"the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."
https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets...
By making an economic exchange computationally expensive, we may have invented another way to make economic activity ecologically expensive.
1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."
With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.
Problem solved.
Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!
2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.
3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"
Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.
2) People, computers, POS, time expenditure, currency fluctuation, uncertainty, economic crisis, and unemployment are problems which are either not addressable by Bitcoin or not meaningfully impacted by it. Bitcoin isn't some magical economic cure-all. It's just a means of exchange.
3) This is a straw man. Horse manure disposal was not a primary concern before cars were invented. The primary concern was how to transport goods before they spoiled. Improved cargo transportation technologies and refrigeration technologies changed the economic landscape, not cars.
4) Infrared radiation is the primary way in which heat is released in to space. The sum of all other means of heat loss from the Earth is currently a rounding error compared to heat loss by radiation. It would take an absolutely massive investment in technology to change that.
2) The first bit is a potentially fair point -- I don't know what the energy costs and waste heat contributions of a transaction is under the current system.
The second bit? "inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin" Mostly sounds somewhere between naive and unhinged, but show the work if you can.
3) I guess the horse manure analogy implies we're going to come up with different technology that doesn't produce waste heat? Are we talking about a revolutionary breakthrough in thermodynamics, or just a shift to more renewables (say, from automobiles to horses)?
The talk about whether infrared radiation is the only way to release heat to space is related, and addressed in the article I linked:
"E: Could not technology pipe or beam the heat elsewhere, rather than relying on thermal radiation?
P: Well, we could (and do, somewhat) beam non-thermal radiation into space, like light, lasers, radio waves, etc. But the problem is that these “sources” are forms of high-grade, low-entropy energy. Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of the waste heat from all the processes by which we use energy. This energy is thermal in nature. We might be able to scoop up some of this to do useful “work,” but at very low thermodynamic efficiency. If you want to use high-grade energy in the first place, having high-entropy waste heat is pretty inescapable."
In other words, it seems to me you're talking about either a fundamental breakthrough in thermodynamics again.
Note that the current monetary system has a very different incentive structure. If VISA needs to devote 1GW of power to process all its transactions today, and tomorrow a new technology comes along that allows VISA to process the same number of transactions with 100MW, VISA has every reason to reduce its power consumption to 100MW. For mainstream payment systems, power use always reduces profits -- so the incentive is always to use the minimum power necessary for processing transactions and detecting fraud.
Population rates in developed countries are plummeting. And just in time too. If only we could make the developing countries do the same thing -- but instead of condoms, careers and consumerism, they have poverty and religion which prohibits condoms.
We should be figuring out ways to handle economic problems such as those Ukraine and Japan will face: an aging, graying population for a few decades followed by less people and more robots doing work. We tax the robots and distribute Basic Income to everybody. Instead, we are worried about sustaining an exponentially growing economy, and how will the kids pay for the parents. On a global scale this is the most dangerous thing on the planet! Pollution and heat!
It's quite possible at some point that one of those will supersede Bitcoin, and/or Bitcoin will alter to proof of stake (perhaps when nearly all coins are mined).
It seems that the Nash equilibrium for this game will then be that none of the miners take the risk, consensus is lost, and the currency does collapse. Perhaps I'm missing something though.
Also consider what has been risked - electrical energy, a small amount of bandwidth, and the ever-present risk of hardware failure. The return is in units of a deflationary currency. In practice the number of wasted blocks is quite low since the network ends up being in consensus most of the time. In the past it has been quite profitable to mine using GPUs and FPGAs.