[Squithrilve]

> flagrant use of power that doesn't necessarily compute anything.

I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees.

This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.

[lilyball]

If bitcoin's power usage is like a massive drain in the middle of the ocean sucking down millions of gallons of water per second, your comment is like complaining about the drip on your kitchen faucet.

[Squithrilve]

Maybe not exactly on my kitchen but rather all kitchens around the world as we all use monitors, TCP etc...

[traverseda]

The problem is that coin incentivizes* the use of electricity, which is a dumb thing to incentivize. Sure, we can incentivize the use of electricity, but we can also decide to incentivize something else.

A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional software encourages more powerful general purpose computers instead of more powerful custom bitcoin ASICS.

There are much better things to incentivize.

[Squithrilve]

> but we can also decide to incentivize something else.

This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...

[joe_the_user]

Uh, power that isn't used for bitcoin mining could be used to improve human lives in innumerable way - or not used at all and allow a decreased production of greenhouse gases.

[Squithrilve]

Why do you think the power is not already being used to bring useful services for people?

It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy...

By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...

[imtringued]

It doesn't really work this way...

If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining.

Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money.

Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.

[Squithrilve]

Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste.

> Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.

That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?

[joe_the_user]

Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here).

Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.

Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.

[viraptor]

The comparisons fall short.

- pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time

- pixels: even whitespace is important next to information

- RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.

- SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.

It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.

[Squithrilve]

> - pixels: even whitespace is important next to information

And protecting money is not important?

> - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.

Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining?

> - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.

The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).

[viraptor]

> The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly

Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that)

On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin which chugs energy/money by design, while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient. People concisely decide to burn money to keep this system running - that's why it's unreasonable.

[Squithrilve]

> while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient.

They are only proposed solutions, not implemented in any existing systems so it's not fair to compare them. Proof of stake for example has numerous drawbacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism

[viraptor]

Filecoin did some good improvements in cpu/energy usage and PoSpace

[free_everybody]

You can't possibly be comparing SSL with bitcoin mining. SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties. Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything. The price of bitcoin is EXTREMELY speculative no matter how you look at it. What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason? All the computation dedicated to mining coins which were never spent would be wasted. Entirely different scenarios here.

[Squithrilve]

> SSL provides a service that is immediately valuable to all parties.

And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties?

> Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything.

Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right?

> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?

You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed?

> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?

That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).

[kiddico]

What are you even getting at here?

That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.

[Squithrilve]

Well Bitcoin is always on because people are constantly using it so it can't "conserve power" just as a constantly on display or CPU can't.

[gtrubetskoy]

> Why won't you complain about monitor pixels

or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is

[traverseda]

Yeah, we gotta get on that dyson {sphere,swarm,etc} thing.

[imtringued]

Bitcoin would happily consume it...