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Comment by rriepe | Hacker News Reader

It only starts out inefficient. Eventually you have enough of them to capture most of the energy of the star.

According to my definition, that's a Nakamoto Type II civilization, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435464

(Spoiler: it's just the Kardashev scale with the additional condition that all available energy has to be burned on crypto mining)

Yeah, we'll end up building a Dyson sphere just to secure a goddamn "financial network".

Been worried about this for a while (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21280454 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24309932).

EDIT: Merged pull request: quotes around "financial network" (usrusr)

EDIT 2: _Microft wins this day. I'm going to start using Nakamoto scale from now on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368015

Basically doing the same as in Accelerando https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

Heh, knowing humanity this is definitely the least unlikely scenario for a Dyson sphere to come into existence.

Pull request: quotes around "financial network"

I've seen your comments throughout the years and it's been one of the sparks for me to learn more about Bitcoin's power consumption, it is truly bizarre how easily shoved aside the argument about the climate impact of PoW cryptocurrencies is by their proponents. Seems that some on the Bitcoin train didn't realise that the concept and technology have been coopted by miners, etc. since the rift about increasing block size or not, the miners and others with high stakes in maintaining the status quo have won. They won't ever allow their investments to become worthless (or at least non-profitable) and now all the other smaller agents have to fight a war against that to ever have a chance to change the massive ecological impact of Bitcoin.

Thanks for shaping a path to educate myself on this issue, I recognised the Dyson sphere analogy pretty quickly, haha.

There's a really strong movement inside the crypto community to move away from any sort of technology that requires a Proof of Work system like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is like the racist grandfather that started the family: nobody _actually_ likes it except the people trying to get close to get rich off of it someday. There are lots of blockchains that are very promising that are excellent alternatives that are gaining major traction. Even Ethereum itself recognizes that Proof of Work is terrible and is restructuring how the blockchain itself operates to correct it.

But something nobody ever even questions is: How much power does Wall Street consume? Or every bank, and every bank chain in the world? It's so easy to point the finger directly at coin mining as "that's bad" because people used to try to do it at home and it became increasingly impossible to do because of the power consumption, but nobody sees the power consumption by the huge amount of computational automation that goes into stock trading.

Ethereum is facing that very scenario of miners versus environment and has told the miners: too bad, your way will die, prepare for it. I don't know if Bitcoin will do that or follow suit, but I would argue that Ethereum is the worst of the two since it still uses GPUs for mining rather than customized ASIC processors (which only have one purpose: to calculate, in hardware, a SHA256 hash using parallel micro-cores that can run hundreds simultaneously per chip) like Bitcoin does.

I'm looking forward to the day when a smart, environmentally-friendly blockchain like EOS/WAX, Stellar, Solana, and the likes take over and slowly "wrap" BTC into them, burning them on one chain to activate their value on another.

Here I was hoping we'd spend it on virtual environments where we could just set account balances to whatever we want

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