Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

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> It is not a waste, as it provides physical security, exactly the same as idle nuclear missiles on standby do, or standing armies that are "doing nothing", until a war happens.

You don't think those get very wasteful in the real world? And there's no equivalent to a real war situation. You can set it up so you don't need to defend against the equivalent of enemy armies.

> The vast majority of mining today uses sustainable energy (70%+), because it is actually cheaper.

What kind of sustainable?

When miners locate next to hydro, and buy it up, that doesn't help anything. That hydro could have been sold as somewhat less cheap power elsewhere, after going over long wires, and then it would have reduced the load on coal plants.

Miners that eat up excess solar can theoretically do a lot to encourage the installation of solar, but they need to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large fraction of the time. If it's still profitable to run 20 hours a day, then they're still encouraging fossil power plants.

> Dishwashers and heated swimming pools use WAY more energy globally, but because pleasant luxuries are quite enjoyable, nobody seems to attack them.

Dishwashers are better than hand-washing, aren't they? Having plates is a lot more important than running cryptocurrencies in a particular way.

If heated swimming pools use that much, then sure let's go after that and use some kind of billing or taxes so they pay extra and encourage sustainable power sources.

I disagree that standing armies and nuclear weapons are a waste. They guarantee your security, which you seem to take for granted. Your views on this could change if you spend a few years in a warzone under artillery fire.

It is of course not 100% perfect analogy, nothing is, but I believe you understood the point I tried to get across: it's a security service, and that costs money. Blackwater stationary guard roles are 180-220k a year for someone with years of experience. I'd imagine monetary networks use a lot of physical security, some central banks are literally located in bunkers under mountains, with a backup site in a similar setup on a different geological plate.

I have not seen any PoS schemes so far that provide anything other than plutocracy as a service. There is a reason why ETH with a 100mil R&D budget is still on PoW, Vitalik is not a dummy.

as for the cheap sources of sustainable energy, those are usually stranded hydro and wind that's too remote to be economic, and stranded natgas (for natgas "green" might be a better term, i've used sustainable in the sense that CH4 is far more damaging that CO2. I've been told by regulators it is actually better to burn off CH4 from stranded wells)

Balancing of the grid also does happen, but I believe primarily with wind and hydro.

I, of course, agree that we should not pollute the Earth we live on. High energy usage in itself is not bad, only if it's a harmful polluter. I've only pointed out dishwashers and pools (don't have the stats handy, but they do indeed use a lot more, like a magnitude more), as a common hypocrisy.

We must rapidly scale up non-polluting energy sources, as it seems unlikely humanity can become a spacefaring species on a self-imposed tight energy budget, and this self-imposed handicap coupled with an unexpected asteroid impact can end us.

Pools in the US use 14 billion kwh it's hard to imagine it being even global orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin.

It's also hard to see how push button Armageddon has possibly made us more safe than nobody having nukes. We are only more safe than if only our enemies had them. The same could even be said of armies.

> but they need to be happy letting their machines be turned off a large fraction of the time

Or they need batteries. Or some other means of energy storage, for that matter; at the scale of a large mining farm, thermal (e.g. heating water) or kinetic (e.g. spinning a flywheel) might be practical.

There is zero waste in PoW. It’s all useful service, therefore waste term doesn’t apply.

If you use 100 watts incandescent light bulb to light your room with 1 watt LED would do, that is waste.

usefulness is subjective.

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