If you are going to do PoW the least harmful way is inherently CPU algorithms like Monero’s RandomX. At least the left over parts have an aftermarket use as CPUs, and at least you are incentivizing production of something useful. It can even run as a lowest priority process with other compute in some cases.
Note that Chia’s form of proof of space does not count since it actually consumes SSDs. CPUs are not (meaningfully) consumed by running RandomX.
(CPUs at dense process nodes do degrade slowly but their life spans are usually far longer than their useful life anywhere in the market.)
isn't that somewhat against the whole idea of PoW? It is supposed to make cheating expensive, because you have to waste a lot of computing power to do it. If that power is not wasted, but instead used for something useful (outside of crypto transaction verification) work that can be sold for money, then cheating becomes profitable again.
Pick something useful that has low monetary value on the open market, like number theory problems or protein folding or something.
I could imagine the RandomX code execution approach being re-worked to incorporate useful scientific computation, and this being worked into the currency itself. It might be possible for people to stake money on compute units and then have the money go to the miner who solves a block in proportion to compute units performed. You'd have to put a lot of work into making this non-gameable though.
Maybe something can be done here with homomorphic encryption too, so the miners would not even know what they are computing.
A lot of interesting open cryptography and math work here.
There was a startup somewhere trying to sell Bitcoin miners as home heating units in cold climates, but the economics don't work since the chips are too expensive and gas is also still too much less expensive than electricity to heat with.
Most industrial processes require heat beyond what a mining chip could handle... unless you fabricated special mining chips out of different semiconductor materials that can handle high heat. But that's probably too expensive for the economics to work too.
What would make some sense to me is an integrated solar PV panel / mining unit. Just deploy them in the desert and connect them. Each panel could be discrete and WiFi connected, meaning you would not have to wire them to anything at all. Just prop them up in the sun with WAPs every so often to connect them to a network.
Except in 2 years they would be obsolete because of wear and tear and or because a new node process is released and or we get more clever around specialized chips for this purpose. More and more parts of the economy are mapped into this work relative to the scarcity of these bits of value. Bitcoin is 0.5% today of global energy usage a few more multiples and it's going to much more directly tie global energy costs to the price fluctuations the currency.
We risk the whole world becoming paperclips type economics doomsday scenario.. least growing number of people that ascribe value to cryto agree to collectively ascribe to an alternative model for distribution of transaction security.
Nature doesn't care, life will continue to exist. Humans deserve nothing, we're only given a slice of time. Life on earth is both beautiful and merciless. We're involuntary actors in a fractal universe.
I do hope that we can develop effective methods to combat climate change so that we can enjoy clean water and a roof above our heads for a bit longer. It would be a shame if our civilisation disappears without a trace, lost forever to entropy. It would be nice to leave something behind, even though our existence is probably less meaningful than we tell ourselves.
I'm not unhappy, I feel blessed for being here and now. The only thing I'm fed up with is people blatantly lying, without repercussions. Big corporations have fucked up the climate by lying and they want me, the average citizen, to feel guilty of my carbon footprint.
> Nature doesn't care, life will continue to exist
Well, maybe it won't.
We managed to kill 41% of insects on earth in over the past 10 years.
Source Sanchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, Biological conservation, 2019
This reminds me of that tweet from BP about their environment calculator, can't find the source right now. But the idea is they "care" about environment while they did the biggest oil spillage in history, otherwise known as the old proverbial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_bla...
Do I really need to point who is the biggest e-waste generator in the world? Solve that problem first.
Well it would be nice if they could stop lobbying against emission standards and stop campaigning to undermine climate change and environmental activism.
Society evolved to the point that if you want to get to work in the US you need a car. There are a lot of places where you need a car to get to.
In many places in Europe you can get to work or holiday destinations by public transport.
In Switzerland (a rich and relatively densely populated country, albeit full of mountains) there are trains and cable cars to almost everywhere, and if not a train there is most likely a bus (managed by the post office). I managed to live there quite a few years without owning a car.
In Singapore they put a hard limit on the number of cars on the road (and no exception for electric cars, to Tesla disappointment), and the available slots are sold at auctions. There is a dense public transport system, supplemented by a relatively high amount of taxi.
What’s “that problem”? It’s not clear from your post.
We always seem to go in circles with whataboutism when posts like this appear: “X is a bigger problem so let’s solve that”. We can do this for every problem — look at the data through the right lens and another problem is always bigger - and never solve anything.
I'm starting to get irate now with the hypocrisy of some who talk about how the Government need to be more green, but then follow up with "oh my bitcoin worth's gone through the roof!"
Oh you mean like those people who fly around in private jets while admonishing people for inter alia flying on commercial airliners too much? (Remember: you're just a peasant. Money elevates you into a new ontic reality where the normal moral principles don't apply.)
That's true. But that's everyone. I've yet to meet a single person who is willing to make the personal sacrifices needed to actually help the world.
You get a bunch of normal people (i.e. 'peasants' if you wish) sitting around talking about how to save the environment while eating fruit grown in a faraway land and trucked to them in a refrigerated truck.
Everyone wants to say the solution is that other people should change the way they do things, not themselves.
That's the whole problem isn't? The actions of any individual, or even the actions of everyone in a small-to-medium sized nation are just too small on their own to mark significant change.
Too many people aren't willing to accept this simple fact: the standard of living in the cushy societies of the Western middle class is completely and utterly unsustainable. And probably never will be. Avoiding environmental degradation is simply not possible without a major quality of life reduction.
I agree with the last part. There is a huge amount of moral licensing as well (I recycled this cardboard box, so flying to Aruba is ok).
But I think both collectively and individually we are unwilling to make the required sacrifices. You're right, the actions of one person don't make a significant change, but they do make some change. If everyone who said they were deeply concerned about the environment started to make the changes that are required, we'd start to make a dent. And perhaps have a larger effect than themselves.
But they won't. We're all mostly just hoping that massive change doesn't happen until after we die.
I think what a lot of people who say individual change is useless fail to realize is that individual change isn't about tipping the scale from their effort alone. An individual change may influence another individual (friend, loved one, someone on the internet, etc) to follow, and now you have 2 individuals. Keep repeating that and it may stop being an individual change.
You're absolutely right. I'll make a big personal sacrifice and close down my oil company. Everyone has to do their part, right?
In seriousness, carbon emissions are overwhelmingly emitted from large corporations and state level actors (like the military). Which isn't to say that people shouldn't do what they can to reduce their own carbon footprint, but the world won't be saved if everyone buys local and starts biking to work.
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
― Edward Everett Hale
Good quote. But, if everyone buys local and starts biking to work, why would the oil companies keep producing as much oil?
We don't have oil companies because shareholders like to pollute for fun. We have them to power refrigated trucks so that people can join enjoy seasonal grapes 365 days a year anywhere in the US. If an oil company gets shut down and people are unable to accept the quality of life decrease that comes with it, then they'll vote to open it back up again.
We just need to align incentives. If externalities were factored into the cost of imported fruits for example, it wouldn't even be a problem. As it stands do you even know what the relative carbon cost of growing or importing an apple vs a watermelon is in your area? Do you know how to tell if a fruit is grown locally or not while standing at the supermarket? Do you think the average person can reasonably be expected to make those judgements?
Some things yes, some things no. I suspect many people realize there are no local producers for a lot of things (I don't think North Dakota has a lot of Coconut production), and seasonality is also important (not a lot of apples are grown in January in New York). But even when it's obvious, people still make choices.
Including externalities would be an interesting path. I don't know what that would realistically look like though. Gas tax?
I'm very much in favor of a carbon tax that aims to capture most of all sources of pollution. If you just tax gas you could get into a situation where it's more profitable but more wasteful for example to grow produce hydroponically because diesel is highly taxed but electricity generated by burning natural gas is not.
Just the effect of making less green options more expensive would help, but of course this would be even better if the money collected from such a tax was used to invest in green infrastructure which could balance the original pollution.
Actually, lots of people say "be the change" and I know quite a few who follow that suggestion.
I have friends who eat vegan, eat more local foods, have cut down meat consumption, avoid travel (yes, before COVID), are reducing their plastic use to near zero, and so on. Few are taking all of that on but some are and there are many other ideas I've heard people taking on.
We keep a garden alongside getting the rest of our vegetables from a local farmer who produces far into the winter via a CSA. We have started replacing some meat consumption with egg consumption from the chickens we keep. We do other things but we definitely have more opportunities. There have been some really nice shifts in perception as our reduced consumption has reduced our stresses and lifted our wealth trajectory.
Consider: could you be hosting some social norms and exhibit some behaviors that keep you from interaction with such people?
Hilariously opposite to the intended message. Sorry, I just found it very funny, have an upvote to make up for my shitpost reply.
I believe in leading by example rather than leading by dictate. Others seeing what's actually possible is far more encouraging of change than pointy fingers and harsh words.
I'm starting to get irate now with the hypocrisy of some who talk about how the Government need to be more green, but then follow up with Windows N+1, Android N+1 or iOS N+1.
I don't know if the numbers in the linked paper and the following paper can be used together as I haven't read both, but I've taken the global annual e-waste estimate from here as unfortunately the linked paper does not mention it in the abstract: https://www.itu.int/myitu/-/media/Publications/2020-Publicat...
While I do think Bitcoin in its current form is a problem and the developers should start thinking of solutions sooner than later, I think starting with Bitcoin to reduce total e-waste is misguided at best.
It would be interesting to have a comparison of e-waste by utility. I imagine this would be impossible without the help of all the consumer electronic producers though. Even then, they might not have the data to tell what you are using your personal electronics for.
Completely pales next to something as egregious as disposable tech that sells in the millions and only has a lifespan of 2 years tops like AirPods.
They will still be washing up on beaches 100 years after every single person involved in their design has passed.
Whole electronics industry needs to take this stuff more seriously, we need more replaceable batteries and storage, right to repair on a global level and laws against the sort of thing Apple does with their repair pricing where the repair costs like $50-100 less than a new device.
You really think that AirPods are a larger cause of e-waste than dedicated Bitcoin mining equipment? Or are you comparing dedicate mining equipment to all consumer technology combined?
Of course. The example wasnt about AirPods but the whole catalogue of consumer electronics bought every year, for sole reason of owning newer version as a social status.
I get value from using my AirPods while they last. They make my life better. Cryptocurrencies? Great if you got in at the top of the ponzi, but otherwise not.
I have an old refurbished iPhone SE, and my AirPods don’t have long battery life but it’s still usable years later and third parties will put in a new battery.
Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life, not everyone is jumping to the latest and greatest.
Yes, yes. Thats why apple products score the lowest and place in the bottom of repeatability scores every single time. Its because you never have to fix their products right?
You are picking ridiculous point and creating some ridiculous 'true Scotsman'
>Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life
It sounds to me like the scope of criticism was right in between the two things you're suggesting: "disposable tech that sells in the millions and only has a lifespan of 2 years tops like AirPods."
In this case, I would take take the word "like" to mean "such as". Your first potential interpretation instead implies that you interpreted it to mean "specifically". And the second ignores all the qualifying adjectives.
For my part, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the dominance of products with built-in, non-replaceable rechargeable batteries in products that don't permit or are fundamentally incompatible with corded use. Because if a fundamental component that it needs in order to function happens to also be a non-replaceable wear item, then yeah, it is a disposable product. As a point of basic morality, we should not be blithely making disposable products that cannot be safely disposed of. It doesn't matter how convenient it is to us, our kids and our grandkids and our peers in less wealthy countries and their kids and grandkids are the ones who will be stuck dealing with the polluted waterways, and we have no right to force that upon them just because we think cords are annoying.
It's really not so different from the leaded gasoline that my grandparents thought was so convenient.
I've wanted something like this for years, a laptop that is actually repairable but isn't awful in specs or ergonomics. When they start selling in my region I'll be all over it.
If you care about these problems then vote with your wallet.
The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that is it a pure, global, free market writ large. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent individuals from choosing to participate in it. Therefore the correct retort to someone like you is to tell you to "cry harder".
You've correctly explained the tragedy of the commons, congratulations. This is exactly why we need regulation to stop people selfishly destroying the environment for everyone for personal gain.
I can easily think of a number of measures that would make it much harder to participate in the bitcoin market that governments could implement without much trouble.
This isn't correct, though. If I decide to start an anti-Bitcoin political movement, I can get leaders elected who can ban the use of Bitcoin in the USA. Sure, some motivated folks will use VPNs and the like, but cutting the general public off from Bitcoin would be devastating. Then who will be crying?
do you have a metric for what is reliable and unbiased? Any time I see an article on Bitcoin or altcoins on a MSM page its factually incorrect and heavily biased.
Also, can you provide an article showing that Bitcoin is used for "tons" (whatever percentage tons means) of illegal activity?
I think I’ll flip it around. Knowing that every major ransom ware attack in the last year has used Bitcoin, have there been any meaningful legal uses? Has anyone bought a pizza?
Where's your source for that? Is there a metric to define a ransomware attack as "major", and a verifiable list to show the amount and means of payment?
Bitcoin is used daily for remittance payments, which is huge since it's way cheaper than sending money through western mutual
There's also Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador which is a bitcoin only circular economy
Paxful provides a service for people to trade gift cards for Bitcoin
Classic whataboutism which also lacks data regarding the comparison. Airpods are an actual physical product. Bitcoin is nothing more than air, speculation.
That said, I prefer a smartphone I can open and replace the battery of. I own one, too: Fairphone 3. I'll look forward to the day wireless earpods have replaceable battery. However, we still gotta think about updating the firmware of the chipset.
Whataboutism is a good thing, and may have been the biggest factor in ending Jim Crow in the US (who was competing with the USSR to determine the future direction of Europe.) America fought the Nazis with a racially segregated military.
Someone points out a legitimate problem with something, and the "response" is to point out a "bigger" problem with something else. Its not a response, its a misdirection. Changing the subject doesnt work.
We have seen this "response" so many times that its laughable. Its like a person who owns large number of shares of Company X and everytime someone brings up the serious problems at Company X she tries to change the subject.
Everything has cost associated with it, and it makes sense to focus our efforts on the biggest wastes first. Granted, a person could reasonably question whether the utility of airpods isn't better than Bitcoin as well, but my point is that focusing on something else isn't automatically wrong.
The problem is, when pretty much anyone brings up Bitcoin's issues , they've got an axe to grind. So I find it totally valid to bring up any and all bigger, worse, and longer historied comparisons to highlight that complaining about Bitcoin is quite petty; a mosquito bite for a cancer patient.
Bitcoin is still new and poorly understood by a significant percentage of the population and therefore hasn't become part of everyone's "lifestyle to which they've become accustomed" yet, so it's automatically viewed more harshly. The comparisons are, in fact, necessary for the appropriate judgemental context.
I’m open to having my mind changed about blockchain/bitcoin’s utility, I could also see a new cryptocurrency changing my mind about all of this, I really _want_ to like this stuff! But whenever I ask people about the environmental impact of crypto (or really any sub-surface level question about blockchain, smart contracts or NFTs) they either dodge the question, ignore the question, give a shallow non-answer, or call me (a developer who works on integrating AR, VR, IoT and neural style transfer into live theatre) a luddite who doesn’t understand or is afraid of technological change. I’d love to be persuaded about why I should incorporate blockchain into my bag of shiny tricks or how I could use it for good. But I’m getting very frustrated with the community’s refusal to answer a lot of really basic questions about it.
Firstly, cool bleeding edge stuff you're into, I was very interested in a little segment during the Olympics about the technologies used to create crowd noise for the empty stadiums - something that must existed as a small background niche until Covid came along. Not sure if that relates to "live theatre" technologies but it reminded me.
On the topic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency utility, I'll point you towards another thread where I badly answered a similar question (and re-reading what I wrote I don't answer it at all), the core of the answer is that it's not simple to explain our to understand if you haven't "played" with it yourself to start the mental ball rolling as to its application and usefulness.
My specific, but vague, commentary is the 18th comment on the above link.
Bitcoin was created to be an alternative to the corrupt money system that brought about the Global Financial Crisis. That isn't a thing that can be easily understood in its everyday utility to the average citizen, there has to be an understanding of the overall corruption (and potential for corruption) of the current system and there almost has to be agreement about that before Bitcoin can be considered to be something useful at all - ie. If person X doesn't have a problem with the current financial system then Bitcoin is a big, complex, electricity hungry beast alternative to a system that's running just fine, and therefore totally unnecessary.
In the years since Bitcoins inception things like Ethereum have come along to add "smart contract" utility that has allowed for things like Decentralised Finance and NFTs (the current usage of NFTs, I think, is detrimental to its potential for real-world problem solving, such as "proof of ownership" and I can't think of anything other use case right now). Decentralised Finance is so new, however, that we won't know what works well and what works poorly as replacements for existing financial services for a few years - bit I think it's important to go through this process of discovery.
> The problem is, when pretty much anyone brings up Bitcoin's issues , they've got an axe to grind
Or it could be that rational people look at incredibly slow and energy expensive security with no fundamentals and no applications after a decade and are skeptical.
I mean, why would someone have an axe to grind? Bitcoin stole their girl?
Without context no arguments about the environment or waste matter at all. The context is extremely important otherwise we end up replacing something moderately bad for the environment with something even worse.
E.g we replace plastic bags with tote bags but a tote bag must be used over 130 times to make it better than a single use plastic bag.
With your thought we wouldn't even be able to compare the two because you're not interested in the actual reality of these issues.
I've never understood why people complain so much about the environmental impact of AirPods. I mean it would be great if they were rechargeable and recyclable etc - but they weigh 4g - about 1/50 of a pair of headphones.
If the average person uses them for 2 years they'll be a drop in the ocean to the tens or hundreds of kilos of plastic and other objects they don't recycle fully in that time.
For me, it's not the plastic casing or even the battery that seems the biggest waste, but their ICs.
It's not that it's polluting the environment that much, more that it's wasteful and creates a unnecessary demand in IC production when they are thrown away in perfect working order.
I got curious, and did some back of the envelope mathematics / Fermi estimation.
> Analysts estimate Apple sold between 14 million and 16 million AirPods in 2017.[38] In 2018, AirPods were Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold.[39][40] 60 million units were sold in 2019.
Each airpod weights about 4g. But we're counting sales. So, we're counting pairs. And we also have to factor in the plastic charging case which comes in at 38g since that's also included in the package as well. That makes for a grand total of 46g per sale.
By my count, the total weight of all airpods ever sold is about 10.350 metric tonnes (46g * 225 million units).
According to the Ocean Cleanup project, the Great Pacific Garbage Page weighs about 88.000 tonnes.
So, all airpods sold between 2017 and end of 2020 make up about... 11.7% of the Great Pacific Garabage Patch.
That's not a number I'd call "negligible". I'm a bit floored and incredulous and not even all too sure of my number work to the point where I've been re-calculating for the past 20 minutes and I'm arriving at the same numbers again and again.
That's just the amount of waste that will need to be disposed of when all units have reached their end of life.
There's also the production process itself which requires resources and produces waste as well. That's not just the molding of plastics and the assembly of circuits. I'm also talking about the extraction, refining,... of natural resources just to produce the half-finished parts that arrive at the plant where the final product is assembled. There's the logistics and transports involved just to move the entire chain. Oh, and the number juggling above is also discounting packaging and wrapping. There's a massive hidden footprint there as well.
~12% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is no small matter and it shouldn't be dismissed but choice of denominator is important.
If we choose number of plastic bags consumed in American on an annual basis (100 Billion [1]) and go by the mass per bag (5.5g [2]) then just plastic bags in America is 550K tonnes/year of plastic.
Also, according to the UN the world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic and electrical waste a year and they estimate 20% of it is recycled. [3]
So, ya. A penny saved is a penny earned and all. But it's still a penny.
Google says there's been 100M AirPods produced, and that each airpod weighs 4g, plus 38g for the case, so 46g total. That's 4.6 metric kiltons of airpods. The paper says that Bitcoin produces 30.7 metric kilotons of e-waste per year, so that's about 6.5 airpod-scale disasters every single year.
To be a bit more fair in the comparison (virtual vs physical), probally could account for shipping from manufacturer, to distributor, and then finally to the end user? It seems like that'd atleast tip the scales a little bit.
I think the article is talking about waste in the form of ASICs used for mining that need to be constantly replaced with upgraded versions to remain profitable, so it's already physical vs. physical.
Shame on me for not reading the article as I could not access to it (forgot my alumni account) -- only could read the abstract.
I misinterpreted this statement:
" On average Bitcoin generates 272 g of e-waste per transaction processed on the blockchain."
To mean the online cost of the hashing/mining, etc, not just physical e-waste.
Regardless this may be moot now, but my feelings was that comparing a consumer product (airpods) to a "bulk consumer" product like ASICs is doing an apple to oranges comparison. Airpods are manufactured in Vietnam and distributed through supply chains throughout the world -- whilst ASICs are manufactured in China and distrubted more locally (in Eurasia)?
> Completely pales next to something as egregious as disposable tech that sells in the millions and only has a lifespan of 2 years tops like AirPods.
Does it? Assuming the claim is accurate, 30700 metric tons per year. Apple sells around 200 million iPhones per year. Assuming 200 g for a phone, that's 40000 metric tons.
Edit: I was off by a factor of 10, corrected. The overall smartphone market is likely approximately 10x of Bitcoin, assuming this study is correct, 200g per device, 1.5 billion devices per year (from https://www.statista.com/statistics/263441/global-smartphone...)
Also, 1.5 billion smartphones per year is incredible. Unless there are many people who break/upgrade their phone several times per year, that means a much bigger fraction of humanity now has access to a computing device and likely also to the world's knowledge than I thought.
Is the hardware still working when it is discarded?
If it is only discarded because there is new hardware with a better calculations/energy ratio then it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
Or are processors and memory broken beyond repair when they have been running at max speed for a few years?
For dedicated ASICs: It's still working, but the hardware can only perform the SHA-256 hash algorithm crazy fast, that's it.
> it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
It's hard for me to imagine what that would be but that could be a lack of imagination on my part. Maybe other non-payment blockchain applications?
The other day some friends and I were musing how cool it would be if we could map some simulation algorithms to SHA-256 primitives. I thought there could be chance because I didn't actually know the mathematical operation SHA was doing. Once I found out, it didn't work out at all. Not even close. Maybe others will be more fortunate.
And for the one-off needs more mainstream CPUs already have support for some acceleration of SHA-256 [1] and that seems to be enough for them.
Please tell me if i am wrong because i am not sure if it is right.
Verifying 1 block requires the calculation of 1 hash. The hashrate for my CPU for RandomX is ~8000hashes/s. The monero blockchain currently has 2450000 blocks. blocks / hashrate = 5 minutes to verify the whole blockchain. Is that really that bad?
Maybe you have a particularly beefy CPU. What if you have the original Raspberry Pi?
Why do you think they made not checking the PoW supporting the checkpoint the default?
Transactions on exchanges do not affect the blockchain's state so they require orders of magnitude less energy... Making a trade on a centralized exchange or performing an off-chain transaction on a centralized wallet doesn't use much more energy than posting a Tweet on Twitter.
Transactions on exchanges are "free" because they don't use the blockchain - the single distinctive feature of bitcoin. Exchange accounts are equivalent to brokerage accounts, or uninsured bank accounts.
Ok so there's no value for a transaction, but rather for a block.
However,many miners compete for a block, is this accounted for or is the number an average for the winning miner?
cost_per_hash is the cost of electricity and mining hardware .
If value_per_block > cost_per_block, mining is profitable and more miners will join the network, increasing avg_hashes_to_find_block, until value_per_block == cost_per_block.
The big three CC companies process around 1.3 billion transactions per day, while Bitcoin processes around 250 thousand transactions per day. That's 5200x more transactions, and you claim they're less efficient than Bitcoin. So... those three companies use >5000x as much electricity as Argentina? (Bitcoin currently uses 150 TWh/year, 5200x that is about 30x global electricity generation FYI).
(This is obviously not quite apples for apples, since you'd also have to account for VISA & Co. likely employing more people than Bitcoin, on the other hand, Bitcoin also requires absurd amounts of throw-away hardware.)
Whenever I read anything about how resource intensive the bitcoin network is, I wonder how it compares to the total energy and other resource use of traditional finance. Those costs have got to be pretty high for traditional finance, especially considering minting and transportation of physical money and considering the innumerable humans needed to run it. However, I've never seen a serious estimate of those numbers, so I have no idea how they compare to bitcoin's.
I think it's a somewhat moot comparison, as Bitcoin does just about none of what traditional finance actually does, particularly on the "human" side of things.
Yeah, good point. It's really impossible to disentangle the costs of traditional finance operations analogous to bitcoin from other costs of traditional finance. The comparison would not be perfect, bit I still feel like it would be a useful insight to get a sense of scale.
Right, and I haven't seen estimates for the resource intensity of traditional finance. (We do have good estimates of the total volume of traditional finance, so an estimate of the total resource usage of traditional finance would be just as good as resource intensity)
I don't know how one goes about measuring resource usage, to be honest. I suppose you can make an inventory of all the resources that have been used by a particular industry over a period of time, but this isn't a single number that can be used to compare the resource intensities of different industries.
These comparisons have been around for a while and they always look really bad for Bitcoin [0], not just in terms of resources but particularly in terms of speed and responsiveness.
That's getting close, and it doesn't look good for bitcoin, but the estimates of visa's energy useage are from a visa published report, and they seem to omit the energy usage needed to sustain employees. Of course, the bitcoin energy estimates also omit the energy usage for employees, but it's easy for me to imagine those are dwarfed by mining costs, and it's not easy for me to imagine something similar for visa.
The energy usage to attribute to employees should be proportional to the number of employees more than anything else. There's no a priori reason to expect that a "Bitcoin employee" uses more or less energy than a "VISA employee."
So as far whether or not that matters... do you expect that there is a substantially different number of employees need to maintain the VISA system than the Bitcoin system, on a per-transaction basis? Even if you're generous and say that VISA needs 10× the employees that Bitcoin would (were it the same size as VISA), it would still require that an employee use 100,000× the energy cost of a transaction to overcome the fact that Bitcoin transactions require 1,000,000× the energy of VISA.
I would expect visa to need more employees to maintain their systems, but that's just my intuition, and it might be wrong. You're right, too. Even though humans are very resource intensive (they need > 2kWh of energy per day), they're unlikely to outweight many orders of, magnitude difference.
I'd like to see an estimate of visa's energy usage using the same method the source you linked used to estimate bitcoin's energy usage. Take visa's revenue and multiply it by some fraction of revenue used for energy use (they used 52%). Some very rough calculations I did put it about 1000 times more energy expensive than visa's own report. That's still 1000 times better than bitcoin, using the same method, but it'd interesting to know where the discrepancy comes from, and whether that should also be considered for bitcoin's energy use.
Unless bitcoin can credibly be a total replacement for traditional finance this isn't really a meaningful comparison though.
Perhaps bitcoin or some other crypto can serve as a currency in a sense, but you'd still need financial institutions to do things like write loans and manage other assets.
Bitcoin's popularity in spite of its extreme inefficiency is a testament to the incredible power of network effects in our current economic system. It seems that Bitcoin's price will not stop growing until the monetary system is replaced by Bitcoin. The monetary system appears to be funding its own demise in an unstoppable, predictable, systematic way.
It seems that Karl Marx was right when he said that "Unbridled Capitalism Will Destroy itself." - It has already destroyed itself in the eyes of a large number of people.
But clearly communism isn't the solution since it also ended up destroying itself on many occasions.
Maybe the solution is bridled (constrained) capitalism? It's interesting to think back to the gold standard and how gold acted as a constraint on capitalism. Maybe what we really need now are constraints; Bitcoin and other deflationary cryptocurrencies can provide this.
Deflationary currency is even worse for wealth inequality though. And one that actively wastes valuable resources on several orders of magnitude more than the alternatives isn't an ethical option.
Bitcoin is a "machine that greens". It will drive sustainable energy development in an emergent free market fashion and take us to a type 1 civilization.
As if Coronavirus were the "disease that eases" that will drive sustainable horse dewormer development in an emergent free miracle cure fashion and take us to an immortal civilization.
Primarily Ethereum, which will hopefully be migrating away from proof of work (mining) in late 2021 / early 2022, so hopefully there will be an abundance of cheap second hand options (which will admittedly have lead hard lives), but also dramatically reduce the demand for new cards.
Graphics cards used for mining are generally maintained better than ones used for gaming because they are often undervolted and kept at 100% instead of cycling on/off.
> In some cases, steady GPU mining can be safer than gaming. When mining with a GPU, the load is evenly distributed over time; therefore, there are no thermal spikes and sudden drops that could damage the GPU.
My favourite benefit of Bitcoin is bypassing the hideously inefficient and corrupt Wall Street financial vampiric system that provided the world with the Global Financial Crisis for which it suffered the punishment of being given billions of dollars by the US Government.
Please get some perspective. Read more actual facts and data from various different angles, you've obviously dived deep into one side with little consideration for any other.
You give me the kind opportunity to quote a favourite lyric of mine:
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
nothing screams 'efficiency' like everyone participating in the network having to write to an append-only ledger every time any transaction whatsoever happens
im sure thats FAR more efficient than banks, right?
i hate banks as much as the next guy but good fucking lord is bitcoin terrible
The append-only ledger is surprisingly efficient, to the point where you can process the entire thing on a decent laptop in a couple days.
And judging the costs bank are able to charge for international wires, even when comparing them to the horrendous fees for Bitcoin (Core, BTC) on-chain transactions, I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that much less efficient.
yeah at least when we're all dying in the fucking water wars you'll be able to sit on your high horse talking about how you actively contributed to it but HEY! at least you didn't support the BANKS!
Attacking another user like this (edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28567074 - yikes!) will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Whether or not you owe that person better, you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it—much better. So no more of this, please—we're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't burn itself to a crisp.
1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.
2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.
Once you find out you'll panic about not having enough. The benefits are apparent when analyzed from the perspective of money as a technology that enables strong property rights defended by cryptography. Robert Breedlove does a podcast on the nature of money which great. This video also does a great job of addressing the "waste" by elaborating on "unforgable costliness" : https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc
All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!
- inviolable property rights
- sound money enables accurate investment valuation and less inflation and wealth inequality
- low cost, high security, international final settlement
- instant payments on lightning network
176 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadNote that Chia’s form of proof of space does not count since it actually consumes SSDs. CPUs are not (meaningfully) consumed by running RandomX.
(CPUs at dense process nodes do degrade slowly but their life spans are usually far longer than their useful life anywhere in the market.)
I could imagine the RandomX code execution approach being re-worked to incorporate useful scientific computation, and this being worked into the currency itself. It might be possible for people to stake money on compute units and then have the money go to the miner who solves a block in proportion to compute units performed. You'd have to put a lot of work into making this non-gameable though.
Maybe something can be done here with homomorphic encryption too, so the miners would not even know what they are computing.
A lot of interesting open cryptography and math work here.
Most industrial processes require heat beyond what a mining chip could handle... unless you fabricated special mining chips out of different semiconductor materials that can handle high heat. But that's probably too expensive for the economics to work too.
What would make some sense to me is an integrated solar PV panel / mining unit. Just deploy them in the desert and connect them. Each panel could be discrete and WiFi connected, meaning you would not have to wire them to anything at all. Just prop them up in the sun with WAPs every so often to connect them to a network.
We risk the whole world becoming paperclips type economics doomsday scenario.. least growing number of people that ascribe value to cryto agree to collectively ascribe to an alternative model for distribution of transaction security.
I do hope that we can develop effective methods to combat climate change so that we can enjoy clean water and a roof above our heads for a bit longer. It would be a shame if our civilisation disappears without a trace, lost forever to entropy. It would be nice to leave something behind, even though our existence is probably less meaningful than we tell ourselves.
I'm not unhappy, I feel blessed for being here and now. The only thing I'm fed up with is people blatantly lying, without repercussions. Big corporations have fucked up the climate by lying and they want me, the average citizen, to feel guilty of my carbon footprint.
We don't deserve these lies.
Do I really need to point who is the biggest e-waste generator in the world? Solve that problem first.
It's also the consumers who are using the oil, not only the oil companies, who are to blame at the end. If no one buys, no one will produce.
Sure, if it's cheap and readily available, people will use it no matter how bad it is.
That's why it's so important that the governments increase the taxes on oil, petrol and diesel.
In many places in Europe you can get to work or holiday destinations by public transport.
In Switzerland (a rich and relatively densely populated country, albeit full of mountains) there are trains and cable cars to almost everywhere, and if not a train there is most likely a bus (managed by the post office). I managed to live there quite a few years without owning a car.
In Singapore they put a hard limit on the number of cars on the road (and no exception for electric cars, to Tesla disappointment), and the available slots are sold at auctions. There is a dense public transport system, supplemented by a relatively high amount of taxi.
What’s “that problem”? It’s not clear from your post.
We always seem to go in circles with whataboutism when posts like this appear: “X is a bigger problem so let’s solve that”. We can do this for every problem — look at the data through the right lens and another problem is always bigger - and never solve anything.
You get a bunch of normal people (i.e. 'peasants' if you wish) sitting around talking about how to save the environment while eating fruit grown in a faraway land and trucked to them in a refrigerated truck.
Everyone wants to say the solution is that other people should change the way they do things, not themselves.
Too many people aren't willing to accept this simple fact: the standard of living in the cushy societies of the Western middle class is completely and utterly unsustainable. And probably never will be. Avoiding environmental degradation is simply not possible without a major quality of life reduction.
But I think both collectively and individually we are unwilling to make the required sacrifices. You're right, the actions of one person don't make a significant change, but they do make some change. If everyone who said they were deeply concerned about the environment started to make the changes that are required, we'd start to make a dent. And perhaps have a larger effect than themselves.
But they won't. We're all mostly just hoping that massive change doesn't happen until after we die.
In seriousness, carbon emissions are overwhelmingly emitted from large corporations and state level actors (like the military). Which isn't to say that people shouldn't do what they can to reduce their own carbon footprint, but the world won't be saved if everyone buys local and starts biking to work.
Good quote. But, if everyone buys local and starts biking to work, why would the oil companies keep producing as much oil?
Including externalities would be an interesting path. I don't know what that would realistically look like though. Gas tax?
Just the effect of making less green options more expensive would help, but of course this would be even better if the money collected from such a tax was used to invest in green infrastructure which could balance the original pollution.
I have friends who eat vegan, eat more local foods, have cut down meat consumption, avoid travel (yes, before COVID), are reducing their plastic use to near zero, and so on. Few are taking all of that on but some are and there are many other ideas I've heard people taking on.
We keep a garden alongside getting the rest of our vegetables from a local farmer who produces far into the winter via a CSA. We have started replacing some meat consumption with egg consumption from the chickens we keep. We do other things but we definitely have more opportunities. There have been some really nice shifts in perception as our reduced consumption has reduced our stresses and lifted our wealth trajectory.
Consider: could you be hosting some social norms and exhibit some behaviors that keep you from interaction with such people?
[edit: s/eat a vegan/eat vegan/]
Hilariously opposite to the intended message. Sorry, I just found it very funny, have an upvote to make up for my shitpost reply.
I believe in leading by example rather than leading by dictate. Others seeing what's actually possible is far more encouraging of change than pointy fingers and harsh words.
Bitcoins annual estimated e-waste: 307 000 metric tons Global annual estimated e-waste: 53 600 000 metric tons
307 000 / 53 600 000 * 100 = 0.57 %
I don't know if the numbers in the linked paper and the following paper can be used together as I haven't read both, but I've taken the global annual e-waste estimate from here as unfortunately the linked paper does not mention it in the abstract: https://www.itu.int/myitu/-/media/Publications/2020-Publicat...
While I do think Bitcoin in its current form is a problem and the developers should start thinking of solutions sooner than later, I think starting with Bitcoin to reduce total e-waste is misguided at best.
Are there any similar studies regarding the banking system?
With buildings and buildings full of offices just for banks, their IT infrastructure, plus ATMs, POS, etc.
How frequently are these systems replaced/upgraded?
How much energy are they using?
I think it would be interesting to make a comparison.
[0] (I have no sources, just based on seeing links to similar studies recently)
They will still be washing up on beaches 100 years after every single person involved in their design has passed.
Whole electronics industry needs to take this stuff more seriously, we need more replaceable batteries and storage, right to repair on a global level and laws against the sort of thing Apple does with their repair pricing where the repair costs like $50-100 less than a new device.
Iphones pods pads etc etc.
Listening to music in strict Islam is considered hurtful and sin. To some people listening to music is as worthless as crypto, or maybe even worse.
Stop whining about crypto being a ponzi scheme. Instead of parroting same points over and over read what ponzi scheme actually is.
Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life, not everyone is jumping to the latest and greatest.
You are picking ridiculous point and creating some ridiculous 'true Scotsman'
>Lots of people use Apple products because they have a long life
Like who? You and other 10 people?
Lots of people that don’t live in wealthy western countries or people that simply don’t have lots of disposable income.
Yeah, that is the target market of Apple, people without disposable income. Keep digging man, keep digging.
In this case, I would take take the word "like" to mean "such as". Your first potential interpretation instead implies that you interpreted it to mean "specifically". And the second ignores all the qualifying adjectives.
For my part, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the dominance of products with built-in, non-replaceable rechargeable batteries in products that don't permit or are fundamentally incompatible with corded use. Because if a fundamental component that it needs in order to function happens to also be a non-replaceable wear item, then yeah, it is a disposable product. As a point of basic morality, we should not be blithely making disposable products that cannot be safely disposed of. It doesn't matter how convenient it is to us, our kids and our grandkids and our peers in less wealthy countries and their kids and grandkids are the ones who will be stuck dealing with the polluted waterways, and we have no right to force that upon them just because we think cords are annoying.
It's really not so different from the leaded gasoline that my grandparents thought was so convenient.
AirPods sell over 14 million a year, that's an astonishing amount of waste for a product with such a limited lifespan.
I'm fine with people making arguments that Bitcoin is bad for the environment, but e-waste is the least of the worries with it.
https://frame.work/
I've wanted something like this for years, a laptop that is actually repairable but isn't awful in specs or ergonomics. When they start selling in my region I'll be all over it.
If you care about these problems then vote with your wallet.
I'm way too excited about this company, it's all the changes I've been hoping for.
Governments in authoritarian countries have shut down bitcoin mining operations and arrested people.
It'd be hard because you'd have to find every single node and disconnect it from the internet, and something like 90% of Bitcoin nodes run over TOR
And you know this... how?
Did you know that 96% of statistics are made up on the spot?
Here's a source if you're curious
Also, can you provide an article showing that Bitcoin is used for "tons" (whatever percentage tons means) of illegal activity?
Bitcoin is used daily for remittance payments, which is huge since it's way cheaper than sending money through western mutual
There's also Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador which is a bitcoin only circular economy
Paxful provides a service for people to trade gift cards for Bitcoin
If you let it take over, the ensuing negativity and Weltschmerz might paralyze you.
And true, most criticism (whether justified or not) comes to nothing if there's a lack of regulating entity that could do something about it.
That said, I prefer a smartphone I can open and replace the battery of. I own one, too: Fairphone 3. I'll look forward to the day wireless earpods have replaceable battery. However, we still gotta think about updating the firmware of the chipset.
We have seen this "response" so many times that its laughable. Its like a person who owns large number of shares of Company X and everytime someone brings up the serious problems at Company X she tries to change the subject.
Bitcoin is still new and poorly understood by a significant percentage of the population and therefore hasn't become part of everyone's "lifestyle to which they've become accustomed" yet, so it's automatically viewed more harshly. The comparisons are, in fact, necessary for the appropriate judgemental context.
On the topic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency utility, I'll point you towards another thread where I badly answered a similar question (and re-reading what I wrote I don't answer it at all), the core of the answer is that it's not simple to explain our to understand if you haven't "played" with it yourself to start the mental ball rolling as to its application and usefulness.
Discussion on the El Salvador legal tender go live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468982
My specific, but vague, commentary is the 18th comment on the above link.
Bitcoin was created to be an alternative to the corrupt money system that brought about the Global Financial Crisis. That isn't a thing that can be easily understood in its everyday utility to the average citizen, there has to be an understanding of the overall corruption (and potential for corruption) of the current system and there almost has to be agreement about that before Bitcoin can be considered to be something useful at all - ie. If person X doesn't have a problem with the current financial system then Bitcoin is a big, complex, electricity hungry beast alternative to a system that's running just fine, and therefore totally unnecessary.
In the years since Bitcoins inception things like Ethereum have come along to add "smart contract" utility that has allowed for things like Decentralised Finance and NFTs (the current usage of NFTs, I think, is detrimental to its potential for real-world problem solving, such as "proof of ownership" and I can't think of anything other use case right now). Decentralised Finance is so new, however, that we won't know what works well and what works poorly as replacements for existing financial services for a few years - bit I think it's important to go through this process of discovery.
Or it could be that rational people look at incredibly slow and energy expensive security with no fundamentals and no applications after a decade and are skeptical.
I mean, why would someone have an axe to grind? Bitcoin stole their girl?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
E.g we replace plastic bags with tote bags but a tote bag must be used over 130 times to make it better than a single use plastic bag.
With your thought we wouldn't even be able to compare the two because you're not interested in the actual reality of these issues.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/49433/two-college-roommates-and-...
https://www.thepodswap.com/
If the average person uses them for 2 years they'll be a drop in the ocean to the tens or hundreds of kilos of plastic and other objects they don't recycle fully in that time.
It's not that it's polluting the environment that much, more that it's wasteful and creates a unnecessary demand in IC production when they are thrown away in perfect working order.
> Analysts estimate Apple sold between 14 million and 16 million AirPods in 2017.[38] In 2018, AirPods were Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold.[39][40] 60 million units were sold in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods
In 2020, another 114 million units were sold.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/
Each airpod weights about 4g. But we're counting sales. So, we're counting pairs. And we also have to factor in the plastic charging case which comes in at 38g since that's also included in the package as well. That makes for a grand total of 46g per sale.
By my count, the total weight of all airpods ever sold is about 10.350 metric tonnes (46g * 225 million units).
According to the Ocean Cleanup project, the Great Pacific Garbage Page weighs about 88.000 tonnes.
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/ Also seems to be confirmed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
So, all airpods sold between 2017 and end of 2020 make up about... 11.7% of the Great Pacific Garabage Patch.
That's not a number I'd call "negligible". I'm a bit floored and incredulous and not even all too sure of my number work to the point where I've been re-calculating for the past 20 minutes and I'm arriving at the same numbers again and again.
That's just the amount of waste that will need to be disposed of when all units have reached their end of life.
There's also the production process itself which requires resources and produces waste as well. That's not just the molding of plastics and the assembly of circuits. I'm also talking about the extraction, refining,... of natural resources just to produce the half-finished parts that arrive at the plant where the final product is assembled. There's the logistics and transports involved just to move the entire chain. Oh, and the number juggling above is also discounting packaging and wrapping. There's a massive hidden footprint there as well.
If we choose number of plastic bags consumed in American on an annual basis (100 Billion [1]) and go by the mass per bag (5.5g [2]) then just plastic bags in America is 550K tonnes/year of plastic.
Also, according to the UN the world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic and electrical waste a year and they estimate 20% of it is recycled. [3]
So, ya. A penny saved is a penny earned and all. But it's still a penny.
[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...
[2] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/plastic-bags-to-recycle-or-...
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/un-repor...
It’s about equivalent to a weeks worth of plastic Starbucks cups every morning and far less than the packaging on a average shopping trip.
I misinterpreted this statement: " On average Bitcoin generates 272 g of e-waste per transaction processed on the blockchain."
To mean the online cost of the hashing/mining, etc, not just physical e-waste.
Regardless this may be moot now, but my feelings was that comparing a consumer product (airpods) to a "bulk consumer" product like ASICs is doing an apple to oranges comparison. Airpods are manufactured in Vietnam and distributed through supply chains throughout the world -- whilst ASICs are manufactured in China and distrubted more locally (in Eurasia)?
Does it? Assuming the claim is accurate, 30700 metric tons per year. Apple sells around 200 million iPhones per year. Assuming 200 g for a phone, that's 40000 metric tons.
Edit: I was off by a factor of 10, corrected. The overall smartphone market is likely approximately 10x of Bitcoin, assuming this study is correct, 200g per device, 1.5 billion devices per year (from https://www.statista.com/statistics/263441/global-smartphone...)
Also, 1.5 billion smartphones per year is incredible. Unless there are many people who break/upgrade their phone several times per year, that means a much bigger fraction of humanity now has access to a computing device and likely also to the world's knowledge than I thought.
Edit: even pointing it out gets me down votes :D
Because if not then what's the point?
If it is only discarded because there is new hardware with a better calculations/energy ratio then it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
Or are processors and memory broken beyond repair when they have been running at max speed for a few years?
> it would be better to use a new POW algorithm, which does not benefit from single purpose ASICs.
It's hard for me to imagine what that would be but that could be a lack of imagination on my part. Maybe other non-payment blockchain applications?
The other day some friends and I were musing how cool it would be if we could map some simulation algorithms to SHA-256 primitives. I thought there could be chance because I didn't actually know the mathematical operation SHA was doing. Once I found out, it didn't work out at all. Not even close. Maybe others will be more fortunate.
And for the one-off needs more mainstream CPUs already have support for some acceleration of SHA-256 [1] and that seems to be enough for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions
Verifying 1 block requires the calculation of 1 hash. The hashrate for my CPU for RandomX is ~8000hashes/s. The monero blockchain currently has 2450000 blocks. blocks / hashrate = 5 minutes to verify the whole blockchain. Is that really that bad?
So transactions on exchanges are less wasteful?
A deposit from wallet to exchange generates the same pollution?
Or is it "only" mined transactions? Does the transaction size matter?
reward_per_block * price = value_per_block
cost_per_hash * avg_hashes_to_find_block = cost_per_block
cost_per_hash is the cost of electricity and mining hardware . If value_per_block > cost_per_block, mining is profitable and more miners will join the network, increasing avg_hashes_to_find_block, until value_per_block == cost_per_block.
co2_emissions = avg_hashes_to_find_block * co2_per_hash.
So the emissions are a function of the price of bitcoin and the price of (electricity + mining hardware).
(This is obviously not quite apples for apples, since you'd also have to account for VISA & Co. likely employing more people than Bitcoin, on the other hand, Bitcoin also requires absurd amounts of throw-away hardware.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity
[0] https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/a-single-...
So as far whether or not that matters... do you expect that there is a substantially different number of employees need to maintain the VISA system than the Bitcoin system, on a per-transaction basis? Even if you're generous and say that VISA needs 10× the employees that Bitcoin would (were it the same size as VISA), it would still require that an employee use 100,000× the energy cost of a transaction to overcome the fact that Bitcoin transactions require 1,000,000× the energy of VISA.
I'd like to see an estimate of visa's energy usage using the same method the source you linked used to estimate bitcoin's energy usage. Take visa's revenue and multiply it by some fraction of revenue used for energy use (they used 52%). Some very rough calculations I did put it about 1000 times more energy expensive than visa's own report. That's still 1000 times better than bitcoin, using the same method, but it'd interesting to know where the discrepancy comes from, and whether that should also be considered for bitcoin's energy use.
Perhaps bitcoin or some other crypto can serve as a currency in a sense, but you'd still need financial institutions to do things like write loans and manage other assets.
It seems that Karl Marx was right when he said that "Unbridled Capitalism Will Destroy itself." - It has already destroyed itself in the eyes of a large number of people.
But clearly communism isn't the solution since it also ended up destroying itself on many occasions.
Maybe the solution is bridled (constrained) capitalism? It's interesting to think back to the gold standard and how gold acted as a constraint on capitalism. Maybe what we really need now are constraints; Bitcoin and other deflationary cryptocurrencies can provide this.
These articles keep popping up every few weeks as the promoters try to revise their messaging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc
Fix the money, fix the world.
As if Coronavirus were the "disease that eases" that will drive sustainable horse dewormer development in an emergent free miracle cure fashion and take us to an immortal civilization.
Cull the weak, accelerate evolution!
May? Have you seen graphic card prices lately? Even really old cards are selling for multiples of what they were a year or so ago.
> In some cases, steady GPU mining can be safer than gaming. When mining with a GPU, the load is evenly distributed over time; therefore, there are no thermal spikes and sudden drops that could damage the GPU.
https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/can-mining-damage-my-gpu-...
Keep in mind that NiceHash is a GPU mining pool
Each to their own I guess.
You give me the kind opportunity to quote a favourite lyric of mine:
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
Thick as a Brick, Jethro Tull[0]
[0]: http://www.collecting-tull.com/Albums/Lyrics/ThickAsABrick.h...
im sure thats FAR more efficient than banks, right?
i hate banks as much as the next guy but good fucking lord is bitcoin terrible
And judging the costs bank are able to charge for international wires, even when comparing them to the horrendous fees for Bitcoin (Core, BTC) on-chain transactions, I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that much less efficient.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
eat my shit and hair
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.
2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.
All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!
They being...?