SolarBatteryBitcoin
github.com
github.com
In the same way a lot carbon capture schemes use clean energy to slightly reduce (but not completely solve) the amount of CO2 added to our atmosphere. A better use of that clean energy is to completely remove the need for adding more CO2 to our energy (rather than just partially) through alternatives that make better/more efficient use of the clean energy that these capture schemes take.
Ideally you need something where the cost of electricity would normally dominate the capital costs of setting up the operation. Otherwise, you're better off running the process all the time, and it's not a useful grid battery.
Alternatively, something where you need to overbuild the infrastructure, perhaps to serve peak demand or for emergency availability.
Water desalination plants and hydrogen factories are expensive to build, so they don't work well here. Bitcoin mining rigs aren't free either. Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build: they meet the second criterion as, for logistic reasons, we build way more cars than are on the road at any point in time.
With water, you tend to use the cheapest option. If you are in the middle east on the coast, far from rivers or other sources of drinking water, desalinating is pretty much the only option. Which is why that has been common for decades. With green hydrogen, what matters is the cost relative to hydrogen produced from natural gas. Both are dominated by the variable cost of the energy rather than construction cost.
Bitcoin as a green, or rather less hopelessly planet destroying thing, does not make sense because it removes energy that could be used for actually doing something more worthwhile.
We need more solutions that work like pumping water back up into a reservoir (see other reply). These solutions aren't at risk that they need to run on high energy cost anyway to stay profitable.
Desalination plants aren't really something you build for profit, they're to secure your cities clean water supply and are usually taxpayer funded infrastructure projects.
A realistic/feasible deployment would perhaps pair desalination with solar or wind (more likely on the coast). During electricity peak hours, it might be more lucrative to sell electricity to the grid and then the rest of the time top up the reservoir. I guess depending on how scarce water is, the $ per kwh earned via water might actually be larger than selling to the grid. But you get my point.
You are right that these things being funded via tax payer money, makes this kind of lateral thinking less likely. But if someone were to do this commercially, this would be a great way to make it more cost effective.
Its also logistically hard to actually get the energy back into the grid from cars. Driving around with it is fine but if you cant put the energy back into the grid at peak time you still have to over produce more energy in total than just to cover the peak. It uses the energy which is good but it does not reduce the difference between peak demand an low demand. If that is reduced it has an overall larger impact than just to using the excess energy.
Pumping water back up into a reservoir is the most common and probably oldest way to store excess grid capacity like an actual grid batter (one that gives energy back to the grid). Ofc its not feasible in many places due to the lack of hydro power plant but there are other ways to actually store energy and deliver it back to the grid unlike the Buttcoin battery nonsense.
So those are good uses of off-peak power when your local economy is already interested in having those things. The state also has some other initiatives to use the excess generation, such as residential water heating and EV charging using "smart grid" sockets that take into account the local and greater network's load and generation.
It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation.
Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.
Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too).
So people that has the same opinion as you, I consider this opinion invalid until they come up with a solution better than bitcoin for the problems I mentined.
To be clear the problems are:
1. How to save money when government is hostile to saving money.
2. How to transfer money when it is ludicrously expensive and/or government or companies are hostile to money transferrence.
EDIT: people downvote me, but none of the answers below so far address the 2 problems I mentioned.
The closest is someone talking about solving problems with trust, but that is the whole issue, if you can't trust the central authorities and companies, who you trust?
At current mining rewards, 329,000 BTC are mined each year, producing 37 megatons of CO2, or about 110 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-bitcoin.
You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.
I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?
> Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?
my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash
I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out.
I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally.
The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust.
Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.
Right now the game is being framed as honest crypto vs corrupt government legacy weakness, but I think an economy that must devote huge resources to maintaining the security and operational infrastructure of their currency will be at a comparative disadvantage.
The defi stuff appeals to me as enabling composable bottom up tools for interaction but trustlessness I think is a very niche attribute which adds a lot of expense and in many cases doesn't mitigate any risks.
while I don't really agree with the bitcoin maxi mindset of the comment you are replying to, do you know that you can buy as little as 1 satoshi? (0.00000001 BTC). Yes, eventually all BTC will be mined (in about 2140) but considering 1 sat is currently worth 0.0006 USD, there is still quite a bit of room for very small amounts of bitcoin being widely accessible (fees being a different issue that will improve with time).
So is your beef against capitalism? Or the medium of exchange?
At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.
So the idea of switching it on and off according to energy prices doesn’t really hold.
How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?
Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.
If ECDSA or SHA256 were shown to be weaker than believed, they can be substituted in the bitcoin codebase (given approval of all participants, which are incentivized to ensure the computational security of the protocol).
The energy is the barrier to prevent malicious parties from rewinding history. Fundamental, understood quantities in the universe is far better than the political whims of the party in charge.
What does hyperbitcoinization look like? This infographic video provides some introduction to what this could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac (Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million)
The endgame of HODL is a digital Fort Knox. Under the gold standard people didn’t actually exchange pieces of eight. They used paper money.
You’ll just get a new state which holds Bitcoin and issues debt based on Bitcoin in the form of promissory notes.
It’s pretty simple - just require taxes be paid in Bitcoin and use violence against those who don’t pay. Just like with other revolutionary wars, you pay generals with land and soldiers with the new currency (I.e. Bitcoin). Some of those generals will end up as a dictator or president depending on whether you are able to establish a democracy.
The state will be the ultimate HODLer just as it was with gold.
You could pick up a history book, and you would learn that gold was almost never used as currency because it was simply too rare, and too valuable for the amounts traded in normal commerce.
Rather, silver was the currency of choice in Europe and most of Asia, with lower-value denominations eventually showing up as coins made of less valuable metals.
Preserving my wealth in the event of the dollar rapidly losing value is not a problem for me. I'm 90% OK on that front without even trying particularly hard to do anything about it.
What would be a problem for me, is that a failing dollar might be a symptom of the US government failing, in which case society would be falling apart around me. If basic services like roads, infrastructure, fire and police, electricity and clean running water aren't working properly nationwide, it's going to interfere with my life big time. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly: e.g. my grocery store has trouble restocking because the supply chain is not running smoothly. Bitcoin doesn't help me with that type of problem at all.
I'd be better off trying to keep my government functional by promoting and voting for good policies, staying involved at the local level, and generally acting as a participant in government rather than a subject of it. Playing John Galt and pretending that I'm just going to have my own safe little bitcoin world if our government fails, so I don't care and in fact assume that it WILL fail, would be both sickeningly cynical (regarding society's outcome) and naively optimistic (regarding my own outcome).
Waste is how it's fair and how it negates cheating by letting people stick to its investments.
You just can't be more wrong than that! With Bitcoin you may buy narcotics, illegal guns, false passports, child pornography, order DDoS attack or even a murder!
There's all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that's one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening), etc.
Not really? Batteries have limited capacity so at the point where the grid cannot buy any and your battery is topped up, you're mining bitcoin.
No one :(
At some point it gives you exactly as much as you pay for energy to mine.
So if you can store electricity in the batteries for long enough to sell it for more than pruce of purchase then you are better off investing in the battery.
But since batteries are expensive and inefficient, you might be better off investing in the wind turbine or solar panel and mine with it if you can't sell energy to the grid for more money.
It's better than battery because when demand is high it gives energy, but it doesn't have to take energy when demand is low and it keeps itself financially afloat even when there's no high demand for a long time which might kill your battery energy storage enterprise.
I know about at least one pumped storage facility that died because of that.
Clearly there aren't such worthwhile loads available, which is why the rates go negative in the first place.
>pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening),
Isn't this counter-productive? The middle of the day is also when the temperature is the hottest, so running AC full blast is also the most wasteful since it generates the biggest temperature gradient (and thus cooling loss).
Right?
And no we don't live in a society where this doesn't matter. You are not allowed to do with your money whatever you want.
Buying a hitman: illegal in most of the world.
And you do understand that it is hypocritical to create a ton of co2 and making farming in other countries really hard and complaining later about immigrants. Just putting it in perspective
If your point is that you can't spend money on illegal things, bitcoin is not illegal.
Also, who complained about immigrants? Where did this come from. And even if immigrants/farming had any relevance to the discussion co2 is likely to increase crop yields.
Bringing up immigration is just a reference on today and what will come due to thinking that we as a society don't depend on decision from others.
It's a global problem with global implications for all of us.
And no co2 hurts us more than it helps us.
This applies to so many things. Snapchat data center? YouTube using gigawatts to process and stream cat videos? On and on. It’s really hard to control what people do with energy. Much better to focus on ensuring its priced correctly and all it’s externalities are properly included in that price. Then we don’t have to involve ourselves in moral debates about what’s a valid or invalid use.
Applies just as well to YouTube cat videos or any other poor use of energy in the digital realm. Banning YouTube in the USA doesn’t mean that China won’t have data centers streaming cat videos to the USA.
Instead if the USA really was concerned about efficient use of energy and capturing the externalities it could extremely easily (in the scheme of things) work out a better pricing mechanism such as a CO2 tax, and implement it. If it were serious it would also be able to find many willing allies in Europe and elsewhere that would sign up to a multilateral treaty.
No american will continue to infest in bitcoin if the majority of miners is in china only
Btc is small and my point I made with the assumption that bitcoin has real influence.
I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow.
Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere good. Meanwhile you and I if we are both reasonable can agree that both services should pay the full cost of their energy use.
Edit: I see by the downvotes that people disagree. So how is it a settled fact that Bitcoin is more wasteful than e.g. Snapchat? Yes I know Bitcoin burns electricity to secure its network. But clearly people find that useful and value that enough to actually spend the money to do that. What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
You wanna burn your own house to the ground, your problem. You live in a flat? Now it’s bigger than you.
I’m optimistic about future tech and green energy and expect PV to solve greenhouse emissions. BTC is, by design, such that allowing it to succeed would lead to an arms race that has no upper bound — build a Dyson swarm, and the entire output of Sol gets spent fighting over who can find the right random numbers that hash in the right way, and it still doesn’t end.
(Of course, civilization doesn’t last that long, because the moment energy is priced in BTC it becomes worthwhile doing anything physically possible to get a 51% double-spend attack).
Bitcoin burns resources for a handful people. A tremendous amount. It doesn't provide jobs in comparison to snapchat and other services.
And independent of snapchat: feel free to see snapchat as a resource waste but that doesn't make bitcoins better.
It's definitively a fact. BSC provides the same pyramid schemes and pump and dump cryptocurrencies for a fraction of the power consumption of Bitcoin.
Same for Bitcoin or literally any other human activity. Miners are not going to consume more energy than mined bitcoins are worth.
Anyway, the production costs of "a Snapchat" depend on the costs of inputs and the current state of technology. Specifically they are not a function of how much a Snapchat is worth in the market. Snapchat can increase the production costs arbitrarily, for instance, by wasting energy, and they could totally decide to waste as much energy as the market price of a Snapchat would allow. How moronic would that be? This is what Bitcoin does. It's important that people understand how Bitcoin works, because once they know how stupid it is a lot of them don't want to have anything to do with it. This has been my experience so far.
BTC has no such property. Make it 1,000 times more efficient to compute hashes and you just hash 1,000 times faster. No change in power use.
Everyone can calculate bitcoins with equal effort? Or is it still an arms race on who can gather more resources (energy/asics)?
You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet.
Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy.
Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
> Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud".
I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
True but irrelevant: The upper bound for rentability is the cost of electricity plus the capital cost of the mining equipment.
As soon as the sum of these two exceeds the expected mining reward, rational miners stop mining.
I don't doubt that there are inefficient miners out there, but I strongly suspect the majority to act according to their rational economic self-interest and not as players in an expensive technological lottery.
> it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck
Yes, but not consistently and therefore also not profitably so. The law of large numbers [1] applies.
The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.
The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.
The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).
Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.
We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.
A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.
"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.
Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.
Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that.
You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.
I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different.
"who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him" I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.
>No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin.
which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments.
Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content.
Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.
Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups').
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives.
However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point.
People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing).
> As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available.
Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.
Your transparency argument, while flaws have been shown from the other person commenting on it, is too much transparency. No one wants to have all transactions publicly available. It could make sense to use it for public funds.
I argue against Bitcoin itself as an independent tool and the power consumption of bitcoin and i don't think we need to spend that much Energy on Bitcoin right now to do further research on blockchain and crypto currencies.
I have never thought about how to write my arguments shorter as no-one every brought it up. But online also makes it quite hard to have a common ground. I will try to be more aware of this.
Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft!
Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would.
So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model.
I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?
When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet.
I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks?
I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not?
The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it
Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
I still do think that it's an important difference whether becoming more resource efficient is something that could be incentivized/enforced without endangering the underlying business model or whether resource waste is the business model.
That only affects who finds the next block. It will always take about 10 minutes, regardless of hashrate, energy usage, hardware efficiency, number of miners, etc. since the difficulty is adjusted to factor all of those out.
For anyone who isn't a miner (and doesn't care to become one), the only variables which matter are energy-usage and difficulty-of-51%-attack (i.e. double spending).
AFAIK the only reasons to advocate for bitcoin mining are:
- A vested interest. Since bitcoin is a zero/negative-sum game, nobody else should care about someone else's vested interest; if anything they should be opposed (in the negative case; e.g. as a waste of shared resources).
- belief that double-spending is currently unacceptably easy, and would become acceptably difficult given the increased hashrate.
Whilst I don't know of an objective 'acceptable optimum' for the difficulty of double-spending, it would take a lot to convince me that (a) there are credible threats given the current hashrate and (b) those threats would be solved by an increased hashrate. The only threats that even come close would be on the scale of nation-states, or perhaps the largest tech multinationals; yet even if we're paranoid enough to believe they could pull off an attack, I fail to see how burning even 10 times as much energy on hashing would disuade such a level of paranoia.
If you hold the hardware constant then hashrate correlates to energy usage obviously, but it's not quite the same thing.
As long as the total hashrate is "cheaper" than that, in terms of hardware and electricity costs, there is an economic incentive for somebody to start mining (more) – so somebody will.
It'd be "can't buu GPUs" all over again.
However having bitcoin mining as defacto dump load would probably demotivate work needed toward creating useful dump loads. I'm also wondering what incentives bitcoin as dump load would have in less wealthy regions where purchase power is no match to compete with BTC mining.
Think of a world where most electricity is unaffordable to people, being wasted to hash some coins instead, because it's more "efficient" from a monetary standpoint.
If a lot of miners mine on mostly dump load energy, minig on anything else becomes uncompetitive.
Caveat on disaster: Unless blackholes aren't real, or they are something else entirely.
1. Flared gas from oil wells. Natural gas is a byproduct of extracting oil from the Earth. In the past this was vented straight to the atmosphere, which is a huge waste of energy and causes horrible air pollution. Capturing this gas isn’t useful for many applications because it happens in remote areas, but if there’s a network connection it can be harnessed for mining Bitcoin.
2. Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
Neither of these is specific to Bitcoin, because the general concept is running a computer at full load for an extended duration. Bitcoin mining just happens to be the most logical (and profitable) application of that concept at present.
Nobody is desalinating their own water at home using waste heat. Oil wells are often located in an area where it would make no sense to transport a bunch of water to desalinate (perhaps that's a good idea for sea-based wells though).
I don't know enough about co2 extraction or electrolysis, only that those also don't sound like things people are likely to do at home.
> Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
This is incorrect because a mining-based heater will be new and use electricity as its fuel source. You can't compare with an old electric heater because a replacement will obviously be new. You can't compare with hydrocarbon heaters, because you need to convert to electricity to run a computer. That means meaning we need to compare with a new electric heater. That comparison is unfavorable, however, because it will probably be based on a heat pump. Heat pumps have efficiency much greater than 100% (usually around 200%) by takng heat from the outside air or ground.
A better example would be something like an electric oven, which typically does just use resistive heating. However, this sort of undermines the argument, since the energy spent on heating food isn't that much compared to things like residential and commercial heating.
There's nothing that makes the idea specific to Bitcoin mining. That's just the implementation they chose for their first product. The idea is to recapture heat generated by computation and use it for another purpose.
You can hate Bitcoin and PoW all you want, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if you banned mining rigs (good luck with that), people would just mine it at home on their spare computers or use botnets. Either way, the only way we'll ever succeed in making PoW green is to make energy production itself green. And that's a problem we'd have to solve even if Bitcoin was never invented!
If so, then as the price of bitcoin goes up, increasing the returns to mining, we would expect to see people generating energy for mining in whatever ways they can, with no view to green credentials.
It seems exciting because it could incentivise some beneficial behaviour given current market conditions, but it isn't obvious to me why it isn't just a transient phenomenon.
Separately, aren't batteries still preferable, at least in principle, as a form of managing excess supply, because they do not throw the energy away? If so, then supporting the price of bitcoin on the basis that it provides the social good of allowing us to have expanded energy infrastructure only works until battery technology is sufficiently advanced, at which point the price would crash (to the level supported by whatever other components make bitcoin valuable), correct?
But we don't just need more solar. We need less non-renewable energy to be consumed.
Solar may replace it but adding tones of solar to retire polluting sources is not directly addressing the issue at stake but just want more solar.
If the only good thing Bitcoin succeeds in doing is accelerating solar capacity rollout, I'd call the tech as a whole a win.
Proof-of-work is an energy sink. Its existence is counter-productive for energy, green or not.
The first principle of green energy is to reduce consumption as much as possible; renewable generation is a 'fallback' for unavoidable power consumption. It's similar to dealing with waste: recycling is a fallback, a far better solution is to reduce consumption.
Even with such a laughably limited definition, "pollution" would include:
- Noise pollution, e.g. from wind farms, construction, etc.
- Chemical pollution, e.g. from batteries, photovoltaics, mining, etc.
- Non-recyclable waste, e.g. many wind turbine blades, structural elements, etc.
- Airbourne particulates, e.g. from transport and construction (tyres, road wear, brake wear, etc.)
These are certainly less bad than "pollution" from fossil fuels; but it would be stupid to increase them for the sake of partially-inverting SHA256 on a few inputs.
It's possible (and desirable!) to pass sensible regulations to require that PoW mining rigs to use only excess renewable energy, and it's possible (and desirable!) to require PoW mining to contribute taxes towards green energy roll-outs. But per my original point, trying to make it go away is a fool's errand -- that's at least as difficult as trying to ban general-purpose computing, and would cause far more problems than it would solve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26811819
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26094279
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444985
(among others)
I'd like to solicit feedback on why this is, did I not explain some point clearly enough or is it just the legitimacy of it coming from ark vs a random commenter on HN?
If we agree on the co2 production problem, lets take a look at what bitcoin is doing:
It converts a lot of energy/resources of our planet into co2. It does that by the asic's someone has to create, and by far the direct energy consumption. What does bitcoin produce? It produces transaction security right?
1. That value bitcoin is creating, is basically necessary to allow bitcoin to function. Without energy consumption, no transaction. Right now, we have a system which is able to create secure transactions, its called our current financial system. Our financial system is optimized for cost, speed and trust. Trust by regulations on different levels (state, world etc.). We have a global financial system.
That financial system is not perfect but bitcoin is also not perfect right? Okay so what is the advantage of bitcoin? People say its open, i can invest in bitcoins without regulations and i can send money to people like who are in a regime (in theory). Is that true? Is Bitcoin making sure that if your country decides to stop money transactions to North Korea for good reasons, that bitcoins stop working there? No it doesn't. All those mechanism, which are there to protect the normal people more than the tax fraud people are gone in the bitcoin system.
Therefore, the big advantge Bitcoin actually delivers (unregulated financial system) will be regulated as hard as our current system as soon as it hits a relevant size. And its not even hard as long as Bitcoin doesn't have any value. It doesn't has any real value as it is not a currency, its only a crypto currency. It doesn't has a country behind it. That it works as it works right now is just due to speculations/gambling.
We have to make sure that investing in batteries, other storage options, dump load with usefullness (pre heating water, using an EV, producing hydrogen, smelting more metals on high demand time, enabling technology to flip on and off devices like washing machines) is actually more reasonable INSTEAD of having to fight the Bitcoin gambling market.
Googles Datacenter are using 10times LESS energy than bitcoin https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu... and every single server/service on a Google Datacenter adds more value to our society than any bitcoin transaction ever will.
All of our datacenters are only using 80twh more energy than bitcion and all those datacenters give us as a society values like entertainment, banking, building, simulating stuff, doing research like cancer research etc. etc.
BITCOIN is the worst invention in our society so far as it is the only invention i'm aware of which has such a high impact on resource consumption with no real value to our planet :(
Your wall of text has many misconceptions and misunderstandings about how things actually work. I implore you to let your partially formed ideas go and read some more about what is really going on here.
Why do you think it is popular if it had no real value. Why is it the biggest meme of our lifetimes? Why will it be our money for the next 500 years?
Our society is quite busy with corona and while bitcoin uses a lot of energy already, the market size is still very small. Core reasons why i think we don't hear more about regulating bitcoins.
Popularity doesn't correlate to real value.
It is not unregulated. There have been several lawsuits brought on to the space already [2][3]. Exchanges that don't enforce AML/KYC have charges brought against them [4]. It is less regulated than the stock market, but it is by no means the wild west, at least in the US.
1: https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap
2: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-262
3: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338
4: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberg-law-analysis/analysi...
But its true its value quadrupled in the last 6 month.
I do hope though that the pressure on Bitcoin increases based on co2 consumption alone.
But also all governments and law things are slow. Like if start a lawsuit today, something like this can take years right?
The only way I see this actually having a positive impact through market mechanisms is if there's a railroad fever and massive buildout of solar capacity for mining, followed shortly by a bitcoin crash which actually makes that energy available for the rest of us to use.
(Also, solar is not a great source for mining to use at the moment: mining hardware still costs an appreciable sum relative to the energy cost of running it, especially considering it depreciates quickly. So if at all possible the miners will run them constantly, not adjust to grid supply vs demand)
(Celebrity endorsements, non-functional technology, libertarian fantasies of escaping the tax man — L. Ron Hubbard would have loved Bitcoin.)
Anyway, like you said, crypto is already working. The network effects are real.
Also, PoW does require a lot of energy, which is a common argument, but this is energy that includes audits, transport and security of the system. For Bitcoin, that's currently over $1 trillion, which to me seems like it is worth securing.
There also do seem to be ways to use excess energy for PoW and make it more green, which seems promising. The energy can be captured anywhere on the planet and used to support the global Bitcoin network from wherever the energy is. There is so much potential in this network.
“How corrupt and two-faced is one who claims, 'I intend to be fair and honest in my dealings with you.' What are you up to, my friend? There is really no need for this preamble. The matter will soon become plain. It should be written on your face, it should ring out immediately in your voice, and shine out at once in your eyes, as the loved one at once knows everything about his lovers from the manner of their glance. In short, a good and honest person should resemble one who smells like a goat in this respect, that anyone who comes near him is immediately aware of it whether he wishes it or not. But the mere pretence of simplicity is like an open blade. There is nothing more odious than the friendship of the wolf for the lamb; avoid this above all. A good, straightforward, and kindly person reveals these qualities in his eyes, and they will not escape you.” —Marcus Aurelius
>snide comments expressing nothing but dislike
That's because people who know a thing or two about economics ánd computer science know that all you're doing is pumping your bags. The only thing bitcon incentivizes is greed, making the rich even richer. Crypto“currencies” are pyramid slash Ponzi schemes hiding behind a veneer of sophistication. https://cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.
Ironic isn't it, since the topic is bitcon.
Well, atleast your username checks out, and we all understand that you’re in the BTC Ponzi scheme for good.
So invest in gold and encourage more gold mining. Or just trust your government and hold cash. Either way, you're losing a shitload of value. Hedge a small piece of your opinion for a year, then re-evaluate in 2022. Then feel free to come back on HN in 2022 and share your opinions on the subject.
Source?
It does, so far, seem to be a risk on asset, as it didn't perform well in March 2020.
It is already storing over $1 trillion of the world's wealth though, and in this case, money talks. Yes, it might have a correction, but the S&P 500 might as well.
That said, Bitcoin's properties may change over time, and it may become more of a hedge. It does seem to have a lot of believers, and IMO, the technology is what makes it very interesting.
It has been running successfully for a decade, and we'll be able to figure out more of what it is in 2, 3, or 5 years.
I think, why not hold some, even just a little bit? IMO, people shouldn't put 100% in, and definitely don't take out any loans to do so (maybe unless you are a company, but I'm against individuals taking loans out for it). You never know, maybe some of the current narratives are correct.
Because that perpetuates and inflates the Pozi scheme. Any "little bit" of positive now will be more than offset during its collapse, having a larger negative effect on more people.
Right. Because there are no other investments.
I'd prefer to hold cash in a savings account, but the rates are so low now it just doesn't make sense to hold a lot in cash. I don't feel that safe in the stock market either.
A single bitcoin transaction has a carbon footprint of 359.04 kgCO2 – equivalent to the carbon footprint of 795,752 VISA transactions or 59,840 hours of watching YouTube.
https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/bitcoin-shocker-cr...
The energy spent on Bitcoin includes mining, auditing, transporting, securing, etc. It is interesting, at least, to consider that mining Bitcoin is all inclusive. All the energy spent supports the global network.
I think it's worth looking into if Bitcoin actually has some benefits. I don't think this is a clear cut issue and outright statements like, "it really has to stop", IMO, isn't going to help at this time.
What you are saying is that people are doing things with energy that you don't understand, and can't make sense of why they do it. The people that do, do understand, and think it is very sensible to do this.
There are many things in this life I do not like, however, I strongly believe that I have no place to condemn the actions of others provided they do no harm.
The argument then becomes if non-green generation of bitcoin is harmful -- I would say, yes it possibly is! That is why projects like SolarBatteryBitcoin are so important, to provide an incentive green-energy production behavior; which appears to be the main reason you don't like this technology.
I implore you to open your eyes to what is going on here. You can sit on the sidelines throwing rocks, or you can take part in the biggest change in your lifetime.
But we live in a more complicated world where coal power plants, other possible uses of excess electricity and many other things exist.
Nope. “Free” PoW undermines the whole system. Mining has to be a sacrifice, otherwise it won’t work anymore. There is no “and I can use the resulting infrastructure for X”. Every joule of energy that goes into proof of work is a joule wasted by design. There is no free lunch.
I’m starting to think that maybe cryptocurrency is the great filter. It’s actually pretty terrifying.
Edit: we should probably have termed it proof of valueless work to make that clear. There is also nothing to stop a speculative bubble crowding out all other energy uses. Our low-growth world is very vulnerable to these schemes.
Either cryptocurrency is extremely useful and the energy spent will turn out not to be wasted at all or it is a big useless energy draining scam and the whole thing will soon collapse.
I really don't see a scenario were it will still be useless or only moderately useful and consuming so much energy that the human species will slowly die off.
Who the fuck invests in bitcoin? People with too much money and the habit of gambling.
No one can tell me that there is a logical argument without flaw and a ton of assumptions that the bitcoin market is in its current state anything than gambling.
Because bitcoin is so active and new makes it so interesting for gambling :(
It's a sacrfice but of something we can easily sacrifice, excess of solar energy we have no means to store but we still need to produce if we want to go 100% renewables.
What are we waiting for then? Lets double the computation difficulty of Bitcoin's network. This will shoot up the price even further and will accelerate solar-battery-bitcoin-green combo. We just save the Earth and a lot of people become rich. Win win situation if you ask me.
/s
Given ARKs time horizon, it would be a prescient investment. There's no way in hell were going to get stable power from solar and batteries alone. The bitcoin power problem is also solved.
We should care about keeping the old ones operating as long as possible, but we've been hearing tales of new safer smaller easy to deploy nuclear plants designs for decades, I wouldn't hold my breath.
We currently use natural gas for this flexibility, which is better than coal, but still a big polluter.
True, non-existent reactors are the least dangerous of all, just like components that aren't there are the most reliable.