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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

And so it begins.

In the developed world in particular, we're seeing the move away from fossil-fuel power. This is good but currently relatively expensive.

Crypto mining is starting to have very real impact on the ability of other people to live. It is adversely and disproportionately affecting poor people (who pay a greater share of their income for power).

And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society.

Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". What this actually means is that crypto-mining is focused on areas that have hydroelectric power because it's the cheapest, generally.

While you might say that's still good, it's starting to raise prices for other people. this has been an issue in towns on the Hudson Valley in New York, for example.

Even if you believe the overall impact of crypto-mining is small I guarantee you it's only a matter of time before politicians start using crypto-mining as a convenient whipping boy.

View on HN

> Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy".

Which is a shit take anyway because that means that non-renewable energy (plus the renewable energy non-consumed by the miners) is now more expensive for everyone else, it's the basic law of supply and demand.

And in the process those miners are also making non-renewable energy a more desirable investment because it now returns more money to those who invest in it (because of said increased prices people are now forced to pay for said non-renewable energy).

It's sad that this gets downvoted because you're not wrong eg [1][2][3].

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bi...

[2]: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env...

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...

China has banned mining.

Update cause I'm getting down voted: the point is that the quoted articles are talking about China and are therefore outdated. I'm not referring to what is happening today with regards to the movement of mining.

_Some_ miners moved to Kazakhstan, but the truth is, they went global.

Did you read any of the articles? China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.

Apparently you didn't fully read the article. The shortages aren't the miners, it is the fact that 3 plants shut down...

"On October 15, the national grid operator, KEGOC, announced electricity rationing after three major coal-fired power plants shut down. KEGOC did not directly blame miners, but it used language similar to the energy minister’s and said it was cutting off customers who “over-consume.”"

> KEGOC did not directly blame miners, but it used language similar to the energy minister’s and said it was cutting off customers who “over-consume.”

And:

> "We have seen that our [country's] electricity consumption has literally increased by 7 percent in one year. That's a very big increase," Energy Minister Magzum Mirzagaliyev said on September 30, noting that consumption usually grows by about 2 percent per annum.

> Mirzagaliyev linked the demand to mining and proposed the government limit supplies of electricity to 1 MW per mining farm and to 100 MW for the whole sector.

Where's the mystery here? Again, hopefully for the last time: China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.

> China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.

We wouldn't be reading about power shortages at all if 3 major power plants didn't go offline.

We also wouldn't be reading about them if crypto people didnt increase power draw by 7%.

Energy is not fungible. Just because you have electricity in place A doesn't mean you can get it to place B in a cost-effective way, so mining next to, say, a hydro station with spare capacity (where electricity is cheap) doesn't necessarily have any impact at all elsewhere.

What you must also mention is that electricity is a finite resource. Consuming electrical energy - even at a hydro power station - means the energy you used isn't delivered to somewhere else.

is electricity finite? i don't think so.

you might say that the grid can only support a certain load at a some given time, but obviously more energy could be provided.

in any case, i think it's silly to concern ourselves with (specifically Bitcoin's) energy consumption, as it's tiny compared to the efficiency gains that are realized elsewhere as a result of bitcoin's adoption.

Yes, electricity is finite. Just because you could add more power generation doesn’t mean it’s infinite, c’mon now.

I disagree, the hydro stations that we have in place were in fact meant to transport electricity from place A (a mountain area, in most of the cases) to place B (where people actually live) in cost-effective ways, that was their purpose from the very beginning. Using that energy up increases the price people from place B have to pay.

You could say that one could build a new hydro station just for delivering energy to crypto miners but that would open another can of worms as we're slowly starting to realise that hydro stations are not the most environment-friendly things imaginable (especially when it comes to habitat loss and disruption).

It's not that simple because these imbalances won't last forever. If the cost of renewable power remains low, it will encourage people in those regions to buy EVs, electrify their homes and businesses, relocate industrial usage to that area, etc.

If crypto-miners jump in to soak up that excess capacity, that cycle doesn't happen and there's very little positive outcome to show compared to all of those uses. 50 years from now, people are going to wish electrifying normal life had happened quickly but they're not going to be using a blockchain or glad that some speculators were able to make large returns for a few years.

Specific example:

Coinmint in upstate new york is located in an old Alcoa aluminum smelter plant that has long shut down. It gets power from Moses Saunders dam a few miles away. The factory was originally placed near the dam so that it could provide massive amounts of power to keep the pot lines hot 24/7.

The whole place is super remote. I've seen the costs for carrying hundreds of MW just a few miles and they are massive at this scale. You can't just economically build more lines to send the power elsewhere.

Short of firing up the superfund site again and smelting aluminum, a bitcoin mine is literally the most profitable thing you could use this power for. The dam needs maintenance and a constant draw of power to keep it operational, and this pays for it.

Since the power lines are direct from the dam to the plant and the contracts were all drawn up decades ago, this has zero impact on the local community prices. Never mind that the local community doesn't draw anywhere near enough power compared with what the dam produces.

There's on the order of 7+ million people within 150km of the dam. I don't think I would call that remote.

Not to mention that all New York power plants, including Moses Saunders, are connected to a massive electrical highway that runs straight to New York City.

The lines from Moses Saunders to the plant are direct. You can even see them on google maps if you zoom in and follow them.

You can't just suddenly push more power through the same lines.

The Moses Saunders dam is connected to the NYISO transmission network. The power system in New York is designed to move power north to south, west to east (lines tend to be symmetric in theory but a good model is that the city is the load). You can look at a price map of New York State and see that. Power from the dam can go from it to anywhere else in New York (or the eastern interconnect) at the cost of transmission losses and tolling. Drawing power directly from a hydro plant doesn’t make that power green because, insofar as the plant could supply electricity to the rest of the grid, it means your power usage has the same environmental impact as the average unit of electricity on the grid at that time. The only thing it does is reduce your cost.

The amount of load that is allocated to the Alcoa facility has been negotiated and fixed into contracts and capex has been spent to build out the infrastructure for that. It isn't like you can just flip a switch and direct the power to the NYISO.

> at the cost of transmission losses and tolling

... a key point that I feel you're glossing over.

Yes you can flip a switch and direct the power elsewhere, that is what switching yards do. The plant might have a supply contract with Alcoa but if Alcoa doesn’t use the supply they contracted for you they don’t have to throw the power away. Usually those agreements have take or pay provisions which require the buyer to pay regardless of whether they take the power. If they don’t take the power the generator is free to sell it on.

Transmission losses are not nothing but they are not huge. Maybe 2% to New York (it isn’t they far). Maybe 5% total if you include distribution.

Edit: Follow the lines out of the plant, at 44.978432, -74.797925 they split.

This does make me wonder how difficult it is to raise the voltage on the same lines by changing transformers.

You might need to separate the lines more (and need bigger insulators), but I wonder how much of this gets overbuilt at the point of construction so you can upgrade to run more energy over the same wires without replacing them.

Anyone know?

The NYPA is in the process of upgrading the Massena-Adirondack transmission lines which will initially be at 230kV, but later be able to be run at 345kV.

https://www.nny360.com/news/stlawrencecounty/power-authority...

Do you know how much to costs, per km, to run and maintain those lines?

I can't be that much since we've had long distance high voltage transmission lines for decades, even in relatively poor countries.

Plus, if you really wanted to because there was no other use, you could, you know, shut down the hydro power plant and return the land to nature. Hydro power plants still have an environmental impact, no point in running them for what is practically, speculation.

In the US, the people who pay for those lines are the consumers and it isn't cheap to run. This translates to more expensive power bills.

Shutting down the dam isn't going to happen. It is split by Canada and the US and does more than just power Coinmint.

The lines are cheap enough to run. About 1-2% of the electricity cost in the UK.

You seemed to be asserting that without a major user near the dam, they would need to build more transmission lines or otherwise waste the generating capacity available.

This seemed unlikely to me, as transmission grids are built with significant redundancy, especially for the high-voltage networks. For example, the transmission capacity for the 8 500kV circuits from Bruce Nuclear (ignoring 3 230kV circuits) is 1.5 times the generating capacity. I wasn't sure about this particular station, but with a bit of digging, it seems like the Massena-Adirondack lines alone (there are several others) can carry 900MW, which is more than the capacity of the power station. So no additional lines should be needed.

Lol your 150km loop captures Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston in Canada and Watertown/Plattsburgh NY.

All of these are about as apples to oranges in relation to geographic ties to Massena as you can get.

Between Massena and those places is a whole lot of nothing for a couple hours.

That's like saying there is some meaningful geographic tie between Bethlehem, PA and NYC (133km), or that "Unity House, PA" is not remote because it's 143km away from NYC and its 8.4mil residents.

Perhaps Massena is geographically remote and isolated then, but it is certainly not when it comes to the electrical system, which is what is being discussed here. There is plenty of existing transmission capacity to export hydroelectric power from Massena even without Alcoa and Coinmint.

The crypto miners who set up shop in Northern NY to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power caused electricity prices to spike for local residents, resulting in municipalities leveraging new taxes on the companies or issuing outright bans. This article is from 2018:

Plattsburgh went over its power allotment and was forced to purchase electricity on the open market for far higher prices. This cost was distributed among the city’s residents, some of whom ended up paying between $100 and $200 more for their electricity than usual.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk4qv/bitcoin-ban-plattsbur...

Massena (near the Alcoa facility) this year issued a moratorium so the city could draw up new regulations:

“The moratorium is a pretty straightforward procedure. The language is relatively clear. The idea is that we place a moratorium on any further cryptocurrency mining development while we get some regulations in place that will govern those types of facilities. The planning board had indicated, and I agreed that the code lacked any real regulatory scheme for these types of facilities within the town,” Mr. Gustafson said.

https://www.nny360.com/communitynews/business/town-of-massen...

https://www.northcountrynow.com/letters/snake-oil-alert-bloc...

You picked off the easily googled articles that are unrelated to Coinmint and happened during the crypto boom in 2017 / 2018, when people were renting warehouses and filling them with miners. Everyone got rightfully pissed.

The article about the moratorium is from the summer, and if you are looking for the Coinmint angle, here you go (dated July 23, 2021):

https://www.northcountrynow.com/news/massena-town-board-plan...

You are just googling articles and not even reading them. Coinmint is mentioned in there, but there is no 'angle' in that article other than the mention. They are still in operation today and expanding and I doubt that is going to change any time soon.

Ya would have to agree. That far upstate NY, it's a different game.

The other aspect to consider, which is being dropped, is Coinmint operates with support from NYS via Empire State Development, so there's that.

People don't build hydroelectric plants in, say, northern Quebec and suddenly discover that there's all this free energy and no one around to use it. The build those hydroelectric plants and the transmission lines to places (say, Montreal) where people need that energy, even if those lines are 1000s of km long.

The electricity may be cheaper next to that hydro station because you're not also paying for the 1000km transmission line. But your use of that electricity would preclude the people 1000km away from using it.

What an odd take, given that electricity is almost the poster definition of fungible. Sure there are transmission losses, but they are very minor.

It's not perfectly fungible, but nothing in the real world is, everything has some sort of shipping costs. I can't think of anything more fungible than electricity except for virtual items like dollars.

so crypto doesn't count for supply and demand or what are you saying?

If big crypto-mining syndacates start using small scale nuclear (as some have shown interest in doing) to be carbon neutral, they could be on the vangaurd of proving out the technology and be a net positive in the medium to long term.

They really want low, consistent prices for electricity. Hydro gives them that but nuclear could also. Solar and wind do not.

> If big crypto-mining syndacates start using small scale nuclear...

Any volunteers for living in the exclusion zones?

Seems fine to me. I already have nuclear irradiated genes, I'm sterile, and I prefer nature for company over human beings.

(If you were sarcastically implying that no one would volunteer, you are mistaken. I encourage making your point more clearly and with less sarcasm, since a worthwhile discussion is possible if you do so.)

I was a bit sarcastic, but the effects on real estate values alone prevent many from wanting to live near a plant.

The sarcasm came from the crypto part. The idea that swaths of US land would be devalued for the latest crypto pump and dump project makes me laugh and die inside.

I mean Solana is actually pretty cool. But all other crypto projects of which I am aware do not add value to our species as a whole. So adding nuclear power to the mix, for which the total cost of ownership is not even calculable? Just wow.

Totally with you on that “die inside” part for sure!

Wait, so you mean we’re solving housing prices too?!! :-)

> but the effects on real estate values alone prevent many from wanting to live near a plant.

So what you're really saying between the lines, is that nuclear power will lead to affordable housing?

I would like to add that I do take your point on sarcasm. Thank you.

I keep reading that this or the other crypto thing had a design flaw that caused people to lose millions.

I really don't want those same kinds of people running nuclear reactors so I can read about how crypto scheme X literally blew up.

They won't be running them, of course, just have long term contracts with the companies that make them. Check out NuScale Power[1]. They recently had their small reactor approved in the US (approval paperwork cost $500 million dollars) and they should have some of them running soon. The reactor can be built in a factory and is small enough to be delivered in one piece via truck. This will dramatically reduce construction costs, if they can get enough orders. Why buying and deploying 1000 of these is not in the climate bill is just crazy if climate change is the huge threat people claim it to be. I think global warming is going to be a big problem; bring on the nukes.

[1]https://www.nuscalepower.com/

I agree with you that all sorts of nuclear power is going to be important in dealing with climate change.

I still disagree with the types of people that run crypto and are ideologically opposed to any kind of common sense regulation being let anywhere near nuclear power.

Here's [1] what happened when those people got something comparatively harmless like a cruise ship. I really don't think it sets a good precedent.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

I'm a bit of a crypto enthusiast, but I generally agree that crypto-mining suck too much power out of the grid for it's current utility level.

However, your comment is a bit short-sighted and doesn't account for the switch of Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake algorithms that is currently happening. PoS use A LOT less power and doesn't need extensive mining farms. See also: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

The only remaining question is: are we going to transition away from bitcoin, the largest PoW bastion, or not ? Probably, yes.

No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.

I didn't meant for Bitcoin to transition to PoS, but rather everyone using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because it's now PoS.

Yeaaaaah i will believe it when i see it. I don't think betting the economy on changing airplane engines mid-flight is a good play. My prediction is that if ETH switches to a PoS consensus model, the value will TANK. If this happens at all. I know the PoS timeline, I think it is fiction.

Ironically, ETH switching to PoS is the reason I am holding the currency.

In the future I expect all PoW cryptocurrencies to be banned, or severely hobbled, because of their electricity usage and e-waste. I have a long bet on ETH specifically because of its eventual move to PoS. Bitcoin doesn't even have a plan, and when the legal landscape changes it will be in the worst position to pivot.

We'll just have to see what the future holds. But I got my money down.

Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world.

Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not.

If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems?

> Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world.

Why can't it be banned? It's wasteful and closer to a Ponzi scheme than an actual currency.

> Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not.

That could be hard if many of the worthwhile places ban it :-)

> If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems?

Most people in crypto are in it for the money, not for idealism.

As someone who has been in this space a long time, I assure you I am idealistic in my positions. Hopelessly idealistic.

What does Ban even mean? That it is illegal to run in places like the US? Very unlikely, and as more institutional money flows into it, it grows more unlikely. Some places are starting to put 401k/pension funds into it. Some places are raising it as legal tender. There is also that 1st amendment thing.

So will it banned like drinking straws? (which are still available) Or banned like drugs? (which are still available).

I feel you WANT it to be banned because it tickles your authoritarian tendencies. I am glad we live in a world, at least today, where your wishes are ignored.

This discussion is worth revisiting in 10 years :-)

How is the first amendment relevant here?

The early cryptography wars were fought over code as speech.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

There is an argument to be made that running software that speaks a protocol is an extension of speech.

The mental position that wants to ban cryptocurrency is the same one that that wanted to ban/suppress cryptography in the 90s.

"If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems? "

Because I want to make money? I don't see why that matters.

I don't need or want the technology to be banned. I want mining operations to be illegal in the US, and I want it to be illegal to convert to/from USD.

If you still want to use it then, enjoy.

I wonder what the economics are like for a Starship-delivered nuclear-powered Bitcoin mine in space…

Why would Ethereum's value tank when it shall be switching entirely to PoS (the PoS chain is already up and running perfectly fine btw)?

Ethereum shall also lower the block reward, lower the fees, and make more people hold on to their ETH to get the staking reward.

Why would the price tank? Also ETH is already at 1/2th the "market cap" of Bitcoin, so a takeover is definitely not unthinkable.

I'm currently staking ETH 2.0 Many people are.

Bad for the free world? That's a bit of a fucking stretch. I think you can pretty comfortably argue the power and e-waste situation created by PoW is much worse for the "free world" than a slightly stronger consensus mechanism for a speculative value store.

I haven’t dug into this, but I do intuitively sense some risks with PoS. Can anyone recommend a good, thoughtful writeup of the specific risks?

Actually PoW accentuates the concentration of miners, while in Ethereum 2 you are limited to a few mining machine, thus distributing more equally the mining power.

Actually, no, the opposite. One of the fundamental problems with PoS is that it has no externally observable metric that a block is correct. PoW is trivially externally verifiable. This is good for decentralization. There can be no lies from the miners.

Bitcoin miners per se do not control Bitcoin network. They are the backbone, but the nodes ultimately decide whether they include a mined block or not. Validating blocks is way cheaper than mining them. Expensive mining process only ensures that you can't easily flood the network with bogus blocks.

isn't the current virtual money system already a PoS system?

(i mean proof-of-stake, not the alternative inflammatory PoS)

I think the other thing ignored is that crypto tends to take as much power as possible.

Making crypto more efficient wouldn't make it use less electricity, it would just increase the number of miners. And you'd be a fool not to do that because only one node becomes part of the chain and the more you mine, the greater your chances you get that golden ticket.

Crypto will always try to get power usage as close to 100% as possible from every possible source. We never get off of fossil fuels unless crypto stops being a thing.

And not to mention, being at capacity all the time is a bad thing. In something you want available all the time, you want a lot of potential capacity in case of failures or demand spikes.

It does not appear that this particular electricity shortage is caused by moving away from fossil fuels. The coal plant shutdowns mentioned in the article were outages (2 unplanned and 1 planned) [1] rather than permanent closures due to an energy transition.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-aft...

Even if it did use mostly renewable energy, which I doubt (I've heard some buy old coal fired plants to run their mining operations), it's still energy that could have been used for something useful. It takes away power for real enterprises and people that use it for their daily living.

> What this actually means is that crypto-mining is focused on areas that have hydroelectric power because it's the cheapest, generally.

Hydro is also interesting because it has to output power. When the reservoir gets above a certain level water has to be let out because dams can't handle overflow. That's achieved by diverting water to a stream without a turbine.

> this has been an issue in towns on the Hudson Valley in New York, for example.

Believe you have your NY State river valleys swapped. There's not much mining downstate. Most of the the mining in NYS is up in the North Country and pulling excess power of the St. Lawrence River and a dam up there that supplies a fair bit of power to NYS/Canada/surrounding region. There was a study from Wharton recently on the impacts of power prices as a result.

Taxation could be a solution though, with rebates for low-income people and individuals. This means that the disadvantaged still get access to cheap power, where as crypto miners have to pay the (taxed) price which makes their operation less profitable.

It's not uncommon for poor people to not have spare money to float some taxes to the government for up to 12 months until they can get their rebate at tax time. That's assuming that the rebate is easy enough to get for 100% of those eligible to claim it.

This seems strictly worse than just taxing "mined" bitcoins more harshly.

Would you be bothered if folks built their own solar farm to power crypto mining on their own independent grid?

A bit, because that solar manufacturing capacity wasn't used for reducing global carbon emissions or other direct human needs.

On the contrary, it directly reduces global carbon emissions by removing a load from a grid that has not been decarbonized.

Any way you skin this cat, resources are limited. So it would be taking away resources from other uses.

Plus producing solar farms is harmful to the environment, as is running them.

Unless you actually use solar farms for something useful, you know, replacing stuff with a higher negative environmental impact.

Building your own power grid for crypto speculation is kind of the textbook definition of greed and selfishness.

The Sun is not a limited resource, not until we're a K2 civilization anyway -- and we're no where close to K2. The other materials in solar panels are abundant and reusable. There is plenty of unoccupied desert to build on.

In what way are resources limited?

Hyper pure quartz for photovoltaic solar is limited.

Are you thinking of purified silicon? Silicon is made starting with quartz, quartzite, or similar minerals rich in silicon dioxide. Crude silicon always requires additional purification for solar uses after it's initially created, so the purity of quartz going into the electric furnace isn't critical.

You can see the process flow from raw materials to completed PV modules here:

http://oasis.mechse.illinois.edu/me432/ME432_L31_Nov4.pdf

No, I'm talking of high purity silicon necessary for the crucibles used to manufacture polysilicon wafers suitable for PV solar panels.

> The Sun is not a limited resource,

Photovoltaic cells and the materials to use them _are_ limited and the amount of power produced by solar today is _very_ limited.

> not until we're a K2 civilization anyway

People should read less science-fiction and look at the actual world as it exists today.

Yes, let's look at the actual world as it exists today: the land area required to power the annual global energy consumption (110 TWh) with the inefficient solar panels that we have today is smaller than the US state of New Mexico.

How's that for pragmatics?

crypto provides a very important social utility to the poor, the only hope that they might stop being that

> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society.

This is true for bitcoin. It failed at everything it set out to be and yet it is the most mined coin. Truly a waste of energy.

There are better projects out there which actually provide value and utility. Monero is an example. It's pretty sad that bitcoin is still number one despite the existence of these projects.

Monero is a proof of work cryptocurrency. I like PoW, it is the most secure distributed consensus algorithm we have discovered. If Monero was as popular as Bitcoin, it would use something similar to the energy. None of it is a 'waste of energy'.

I agree with you. It's a waste of energy because that energy is being spent mining BTC, a useless coin that isn't anonymous, private, decentralized, fungible, it isn't even an actual currency. It should be spent mining Monero instead which actually does have all of those properties.

Oh dear.

I don't remember who said that crypto is Lululemon, Amway, multi-level marketing for tech guys, but it's amazing the similarities.

In a discussion on Proof of work does not scale, cannot scale, will choke out production in the economy going forward because of its design, a person responds with say "you're right, that product is bad. Don't buy that one instead buy this one".

Does this other one solve any of those problems? Nope, but the person hawking it has purchased a lot of product and gets a cut if you buy into it.

It's amazing how disingenuous crypto conflict of interest has made any and all discussion about crypto.

So you think I'm a multi-level marketer? Is it even possible to prove otherwise? I just happen to believe in that project and like to talk about it. Am I supposed to not talk about this stuff?

I don't particularly care that energy is being spent on cryptocurrency. What I hate is the fact that energy is being spent on bitcoin in particular. The energy is not supposed to be wasted, it's supposed to buy us something. Namely, a decentralized, private, anonymous, uncensorable, unsanctionable digital cash network. Something that could withstand even the might of the US and China if needed.

Bitcoin is not it. At this moment I think Monero is closest to being it. I'm totally open to new ideas.

> I'm totally open to new ideas.

Find a better hobby =/ This casino is not worth boiling the world.

It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them. The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy. China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The very computers we're posting this on? Yet I'm expected to care about BTC energy consumption? No, I refuse to care. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the real problems that no government will lift a finger to solve.

That said, I'm totally open to new hobbies.

> It's not even 1% of global energy consumption.

For now. As its usage goes up, its energy consumption will go up, <<by design>>. It's crazy that we're even talking about a <<currency>> (!!!) using this much power.

> It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them.

We are working on all of that, I guess you haven't been following the news. It's not easy, but we are.

> The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy.

Same. Electric cars, environmental regulations for factories, increased energy efficiency for houses, etc.

> China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No.

China's working on it and the US and EU are actually kind of gearing up towards a trade reduction.

> No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The very computers we're posting this on?

These computers are also used for work, hobbies, making people's lives better.

> No, I refuse to care. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the real problems that no government will lift a finger to solve.

It's not a drop. It's something we created about a decade ago and it uses up a 100th of the energy the entire world is using. That's crazy. And those real problems are being tackled, you just don't know it or refuse to see or think it's simple and easy to solve.

> And those real problems are being tackled, you just don't know it or refuse to see or think it's simple and easy to solve.

Okay. Let's wait for them to solve the big problems first before we focus on inconsequential stuff like cryptocurrency. Once that's taken care of, we'll see if proof of work remains an issue.

1% energy usage is far from a drop in the ocean. It's huge!

In absolute terms, sure. In relative terms, it's nothing. Removing BTC energy consumption from the equation barely affects the result. In order to actually do something about climate change, humanity needs to tackle that big 80-90% chunk of energy consumption coming from much more problematic industries. Cryptocurrency is a nuisance by comparison, a minor problem.

I think if you're going to promote this view, you really need to look into the energy growth rate of Bitcoin.

It has doubled in the past 6 months. And gone up 10x over the past 4 years. How many more times can it go up 10x before you would consider it no longer nothing, and now a concern for the world?

The first rule of holes is "stop digging". We are in a hole with energy consumption. And we've set off an automated digger to sit next to us. People are shouting, if we want to get out of this hole, yes we need to fill it, but first need to do something immediately about this automated digging machine.

In my option (and I'm not singling you out as many in crypto feel this way), it is incredibly backwards for anyone to both say stopping climate change and energy consumption is a priority - and that promoting a growing energy beast isn't a huge concern to be addressed.

I'm not ignoring or dismissing the problem. I just think it's not a priority right now. I also completely support ideas that make cryptocurrency mining more sustainable. In this thread I had an amazing discussion about using the waste heat generated by miners for useful purposes. We definitely need more of that.

I don't like these posts claiming cryptocurrency is literally destroying the world and must be banned or regulated out of existence. Those need a reality check, and the reality is cryptocurrency is not even 1% of world energy consumption.

The evidence seems pretty strong that the world’s gonna get boiled anyway, fwiw.

It’s fine to hope that things might be different, but making decisions and plans based on that hope seems…imprudent.

> Namely, a decentralized, private, anonymous, uncensorable, unsanctionable digital cash network.

In other words, the perfect ability to money launder, evade taxes and purchase contraband. Great.

But what would a law-abiding person do with this?

Why would law-abiding citizens need untraceable, anonymous cash (which is used in 99.99% of crime). This is not a good argument. There are plenty of uses for privacy beyond crime. It is the equivalence of the 'you have nothing to hide' argument, which is total authoritarian bs.

'I have nothing to share'.

Whatever a law-abiding person does. We should not be subjected to total government surveillance because someone somewhere might evade taxes or launder money. We fight hard to maintain our privacy in all fronts, there's no reason for finances to be any different.

> So you think I'm a multi-level marketer? Is it even possible to prove otherwise? I just happen to believe in that project and like to talk about it.

And do you own any Monero?

I own zero XMR right now.

Lululemon is a regular clothing retailer, with no MLM, membership or even loyalty program at this time.

You can't earn any money by re-selling their clothes, you'd probably get sued if you tried.

You probably mean LuLaRoe, a brand that is capitalizing on the name similarity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuLaRoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lululemon_Athletica

Yes, I meant LuLaRoe thank you. Too late to correct it.

I like and hold Monero, it is a good coin.

But it is not Bitcoin. It likely will never have the attention of large capital holders (eg: Financial Institutions). Ignoring the regulatory risks (which absolutely exist), IMHO the real critical risk is that bugs or bad math will break the economic model.

With transparent blockchains like BTC, you can trace every satoshi. With opaque chains like XMR, you risk that a bug in the code will permit invisible inflation. This has happened before! (https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/exploiting-low-o...).

The same problem applies to all ZK based solutions -- Zcash, Grin, Mina... You are one mistake away from invisible inflation that will sap all the value from the coin.

> Ignoring the regulatory risks (which absolutely exist)

I'm of the opinion that Monero is a failure if it can't withstand regulation.

> IMHO the real critical risk is that bugs or bad math will break the economic model.

I agree. I don't think I have sufficient cryptography knowledge to evaluate this risk but I acknowledge its existence. For the moment I trust that the Monero developers will do everything possible to prevent this from happening.

Still, BTC is way too valuable for something that failed to become everything it was envisioned to be. It seems to be driven by brand name alone. XMR is way too undervalued and undermined for a coin that at least tried to address the majority of problems in BTC.

>yet it is the most mined coin

Not a surprise when it is the most valuable one, a day of drops and the corresponding surges that come afterwards can set you up for a long time if you're not from the EU/US, it also appreciates faster than a house, which makes it a great asset to hold.

Not a surprise it is the most sought after, looking at it from the supply/demand aspect.

An important distinction here, this really only applies to PoW (proof of work) tokens. The original philosophy for Bitcoin being proof of work is that you had to give up something (electricity) to produce it.

Your comment is very true for Bitcoin and other PoW tokens but that will soon be in the rearview mirror as more and more coins either come out as PoS (proof of stake) or migrate to it (in the case of Ethereum), even Bitcoin is taking about migrating to a PoS model.

Crypto will evolve past this.

This has been a popular defense for several years now. For awhile I too bought into it. But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack.

The best evidence for this is that PoS hasn't happened despite years of talk about it.

> But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack.

At this point PoS is quite prevalent among modern blockchains (Cosmos, Solana, NEAR, Algorand, Polygon, Cardano, ...). As far as I know, there have been no successful attacks based on PoS's theoretical weaknesses, like its reliance on weak subjectivity. Some PoS networks like NXT have been in production for nearly a decade now. Isn't that fairly strong evidence that PoS works fine in practice?

There have been several consensus failures from PoS, including the recent outage of Solana. One just needs to look at the Steem/Hive 'takeover' by Sun to see how political wars can form and threaten the security model in PoS world. Contrast with bcash incident of 2017.

A few years ago, I saw a Hybrid PoS/Work chain (a satoshi-client derivative coin) being attacked in real time, and totally hijacked. Ultimately it was a bug in the PoS logic that enabled it. I am very apprehensive about PoS even providing a fragment of the security. Chain takeovers are a real threat in PoS world. The attacker needs very little physical resources -- just know the right stakeholders. PoW need resources. PoW is trivial to verify and test. PoS advocates like to gloss over all the real world failures.

You may notice that during the China ban, Bitcoin worked pretty much as expected (with some slight block delays until difficulty adjusted). PoW works.

The other metric to observe is how many chain reorg's occur due to PoS. This is practically a non-event in large PoW chains like Bitcoin, today. In Turing complete chains like EVM chains, it might not be possible to reorder transactions with no-loss during reorgs as transactions are state dependent. PoS potentially destroys finality.

> the recent outage of Solana

Do you mean [1]? It sounds like the consensus issues there were related to Solana's unusual PoH model. Validators being "unable to process all the proposed forks" would never happen in a BFT PoS model, like Tendermint etc, since forks cannot occur (under a 2/3 honesty assumption).

> Ultimately it was a bug in the PoS logic that enabled it.

To state the obvious, PoW chains can have bugs too. It sounds like you were just looking at a niche project that didn't have high standards for engineering and audits.

> PoS advocates like to gloss over all the real world failures.

PoS and PoW chains have both had plenty of incidents, but you haven't really pointed out any PoS incidents that were caused by weaknesses inherent in the PoS security model.

> Bitcoin worked pretty much as expected

Bitcoin has been around the longest, has a relatively small feature set, and rarely changes. One would expect such a chain to be very stable regardless of PoW/PoS.

> The other metric to observe is how many chain reorg's occur due to PoS.

Reorgs can't occur in BFT PoS chains (under a 2/3 honesty assumption).

[1] https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview

Agreed about bugs. Bugs can exist everywhere. It is far easier to validate and test PoW code. Its a < comparision.

Contrasting: https://etherscan.io/blocks_forked and https://polygonscan.com/blocks_forked it would appear that indeed PoS BFT chains like Polygon can and do reorg, very regularly.

"extremely limited utility for society" is harldy an argument.

It's limited today. In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto).

Going to space had hardly any utility, going to Mars even less. But on the way there will a TON of progress and discoveries made that will be used in medicine, manufacturing etc.

Yeah, but meanwhile let's not burn the planet down.

Let's ban all resource intensive crypto-currencies.

If they're so good for society, surely they can be lean, too?

> In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto).

Can you suggest some ways my life might be different in ten years thanks to cryptocurrency?

> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society.

Whenever you sell it, if you generated a profit on that sale, you are going to pay taxes on it (at least in the US).

That's a real value for society. Can it ever be enough to offset the added squeeze on the electricity grid (which we really don't need right now, with EVs coming on and our grid in serious need of upgrade/expansion)? Someone will have to do the math on that.

No. Your profit from trading bitcoins is someone else's loss. The amount wealth in society remains unchanged, only it's allocated differently. Total value added = zero. A tax on profits doesn't add any value either, it's just an additional re-allocation of the same wealth.

That’s not strictly true; some forms of capital allocation increase future productivity (and therefore future wealth) at a greater rate than others.

Crypto transactions cannot create or destroy fiat currency.

If you buy and hold cryptocurrency, at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones.

So if you make money by selling some cryptocoin, that is _entirely_ because someone else purchased it at a greater price than you did.

Their expectation is that someone else will later buy it at a greater price from them, and that person will be buying it on the hope that someone will pay yet more again.

No actual cashflows appear anywhere in this process.

What happens when there isn't a new Greater Fool?

The value of fiat could go to zero.

> at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones

Why it has to be physical? One could use cryptocurrencies to pay for virtual things on virtual internet, which are nevertheless thought to be meaningful.

Like, fiat currencies exist as a way of paying taxes to your government and also you can exchange them for goods and services.

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