[intelliot]

It's too early for anyone to say whether this concern is a real problem, but here are a few points that you should analyze further:

1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."

With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.

Problem solved.

Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!

2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.

3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"

Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.

[gamblor956]

1) ASICs generate a lot of heat, so that problem is not solved.

2) People, computers, POS, time expenditure, currency fluctuation, uncertainty, economic crisis, and unemployment are problems which are either not addressable by Bitcoin or not meaningfully impacted by it. Bitcoin isn't some magical economic cure-all. It's just a means of exchange.

3) This is a straw man. Horse manure disposal was not a primary concern before cars were invented. The primary concern was how to transport goods before they spoiled. Improved cargo transportation technologies and refrigeration technologies changed the economic landscape, not cars.

4) Infrared radiation is the primary way in which heat is released in to space. The sum of all other means of heat loss from the Earth is currently a rounding error compared to heat loss by radiation. It would take an absolutely massive investment in technology to change that.

[sroerick]

2. Parent was simply comparing the infrastructure supporting the bitcoin netwrok with the infrastructure supporting credit card processing. The question isn't "is Bitcoin wasteful?", the question is "Is Bitcoin more or less wasteful than the current payment infrastructure?"

[fiatmoney]

3 is historically inaccurate; in the timeframe when horses were widely used, a fairly large amount of effort was expended in removing manure (& human waste, for that matter) in major cities like New York and London.

[betterunix]

ASICs are not the solution to the Bitcoin energy problem. If you can devote 1kW to CPU mining, you have every reason to devote 1kW to ASIC mining. Future technology is irrelevant -- every reduction in the power required per hash will result in an equivalent increase in the hash rate.

Note that the current monetary system has a very different incentive structure. If VISA needs to devote 1GW of power to process all its transactions today, and tomorrow a new technology comes along that allows VISA to process the same number of transactions with 100MW, VISA has every reason to reduce its power consumption to 100MW. For mainstream payment systems, power use always reduces profits -- so the incentive is always to use the minimum power necessary for processing transactions and detecting fraud.

[wwweston]

1) Two words: Landauer Limit. No matter what your incentives or process improvements are, efficiency for non-reversible computation (and we are talking about crypto here) has fundamental limits.

2) The first bit is a potentially fair point -- I don't know what the energy costs and waste heat contributions of a transaction is under the current system.

The second bit? "inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin" Mostly sounds somewhere between naive and unhinged, but show the work if you can.

3) I guess the horse manure analogy implies we're going to come up with different technology that doesn't produce waste heat? Are we talking about a revolutionary breakthrough in thermodynamics, or just a shift to more renewables (say, from automobiles to horses)?

The talk about whether infrared radiation is the only way to release heat to space is related, and addressed in the article I linked:

"E: Could not technology pipe or beam the heat elsewhere, rather than relying on thermal radiation?

P: Well, we could (and do, somewhat) beam non-thermal radiation into space, like light, lasers, radio waves, etc. But the problem is that these “sources” are forms of high-grade, low-entropy energy. Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of the waste heat from all the processes by which we use energy. This energy is thermal in nature. We might be able to scoop up some of this to do useful “work,” but at very low thermodynamic efficiency. If you want to use high-grade energy in the first place, having high-entropy waste heat is pretty inescapable."

In other words, it seems to me you're talking about either a fundamental breakthrough in thermodynamics again.

[brianbarker]

The cost and scarcity of ASICs will just centralize the mining power into the hands of a few groups. Not so decentralized at that point.

[pseut]

Re: 2, whether or not this is true, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the protocol on its own.