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The saddest or the most idiotic part of this whole story is the "bitcoin to the moon" crowd. Bitcoin price almost directly increases the effort spent on mining - if you're going into bitcoin now hoping it will 2x this literally means you're hoping it will 2x the hardware and energy consumption.

Great point! For what it's worth, they could easily spend more than that $1.5 billion. Or at least cause to be spent. There's well known theft of electricity and computation for mining. Give the opaqueness of the industry, it's totally plausible that there are under-the-table deals or power diversions at large scale. Some people will be in the grip of sunk-cost fallacy or irrational optimism about Bitcoin's future gains. And then of course there are the negative externalities from things like pollution.

In one sense the solution is PoS. But Bitcoin will never ever ever adopt PoS, so we need to somehow convince hodlers and traders to switch to another cryptocurrency in a way that doesn't look like discrimination (e.g. outright banning PoW). A global carbon tax is an obvious yet oh so difficult possibility. Some kind of memetic warfare might be more feasible.

Discriminating against PoW algorithms seems fine? It's like discriminating against fossil fuels.

Which is fine.

The way the bitcoin network works, as far as I understand it, is by running a lottery every 10 minutes. The thing is there are many ways of running a lottery that don't involve burning tons of electricity in the process. In fact most lotteries don't burn any energy at all. Why the inventors of bitcoin decided to do it this way is beyond me.

> there are many ways of running a lottery that don't involve burning tons of electricity in the process

You need something to be the limiting factor on the amount that you can try to win such a lottery. With proof of work, it's electricity. (assuming everyone is about as efficient as each other) Early on, they talked about it being proportional to cpu-time. That has become more abstract since.

The limiting factor can be the price of the lottery ticket. (It seems the most obvious limiting factor, by the way.)

But what's the cost of the lottery ticket? Is it a certain amount work done? That's "proof of work". Is it an amount of the currency? That's "proof of stake", kinda.

I haven't heard of any cryptos that require you to risk your coins to mine. Sounds like a neat gimmick, but hard to implement.

The lottery isn't the point, it's a side effect. The network needs consensus on what transactions have happened and which haven't. The main difficulty in getting this when you can't trust the nodes that someone can just spin up an arbitrary number of nodes to overwhelm the consensus, if the consensus just goes by majority vote. If you want to prevent this you need to tie the consensus to something which is scarce, which is what proof of work does. As a side effect of how this is implemented, it becomes a lottery.

If you implement proof of stake, for example (where the scarce resource becomes the currency of the network itself, which is a lot trickier to implement and especially quite hard to bootstrap from nothing because in the early days of a currency there's going to be only a few people owning it), then there's no need for the reward process to be a lottery (though it still can be).

It's still a lottery, except the way you buy tickets is by wasting electricity. The more electricity wasted the more lottery tickets you have. It doesn't need be like this, just buy the tickets with effing bitcoins and you achieve the same result without wasting electricity.

It’s not that easy. You can’t secure Bitcoin with a lottery run on Bitcoin, because then you could forge your own tickets and forge the drawing, too.

The proof of stake proposals don’t seem to work that way. They seem to be more a matter of stakeholders having machines that vote about who is trustworthy.

I don't think you would be able to forge your own ticket. For example, the lottery tickets could be "purchased" by sending some amount of BTC to a special/nonexistent address, and these transactions would be required to be present in the block being validated for the block to be considered valid. Admittedly I haven't thought about all the details but it would surprise me if there wasn't an obvious alternative to the proof-of-waste system currently in place.

> We need to drum up interest for a solution.

There is already massive interest in finding more efficient ways to solve the problem. It's a difficult problem to solve (as Elon Musk will likely learn in the coming year).

The cost of proof of work is paid in two forms. The first is in the form of inflation. Merely holding onto Bitcoin means eating dilution as new Bitcoins are printed to fund the mining ecosystem. And the second cost is in terms of transaction fees. At times, it can cost $20+ to send a transaction over the Bitcoin network, and a more efficient / higher throughput system could significantly reduce these fees.

The users of Bitcoin are already themselves naturally incentivized to look for better solutions, even completely absent any care about the environment.

>The users of Bitcoin are already themselves naturally incentivized to look for better solutions

This would imply the users of Bitcoin use it for anything more than speculative investment.

Holders of Bitcoin want to see the price go up, which makes the problem worse. So the primary incentive is very bad and that's how we got here.

More enlightened self-interest would be to want to see the price go up without using more electricity, but this is secondary to the primary incentive.

To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

> To get action from enlightened self-interest, there needs to be leadership for making changes. (Ethereum seems to have this?)

Knowledge preceedes enlightenment. For example, Git is also green-friendly, and shares a virtually identical consensus model to pure PoS consensus designs. It’s just that “green-friendliness” wasn’t a design goal of cryptocurrency — creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was.

As it were, pure PoS consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains [1]. In PoW networks, cumulative hashing power can be simply and easily mathematically compared to produce cold, quantitative consensus. In PoS networks, there is no hashing power, and human intervention is required — just like Git.

Which begs the question, why do PoS networks even need a blockchain? I think we all know the reason for that, though — Git doesn’t have a hype train. Git just isn’t good enough at separating the general public from their hard-earned money.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27144921

Saying "just use git" seems simplistic. But I could imagine a Debian-like organization that chooses a pool of trusted servers run by independent organizations in multiple countries, where they all have to agree, and with a full transparency log like DNS.

Bitcoin is trustless, it is designed to withstand quite serious attempts at committing fraud (haha, a pun).

Git was designed for cooperative work, and critically depends on trust (commit access).

Merkle trees are easy, scalable schemes of trustless consensus, less so :(

One way would be to simply start to do CO2 offsets of the total estimated energy spent per block mined. It’s a fun thing to calculate & dream about but enforcement would be hard.