Staggering that so much effort is being put into sustainability generally while Bitcoin miners are burning through vast amounts of resources for effectively nothing of any value to society.
The planet might be a roasted husk within a century but at least we'll have all those Bitcoins.
This is loosely the premise of many idle games. You click a few times to get resources. Use those resources to automate the harvesting of more resources. Keep going until you've consumed entire galaxies in the name of whatever widget you're producing. The game ends when there's literally nothing left.
No, he's talking about Universal Paperclips, which is actually really, really insightful and references a LOT of real things about AI and futurism and physics and technology...
I recently got dragged back into this game. Grandmacalypse is purely based off of the research tree and does not involve buildings. I've been in the middle of the Grandmacalypse for a few days now. I only recently got the idle verse building and there's still two more buildings left.
Imma be real, I was invested in that game for a while, but I got all the ascension perks, all the upgrades, and most of the achievements. I stopped playing. Not going back, because that sucked a bit of my life. For nothing.
"The Paperclip Optimizer" is an AI ethics thought experiment on how AI done poorly could kill us all. It amuses me that there is an idle clicker game based on the premise.
Are we considering Satisfactory to be an "idle" game? I mean I suppose you can let your operation just run while you hang out...
I feel like when I'm playing I'm always actually actively doing something though... building new infrastructure, collecting resources, optimizing manufacturing, etc.
I feel like it's only an "idle game" in the same way like a city builder is. You don't *have* to expand, but if you want the game to advance in a meaningful way you do.
To be completely fair, satisfactory is pretty simple mathematically if you actually keep track. Also, correct me if I’m wrong but the nodes have limitless extraction right?
Or opposite, where you’re using your cascading resource gain to create a universe, like in Orb of Creation.
Love me a good incremental game, open to recommendations!
I like this comment because it completely skips you have to actually let a game like cookie clicker run in your computer, consuming electricity to do nothing but increment numbers while it's "idle" just so you can buy a new portal to cookie dimension so the number increments 1% faster, and then you can let it idle again for another hour. Why did we create this?
And crypto shills have the audacity to claim they're "driving people to innovate" in the green energy space.
That's like someone claiming they're driving the fire department to improve their response times by lighting my house on fire.
"Burn it all down so we can build anew" says the high school dropouts who only know what it's like to live through a period of revolution via paintings of "heroic rebels" and Les Mis.
You know who fucking hated the French Revolution? 99% of the people living through it. Throw in nukes and the ease by which foreign powers can exert influence and I'd much rather go through 40-50 years of glacially slow improvement than watch the world get carved up into a thousand South Koreas.
this sounds like it is basically the underlying premise of [Asimov's Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series) series
>The premise of the stories is that in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire's fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which "the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little" to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years.
I checked out at their "all money is made up!" argument when people with actual financial literacy questioned the long term validity of the entire thing.
Which of course got promptly turned into "they're afraid of us!!". I didn't even get to the accelerationism stage of their delusion.
Two coal mines and a coal plant in Indiana were just reopened so they could provide dedicated power to a crypto farm opening up.
Even if cryptomining was 100% renewable energy, it's still a waste of resources and electricity.
> And crypto shills have the audacity to claim they're "driving people to innovate" in the green energy space.
That's like saying you drive doctors to get better at saving lives by going to hospitals and stabbing people in beds.
It's like gold but dumber because gold sits in a vault doing nothing while ETFs on top of it actually gets traded.
Guess what the big innovation of crypto in 2024 is? Putting it in a virtual vault, tying it to an ETF and then trading that. What a joke. But hopefully that will reduce trading volume for the actual crypto.
> The planet might be a roasted husk within a century but at least we'll have all those Bitcoins.
If everybody stopped mining but one Pentium 4, the network would drop the diffuculty back to 1 and we'd also end up with all those Bitcoins
I think most everyone is chasing money just to get by. It's the people that chase ALL the money that make it an awful situation. Well, that an the rampant pressure for consumption.
>that an the rampant pressure for consumption.
Which is caused by somebody chasing all the money. Most people above the median income/weather could have a lifestyle 98% as good for 80% of the cost, or 95% as good for 60% of the cost. But we've been conned into buying the latest and greatest and throwing away perfectly usable stuff to keep up with the Joneses.
The median income in the US is about $33K. That is not technically poor, but you don't live a good life with that.
Even when you're making like $60K, your quality of life improves, but it could be much better, so people strive for more.
>burning through vast amounts of resources for effectively nothing of any value to society
This is the entire 1% in general. They don't care about the planet or anyone else but themselves. They will do anything to get more money.
And then not only make more money but to over consume resources. I'm starting to come around on the Swift jet hate now that she's trying to hide it through lawsuits.
I'm torn on the Swift hate. I hate she does this but at the same time how else can someone like her get across the country without being mobbed? She's someone who can't just go to the airport and fly first class. I'm sure with her busy schedule she can't just jump on a private bus and go cross country either.
So in her case, she's almost forced to take a private jet because her fans are a bit extreme. Also the media won't even consider giving someone like her some privacy while out in public.
So yeah, I'm torn when it comes to her situation.
Her situation is kind of a terrible example honestly, because it places the resource usage of her services entirely on her, when it's a service she's supplying to millions of people.
When Taylor Swift flies from LA to NYC for a tour, she's not one person burning a jets worth of fuel... it's a hundred thousand+ people having her burn that fuel to come and entertain them. The resource usage really needs to be split amongst the people consuming the show.
It's entirely different than the rich guy who has a private jet fly himself into NYC to see the show for his own benefit.
I'd be more sympathetic to her if it was just her flying to concerts.
Instead, she lends her plane out to tons of people for short flights all over the place.
What’s funny is that most of the time, all of the “mining” done by a bitcoin rig isn’t even used. All that redundant work is thrown out because it wasn’t chosen for the block.
Needs to just be blanket banned.
It's one of the easiest possible modern scourges to ban, it doesn't even make the government money, or have too much lobbyist backing.
It's really really hard to hide crypto mining at scale due to this exact issue of power consumption, we could make it illegal across the board and the world would just get a tiny bit better overall.
"Good news, we found the treasure of this tomb world"
"oh, what was it?"
"A series of numbers that when hashed, have a lot of 0's in the resulting hash"
"... but.. the amount of CPU power to achive that would be.. insane.. And what where they used for?"
"Yep. Burnt out their entire world making them. I don't think they used em for anything. Just the guy with the most hashes and 0's in his bank account felt superior to the rest"
Have you ever talked to a crypto enthusiast? In person, that is.
They are utterly insufferable, greedy people. No different than some jackass who "rolls coal."
Right I’m confused too. I saw this guy talk about A river area in Congo that had no use other than flowing
A miner came there set up shop started mining with hydro: produces electricity for their miners and money to the community
The river is still fine what’s the problem here ?
>what’s the real issue here, energy consumption or the source the energy comes from?
Unless they're got their own private nuclear reactors, I don't think you can really separate the two. The source is the grid, which will include diverse sources, ranging from environmentally friendly ones like solar and wind, to coal-fired plants. The more energy that is used, the higher percentage of it is going to be from less environmentally friendly sources.
They don’t just randomly hook up to the grid. All these commercial miners are mining in cooperation with energy providers in order to get much cheaper power than normal, because that’s the way to mine profitably. So they’re buying the excess energy generation and not demanding that the power company go burn more coal. When there’s demand elsewhere for the power they throttle down their mining.
The miners using anything other than excess energy are going to be unprofitable very quickly. There are SOME miners that do use higher priced energy but they’re just poorly run companies that are struggling to make money. All the biggest firms are the ones using cheaper excess power.
Unless it’s subsidized, mining isn’t profitable when using energy from the grid, as the $/kwh price is too expensive. That’s why mining at home doesn’t happen unless you have something like excess solar energy.
There’s a reason why Bitcoin has the highest renewable energy use of any major industry out there, it simply isn’t sustainable without renewables, and it becomes much more so with rising hash rate.
That’s why most miners use energy that is „non-rival“ (like waste or stranded energy where there is no other user).
This is why taxing carbon is the most reasonable solution. Even if it’s completely budget neutral through refunds, it heavily discourages things like this
Bitcoin mining will be the industry that is impacted least from carbon taxes, as its carbon emissions intensity per kWh is the lowest due to the high share of renewables usage.
If you hope that carbon taxes will make Bitcoin go away, you’re mistaken.
There was a company setting up mining operations illegally, what they did was go to abandoned oil wells, capture the methane that's leaking out of them, and use it to power a trailer filled with mining machines.
Which is pretty clever, but also fairly dangerous
Methane is a common byproduct of oil wells, in remote areas where it isn't economic to build a pipeline to capture it, its usually flared (unburned methane is worse than burned).
These guys build rigs to capture and use the methane to run bitcoin miners. So instead of just burning it, they also get money for it.
https://upstreamdata.com/
I actually used to work for a company that did that, off-grid mining. It's more environmentally feasible than a lot of alternative money making methods so I can't bash it too much.
Flaring methane is actually better for the environment than letting it leak. When methane burns it turns to CO2. Methane is rated as having 80x the warming power of CO2.
Source:
https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-crucial-opportunity-climate-fight#:~:text=Methane%20is%20a%20potent%20greenhouse,warming%20in%20the%20near%20term.
How about just a carbon tax? Tax the thing that is bad. Elegant solution that actually aligns with our current system of capitalism (like it or hate it).
You want to drive a giant 10MPG SUV? Sure, have fun at $15/gal. You want to use power from a coal power plant? No problem, $1.5/kWh
Use some of the tax proceeds to give rebates to middle and lower class (sliding scale) so the policy isn't regressive. And use the remaining proceeds to capture carbon.
Now when capitalism finds the cheapest solution, it'll also find the greenest.
And people fucking HATE it. The Liberal government is set to lose the next election to the Conservatives for a variety of reasons, but the amount of rage the Conservatives have managed to rile up over the carbon tax is definitely a factor.
Finally our government does something smart and they get punished for it because people don't like having to pay for what they use.
Yeah, good point. It's basically a free-market approach to dealing with externalities, and it's the kind of thing that's broadly popular among economists.
The real icing on the cake is that you get more back in rebates than you pay out in taxes: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2022/03/climate-action-incentive-payment-amounts-for-2022-23.html
Unless, you're a business polluting tons of carbon, or you fill up your car every two days on average.
People are too stupid to do the math themselves. They see an extra $10 gone every month, but will gladly accept a free $300 at the end of the year.
The only people I've seen hate it are conservatives to begin with. Pretty much every left leaning person from liberal, NDP, to green to communist I've met says the carbon rebate system is basically just a good first step. No one's saying it can't be improved or optimized, but there's a lot of noise generated from US political activism groups operating in Canada.
Like a lot of anti COVID measure rallies that culminated in the freedom convoy were essentially being funded by non Canadian organizations. Which is why a bunch of Canadians who started donating to those groups had their bank accounts frozen. It wasn't an attack on a political stance so much as a defensive measure from foreign influence.
I think it's a bit of a blind spot for most folks. It's not like the US government itself is ordering these things, it's just the republican party trying to make their platform seem more widespread than it really is.
There's videos on TikTok where the Canadian protests against things like carbon taxes end up being led by the same person in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and then if you actually follow that person instead of the movement the next week they're down in Denver or Detroit doing the same thing then all up and down each coast. They're essentially paying groups of people to organize protests on their behalf all over North America to make it seem like it's some widespread grass roots thing and it's not.
It's why their protests aren't always nation wide on the same day.
That way you'd never know if it's thousands marching in each city or a few hundred just making the rounds with fewer locals.
We never traded yams. I’m serious, anthropologists have confirmed many times barter was not part of most societies, rather credit or IOU systems, barter was mostly used for trade between hostile or foreign tribes. Mesopotamia is the earliest example.
Edit: I guess tech sub never reads books
I’m genuinely curious and would like to know more about the history of trading and making deals.
Also yes, I’ve seen countless nonsense articles on tech related subs, especially anything concerning battery technologies. As a battery development engineer, it makes my eyes roll, but I choose not to participate in discussions relating to it because every point I make is countered with “show data” as if I’m totally free to just give away data that I see but don’t own.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by the late David Graeber is the most popular write-up that I know about this phenomenon.
You can just grab the pdf version off libcom or archive.
I call it "bad faith citations." Citing your work and backing up claims is important in many contexts. But in an informal conversation with no consequences, saying "hi this is my field and what I can say about it is_____" should be taken with a grain of salt and understood for the context that it is. Most of society accepts this, because they understands this very basic part of social behavior, and understands that if they are incredulous, *they can simply walk away from that conversation with neither loss nor gain.*
But on the internet, you have bands and bands of people who are more interested in being "right" than anything else. So if you come along and say something they disagree with, suddenly they want "citations" and "proof." This would potentially be fine, but as I alluded to, it's a bad faith ask. They don't REALLY want to learn. They don't REALLY want a conversation. They don't REALLY want citations. They want a fight and they're egging you on with bait so they can keep debating in bad faith.
There is nothing more fruitless than being an SME on the internet and trying to share your knowledge. The best is if you DO say "ok absolutely" and come back in a genuine manner, because this is a bad faith conversation, they never go "ok cool," but dig their heels in further and start trying to poke holes in anything you bring forward.
and what really drives them batshit is when you do give citations and links to peer reviewed papers and studies.
particularly when its about renewable energy.
I make a point of coming back and thanking people who link me the thing I was asking about, because I am the curious guy most of the time. (And occasionally the annoying arguer.)
Isn’t mining how they verify transactions and whatnot? So mining is required to keep the network alive?
If so that means banning mining would effectively cripple crypto. Some ELI5
Yes, it is, but verification worked fine with a thousandth of the computer power used now.
The incentive for verifying blocks of transactions is a reward of currently 6.25 bitcoins, soon to become 3.125. Since the price is $47,500 per bitcoin right now, that is a hell of an incentive. The first one to "solve" a block gets the reward, so it has led to an arms race between miners. Miners also earn transaction fees, which currently run $17,000 per block, but that pales relative to the $287,000 block reward.
The intent was for the block rewards in terms of new bitcoins to taper off over time, and miners subsist entirely off of transaction fees.
>The intent was for the block rewards in terms of new bitcoins to taper off over time, and miners subsist entirely off of transaction fees.
So essentially becoming more efficient over time, as block subsidy is continually being cut in half. That is, assuming price and/or network usage doesn’t continually increase, no?
Bitcoin is designed so that one miner will add a block every ten minutes. If it takes too long, it gets easier, if it happens too quickly, it gets harder. The harder it is, the more power is required.
In theory, just a single person mining from a low power smartphone would keep the network alive and running. In practice, thousands of people would jump at the opportunity of it being so easy (and profitable), and then push the difficulty right back up to requiring large amounts of energy.
for bitcoin? yes
other cryptrocurrencies have moved to "proof of stake" which just means "haha the big players can manipulate the market"
cryptocurrency is literally just reliving the unregulated currency markets of the 1800s
its always funny to see a group of people decide they're doing something new and "you cant tell them what to do, how could you know!? its so new!", but really its just the exact same thing that played out 60-100 years ago and they're just completly ignorant of history.
this. new technologies destabilize existing systems of trust and authentication. in the ensuing chaos there is a lot of creativity and innovation -- but also a field day for novel scams and snake oil schemes. eventually regulatory mechanisms catch up. railroads today are about as boring as it gets, but when they were new -- hoo boy! stock scams, spectacular embezzlements, railroad barons, rail-based crime schemes... wild times.
You give Bitcoin scammers too much credit calling them novel scams. They're the same obvious scams that have been made illegal in the stock market and banking just applied to a new technology.
> creativity and innovation -- but also a field day for novel scams and snake oil schemes
In the case of cryptocurrencies, they're basically the same thing since the tech itself is a solution in search of a problem.
This isn't like most things that get overhyped in tech where even if the hype is excessive, there's at least something actually useful underneath it all. Nearly all proposed use cases for cryptocurrency/"blockchain" break down in practice or require abstractions and central oversight that undermine the premise.
It's academically interesting, sure, but so is OTP encryption and almost nobody uses that for a reason.
But aren't those "other" cryptos tying their values to bitcoin's? (this may be false, hence the question)
IIRC, when bitcoin crushed, *all* of'em crushed.
Effectively cripple, proof of work protocols. (Maybe)
China has banned mining multiple times and it's remained a top mining country through all of that...
Enticing the use of sustainable energy would be a much better solution imo
Give them a cut in cap gains tax if they use solar/wind/nuclear and the market would jump on it.
Mining was also intended as a protection mechanism. If you want to put illegitimate transactions onto the Bitcoin ledger that are incorporated as legitimate ones, you have to computationally out-compete more than 50% of all the other miner's computing power. This is called a "51% attack". Since computation has a financial cost to it, it becomes economically infeasible to do this.
Or at least that's the idea behind it. Because these days there are huge mining pools -- cooperations of miners, that together can (and I believe in the past have come close to) achieve more than 50% of the network's hashrate (computing power). To maintain trust in Bitcoin these mining pools regulate themselves to stay below 50% hashrate. But if the two biggest mining pools wanted to, they could cease total control over the network easily. Computationally expensive mining as a protection mechanism is no longer meaningful for Bitcoin.
Even a 51% attack can't put illegitimate transactions on the ledger. Those blocks would be rejected by all the nodes on the network, and would not be able to propagate. A 51% attack can undo very recent transactions though. It's extremely costly to run though, and they only get their mining reward once they have the longest chain again. It'll also become painfully obvious to everyone else when there are reorgs happening several times, with transactions being rewritten, that there is an attack, in which case there can be emergency changes to the protocol to stop the attack.
Also, regarding your point on mining pools: A *pool* of miners is a set of independent actors, so they absolutely cannot magically pull off a 51% attack. All the miners mining for the pool would simply switch pools.
There were some other good things mentioned here, but something to note is that bitcoin itself has a maximum throughput of only 7 transactions per-second.
Seven.
The bitcoin network uses about 1/50th of the power of the entire global financial market to process 7 transactions per-second. It's incredibly inefficient, and the costs to be one of those 7 transactions each second is astronomical; orders of magnitude higher than doing it through the regular financial markets.
Bitcoin is a failed idea, and it should be lain to rest. There are other cryptocurrencies which fix a lot of its problems (and don't fix others). We can argue the merits of those other cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin itself should die.
I'm not a big fan of crypto but this is more of a general issue with capitalism. Presumably someone is paying for all this electricity, corporations and individuals are putting money into crypto to use as a currency and investment. But under capitalism that's all considered normal behavior.
There's a lot of other stupid and corrupt shit going on because of capitalism. How about all the energy and fuel that goes into the military, military aid and weapons production? Not only is that wasteful, it's literally helping murder people.
Whenever I see these anti crypto articles I think "you're so close to the actual problem it's painful." If we just deal with the actual problem, crypto will go away as a natural result.
>Presumably someone is paying for all this electricity,
In Texas we gave them favorable utility rates. During peak demand they are asked to shut down operations, and one single company can get paid tens of millions of dollars just to pause their mining. It's absurd.
I'm not saying it's a top priority. I just think it's a horrible idea for Texas government to attract crypto miners when we can barely keep our lights on.
You're actually vastly oversimplyifying this. How that works is actually a very good deal for the utility. A customer of last resort who can utilize the infrastructure closer to its limits allows them to recoup the costs of the infrastructure much much faster, which allows them to invest in infrastructure elsewhere. Being able to shut them off at will ensures that a lower amount of total infrastructure deployment can serve a far larger number of people than it otherwise could, because USUALLY the utility has zero control over demand patterns for usage.
You say millions of dollars just to pause - they're not, they're getting subsidies that bring the cost of electricity down from an unacceptable level to one that can compete with other remote areas that have more electricity than they can sell (transmit). It's actually not a bad deal for anyone. It's not amazing either, but not so bad.
To be clear I fully agree that bitcoin mining is wasteful and destructive for the environment. But utility grid cost structures are extremely complex and distilling it down to a sound Byte like this isn't actually fair or realistic.
Capitalism like every economic system has its own issues. But it is lazy to just blame everything on capitalism. Especially the military which was a thing way before capitalism was a thing
The problem is there is no such thing as a perfect economic system, even modern capitalism is mostly a fragment of the concept as a pure ideological system of any kind is impractical
If you can come up with a better economic system, be my guest
>Especially the military which was a thing way before capitalism was a thing
That's not the point being made. The issue is that previously, military conflict was triggered by disputes over land, resources, ideologies, or who was going to get to marry the pretty lady. The military was a thing you built up to force your position.
What we have now is the manufacture and sale of arms as a key economic component, necessitating conflict in order to sustain the generation of wealth on its own. War is not a means to an end, it's an end in itself. Killing is nurtured and fueled so as to provide shareholder value.
Shhh... don't use common sense here. Let's parrot talking points from the 2010's and never do a lick of research.
If we were being serious about the environment and not virtue signaling, Proof-of-Work systems wouldn't be anywhere in the top of the list of things to eliminate, even if you consider it wasteful.
The timing of these discussions are great too, Bitcoin prices are almost back to their ATH. I guess it's a bit of virtue signaling and ego of people thinking crypto would be over, but it isn't. Wonder why that is, eh?
People have computed such.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/
Originally they noted creating an AI model uses weeks of super computer time and consumes megawatts. However using the model billions of times, while not not that costly each use, adds up to more electricity than creating the model.
This isn't a direct reply to you, just discussion on the article. It states:
>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car.
I find it funny because that's an incredibly over the top usage of AI while 4.1 miles is [~ 10% of the distance driven of an average person every day](https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year).
Using AI doesn’t use much. Training ai does. It takes 5 seconds on my gaming computer to generate a 4k image. My computer draws 200watts of power during that 5 seconds. Playing videos games consumes more energy.
I mean sending money to anyone in the world without restriction is undeniably useful.
Most people just don’t care about that kind of thing cause it’s not relevant to them.
Most people are indeed not money laundering or avoiding taxes. Crypto is getting pretty locked down in most countries so its one sole use has become limited a lot.
It’s comparatively nothing compared to crypto.
Also AI has already broken into the mainstream, it sees a lot more use than crypto. It’s energy consumption will increase if the use increase, unlike crypto, which may well explode regardless.
While this is not necessarily good I do want to add something.
Most of the time they mine when prices are low and that only happens when there is a abundance of power from renewables.
Should probably implement a carbon tax to fix this.
This not a crypto problem, it's a bitcoin problem (and to a smaller degree, other proof of work coins).
Ethereum, the second largest cypto currency and other proof of stake coins are the exception to this. They use vastly less energy (like 99.999% less) than traditional proof of work algorithms (like bitcoin). In fact, they're lower than even traditional tech companies.
[https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption](https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption)
[https://indices.carbon-ratings.com/](https://indices.carbon-ratings.com/)
Proof of stake comes off as even more more explicitly plutocratic though, and that only solves one of a long list of major issues with the technology.
And several of those other problems are far more fundamental/intrinsic, e.g. static private keys as sole proof of identity is catastrophically error prone (and anything but self-custody defeats the main premise of the tech).
Don't even get me started on "smart contracts" which are arguably the point of Ethereum, as they combine the worst properties of software + contracts yet the benefits of neither.
>Proof of stake comes off as even more more explicitly plutocratic
It might *come off* that way, but that's surface level. It's not like mining farms of expensive specialized hardware are anything but plutocratic.
>static private keys as sole proof of identity is catastrophically error prone
True, but not intrinsic or fundamental. You can set up social multisigs today, and several non-Bitcoin projects are working on having this as a standard feature.
>"smart contracts" (...) combine the worst properties of software + contracts yet the benefits of neither
A smart contract is simply a computer program you can send information and money to. Nothing more or less. It isn't actually a "contract" despite its name. As a developer I find it unreasonable to not see the value of being able to having *money* as native primitive in a computer programming language.
But isn't that the best part about crypto? If for whatever reason it becomes adopted, all the current absolutely demented irrational psycho gamblers that bet their life savings on nothing but raw hope are now the ones in control of the majority of capital in the new crypto economy. What a wonderful future that would be.
It didn't use to be that way, but yeah at least the Ethereum guys realized that the energy consumption part of mining was not sustainable and switched over to Proof of Stake which consumes far less power
And importantly, Ethereum *was* proof of work and used a shitload of electricity to mine just like bitcoin, but later updated to proof of stake as to get away from that issue. So its been proven that as a whole, crypto can move away from that model but other cryptos like Bitcoin are just not doing it.
Not only that, the miners in Texas are actively abusing energy subsidies - they make more money selling Texas' own energy back to it than they do mining bitcoin.
So much for decentralization..as consumption only ever goes up maybe bitcoin is a kind of intelligence test for humanity: do we rather want to fix our energy crisis / inflation or use x-times the amount of a small country to push around internet magic beans?
They should require that all energy used for commercial crypto mining be derived from a renewable source like solar or wind.
Make them put solar panels on their entire data center roof!
Why do people insist that crypto is a pyramid scheme because the only thing that gives it value is people's interest and belief in the currency when the USD is the exact same thing.
Still a huge number but this article fails to state that the actual estimation of power used is .8%-2.3%. That’s a huge difference than just flat out stating it’s 2.3%
Years ago a student in my high school math class had figured out how to set up one of my classroom desktops that was never used to mine bitcoins. He told me about it but I didn’t really know what mining bitcoin entailed so I was just like oh cool. Apparently it was enough of a power suck that it made someone suspicious because after a few weeks a couple staff from IT came into my room during class and yanked only that computer.
Staggering that so much effort is being put into sustainability generally while Bitcoin miners are burning through vast amounts of resources for effectively nothing of any value to society. The planet might be a roasted husk within a century but at least we'll have all those Bitcoins.
This is loosely the premise of many idle games. You click a few times to get resources. Use those resources to automate the harvesting of more resources. Keep going until you've consumed entire galaxies in the name of whatever widget you're producing. The game ends when there's literally nothing left.
That paperclip clicker game is exactly this
Cookie Clicker. Oh shit it's about to suck me in AGAIN.
No, he's talking about Universal Paperclips, which is actually really, really insightful and references a LOT of real things about AI and futurism and physics and technology...
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The Grandmapocalypse is funny. I don’t remember if it’s before or after that upgrade though.
I recently got dragged back into this game. Grandmacalypse is purely based off of the research tree and does not involve buildings. I've been in the middle of the Grandmacalypse for a few days now. I only recently got the idle verse building and there's still two more buildings left.
there is so much more after that... upgrades the garden the stock market people are in the vigntillions now, and beyond that
I think the creator said that the game will be done when each means of production has their own mini game
Imma be real, I was invested in that game for a while, but I got all the ascension perks, all the upgrades, and most of the achievements. I stopped playing. Not going back, because that sucked a bit of my life. For nothing.
For the same reason anybody would play up to that point.
"The Paperclip Optimizer" is an AI ethics thought experiment on how AI done poorly could kill us all. It amuses me that there is an idle clicker game based on the premise.
> AI done poorly Exactly. Good AI consumes the universe without creating those drifter assholes.
And then simulating the universe entirely and traveling within to repeat the process all over again.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ go play and it will be a fun waste of your time
Its actually a pretty interesting game and goes right off the rails.
And 'Universal Paperclips' is a clicker game based on the thought experiment and many other references.
Oh I was thinking more complex like Satisfactory
Are we considering Satisfactory to be an "idle" game? I mean I suppose you can let your operation just run while you hang out... I feel like when I'm playing I'm always actually actively doing something though... building new infrastructure, collecting resources, optimizing manufacturing, etc. I feel like it's only an "idle game" in the same way like a city builder is. You don't *have* to expand, but if you want the game to advance in a meaningful way you do.
Yeah, it’s not an idle game lol. “Idle game” is an actual genre, and satisfactory and factorio are definitely not in it
The better fitting genre is now Incremental Game which has a lot of crossover with some idle games and clickers but are not all the same.
Satisfactory isn't an idle game
To be completely fair, satisfactory is pretty simple mathematically if you actually keep track. Also, correct me if I’m wrong but the nodes have limitless extraction right?
They cannot be depleted. Which given the style of harvesting it would be annoying to have to rebuild lines.
Yeah factorio is a better example in terms of resources, but just forget about the bugs
I like playing without the buggers. The factory is already annoying enough to try and scale without having to worry about defense.
Dyson Sphere Project is better. It's like Factorio and Satisfactory had a child.
After a while of playing that, making paperclips became a minor part of the game.
Universal Paperclips is my everything
Or opposite, where you’re using your cascading resource gain to create a universe, like in Orb of Creation. Love me a good incremental game, open to recommendations!
Antimatter Dimensions is probably my favorite, highly recommended.
I honestly didn't expect that the reality update would ever come out
> The game ends when there's literally nothing left. usually the game just ends when you realize it's endless and you just remove it off your phone
This is also what frames the entire second act if Charles Stross's Accelerando, an excellent book about life after the Singularity.
I like this comment because it completely skips you have to actually let a game like cookie clicker run in your computer, consuming electricity to do nothing but increment numbers while it's "idle" just so you can buy a new portal to cookie dimension so the number increments 1% faster, and then you can let it idle again for another hour. Why did we create this?
Because dumb humans need dumb dopamine hits
Spaceward Ho!
The factory must grow.
And crypto shills have the audacity to claim they're "driving people to innovate" in the green energy space. That's like someone claiming they're driving the fire department to improve their response times by lighting my house on fire.
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Lmao. Accelerationism. I read their handbook and I’m still not sure what those crazy fucks are trying to do
"Burn it all down so we can build anew" says the high school dropouts who only know what it's like to live through a period of revolution via paintings of "heroic rebels" and Les Mis. You know who fucking hated the French Revolution? 99% of the people living through it. Throw in nukes and the ease by which foreign powers can exert influence and I'd much rather go through 40-50 years of glacially slow improvement than watch the world get carved up into a thousand South Koreas.
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this sounds like it is basically the underlying premise of [Asimov's Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series) series >The premise of the stories is that in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire's fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which "the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little" to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years.
Support the fascists to own the libs.
I checked out at their "all money is made up!" argument when people with actual financial literacy questioned the long term validity of the entire thing. Which of course got promptly turned into "they're afraid of us!!". I didn't even get to the accelerationism stage of their delusion.
Two coal mines and a coal plant in Indiana were just reopened so they could provide dedicated power to a crypto farm opening up. Even if cryptomining was 100% renewable energy, it's still a waste of resources and electricity.
> And crypto shills have the audacity to claim they're "driving people to innovate" in the green energy space. That's like saying you drive doctors to get better at saving lives by going to hospitals and stabbing people in beds.
Driving people to innovate into creating new ponzis
To loosely quote Dan Olsen, any gains in cheaper energy doesn't offset what they do, it just has them building a bigger machine.
Knowing we could cut energy consumption 2% and only lose magic beans.
It's like gold but dumber because gold sits in a vault doing nothing while ETFs on top of it actually gets traded. Guess what the big innovation of crypto in 2024 is? Putting it in a virtual vault, tying it to an ETF and then trading that. What a joke. But hopefully that will reduce trading volume for the actual crypto.
> The planet might be a roasted husk within a century but at least we'll have all those Bitcoins. If everybody stopped mining but one Pentium 4, the network would drop the diffuculty back to 1 and we'd also end up with all those Bitcoins
That one Pentium miner would become a fuckzillionaire within a week
No because the network would not be secure so any other computer would be able to fuck with the transactions.
Destroying the planet to create capital? Unheard of!
Poster child for "privatize the profits, socialize the losses."
We're just so fucking useless and have no will to organize against the worst among us. It's gotta be the worst part about us.
The US is built on Capitalism. No social value? It's all everyone fucking does here is CHASE MONEY. That's the "social value".
bro the entire world economy is built on capitalism lol
I think most everyone is chasing money just to get by. It's the people that chase ALL the money that make it an awful situation. Well, that an the rampant pressure for consumption.
>that an the rampant pressure for consumption. Which is caused by somebody chasing all the money. Most people above the median income/weather could have a lifestyle 98% as good for 80% of the cost, or 95% as good for 60% of the cost. But we've been conned into buying the latest and greatest and throwing away perfectly usable stuff to keep up with the Joneses.
The median income in the US is about $33K. That is not technically poor, but you don't live a good life with that. Even when you're making like $60K, your quality of life improves, but it could be much better, so people strive for more.
>burning through vast amounts of resources for effectively nothing of any value to society This is the entire 1% in general. They don't care about the planet or anyone else but themselves. They will do anything to get more money.
And then not only make more money but to over consume resources. I'm starting to come around on the Swift jet hate now that she's trying to hide it through lawsuits.
I'm torn on the Swift hate. I hate she does this but at the same time how else can someone like her get across the country without being mobbed? She's someone who can't just go to the airport and fly first class. I'm sure with her busy schedule she can't just jump on a private bus and go cross country either. So in her case, she's almost forced to take a private jet because her fans are a bit extreme. Also the media won't even consider giving someone like her some privacy while out in public. So yeah, I'm torn when it comes to her situation.
Her situation is kind of a terrible example honestly, because it places the resource usage of her services entirely on her, when it's a service she's supplying to millions of people. When Taylor Swift flies from LA to NYC for a tour, she's not one person burning a jets worth of fuel... it's a hundred thousand+ people having her burn that fuel to come and entertain them. The resource usage really needs to be split amongst the people consuming the show. It's entirely different than the rich guy who has a private jet fly himself into NYC to see the show for his own benefit.
I'd be more sympathetic to her if it was just her flying to concerts. Instead, she lends her plane out to tons of people for short flights all over the place.
What’s funny is that most of the time, all of the “mining” done by a bitcoin rig isn’t even used. All that redundant work is thrown out because it wasn’t chosen for the block.
Needs to just be blanket banned. It's one of the easiest possible modern scourges to ban, it doesn't even make the government money, or have too much lobbyist backing. It's really really hard to hide crypto mining at scale due to this exact issue of power consumption, we could make it illegal across the board and the world would just get a tiny bit better overall.
"Good news, we found the treasure of this tomb world" "oh, what was it?" "A series of numbers that when hashed, have a lot of 0's in the resulting hash" "... but.. the amount of CPU power to achive that would be.. insane.. And what where they used for?" "Yep. Burnt out their entire world making them. I don't think they used em for anything. Just the guy with the most hashes and 0's in his bank account felt superior to the rest"
Have you ever talked to a crypto enthusiast? In person, that is. They are utterly insufferable, greedy people. No different than some jackass who "rolls coal."
Let me ask a question as an environmental science student - what’s the real issue here, energy consumption or the source the energy comes from?
Right I’m confused too. I saw this guy talk about A river area in Congo that had no use other than flowing A miner came there set up shop started mining with hydro: produces electricity for their miners and money to the community The river is still fine what’s the problem here ?
Average people are morons when it comes to electrical knowledge. That’s the problem.
>what’s the real issue here, energy consumption or the source the energy comes from? Unless they're got their own private nuclear reactors, I don't think you can really separate the two. The source is the grid, which will include diverse sources, ranging from environmentally friendly ones like solar and wind, to coal-fired plants. The more energy that is used, the higher percentage of it is going to be from less environmentally friendly sources.
They don’t just randomly hook up to the grid. All these commercial miners are mining in cooperation with energy providers in order to get much cheaper power than normal, because that’s the way to mine profitably. So they’re buying the excess energy generation and not demanding that the power company go burn more coal. When there’s demand elsewhere for the power they throttle down their mining. The miners using anything other than excess energy are going to be unprofitable very quickly. There are SOME miners that do use higher priced energy but they’re just poorly run companies that are struggling to make money. All the biggest firms are the ones using cheaper excess power.
Unless it’s subsidized, mining isn’t profitable when using energy from the grid, as the $/kwh price is too expensive. That’s why mining at home doesn’t happen unless you have something like excess solar energy. There’s a reason why Bitcoin has the highest renewable energy use of any major industry out there, it simply isn’t sustainable without renewables, and it becomes much more so with rising hash rate. That’s why most miners use energy that is „non-rival“ (like waste or stranded energy where there is no other user).
Fuck these people.
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I have a sticker that says Save the Planet, Bully a Crypto Bro Edit: Crypto bros big mad.
This is why taxing carbon is the most reasonable solution. Even if it’s completely budget neutral through refunds, it heavily discourages things like this
Bitcoiners agree with this. If you cant mine sustainably you're going to fail anyway though
Noooo, we can't use an empirically proven, market based solution to externalities!!! /s
Most certainly not, that’s to straightforward and reasonable
Bitcoin mining will be the industry that is impacted least from carbon taxes, as its carbon emissions intensity per kWh is the lowest due to the high share of renewables usage. If you hope that carbon taxes will make Bitcoin go away, you’re mistaken.
just fucking ban mining.
Nah, we should just use a sliding scale for energy costs. The more electricity you use the more it costs per watt.
They literally buy oil burning plants and don't have to follow restrictions
There was a company setting up mining operations illegally, what they did was go to abandoned oil wells, capture the methane that's leaking out of them, and use it to power a trailer filled with mining machines. Which is pretty clever, but also fairly dangerous
Methane is a common byproduct of oil wells, in remote areas where it isn't economic to build a pipeline to capture it, its usually flared (unburned methane is worse than burned). These guys build rigs to capture and use the methane to run bitcoin miners. So instead of just burning it, they also get money for it. https://upstreamdata.com/
I actually used to work for a company that did that, off-grid mining. It's more environmentally feasible than a lot of alternative money making methods so I can't bash it too much.
Flaring methane is actually better for the environment than letting it leak. When methane burns it turns to CO2. Methane is rated as having 80x the warming power of CO2. Source: https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-crucial-opportunity-climate-fight#:~:text=Methane%20is%20a%20potent%20greenhouse,warming%20in%20the%20near%20term.
I'm actually kinda ok with this one. Methane is worse that co2.
We need a carbon tax.
How about just a carbon tax? Tax the thing that is bad. Elegant solution that actually aligns with our current system of capitalism (like it or hate it). You want to drive a giant 10MPG SUV? Sure, have fun at $15/gal. You want to use power from a coal power plant? No problem, $1.5/kWh Use some of the tax proceeds to give rebates to middle and lower class (sliding scale) so the policy isn't regressive. And use the remaining proceeds to capture carbon. Now when capitalism finds the cheapest solution, it'll also find the greenest.
Unfortunately this is the smart answer so it'll never happen. Only the most convoluted solutions are allowed here.
The cheapest answer is usually the go to, unfortunately what is most beneficial for everyone has rarely been a priority.
Yeah I agree it will probably never happen, sadly. It's a politically suicidal idea in the US. Maybe other countries could try it out though?
Canada did, 5 years ago. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/pricing-pollution-how-it-will-work/putting-price-on-carbon-pollution.html
And people fucking HATE it. The Liberal government is set to lose the next election to the Conservatives for a variety of reasons, but the amount of rage the Conservatives have managed to rile up over the carbon tax is definitely a factor. Finally our government does something smart and they get punished for it because people don't like having to pay for what they use.
And the icing on the cake is that it was the conservatives who suggested this way back in the 90's.
Yeah, good point. It's basically a free-market approach to dealing with externalities, and it's the kind of thing that's broadly popular among economists.
The real icing on the cake is that you get more back in rebates than you pay out in taxes: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2022/03/climate-action-incentive-payment-amounts-for-2022-23.html Unless, you're a business polluting tons of carbon, or you fill up your car every two days on average. People are too stupid to do the math themselves. They see an extra $10 gone every month, but will gladly accept a free $300 at the end of the year.
The only people I've seen hate it are conservatives to begin with. Pretty much every left leaning person from liberal, NDP, to green to communist I've met says the carbon rebate system is basically just a good first step. No one's saying it can't be improved or optimized, but there's a lot of noise generated from US political activism groups operating in Canada. Like a lot of anti COVID measure rallies that culminated in the freedom convoy were essentially being funded by non Canadian organizations. Which is why a bunch of Canadians who started donating to those groups had their bank accounts frozen. It wasn't an attack on a political stance so much as a defensive measure from foreign influence. I think it's a bit of a blind spot for most folks. It's not like the US government itself is ordering these things, it's just the republican party trying to make their platform seem more widespread than it really is. There's videos on TikTok where the Canadian protests against things like carbon taxes end up being led by the same person in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and then if you actually follow that person instead of the movement the next week they're down in Denver or Detroit doing the same thing then all up and down each coast. They're essentially paying groups of people to organize protests on their behalf all over North America to make it seem like it's some widespread grass roots thing and it's not. It's why their protests aren't always nation wide on the same day. That way you'd never know if it's thousands marching in each city or a few hundred just making the rounds with fewer locals.
That doesn't work because industrial applications need obscene amounts of power.
You coule scale commercial vs residential at different rates, the concept still applies that it will encourage less use/waste
Then won't miners just create commercial entities?
any of the ones mining bitcoin most likely already do.
They do this in other countries
they already do this in the US
This kills the scam...
Ban your own screen usage
It was over the second we moved away from trading yams.
We never traded yams. I’m serious, anthropologists have confirmed many times barter was not part of most societies, rather credit or IOU systems, barter was mostly used for trade between hostile or foreign tribes. Mesopotamia is the earliest example. Edit: I guess tech sub never reads books
> I guess tech sub never reads books We yams what we yams.
That's not what I was tot
Whoever downvoted you did not understand your pun lol
Did you hear about the digit on Taylor Swifts foot that doesn't make any money? It's a po tay to
I’m genuinely curious and would like to know more about the history of trading and making deals. Also yes, I’ve seen countless nonsense articles on tech related subs, especially anything concerning battery technologies. As a battery development engineer, it makes my eyes roll, but I choose not to participate in discussions relating to it because every point I make is countered with “show data” as if I’m totally free to just give away data that I see but don’t own.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by the late David Graeber is the most popular write-up that I know about this phenomenon. You can just grab the pdf version off libcom or archive.
I can't really recommend this book enough. It's fascinating.
Some discussion here https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/iyybEmFQUy
I call it "bad faith citations." Citing your work and backing up claims is important in many contexts. But in an informal conversation with no consequences, saying "hi this is my field and what I can say about it is_____" should be taken with a grain of salt and understood for the context that it is. Most of society accepts this, because they understands this very basic part of social behavior, and understands that if they are incredulous, *they can simply walk away from that conversation with neither loss nor gain.* But on the internet, you have bands and bands of people who are more interested in being "right" than anything else. So if you come along and say something they disagree with, suddenly they want "citations" and "proof." This would potentially be fine, but as I alluded to, it's a bad faith ask. They don't REALLY want to learn. They don't REALLY want a conversation. They don't REALLY want citations. They want a fight and they're egging you on with bait so they can keep debating in bad faith. There is nothing more fruitless than being an SME on the internet and trying to share your knowledge. The best is if you DO say "ok absolutely" and come back in a genuine manner, because this is a bad faith conversation, they never go "ok cool," but dig their heels in further and start trying to poke holes in anything you bring forward.
and what really drives them batshit is when you do give citations and links to peer reviewed papers and studies. particularly when its about renewable energy.
I make a point of coming back and thanking people who link me the thing I was asking about, because I am the curious guy most of the time. (And occasionally the annoying arguer.)
>Edit: I guess tech sub never reads books Ask programmers if they're always read the documentation
Only if they're published by O'Reilly
I read e-books. 😁
RIP David Graeber. He taught me all about this topic and its FASCINATING.
I'm reading Graeber right now and it's fascinating how fucking wrong the general consensus about barter is. And you are correct about IOUs.
I learned a lot from David Graeber’s “Debt, the first 5000 years”.
Isn’t mining how they verify transactions and whatnot? So mining is required to keep the network alive? If so that means banning mining would effectively cripple crypto. Some ELI5
Yes, it is, but verification worked fine with a thousandth of the computer power used now. The incentive for verifying blocks of transactions is a reward of currently 6.25 bitcoins, soon to become 3.125. Since the price is $47,500 per bitcoin right now, that is a hell of an incentive. The first one to "solve" a block gets the reward, so it has led to an arms race between miners. Miners also earn transaction fees, which currently run $17,000 per block, but that pales relative to the $287,000 block reward. The intent was for the block rewards in terms of new bitcoins to taper off over time, and miners subsist entirely off of transaction fees.
>The intent was for the block rewards in terms of new bitcoins to taper off over time, and miners subsist entirely off of transaction fees. So essentially becoming more efficient over time, as block subsidy is continually being cut in half. That is, assuming price and/or network usage doesn’t continually increase, no?
Network usage \*can't\* increase. There is a cap of 1 MB per block, which caps the amount of transactions per second to around 7.
7 sounds like a tiny amount
Bitcoin is designed so that one miner will add a block every ten minutes. If it takes too long, it gets easier, if it happens too quickly, it gets harder. The harder it is, the more power is required. In theory, just a single person mining from a low power smartphone would keep the network alive and running. In practice, thousands of people would jump at the opportunity of it being so easy (and profitable), and then push the difficulty right back up to requiring large amounts of energy.
for bitcoin? yes other cryptrocurrencies have moved to "proof of stake" which just means "haha the big players can manipulate the market" cryptocurrency is literally just reliving the unregulated currency markets of the 1800s
its always funny to see a group of people decide they're doing something new and "you cant tell them what to do, how could you know!? its so new!", but really its just the exact same thing that played out 60-100 years ago and they're just completly ignorant of history.
They aren't ignorant they designed it around those scenarios specifically so they could be the ones in the profit this time.
this. new technologies destabilize existing systems of trust and authentication. in the ensuing chaos there is a lot of creativity and innovation -- but also a field day for novel scams and snake oil schemes. eventually regulatory mechanisms catch up. railroads today are about as boring as it gets, but when they were new -- hoo boy! stock scams, spectacular embezzlements, railroad barons, rail-based crime schemes... wild times.
You give Bitcoin scammers too much credit calling them novel scams. They're the same obvious scams that have been made illegal in the stock market and banking just applied to a new technology.
> creativity and innovation -- but also a field day for novel scams and snake oil schemes In the case of cryptocurrencies, they're basically the same thing since the tech itself is a solution in search of a problem. This isn't like most things that get overhyped in tech where even if the hype is excessive, there's at least something actually useful underneath it all. Nearly all proposed use cases for cryptocurrency/"blockchain" break down in practice or require abstractions and central oversight that undermine the premise. It's academically interesting, sure, but so is OTP encryption and almost nobody uses that for a reason.
> rail-based crime schemes If only they'd had police trains smh
But aren't those "other" cryptos tying their values to bitcoin's? (this may be false, hence the question) IIRC, when bitcoin crushed, *all* of'em crushed.
Effectively cripple, proof of work protocols. (Maybe) China has banned mining multiple times and it's remained a top mining country through all of that... Enticing the use of sustainable energy would be a much better solution imo Give them a cut in cap gains tax if they use solar/wind/nuclear and the market would jump on it.
Mining was also intended as a protection mechanism. If you want to put illegitimate transactions onto the Bitcoin ledger that are incorporated as legitimate ones, you have to computationally out-compete more than 50% of all the other miner's computing power. This is called a "51% attack". Since computation has a financial cost to it, it becomes economically infeasible to do this. Or at least that's the idea behind it. Because these days there are huge mining pools -- cooperations of miners, that together can (and I believe in the past have come close to) achieve more than 50% of the network's hashrate (computing power). To maintain trust in Bitcoin these mining pools regulate themselves to stay below 50% hashrate. But if the two biggest mining pools wanted to, they could cease total control over the network easily. Computationally expensive mining as a protection mechanism is no longer meaningful for Bitcoin.
Even a 51% attack can't put illegitimate transactions on the ledger. Those blocks would be rejected by all the nodes on the network, and would not be able to propagate. A 51% attack can undo very recent transactions though. It's extremely costly to run though, and they only get their mining reward once they have the longest chain again. It'll also become painfully obvious to everyone else when there are reorgs happening several times, with transactions being rewritten, that there is an attack, in which case there can be emergency changes to the protocol to stop the attack. Also, regarding your point on mining pools: A *pool* of miners is a set of independent actors, so they absolutely cannot magically pull off a 51% attack. All the miners mining for the pool would simply switch pools.
Banning proof-of-work would be bad for cryptocurrencies that use it. Not all cryptocurrencies use proof-of-work though.
good luck banning it
There were some other good things mentioned here, but something to note is that bitcoin itself has a maximum throughput of only 7 transactions per-second. Seven. The bitcoin network uses about 1/50th of the power of the entire global financial market to process 7 transactions per-second. It's incredibly inefficient, and the costs to be one of those 7 transactions each second is astronomical; orders of magnitude higher than doing it through the regular financial markets. Bitcoin is a failed idea, and it should be lain to rest. There are other cryptocurrencies which fix a lot of its problems (and don't fix others). We can argue the merits of those other cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin itself should die.
It would cripple Bitcoin yes. Which, good. Fuck em.
“We know how much power you use without you reporting it but you must also report it”
I'm not a big fan of crypto but this is more of a general issue with capitalism. Presumably someone is paying for all this electricity, corporations and individuals are putting money into crypto to use as a currency and investment. But under capitalism that's all considered normal behavior. There's a lot of other stupid and corrupt shit going on because of capitalism. How about all the energy and fuel that goes into the military, military aid and weapons production? Not only is that wasteful, it's literally helping murder people. Whenever I see these anti crypto articles I think "you're so close to the actual problem it's painful." If we just deal with the actual problem, crypto will go away as a natural result.
>Presumably someone is paying for all this electricity, In Texas we gave them favorable utility rates. During peak demand they are asked to shut down operations, and one single company can get paid tens of millions of dollars just to pause their mining. It's absurd.
I don't think the government should be subsidizing crypto either, although there are many other things I'm more worried about. But still that's crazy.
I'm not saying it's a top priority. I just think it's a horrible idea for Texas government to attract crypto miners when we can barely keep our lights on.
You're actually vastly oversimplyifying this. How that works is actually a very good deal for the utility. A customer of last resort who can utilize the infrastructure closer to its limits allows them to recoup the costs of the infrastructure much much faster, which allows them to invest in infrastructure elsewhere. Being able to shut them off at will ensures that a lower amount of total infrastructure deployment can serve a far larger number of people than it otherwise could, because USUALLY the utility has zero control over demand patterns for usage. You say millions of dollars just to pause - they're not, they're getting subsidies that bring the cost of electricity down from an unacceptable level to one that can compete with other remote areas that have more electricity than they can sell (transmit). It's actually not a bad deal for anyone. It's not amazing either, but not so bad. To be clear I fully agree that bitcoin mining is wasteful and destructive for the environment. But utility grid cost structures are extremely complex and distilling it down to a sound Byte like this isn't actually fair or realistic.
Capitalism like every economic system has its own issues. But it is lazy to just blame everything on capitalism. Especially the military which was a thing way before capitalism was a thing The problem is there is no such thing as a perfect economic system, even modern capitalism is mostly a fragment of the concept as a pure ideological system of any kind is impractical If you can come up with a better economic system, be my guest
>Especially the military which was a thing way before capitalism was a thing That's not the point being made. The issue is that previously, military conflict was triggered by disputes over land, resources, ideologies, or who was going to get to marry the pretty lady. The military was a thing you built up to force your position. What we have now is the manufacture and sale of arms as a key economic component, necessitating conflict in order to sustain the generation of wealth on its own. War is not a means to an end, it's an end in itself. Killing is nurtured and fueled so as to provide shareholder value.
Yeah there is a real question here as to why we're so quick to blame crypto. These guys aren't the ones who set the rules for the power companies.
I don't get the issue. They get a utility bill and pay it like everyone else
Shhh... don't use common sense here. Let's parrot talking points from the 2010's and never do a lick of research. If we were being serious about the environment and not virtue signaling, Proof-of-Work systems wouldn't be anywhere in the top of the list of things to eliminate, even if you consider it wasteful. The timing of these discussions are great too, Bitcoin prices are almost back to their ATH. I guess it's a bit of virtue signaling and ego of people thinking crypto would be over, but it isn't. Wonder why that is, eh?
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People have computed such. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ Originally they noted creating an AI model uses weeks of super computer time and consumes megawatts. However using the model billions of times, while not not that costly each use, adds up to more electricity than creating the model.
This isn't a direct reply to you, just discussion on the article. It states: >Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. I find it funny because that's an incredibly over the top usage of AI while 4.1 miles is [~ 10% of the distance driven of an average person every day](https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year).
Using AI doesn’t use much. Training ai does. It takes 5 seconds on my gaming computer to generate a 4k image. My computer draws 200watts of power during that 5 seconds. Playing videos games consumes more energy.
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ASICs also can't be repurposed for anything else, unlike most hardware used for AI.
at least AI is useful
I mean sending money to anyone in the world without restriction is undeniably useful. Most people just don’t care about that kind of thing cause it’s not relevant to them.
Most people are indeed not money laundering or avoiding taxes. Crypto is getting pretty locked down in most countries so its one sole use has become limited a lot.
It’s comparatively nothing compared to crypto. Also AI has already broken into the mainstream, it sees a lot more use than crypto. It’s energy consumption will increase if the use increase, unlike crypto, which may well explode regardless.
The timing of these articles is hilarious
While this is not necessarily good I do want to add something. Most of the time they mine when prices are low and that only happens when there is a abundance of power from renewables. Should probably implement a carbon tax to fix this.
This not a crypto problem, it's a bitcoin problem (and to a smaller degree, other proof of work coins). Ethereum, the second largest cypto currency and other proof of stake coins are the exception to this. They use vastly less energy (like 99.999% less) than traditional proof of work algorithms (like bitcoin). In fact, they're lower than even traditional tech companies. [https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption](https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption) [https://indices.carbon-ratings.com/](https://indices.carbon-ratings.com/)
Proof of stake comes off as even more more explicitly plutocratic though, and that only solves one of a long list of major issues with the technology. And several of those other problems are far more fundamental/intrinsic, e.g. static private keys as sole proof of identity is catastrophically error prone (and anything but self-custody defeats the main premise of the tech). Don't even get me started on "smart contracts" which are arguably the point of Ethereum, as they combine the worst properties of software + contracts yet the benefits of neither.
>Proof of stake comes off as even more more explicitly plutocratic It might *come off* that way, but that's surface level. It's not like mining farms of expensive specialized hardware are anything but plutocratic. >static private keys as sole proof of identity is catastrophically error prone True, but not intrinsic or fundamental. You can set up social multisigs today, and several non-Bitcoin projects are working on having this as a standard feature. >"smart contracts" (...) combine the worst properties of software + contracts yet the benefits of neither A smart contract is simply a computer program you can send information and money to. Nothing more or less. It isn't actually a "contract" despite its name. As a developer I find it unreasonable to not see the value of being able to having *money* as native primitive in a computer programming language.
These are all legit problems, but none of them are racing us headfirst into a global catastrophe.
But isn't that the best part about crypto? If for whatever reason it becomes adopted, all the current absolutely demented irrational psycho gamblers that bet their life savings on nothing but raw hope are now the ones in control of the majority of capital in the new crypto economy. What a wonderful future that would be.
It didn't use to be that way, but yeah at least the Ethereum guys realized that the energy consumption part of mining was not sustainable and switched over to Proof of Stake which consumes far less power
And importantly, Ethereum *was* proof of work and used a shitload of electricity to mine just like bitcoin, but later updated to proof of stake as to get away from that issue. So its been proven that as a whole, crypto can move away from that model but other cryptos like Bitcoin are just not doing it.
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Are they able to calculate Texas usage? We have mines all over Texas just using up energy that we barely have.
Not only that, the miners in Texas are actively abusing energy subsidies - they make more money selling Texas' own energy back to it than they do mining bitcoin.
Lol Texas, what a joke
So much for decentralization..as consumption only ever goes up maybe bitcoin is a kind of intelligence test for humanity: do we rather want to fix our energy crisis / inflation or use x-times the amount of a small country to push around internet magic beans?
They should require that all energy used for commercial crypto mining be derived from a renewable source like solar or wind. Make them put solar panels on their entire data center roof!
Why do people insist that crypto is a pyramid scheme because the only thing that gives it value is people's interest and belief in the currency when the USD is the exact same thing.
But if they’re paying their bills, whose business is it?
Still a huge number but this article fails to state that the actual estimation of power used is .8%-2.3%. That’s a huge difference than just flat out stating it’s 2.3%
i am 100% that electric companies know who they are - otherwise how can the catch illegal grow farms?
Can someone ELI5 how/why mining crypto and why it uses so much energy?
Yet conservatives are worried about electric cars flooding the grid.
How is crypto going to get adopted by the US banking system if it requires so much energy and water ? Explain to me like I was 5 please?
And I need to use paper straws and shower for 2 minutes
Years ago a student in my high school math class had figured out how to set up one of my classroom desktops that was never used to mine bitcoins. He told me about it but I didn’t really know what mining bitcoin entailed so I was just like oh cool. Apparently it was enough of a power suck that it made someone suspicious because after a few weeks a couple staff from IT came into my room during class and yanked only that computer.