bitcoin, so doesn't that make it even better for the environment because they want even more clean power than Bitcoin?

> made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy

Well, Britain transferred all its money to the US for arms, so that would help the US economy. (Churchill spent the last year of the war concerned with how to pay for it.) Also, there were wage and price controls to control speculation (and inflation.)

It’s not double-spending energy. The chunk of energy you generate isn’t spent by you, it’s supplied to Bitcoin users to power their transactions. You only consume the second chunk of energy for yourself.

The problem with analogizing Bitcoin mining to gold mining is that Bitcoin mining secures value in the past and gold mining secures value in the future. If you stopped mining Bitcoin, all previously mined Bitcoin would lose value due to the decreased security of the block chain.

It's like if gold began to sink into the ground the moment you stopped mining it, and you had to keep mining and smelting it at a ever-more furious rate to keep it above ground.

In a physics sense a processor just turns current into heat, the same way a wire does. It just does so in a way that happens to be useful to us. So in that sense they're resistive heaters, so 100% efficient.

It can be utilized for heating human occupied spaces. Humans need a lot of heating.

You don't regain energy this way. You're buying new energy.

That's not how batteries work.

   It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.

This gets the cause and effect completely wrong. The only reason you can sell it later is because someone will need it later. As a society you store energy precisely because you will need it later. Whether you do this by creating a market for it or not is purely an implementation detail.

You are right, I should have used short term and very short term.

a) NFTs as a concept aren't tied to a particular blockchain

b) if you choose today to put yours on ETH instead of a chain that is today not PoW, you don't get to play the "but soon(TM)" card IMHO

You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though.

Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!

> Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They run on money.

You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an abstraction of energy and resources used by a human organization. Remove the money and the organization can still function. Remove energy and resources and the organization can't function.

my underwear is a weird kind of battery actually. You put your energy in it, and when you need energy later, you use the money I paid you.

But you will notice that my hypothetical stipulated a new energy source becoming available (or cheaper).

The difference between bitcoin and aluminum is that bitcoin values the energy not qua energy, but purely for its wasted cost, so if energy becomes cheaper overall (or hash computation becomes more efficient), you have to use more of it to create the same value for bitcoin, if it becomes more expensive, you can create the same value using less energy.

That's why I find it silly to say that bitcoin stores "energy". It stores sunk cost.

Depends on whom you mean with "you".

US money supply has not grown at anywhere near 10x recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM

Tether supply has grown roughly 10x since January 2020, though, but that's on a blockchain, so surely everything is on the up and up: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

Main reason we don't develop renewables faster is storage capacity.

And storage capacity technologies we can create are oscillating around break even point economically.

There's no gold rush to place energy storage system everywhere and it's not obviously economically profitable.

However variable load such as crypto mining provides similar incentives as energy storage. And there is a crypto gold rush.

Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models so easily that everyone can participate.

It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable.

I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy.

I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia".

If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.

Transaction fees are not just proportional to usage. They are a price set by demand (usage) and supply (block space).

Currently Bitcoin limiting the block size to 1MB is artificially lowering supply.

Recently, Bitcoin Cash has surpassed Bitcoin in transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.ht...

Their blocks are larger, so there is more room for transactions, so miners are not so well rewarded, so they can afford to waste less electricity in total.

Of course, this reduced waste implies reduced security (instead of securing >$700k/h, it's "only" $8.5k/h - https://www.crypto51.app/).

The energy consumed per transaction to produce the PoW to earn the block subsidy decreases as the number of transactions increases, because the two are independent of each other, with rising transaction volumes not increasing the block subsidy and the associated energy consumed to earn it.

Moreover, the energy consumed per transaction to produce the PoW to earn the transaction fee decreases when the transaction fee decreases.

So for both of these reasons, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin Cash, that can process thousands of times more transactions than Bitcoin, has the potential to be orders of magnitude more energy efficient.

I think there are two angles on Bitcoin that make some sense:

1. The true believers like labor theory of property a lot, and see having a mining rig as an extension of that(falliciously or no - there are plenty of critiques of labor theory of property itself). A bitcoin represents the "same amount" of effort relative to its value at a given moment in time.

2. As a lower margin use of energy premised on maintaining consensus, it has qualities that resemble perfect competition(in the economist's sense of that phrase) but actually go BEYOND perfect competition. While you can own a large part of the distribution or mining power, if you try to monopolize Bitcoin as a rentier you just end up forking it, as has been demonstrated by various events over the years. If people don't like your particular imposition of scarcity, they pull the rug in short order.

The second part is rather more important than the first, IMHO. Mining's meting out of energy usage as credit and the resulting price deflation is a way to get people on board with consensus and start engaging in speculative action, but there's a sense among the people interested in other cryptocurrency that that's just a starting point, and the development of distributed consensus tech itself is what makes this a "railroad" and not a "tulip".

"No rentiers" is really a pretty earthshaking concept, to the point where most of the people in the space can't see that light and look at the shadow puppets instead. But it does not seem to be refuted by anything I've encountered. While onramps and offramps to crypto are mostly controllable, this is still a huge upset to our models of what markets are or could be.

At least long-term holders believe it's worth it.

You can judge that there exist such people by the fact that the bottom of crashes (at the maximum fear), do not continue until zero.

I suspect cryptocurrency fills a need for hard money - not like fiat, that loses purchasing power at the whim of unelected central or commercial bankers.

Of course, there's lots of volatility, but I suspect that's normal for an asset class this new. Do you research, discount its future value to you, try to come up with true and relevant inflation rates, and only buy when the market is in a fear cycle.

About the externalities, they are the same as with any other human endeavour. Government should help internalize environmental costs.

what?

you forgot another class: big dick energy.

You're right. This is why I love dry underwear. You can readily stack them and put up a sewing machine on top of it after which you can make more dry underwear. It's basically free

Literal energy isn't the same thing as capital.

But miners are competing for bigger slices of the pie. So more energy does mean more bitcoin (for a specific miner).

That cannot continue, pop will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2.

People don't ruin the environment with bitcoin mining because they "enjoy" it. They do it because they can get money out of it.

Stop the supply of money, it goes away.

Sometime, I think that "Proof of Work" is very similar to "Proof of Burn".

Usually in "Proof of Burn" you "burn" some cryptocoin sending it to an invalid address, and the blockchain has a proof that they are unrecoverable. (It was popular before someone notice that with an ICO you can have your cake and eat it too.)

In "Proof of Work" you "burn" a few barrels or petrol to produce electricity and then make some hash with the electricity, so if you find the correct hash it is a probabilistic proof that you burned the petrol. (You can cheat with other source of energy, like solar or wind, but they also have a cost.)