Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

What will happen if more countries ban crypto mining, say the US? Would that leave mining under Russian control? In that case could Bitcoin be embargoed, because they’re “made” in Russia?

Personally I don’t see the value in crypto-currencies, but that doesn’t mean it not useful to someone. The crypto community should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin, before the whole thing is regulated away. Right now it’s pretty hard to defend Bitcoin, based on the environmental impact alone.

View on HN

>The crypto community should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin

It cannot be addressed. By definition. It's not like sadly there is a part of the Bitcoin algorithm that is very expensive computationally and therefore energetically and if we could only optimize that part the problem would go away. There is an intentionally hard part that is a part of the Bitcoin protocol to make the Proof-of-Work algorithm, that obviates the need for a central source of authority or trust, work.

Anybody who tells you that Bitcoin will overcome the exorbitant energy needs is ignorant or a scam artist.

Yeah, isn't it kinda on purpose ?

I always understand it as a way for anyone anywhere being able to join just with a computer and electricity, without having to beg any existing centralized entity for permission to exchange their "real" money for the crypto tokens.

And it seems to have been right, as exchanges are indeed where most fraud happens a what is actually targeted when a government does not like a cryptocurrency.

Still not sure how one is supposed to avoid this without handing over the given crypto network to a centralized entity that decides who gets what.

That is exactly correct. And proof of work solves a problem that was thought unsolvable. So no other solution is likely to appear soon. None yet. (Proof of stake just recreates the problem.)

What is the problem with PoS that you speak about?

https://endthefud.org/PoW

> https://endthefud.org/PoW

Hardly an unbiased source (has "The best links to articles debunking Bitcoin FUD " as the subtitle). I read through some of the links and they are all high on big words and philosophy.

We will know soon enough whether there's merit to any of these. Ethereum plans to move to PoS early this year so we'll have a real world data point.

> has "The best links to articles debunking Bitcoin FUD " as the subtitle

It does what it says in the tin, no more no less.

Yup. And as such that source is ineffective in convincing someone not already convinced.

If the use of it is banned in just a few major economies (ie banned in the sense of blocking contact points with the regular economy in the conversion to traditional currency or purchase /sale of goods or services) then the value of BTC would tank, no?

BTC doesn’t need to overcome its energy needs, so long as people just stop wasting any energy. There is an infinity of things with massive wasteful energy use that no one does (such as sending rocks into space or boiling lakes for fun) simply because there is no financial gain.

If BTC is altogether banned probably. If just mining is banned then probably not.

Would moving to proof-of-stake help reduce energy (as used in newer Ethereum)? (less secure, but more energy efficient/faster)

Next step: one dude in a basement with an Excel sheet. Can also process 4 transactions per second (if typing fast), a bit less secure, but much more energy efficient. (Note: at BTC's cost of US$ 1.5 million per hour, we can also hire a few trustworthy people to stand behind the dude and make sure that there's no cheating, and still be more efficient.)

Ethereum's proof of stake currently has a quarter million validators, so it's arguably a bit more secure and decentralized than one dude with an Excel sheet.

What about Iota coin or just using GPG signatures?

The way to address bitcoin energy usage is to build your own renewable energy sources to power your bitcoin mining. And sell electricity to the grid when it's more profitable than mining.

Maybe Bitcoin people could finance nuclear fusion research to keep up with the energy consumption.

Compared to fusion, the better play is in space-based powersats and off-planet computation. BTC on cubesats. Then what will they complain about?

Kessler syndrome

>should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin

Proof of work is the core of bitcoin; it has a built-in deflation on top it. In short it won't happen. And yes, if someone mentions proof of stake, there is still no working case for it.

Isn't Ethereum using proof-of-stake since a recent update? (I'm not an expert in this though)

It's running a proof-of-stake network in parallel to the main chain, which is still running proof-of-work. The proof-of-stake network has been running for a bit over a year and has $30 billion in ETH deposited. Code for merging the two networks and eliminating mining is on a public test net right now. Previous upgrades have gone live within a year of the launch of their public test nets.

> Previous upgrades have gone live within a year of the launch of their public test nets.

I didn't know that, but it helps with my hope that PoS will become the default. People bringing up how long they've been trying to switch had been hurting my confidence.

Might use it in June, unless they push it further (like they did previously).

I think Chia makes a pretty good case here — same Nakamoto consensus security guarantees as Bitcoin only using hard drive space instead of processor power so the ongoing energy use is vastly less. There are around ~350k full nodes today (compared to bitcoin's 15k) and it uses about 400x less power: https://chiapower.org/

I farm it completely with old hard drives that I had lying around that weren't being used anyway.

Chia has weaker guarantees than Nakamoto consensus.

Every proof-of-work solution in Bitcoin commits to the transaction history, but the proofs-of-space in Chia only commit to the farmer public key.

Which is used to separately sign for a block of transactions. Which allows a collusion of recent farmers to produce alternate transaction histories at no cost.

You could be right! Do you have any evidence, research, or other supporting arguments that show what you're claiming?

See https://docs.chia.net/docs/03consensus/foliage/

"farmers could theoretically create a foliage re-org where foliage is replaced"

As you can see, Chia devs consider this an impractical attack. But it's definitely a weaker security guarantee than what PoW provides.

Ah, thanks for the link! It seems what you're saying is right — the security guarantees of Chia are not the EXACT same as Bitcoin, but it's not clear to me that this means they're "weaker" for the reason you described.

> As soon as one honest farmer has added a foliage block, the foliage becomes impossible to re-org beyond that height with the same PoSpace

With ~350k Chia full nodes, the likelihood of colluding farmers being able to pull this off is a lot lower than if there were only the ~14k full nodes of Bitcoin, no? And Chia is still pretty new — it had a maximum of ~750k full nodes before.

I guess it's kind of a trade-off, huh? Bitcoin's big centralized pools are a worrying source of attack that's not there in Chia (the official pooling protocol has the farmers sign blocks so it's completely decentralized and pools using it can't orchestrate attacks). https://docs.chia.net/docs/11pooling/pooling

Huh. I have nearly 100tb in unused but brand new hard drives. Might be worth using them to help create an energy efficient alternative to bitcoin.

So instead of wrecking the GPU market we would move to wrecking the HDD market?

I'm not sure if you're interested in discussing or just want to do a drive-by criticism, but that's actually an interesting question!

Currently 1.5 zettabytes of new HDDs are sold each year which is around $65 billion. So HDDs are a pretty mature market with massive data centers buying most of that storage.

One of the hypotheses with Chia was that there is a lot of over-provisioned storage already out in the world — on both consumer and idle enterprise drives. This is in line with the original intent of Bitcoin that anyone could mine which would make the network more secure.

It's obviously cheaper to use existing storage to secure the Chia blockchain than to buy new drives so the market will move toward maximally using existing storage. Datacenters could use their existing idle storage for Chia farming before a more lucrative use came along. And the storage doesn't need to be very reliable for Chia farming, so old hard drives that are no longer viable from datacenters can be used (apparently datacenters just destroy HDDs outright currently?)

Currently there are about 35 exabytes of storage in the Chia network, which is about 2-3% of the entire yearly supply of HDDs. Given that supply chains weren't really disrupted, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Chia bet was right and that it's actually utilizing a bunch of unused space already out in the world. And the IDC agrees: https://idcdocserv.com/US47836321

Now, obviously if the market valued Chia extremely highly then supplies of HDDs would be impacted. But I wonder how much that would affect everyday folks like you and I since most storage in devices are now SSDs, which are not very storage-dense so aren't really as economical for Chia. Would it be the case that consumers couldn't buy HDDs? At some coin price, yeah, definitely. I have no idea what that price could be.

The big private players in Crypto who have invested a lot of money and time would not let US government ban mining.

There are equally big or larger players with an entrenched interest in the "regular" financial system. The environmental lobby is no slouch either. Crypto mining will only remain legal if it can defeat both of those groups and merely having a few billionaires on your side is not enough when the other side has more of them.

The fossil fuel companies have been largely unable to stop environmental regulation (though they've arguably been able to slow them down in the US somewhat); I'm not sure that a few VC firms would necessarily be able to stop the government in its tracks.

Like, the big private players in crypto-nonsense just aren't _that_ big.

Let’s play a game of who has more influence:

A16Z or Goldman Sachs?

Block or JP Morgan Chase?

Coinbase or Vanguard?

Developing countries are more likely to ban crypto mining because they subsidize electricity prices. Economically it just doesn’t make sense for them, though one could easily argue that their utility pricing is designed to be gamed in the first place. Developed countries are much less likely to ban crypto mining because they charge market rates (or more) for electricity. Russia, ironically, fits more into the former rather than latter category, so they might just ban crypto mining as a pragmatic concern.

Do you think hair dryers should be banned? Are clothes dryers indefensible? They all are unnecessary- just hang clothes up.

And use dar more power than bitcoin.

If hair dryers or clothes dryers used the proof-of-work algorithm--which is designed to be wasteful--then yes, I would ban them.

Honestly if we could limit mining to heating up buildings/hair/whatever, that would solve the problem for a good while. Maybe one day we'll all be on heat pumps and geothermal, but we're not quite there yet.

Only pump Bitcoin is good at is pump and dump.

There is not really an efficiency difference between creating heat from electricity with a space heater and creating heat from electricity with a computer.

Not sure if you were just joking or if you simply didn't know that miners can double as heaters without loss (or if you meant something else).

Yeah. There is. Heaters don't cost thousands of dollars, maybe more for ASIC.

Also heaters are way better at converting energy to heat, since they don't have to do the whole mining thing. And they can reach higher temperatures without frying themselves. Being a simple resistor rather than complex logical circuit.

If I spend 1kWh to just warm water vs I spend some part of that 1kWh to mine bitcoin and warm water, the former will be more efficient.

> Heaters don't cost thousands of dollars

Sure but the point is that this will be earned back easily. If it didn't turn a profit then nobody would buy them today, let alone when they have an extra purpose.

> they can reach higher temperatures without frying themselves

Sure, we can't replace industrial processes like forging steel with mining. But residential heating requires no more than, say, 70°C which is easily within reach of any chip today. I was specifically talking about replacing something like a space heater, not a process that needs hundreds of degrees.

> If I spend 1kWh to just warm water vs I spend some part of that 1kWh to mine bitcoin and warm water, the former will be more efficient.

Is that so? How much then? Because I've always heard it's 1:1 for all intents and purposes.

Edit: of course I have to look it up myself... https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Spac... Looking at the graph, it's like I said /edit.

---

Note I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, it seems ripe for abuse (running the miner also when you don't need the heat) and we'd have more chip shortage issues, but I am interested from a technological standpoint. It seemed to me like it would be an improvement if their waste heat was used.

>Sure but the point is that this will be earned back easily.

No, it won't. Most chips go in the trash without ever mining a block. This is just more crypto theory that doesn't match reality.

If you find me a way to cut down on my heating costs in the winter using chips, you can bet I'm going to use it. The problem is, you can't.

This makes no sense.

"Most chips go in the trash without ever mining a block" that's your own choice, isn't it? If you don't want to waste the product you bought, don't trash it?

"This is just more [nonsense] crypto theory" I do not invest in cryptocurrency. I bought socks for like 2BTC back in the good old days when it wasn't yet apparent (to me at least) that bitcoin was going to be a major problem; bitcoin was interesting technology for teenage me back in 2012. I'm not some delusional trader that is making profit off the backs of everyone's climate and wants to justify mining. See basically everything else I said above. In particular the part where I said "Note I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, it seems ripe for abuse [...] but I am interested from a technological standpoint." The person was making technological arguments, not some nonsense about "crypto theory".

"If you find me a way..." Do you own a computer? There, turn it on during winter, have fun gaming. Now you're generating heat using electricity that you'd consume for gaming regardless.

>that's your own choice, isn't it? If you don't want to waste the product you bought, don't trash it?

I don't think you understand how all of this works. Mining chips have a lifespan, they don't last forever. They stop working, then you can't use them to compute hashes anymore. Most mining chips die--as in stop working--before they ever mine a block.

>turn it on during winter, have fun gaming.

I already do that. Mining Bitcoin to heat my home, on the other hand, will lose me money. I'll just burn through expensive chips without ever getting a reward, because a home mining rig can't compete with the industrial operations. The idea doesn't work.

Actually a dryer that uses POW generated heat would be much less wasteful than just heating up air, it would produce the same amount of heat per watt and it would do something useful with it.

"useful" I take it you've never had long hair?

Except that isn't true. The chip in the hair dryer would become obsolete before it ever mined a block, so your expensive hair dryer would be even more wasteful. What a ridiculous proposition.

I take it you are not familiar with POW mining? You don’t have to mine a full block, you get paid for any fractional contribution.

Any device that converts energy to heat can be replaced by another that converts the same amount of energy to the same amount of heat while doing POW work.

Last I checked, Bitcoin didn't automatically give fractional mining rewards, and one needed to join a mining pool for that.

But it doesn't matter, because the reward would be so small in this case that it wouldn't outweigh the cost of buying a chip to put in an appliance. If you think I'm wrong, then by all means mine hardware with all of your heating devices. Hell, if the money is really there, create a startup selling mining appliances and get rich. It's easy money, right? Start today.

If there is a proper alternative such as LEDs were when Incandescent bulbs were banned then yes they can and should be banned. Unlike lightbulbs where the heat was waste, hair drivers are unlikely to see such alternatives though. But on principle yes, when there is an alternative the wasteful solution can be banned (or taxed, or the alternative subsidized etc)

I’ll consider a heat pump dryer[0] when mine breaks, which has the potential to make the device way more efficient as the technology improves.

0: https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_dryer

I can personally recommend baldness as a highly energy efficient alternative.

All of this is already happening. In the EU energy efficiency labels are being put on household appliances and cars. Clothes dryers have them, vacuums have them, washing machines and dishwashers, too. It's not allowed to sell things that waste more energy than it's currently technologically necessary (within reason).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label

> Are clothes dryers indefensible?

So the trend there has been for reduction in use in energy (particularly in Europe, where the regulators are leaning on the manufacturers). A modern heat pump dryer is far more efficient than a traditional dryer, say, and will be the dominant type in Europe soon, and probably shortly afterwards in the US.

Crypto-nonsense, on the other hand, tends to use _more_ energy over time.

And, frankly, if you banned hairdryers and clothes dryers, literally billions of people would be very annoyed. If you banned crypto-stuff tomorrow, certain parts of twitter would be very annoyed, and the vast majority of people would not even _notice_. Totally different political calculus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com