| 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. |