Cryptocurrency Mines Consume More Power Than Argentina–But PSUs Can Help | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency Mines Consume More Power Than Argentina–But PSUs Can Help

allaboutcircuits.com

7 pointsone2three420 comments

If you get a more efficient PSU, miners' energy bill will be lower, which means the hash rate will go up by the same amount because the profit is not affected by mining efficiency (transaction fees plus block reward) whereas the costs (hardware plus energy) just went down. It would do nothing towards improving the environmental situation.

The only way to get miners to stop buying hardware or stop spending energy on this, is to lower the reward, i.e. if we decrease the value of a Bitcoin (stop putting more money into it) or collectively decide that maybe PoW isn't such a good idea in the middle of a climate crisis and try to bundle (do fewer) transactions or even stop using this system altogether. We can also try increasing energy taxes to the equivalent of climate impact (something approaching the cost of atmospheric carbon capture, on the order of €1 per kg of CO2e[1], because that's what it takes to undo what they caused), but that would just push miners to use up the cheaper renewable energy and crowd out everyone else and also impact people that use energy as a modern life necessity rather than for fun and profit.

[1] https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions

The only reason why Bitcoin energy usage is so high is because the difficulty is automatically adjusted so that the average time between blocks is approximately 10 minutes. Any attempts to improve the energy efficiency, rather than reduce total power consumption, will likely just make Bitcoin mining cheaper and bring more miners online.

The only practical thing that would reduce the environmental impact of Bitcoin would be a drop in the price of bitcoin. I keep thinking this thing is on its last legs but it keeps going like a bad dream driven only by speculative frenzy.

For the record, I'm not against the concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency but most popular cryptocurrencies are very badly suited to actually being currencies and in the meantime just serve to warm the planet.

There's only one solution: Get rid of Argentina.

I feel like absurdist humor is not appreciated here. Shame :)

Two fallacies:

1- "Mining Involves Computation-intensive Operations" => this is just a cheap brute force loop for guessing the nonce

2- "Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency" => Whales and Pools can control the price. 65% of Hashrate is concentrated in China.

Sorry I don't understand how the first one is wrong?

AFAIK it uses two iterations of SHA-256 to generate the hash.

ie. A cryptographic hashing function designed to be computationally expensive/infeasible to reverse.

Hashing is the easy part and because it is not reversible miners waste energy looping and trying different nonces so you get a hash with the required amount of zeros.

For my is just like a brute force password try-loop with a hashing in between. And that is the whole science XD

>Hashing is the easy part and because it is not reversible miners waste energy looping and trying different nonces so you get a hash with the required amount of zeros.

The above is massively computationally expensive, hence why it's not a fallacy.

sorry with all respect but Expensiveness is related with how many zeros have the target because you have too loop more.

That is why you waste more energy (more expensive) now than years ago.

I disagree, the computational expensive aspect is the fact that you are trying to find the inverse of the double hash. Hence you are forced to brute force.

If the problem was adjusted where it wasn't using a double hash, and had some simple two-way function than it wouldn't be considered computationally expensive. That is irrespective of the length of the nonce. E.G if it was just a how much do I add to get a nonce of length x.

The complexity here is caused by the double hash.

The length of the nonce is just an even further scaling of an already difficult problem.

look we can discuss a lot about what is expensive. But my comment was about that just a brute force "guessing" loop algorithm in PoW is being sold like a "Computation-intensive Operation" what in my opinion is just a stupid way to waste energy and belongs in the same club of institutions like Bank Industry and Gold Mining that also waste energy. PoS is loot better.

I think this is a pretty silly article. Yes some PSUs are more efficient than others, but we're talking about the difference between 80% worst case to 95% best case. So at best you're lowering conspution by around 10-15%, which is not nothing, but it's also no where near addressing the fundamentally huge power consumption of crypto. Also realistically since energy is one of the two primary costs of crypto mining, miners are probably pretty clued up already about efficient PSUs so it may well be that there is 0 energy consumption that can be reduced by moving to more efficient PSUs.

It would be kind of comical if crypto miners had gone to the trouble of designing ASICs for mining but hadn't bothered to have a browse on newegg for a decent PSU.

The ongoing discussion if mining cryptocurrency is a better "waste of energy" in comparison to watching Netflix or mining gold is repetitive and cumbersome. Just make sure energy costs include negative externalities (e.g. CO2) and the market will do the rest.

Innovation in finding a crypto currency hook to hang a fairly ordinary piece of content marketing on. But yes, power supplies matter, and saving a watt across millions of devices always adds up.

100 years from now BitCoin will be seen for what it really is - the computing icing on top of the large excrement cake that is our industrial civilisation.

Is this whole article just an advertisement for Transphorm?

We need legislation.

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