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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Public key encryption invents the notary public, now with 10,000% more energy use?

Back of the envelope math:

Assume that the notary public needs a 70watt light bulb to function (ignoring food costs, paper, etc). 8 hour day, so about a half kwh. That electricity with a new asic miner would get you about a half bitcoin, which would let you send 1000 messages of up to 1kb each, given the transaction fees.

I'm ignoring some things, but at the moment it seems to be quite the net-win.

Don't forget the costs of relying on authority. First, trust can be broken. Second, if notary is offline or asleep you cannot register your data.

Also: even if you fully trust your notary, it's no guarantee some random people in Japan, Australia or South America will trust him too. Anyone anywhere can verify blockchain, though.

Also, the notary is a person, and needs to consume food, which also takes energy to produce and transport.

That brings up an interesting thought. Is the energy (cost) being expended actually going somewhere? I think perhaps, the fact that people put some sort of value onto teach of the transaction, no matter how minimal, accurately (though maybe not precisely) models the "stake". You wouldn't think much on using RSA keys as a public ledger, but as soon as you are tracking something that has some nominal, perceived value, people treat it with more respect and accountability. (Now, is this inherently true? I don't know.)

And 100% less human being?

We haven't hit the scaling limits of computation and are unlikely to for some time. But the scaling limit of a human is fixed at sixty minutes per hour.

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