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Comment by lofi_lory | Hacker News Reader

Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact.

Tho, all these systems require some ressource scarcity and will inherently maintain/promote scarcity. This is completely unacceptable in the coming years. People don't realize how much we need to cut back on natural ressource extraction and energy expenditure. Out whole world is build on massive mineral and energy debt. E.g. natural cycles do not allow for biomass generation for food and energy on today's scale. It's simply impossible, the math doesn't check out. See peak phosphorus or dive into the viability of bio-plastics. If we don't tap into some unlimited energy source soon, we have to massively cut back in everything we consume. It's madness to use any unnecessary energy or resource on crypto finance, when there are more energy efficient alternatives.

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Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.

How secure is Bitcoin? How secure does it need to be? Can we put a number on any of these - are we at the optimum security level now? Are we maybe at 150%?

Its security level is set by market demand (mediated by transaction fees).

You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you?

Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut.

Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitcoin works against our future?

Do you see capitalism as working for/against our future?

It can be both in different ways. You're stuck in either or thinking.

And keep in mind, capitalism (when working properly) is supposed to find minima. Not create further barriers to getting things done. The group that gets the job done at the highest output:input ratio for as long as the problem they are solving is relevant was the intended optimization point. Irrational markets being what they are, this frequently does not converge as planned.

Capitalism's search for minima isn't linked to human welfare tho. Therefore the minima may or may not align with humanity's long term interests. Right now the system seems on track to optimize for our extinction.

Without regulation, most essential markets fail humans.

And finally an ancap "free market economy" was the default state of the world and the whole of human history has been the struggle to overcome/refine that stake based hell.

Do you mean "capitalism" as in the dogmatic belief an unregulated market will somehow manage human needs to their benefit?

Yeah, I think that's an extremely ignorant and outdated ideology. Which is evidently progressing towards human extinction.

Optimizing towards the metric of monetary reward/economic growth is just horribly disconnected from human welfare.

There is also the fallacy of assuming all things interchangeable for market dynamics when in reality some things running out means "down-regulating demand" by killing off most of the population, e.g. phosphate rock.

Capitalism isn't set up to get us two cookies later. There is just no incentive for the market to give a fuck about humans. It's like the "stamp making AI" thought experiment. Or the attention optimizing algorithms mindlessly destroying political culture. Oversimplified metrics spiralling out of control.

Tho, economists have realized this and most markets are recognized to fail without regulation for their inherent nature. E.g. housing, water, electricity, education, ...

C'mon dude, any day now it will become profitable to stop exploiting natural resources, house the homeless, and build towards a future where we aren't completely replaced by robots (see dominos, see boston dynamics, see fruit picking robots)....any day now...bum da ba dum if you believe in magic... /s

Bitcoin only consumes enough energy to meet market demand for security.

You need to chill if you think the demand is high enough to literally wipe out humanity.

Thats why the only cryptocurrency that really appeals to me now is Chia with its Proof of Space. Not zero power usage, but better, and I like the design goals and its approach.

I assume you mean storage space. There you run into the same problem if you scale the system. The proof still needs scarcity in whatever storage is made of.

For many natural resources, the local concentration is key to viability. See phosphorus, or helium depletion. Once the reserves are gone, we cannot maintain our scale of production, as alternative extraction usually is too energy intensive to scale. Please consider this on an interdependent scope, where it all comes down to burning through the geological work of millennia as the fundamental ressource. 500 years ago, people were already hitting the limits of ecological sustainability where they settled and back then all of earth was home to something like 500 million people.

Maintaining just the food production for 7 billion humans is gonna be an overbearing challenge the next years. Anarchocapitalist delusions have no future.

Helium is the second most abundant element, we just need to go to space, plenty of resources there.

Every year we delay is another year worth of black holes swallowing up entire galaxies worth or resources.

That's my point. Phosphorus is also plenty around. Yet it's practically unobtainable. We depend on phosphorus rock for our food production. There is no way around it.

The person you replied to mentioned some random project no one has heard of, what are you talking about here?

You went on a rant that started barely connected and ended up talking about food production for 7 billion people (which is currently happening by the way since there are about 7 billion on earth).

Chia’s consensus mechanism, while probably the cleverest of non-PoW mechanisms (their white paper explains why most Proof-of-Whatever mechanisms besides proof-of-work are broken), is pretty sketchy. Their reliance on “time lords” seems to be pushing a lot of the consensus mechanism towards hyper-centralization. It’s complicated enough that I can’t spot exactly what the weak point is, but that in itself is pretty concerning.

I don't think there are any rewards for running Time Lords or any vulnerabilities inherent in them. Chia relies on VDFs and I think its just "altruistic" to run a Time Lord. I think Chia Inc. does and will continue to run most of them.

Chia is pretty complicated but I'm not sure its much more complicated than other cryptocurrencies. The complexity seems pretty inherent in them.

> Heat generation really is the stupidest way of doing things. With things like storage, at least you can reuse it after the fact.

For what it's worth - something like a house heating unit could easily be done by a coin miner, and there have been such projects presented on Reddit and HN before.

Yeah, except the days of mining bitcoin in your closet are long over, and a substantial part of the energy budget for the datacenters we're actually talking about is cooling.

Isnt this kind of like saying we should bring back incandescent light bulbs so people will heat their houses with them?

Like, I appreciate trying to dual purpose energy use... but I dont see a specialized computer that pumps heat as practical. I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater. My 800w box doesn't generate anywhere near as many BTUs as a 600w ceramic box heater. Even though I may joke otherwise. While on hot days in Florida, there is a difference when it's on or off in a room... on the 5 actual cold days we get, it can barely keep my feet warm. When I lived in Colorado... Haha no. The little office I had with a buddy, there were 4 servers in a room, either rendering or doing video analytics crunching. They didnt do shit when ambient was 60f, plus our desktops. Using bitcoin miners as home heaters seems as practical as Juiceroo was to "fresh juice".

800 watts is not actually very much heat. A typical small space heater is 2000W. I have no idea what you intend by implying that 800 watts is not as many BTUs as 600 watts--watts are literally a measure of power, i.e. can be converted to BTUs per hour. And yes, all those 800 watts of power your computer draws do end up as waste heat [1].

> I'm pretty sure it's going to be wasted watts too instead of using a real heater.

That makes no sense. You literally cannot "waste" waste heat, unless you are venting it to outside or something. If your space is not getting warm enough, it's because your computer is not generating enough heat!

[1] only a very miniscule amount of the power consumed by a PC actually permanently flips bits on harddisks or SSDs or transmits bits across the network. These take extremely low amounts of power.

Once you understand this, you start to understand how the recent FUD about crypto is generated by people with an agenda.

Or people who live in places that aren't cold every moment of the year

This doesn't matter at all. It's a flaw in principle, which will sooner or later manifest. This is the case for any definition of "work" the system encodes, that comes down to the fatalistic reductionism of "increasing entropy". At some point your house becomes an oven, while the systems starts folding random amino acid chains.

'Work' cannot be losslessly reduced to heat generation and market value does not represent contribution to human welfare.

It's the fallacy of conflating correlation with causation, when the free market economic systems aligns with human interests for a moment. And PoW crypto currencies aim for giving up all governance control to this fallacy. Earth becoming absolutely oxidized into a lifeless rock a valid possible equilibrium for free market economic systems.

Inefficiently though.

Electric heaters are only 100% efficient at turning electricity to heat. We can do a lot better than that

I know that in theory a heat pump can do better, but in cold enough climate it can't because one side collects condensation and freezes making it less than 100% efficient. So no, we can't do better.

Use geothermal heat pumps in cold climates.

I agree on everything you said, but I have the suspect that if we untapped an unlimited energy source that would quickly put a (near) expiration date on our civilization, and maybe on our planet. Scarcity is necessary to maintain balance.

It's unobtanium anyway. Not even fusion energy will give us that. Most technological salvation promises, ignore the reality of our massive overexploitation and fossil carbon dependency. We don't have the building material and energy left to bootstrap abundance.

However, the theoretical thought of a near infinite energy source inevitably pushing a PoRessource currencies system into finding (another) limitation again is outrageous. With all those free market edgelords in the cryptosphere, why don't they see the catastrophic flaw of dependency on scarcity? That's just insane. No matter the material/energetic efficiency technology will ever achieve, PoR will automatically counterbalance it.

It's full commitment into the long known failings of a free market economy. Giving up all control to the reward delay capacity of a toddler. A modern take on the easter island collapse on a holistic, global scale.

> It's madness to use any unnecessary energy or resource on crypto finance, when there are more energy efficient alternatives.

Agreed. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake are a great alternative to cryptocurrencies that use natural resource scarcity.

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