[HN Gopher] Bitcoin as a Battery
___________________________________________________________________
Bitcoin as a Battery
Author : tomsyouruncle
Score : 137 points
Date : 2021-03-28 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nickgrossman.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nickgrossman.xyz)
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| An infuriating article. A better title would have been bitcoin as
| a way to use all the cheap electricity. I hope I'm being trolled.
| user-the-name wrote:
| This is actually what bitcoiners believe. Well, I say
| "believe", but it's more that bitcoiners do not care about
| truth or making sense, all that matters is bitcoin and the
| price going up.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not
| store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the
| economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is
| more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this
| could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and
| other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much
| infrastructure.
|
| From a purely financial point of view I suspect maintaining a
| bitcoin mining operation in remote areas is harder and requires
| more frequent upgrades than if you were doing a more traditional
| manufacturing process.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The main infrastructure needed for a bitcoin running operation
| in a remote place would be:
|
| * the mining rig itself. If there's a way to ship manufacturing
| product from the location, there must be a way to bring this in
| too. Pound for pound and liter by liter, this can't take more
| space or infrastructure to bring than aluminum or any other
| physical product I can think of.
|
| * cooling. same as above.
|
| * electricity. If you can manufacture aluminum, you have
| enough.
|
| * small amount of on-site workers to perform critical repairs
|
| Things you don't need:
|
| * large custom-built machines.
|
| * many trained/untrained workers to take care of the machines
|
| * infrastructure that can consistently ship tons of material to
| and from a remote location all year round (mining rig upgrades
| consume much less mass/volume and can be batched to avoid
| shipping during rough climate seasons)
| hinkley wrote:
| Moving bauxite in and doing something with the slag and spent
| reactants takes quite a bit of infrastructure, no? Perhaps
| aluminum recycling is a better option for this scenario?
| smashem wrote:
| > ...it does not store energy.
|
| Yes it does. It stores what is called "monetary energy", and
| monetary energy belongs in the same class as kinetic, elastic,
| and chemical energies.
|
| One of the key differences between bitcoin and other monetary
| assets is that bitcoin is absolutely scarce (the first
| absolutely scare monetary asset in human history), so its
| energy cannot leak via inflation.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| what?
| gammalost wrote:
| > crypto mining is driving the energy transition from fossil
| fuels to renewables.
|
| Why is waste a good thing if it's renewable? It's the argument I
| see brought up almost every time. It feels like people are
| conflating renewable with a infinite energy source.
| hinkley wrote:
| Because nobody is talking about heat pollution yet and Out of
| Sight, Out of Mind.
| toss1 wrote:
| What the author is describing is not a battery.
|
| It is a sink.
|
| I saw no method of storing and re-releasing the energy
|
| Only a method of immediately consuming the energy into something
| potentially useful and transportable. IT is not like transporting
| your BTC will allow you to extract new energy at its destination,
| the way that transporting charged batteries or gasoline would.
|
| So it has utility, but not nearly as much as he's advertising in
| the headline.
| a9h74j wrote:
| A "store of energy" implies some ability to extract energy back
| out.
|
| "A putative store of value" != "a store of energy".
| nathias wrote:
| In a sense, the aluminum coming from Iceland is like a battery.
| What is a battery? A way of shifting both the location and the
| time-of-use of energy.
|
| This is a bad analogy, batteries are energy storage, spending
| energy is not the same as storing energy.
| andagainagain wrote:
| So... to break down the idea, it starts with redefining energy,
| then leans on that definition to justify making more bitcoin.
|
| What this means has nothing to do with energy, and everything to
| do with cost savings on bitcoin mining by intentionally
| increasing electricity load on a system based on electricity
| variation of renewables.
|
| You can do that IF your goal is to get more bitcoin. But you're
| not storing energy by doing so. Electrically speaking, you are
| only a cost on the system.
| sdfzug wrote:
| being far fetched seems like an understatement
| PeterBarrett wrote:
| This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify
| the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If
| bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of
| electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart.
|
| Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to
| power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does
| noting to help with the shift to renewables.
| Dzugaru wrote:
| This is an excellent take on why the Grossman's idea is plainly
| idiotic [0]. You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity,
| you just get more security. The system itself can reach a state
| when you need 51% of whole planet electricity and computation
| devices locked into it to be perfectly secure. Thats frankly
| scary. [0] https://elad-verbin.medium.com/bitcoin-is-not-a-
| battery-it-i...
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Yes, to me this response seems intuitive if you know anything
| about bitcoin and PoW blockchains. The original article seems
| based on misconceptions.
|
| I find it strange that even people at a prominent firm like
| Union Square Ventures are perpetuating such misconceptions.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I don't think it's a bit strange if they're heavily
| invested in Bitcoin. You may be assuming it's a good-faith
| argument.
| acdha wrote:
| > I find it strange that even people at a prominent firm
| like Union Square Ventures are perpetuating such
| misconceptions.
|
| Remember, their goal is to make money. As we've seen over
| and over again, there's a strong financial interest in
| doing whatever is needed to make their holdings profitable
| and most will say anything short of legally actionable
| misrepresentations.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Idiotic all the way. If aluminum can be perceived as a
| battery, then everything else can be. "Poop as a Battery
| (PaaB)" (am I the first to use this?)(no I won't DDG it).
|
| In that sense, Bill Gatess "Reinvented Toilet" does kinda the
| same. People pee and poop, sewage is processed and is
| converted to clean water and can produce energy [0]. Thus
| PaaB(!?)
|
| [0]: https://www.elitereaders.com/waterless-toilet-system-
| generat...
| thatcat wrote:
| Poop can be a microbial power source at waste treatment
| plants with the right tech. Unlike btc it pulls power from
| waste streams and makes it available.
| africanboy wrote:
| the obvious conclusion then is that even poo is more useful
| than bitcoins.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity, you just
| get more security.
|
| Specifically, more security for the next block, only. Once
| that block is mined, the process starts all over again for
| the next block.
|
| The energy usage reset button is pressed as soon as each
| block is mined. No energy is "stored".
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Bitcoin itself is energy or can be converted into energy.
| If I can buy wood to burn for energy with Bitcoin, I am
| converting mined Bitcoin into energy.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Because I can buy BTC with dollars, dollars are bitcoins!
|
| Because I can buy fiat currency with BTC, BTC is a fiat
| currency!
| africanboy wrote:
| in this scenario am I a battery because I can make my own
| wood?
|
| and is the tree I am cutting a battery too?
|
| wouldn't it be easier (and more sustainable) then to
| plant trees than mine bitcoins?
| user-the-name wrote:
| It's not. This statement is just plain dumb.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| If I have Bitcoin how do I convert it into energy to
| power something else?
| danboarder wrote:
| By purchasing electricity with Bitcoin.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| By this logic, dollar bills make a much better "battery".
| wavefunction wrote:
| I can at least light a dollar on fire for some small
| measure of warmth!
| vntok wrote:
| Not really because the Dollar bills battery keeps
| discharging at the inflation rate.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Right, because BTC value never goes down.
| bingbong70 wrote:
| NGU - "Number Go Up" technology is one of Bitcoin's most
| interesting & unique attributes. Few here understand.
| vletal wrote:
| > Few here understand.
|
| Sounds like a catch phrase from an "alternative" news
| site or a thing a member of a religious cult would say.
| Retric wrote:
| Money doesn't buy electricity in a blackout. That's the
| difference between an abstraction and the underlying
| reality.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| It does actually, thousands in Texas had no electricity
| while I did. Cost me 1/5 of a Bitcoin.
| selectodude wrote:
| Did your electricity provider accept Bitcoin?
| bingbong70 wrote:
| Whoever sells generators in an outage definitely will
| accept your bitcoin pre/post conversion.
| Retric wrote:
| I think you misunderstood. I had electricity just fine
| during the storm due to the wonders of working
| infrastructure and thus not being in a blackout.
|
| But, for those without power due to a blackout, you can't
| simply spend money and instantly turn the lights back on.
| You can either have already spent money to have backup
| power, or you have a problem. It's like breathing, if
| your drowning spending money to be able to breath in 2
| hours is useless you need air now.
|
| Which is why electric grid operators need infrastructure
| not money to avoid causing blackouts.
| lottin wrote:
| What if I buy gold with it? Does it mean I have turned
| electricity into gold?
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Then Bitcoin _stores_ no energy whatsoever. If I purchase
| the same amount of electricity with $, or with gold, or
| with seashells instead of Bitcoin, there will be no
| difference on the side of the electricity supplier. Aside
| from, of course, Bitcoin potentially affecting
| electricity prices.
| whoisstan wrote:
| It's so totally misguided IMO that I feel like I am maybe not
| understanding that.
|
| It seems to inspired or in the spirit of 'The Ministry for the
| Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson.
|
| " It's called Carbon Coin in the book, a Bitcoin-like currency
| that the Ministry gives out for carbon sequestration -- that
| is, any project that sucks CO2 out of the air, whether it's
| carbon capture or farmers rewilding their fields -- at a rate
| of one coin to one ton. Oil companies get coins if they stop
| being oil companies, basically, leaving their assets in the
| ground for a century or so. Coins can then be bought and sold
| on currency exchanges like any other."
|
| The only argument I can see is that the sheer resource hunger
| will force our hand in using renewable energy. Of course, I am
| not saying this is a good argument at all.
|
| There is no such thing as virtual energy. And the other forms
| of payment we use are a million times more energy effective.
|
| What bothers me is that newsletters as this one who I believe
| are widely read serve this up as a good idea.
|
| https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-315
|
| %)
| jasonlaramburu wrote:
| Bitcoin's price is backed by the sunk cost of energy used to
| mine it. If any critical mass of miners began using cheap or
| free renewable energy, the price of BTC would fall
| precipitously.
|
| Miners have, in the past, resisted improvements to the network
| that would reduce their profits so this all seems pretty
| unlikely as well.
| mode80 wrote:
| This is false. Bitcoin's value is "backed" by the expectation
| that it will be valuable tomorrow -- nothing more. It's the
| same with gold. Gold's value has nothing to do with the cost
| of mining it out of the ground. Rather the cost of mining it
| is justified on the basis of its expected value.
| jasonlaramburu wrote:
| Its price certainly can appreciate for many reasons but
| that's not my point. The price of BTC price is backstopped
| by the sunk cost of mining. Every time the price has fallen
| below the cost of production miners deactivate and the
| price stabilizes. If a miner's opex goes to zero (due to
| cheap or free renewable energy) in the future there will be
| no incentive to stop mining during a crash and prices will
| go to $0.
| toss1 wrote:
| Then it is not the sunk cost of the mining that drives it
| in your model, but the cost of new mining. (the sunk cost
| is mere history).
|
| Also, it is not clear that having more or fewer miners on
| the network drives prices - it seems more likely that
| more miners reduce transaction/confirmation times,
| improving service levels and increasing value (to the
| extent that actual transactions drive value or price).
| jasonlaramburu wrote:
| > Also, it is not clear that having more or fewer miners
| on the network drives prices
|
| Of course it is. If it costs a miner $10k in electricity,
| rent etc to mine 1 BTC, they will need to sell at least
| $10k worth of BTC to cover their cost. If they stop
| mining, they will have less pressure to sell.
|
| Miners hold over 2mm BTC so hard to see how their actions
| have no direct impact on price.
|
| My point, is that when electricity costs approach zero,
| more people will mine which will impact prices.
| [deleted]
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Bitcoins price is basically unrelated to the energy used.
| Right now, it is an independent currency at best and a
| speculation object at worst. Energy spent is only useful in
| so far as that no single entity can take over the network;
| for all other purposes, bitcoin could run on a single 10 year
| old GPU.
| lottin wrote:
| An entity could launch a coordinated air strike on well-
| known mining locations and take over the network at
| anytime.
| nickez wrote:
| If bitcoin would be fully powered by renewables, do you still
| think its energy consumption would be a problem?
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Yes. Energy spent on Bitcoin is energy not spent on something
| else, even in a world where everything is powered by
| renewable energy. We do not live in a world where everything
| is renewable, and renewable energy spent on Bitcoin means
| whatever non-renewable power is being used elsewhere instead
| of being eliminated. It is also a myth that renewables have
| no negative environmental impact: metals have to be
| mined/smelted/etc., chemicals of various kinds are used, and
| there is waste from the manufacturing processes. Ideally we
| would be working towards more _efficient_ technologies that
| use less energy to accomplish whatever task (and for the most
| part we have been doing that).
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Yes, because those renewables could be powering people's
| homes and productive equipment, or powering conventional
| payment systems with plenty capacity left over. It's not
| necessarily a deal-breaker, but plenty of crypto exists that
| doesn't need this much power.
| doomroot wrote:
| Energy for the home and nearly every other electricity
| demanding enterprise easily outbids bitcoin miners. There's
| a reason they have to go the there ridiculously remote
| places to set up operations.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Not the energy consumption in itself, but the amount of heat
| and physical electronic waste generated certainly is.
| skohan wrote:
| Yes it's not like solar panels are condensed out of the air
| with zero waste. They have to be manufactured, in a process
| which almost certainly isn't carbon neutral yet. The
| materials used to make them have to be extracted from
| somewhere. They're transported to the installation site on
| the back of diesel-burning trucks.
|
| Cleaner energy sources are a necessity, but simply reducing
| consumption will always have the best impact on
| sustainability.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If
| so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use
| carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places
| where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful
| locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power,
| then it'd be much less of a concern.
|
| I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is
| halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite
| for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall
| order.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Proof of work will always be an expensive way to secure a
| ledger, with little in the way of real advantages.
|
| "Distributed" sounds nice, but it isn't really that valuable
| in the end.
| noxer wrote:
| PoW doesn't even lead to good distribution as we can see
| since a few years and more importantly its not needed. We
| have Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) "blockchians"
| since like 8 years and it beats PoW by any metric.
| plater wrote:
| All energy generation is bad for the environment, just more
| or less bad. Solar cells and wind power might be "renewable",
| but it requires a lot of metals and material to build (and
| also energy), they disturb natural habitat etc. They are much
| better than coal, oil and gas, but they are not harmless.
| It's better to avoid using energy if possible than using
| renewable energy.
| bingbong70 wrote:
| Cavemen used very little energy before the discovery of
| fire. Are you prescribing a return to that state?
|
| >>>Response to Dan added here due to rate limit.
|
| > waste power
|
| Infinite energy in the universe and everything mankind has
| achieved has been in large part due to energy consumption.
| The idea that we should now stop that trend is
| antihuman/antihuman-progress at its core.
|
| Let the individual/market decide the best uses for
| energy... not your money = not your choice.
|
| BTW off-planet mining using the sun/stars is a great idea
| for the future and doesn't require them to be blacked out.
| danShumway wrote:
| No of course not, that reading isn't any more accurate
| than it would be to say that you're arguing that we
| should set up a Dyson sphere around our sun to black out
| the earth and mine Bitcoin in the vast dead emptiness of
| space for all eternity[0]. Be careful not to inflate
| arguments into completely separate positions.
|
| What GP is saying is that switching to renewables doesn't
| make all of the negative externalities of wasting power
| go away.
|
| You shouldn't extrapolate out on that to some grand view
| of the world that says we should never use technology. It
| just means we shouldn't waste power, and we shouldn't use
| "solar" as an excuse to waste power.
|
| [0]: After all, Dyson spheres are powered by renewable
| energy.
| bingbong70 wrote:
| > waste power
|
| > not a battery
|
| What's a better way to losslessly and securely store
| human labor/time for future use? Almost everything else
| (fiat, gold, silver, real estate, etc...) that exists is
| debased/debasable, deteriorates, or loses value.
|
| The above arguments completely hinge on energy being
| "wasted". Lossless labor/time storage isn't "waste" to
| market participants seeing a need for it and putting
| their hard earned money behind it.
|
| Bitcoin basically turns one of the hardest to counterfeit
| things in the universe, energy, into money.
|
| How else can you achieve lossless storage without a
| trustless secured environment (the bitcoin network)? Any
| multi-decade/multi-century solution that market
| participants should focus on instead?
| delaaxe wrote:
| Bitcoin mining is good for the environment
| https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-mining-is-good-for-the-e...
| wrnr wrote:
| Having an open mind but is good but make sure your brain
| doesn't fall out of its skull. Just because a mining
| operation produces methane gas and it is better to burn this
| gas at the site and turn it into carbon dioxide because it is
| the lesser of green house gasses shouldn't mean you can sell
| this as a carbon offset since there is still a net
| contribution.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I was told the existing financial system uses more power than
| Bitcoin, so doesn't that make it even better for the
| environment because they want even more clean power than
| Bitcoin?
| elaus wrote:
| I can't really follow the logic in this article - maybe I
| don't get it?
|
| The article states that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy and as
| miners want to maximize profit, they want cheap energy. This
| is good for renewables as that is cheaper than other forms of
| energy generation.
|
| Doesn't everyone want cheap energy, like factories or heavy
| industry? Are Bitcoin miners really more eager to push for
| clean energy than other industries?
|
| The whole arguments sounds like "we need to use up more
| energy so there's more incentive to produce additional, clean
| energy".
| Nursie wrote:
| That's exactly what it is - any energy demand, under this
| worldview, is good because it means more demand for clean
| energy.
|
| In a world that's _already_ struggling with this, it makes
| no sense at all.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Doesn't everyone want cheap energy, like factories or
| heavy industry? Are Bitcoin miners really more eager to
| push for clean energy than other industries?
|
| Yes. Given enough time, Bitcoin will gentrify the power
| grid.
| eganist wrote:
| The post is making the free-market argument:
|
| > In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth.
| Bitcoin is actually one of the greatest financial incentives
| to transition the world to clean energy.
|
| without bothering to explain why any one point they highlight
| would beget any one outcome claimed by the post. In fact,
| there are some backwards incentives that are missed. An
| example would be their claim with regards to Great American
| Mining: rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for
| capturing lost methane, what's to stop producers from
| diverting existing gas production towards mining right now,
| putting demand pressure on existing supplies and driving up
| gas production (and leaks, etc.) rather than just capturing
| and processing leaked gas?
|
| There's nothing. There's no incentive for existing gas
| facilities to fix their leaks when they can just pipe their
| existing output into bitcoin, drive up demand for gas, and
| therefore justify more drilling (and more inevitable leaks
| that they won't have any incentive to fix).
|
| > Bitcoin isn't bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is
| very, very good for the environment. The University of
| Cambridge reported at over 75% of miners use renewable energy
| and now there are solutions to turn methane emissions into
| mining as well.
|
| This doesn't mean anything. Or worse, it means 25% of _a
| phantom industry_ makes use of dirty power, So whatever
| Bitcoin imposes on the world in power usage (130 Terawatt-
| hours of energy - https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-
| debate-about-cryptocur...), 25% of that, or about 0.15% of
| global power production, leverages dirty fuels. If all mining
| ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially from dirty power
| usage coming down and more clean energy supply being directed
| back into productive work.
|
| Thanks for hearing my rant.
| noxer wrote:
| Kinda funny as we know the free-market eventually will
| switch to a non-PoW solution. There is no way around it.
| Proven wrote:
| > rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for
| capturing lost methane
|
| Because that's a useless activity and no one wants to pay
| for it. FartCoin wouldn't last a day.
|
| > If all mining ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially
| from dirty power usage coming down and more clean energy
| supply being directed back into productive work.
|
| I doubt that. Why would dirty producers cut their output?
|
| Those arguments in favor of Bitcoin _are_ nonsensical but
| your counterarguments aren 't that great.
| doomroot wrote:
| > what's to stop producers from diverting existing gas
| production towards mining right now.
|
| Because it makes 0 financial sense to do so. The market
| demand for gas waaaayy out competes bitcoins demand for
| gas.
| darkerside wrote:
| I'm sure many of those 75% would be using renewable energy
| for something more productive
| bttrfl wrote:
| "Bitcoin isn't bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is
| very, very good for the environment."
|
| wish I could downvote.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of
| electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart
|
| This is actually a weird game theory problem because there are
| a lot a miners with expensive hardware that would be worthless
| if such a change happened. You could fork it, but you'd have to
| attract miners after burning them (possible if commodity GPUs
| were viable, again), and you'd have to convince people that the
| new tokens are also valuable, and this isn't just Bitcoin Cash
| II.
|
| Bitcoin has odd, long-term systemic risks based around miners.
| incrudible wrote:
| > Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to
| power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does
| noting to help with the shift to renewables.
|
| Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to
| power _nothing_ also appears nonsensical at first glance, yet
| it actually happens to the point that energy prices can go
| _negative_.
|
| For one, some forms of renewable energy are highly volatile and
| can not just be made to match demand under any circumstance.
| Hence there is a need for batteries to store this otherwise
| worthless energy. Today, these batteries just don't exist, wind
| farms are ideally backed up by gas plants, whose output can be
| regulated to even out wind volatility. In other cases, wind is
| backed up by coal or nuclear plants which can not be regulated
| as well, hence more of that wind energy goes to waste.
|
| Secondly, especially in the case of China, these renewable
| energy projects are meant to raise the domestic product and
| production capacity numbers, with little regard to actual
| demand. The electricity grid to deliver all that energy to
| actual consumers is an afterthought.
|
| In due time, these problems shall be solved. Better ways to
| store volatile renewable energy will emerge, better
| transmission infrastructure will arise. Bitcoin could be a
| stepping stone to solve the hen-egg part of that problem.
| jgeerts wrote:
| > This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to
| justify the incredible amount of electricity required by
| bitcoin.
|
| It's not "required", it's only that high because it has so much
| success. Bitcoin would be working with only one miner running,
| the first blocks were minted on a private computer.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It would work in the sense that you've be able to add more
| transactions to the chain. But it'd also be very easy for
| somebody to double spend.
| noxer wrote:
| Sorry but that's BS, It absolutely requires the energy. If it
| would be running on a privet computer still then anyone with
| such a computer could double spend which would make it
| useless regardless of success.
| specialist wrote:
| From OC:
|
| > _One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so
| often, your conception of what it is changes._
|
| Yup. Money is weird.
|
| Measurement of value, accounting of debts, commodity to be
| collected.
|
| David Graeber's book Debt has a pretty good survey of our
| evolving, manyform, paradoxical thinking towards money and
| related metaphors.
|
| As for crypto currency, I mostly agree with Mark Cuban's
| conclusion they're collectibles. Ergo, they're useful for escrow
| use cases, like exfiltrating money and swapping assets.
|
| I'll believe crypto currencies are proper money once a government
| accepts them as payment for taxes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism
| ashray wrote:
| Not trying to convince you of anything but just wanted to share
| this with you. It has started happening...
|
| Zug in Switzerland accepts crypto for taxes.
|
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-h...
| bootlooped wrote:
| It seems like increasing electricity demand would also increase
| the incentives to keep old fossil fuel plants online.
| fsh wrote:
| I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery
| is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere.
| There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat
| while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery.
|
| The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since
| aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas
| cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the
| article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy,
| where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of
| resources.
| tomxor wrote:
| Well said. Also purely from the point of view of physics: no
| energy is stored, you would simply be buying energy _produced_
| elsewhere with the intrinsic value you created... in other
| words you are double spending energy!
| Liron wrote:
| It's not double-spending energy. The chunk of energy you
| generate isn't spent by you, it's supplied to Bitcoin users
| to power their transactions. You only consume the second
| chunk of energy for yourself.
| usrusr wrote:
| Well, low intensity heat. It's trivial to create a setup where
| you take your hot morning shower with water heated in last
| noon's solar surplus. Setups like that are actually not
| uncommon at all, but they use direct solar heat extraction
| instead of photovoltaics. But a "bitcoined" version would be
| way too small scale and idle way too much to ever make back the
| hardware expense, at least unless progress suddenly stops.
|
| Granted, it could still provide value beyond hot water: if you
| happened to own a considerable amount of bitcoin, your net
| worth would benefit from a greenwashing strawman giving bitcoin
| some more press attention.
| buu700 wrote:
| Interesting, TIL:
| https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-
| fa....
|
| This reminds me of another interesting point I recently saw
| raised regarding WWII. WWII is often credited with ending the
| Great Depression, but in reality was primarily helpful insofar
| as it made it politically viable for the US government to
| inject a massive stimulus into the economy far eclipsing the
| New Deal (and other governments to do likewise).
|
| Tying that to the broken window fallacy, it seems the ultimate
| conclusion is that wartime economic policy without the actual
| war would have been a better way to achieve the desired result.
|
| Of course the reality may not be so simple from a US
| perspective when we consider that all the broken windows were
| outside our borders, the national focus and urgency imposed by
| the war, and that removing the war from history would have
| dramatic unpredictable effects on our world today.
| Nevertheless, the idea seems convincing enough to me in
| abstract that starting a new war purely for perceived economic
| benefits would be an inefficient alternative to simple
| progressive economic policy on an equivalent scale.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > made it politically viable for the US government to inject
| a massive stimulus into the economy
|
| Well, Britain transferred all its money to the US for arms,
| so that would help the US economy. (Churchill spent the last
| year of the war concerned with how to pay for it.) Also,
| there were wage and price controls to control speculation
| (and inflation.)
| osrec wrote:
| How much of the energy used by a processor is dissipated as
| heat? If it's a significant amount, perhaps it could be
| recovered in some way?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| In a physics sense a processor just turns current into heat,
| the same way a wire does. It just does so in a way that
| happens to be useful to us. So in that sense they're
| resistive heaters, so 100% efficient.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It can be utilized for heating human occupied spaces. Humans
| need a lot of heating.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Then the argument of "we will just stick the miners in
| Iceland where renewable energy is cheap" falls apart. If
| you want to mine where humans are then you need to mine
| with grid electricity.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That'a very good point. Crypto heat use will be limited
| to windy cold places where some people live.
|
| Unless there are some industrial processes that might use
| this mild heat. Maybe poultry production? Some green
| houses in cold climates?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The point is that there isn't enough renewable energy for
| population centers right now. So every clean watt used
| for mining btc takes that clean watt away from somebody
| else. This is why reducing energy use is so powerful.
| Even if X% of your energy use comes from zero-emissions
| sources, all marginal energy use comes from carbon.
|
| The only way that btc mining can truly claim to have no
| impact on global emissions is if it uses zero-emission
| energy that otherwise _couldn 't_ be used in some other
| productive way. And that, almost by definition, limits
| the use of the waste heat.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > The point is that there isn't enough renewable energy
| for population centers right now.
|
| Even when it will be enough when renewables work at 100%
| it won't be enough if they give 8% of their max output
| because it's not that windy today.
|
| We should have at least 10 times the capacity in
| renewables than we actually need to have plenty on bad
| days (and nights).
|
| > The only way that btc mining can truly claim to have no
| impact on global emissions is if it uses zero-emission
| energy that otherwise couldn't be used in some other
| productive way.
|
| I agree, and that won't happen until we go 100%
| renewables, but we can't do that without a storage, and
| we don't have storage, but we can go 1000% renewables
| instead because that's the technology we have and already
| it is the cheapest way of making energy. And I think next
| crypto boom could put us on trajectory to achieve that by
| utilizing every bit of energy we'll overproduce and by
| being a mechanism to funnel money from the pockets of
| Wallstreet into renewable energy production investments.
| blackshaw wrote:
| There was an article on the front page of HN not that long
| ago about a guy using the waste heat from crypto mining to
| heat his home:
|
| https://blog.haschek.at/2021/how-i-heat-my-home-by-
| mining.ht...
| speedgoose wrote:
| If you are going to use electricity to heat human occupied
| spaces, you should use a heatpump which has much better
| efficiency, above 100%.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Sure, that's not optimal way of heating with electricity.
| That's just a way of utilizing heat from computing.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| But if you're using electricity to power CPUs, may as
| well pump that heat into human-inhabited areas to keep us
| toasty warm.
| imtringued wrote:
| Cooling technologies just move the heat around. A
| datacenter produces a lot of heat that is then
| subsequently moved out of the building. Capturing that
| heat shouldn't be too difficult because it passes through
| central AC or central chillers.
| noxer wrote:
| Capturing as in storing? Simply knowing where the heat
| is/goes doesn't really make it easy usable. You can heat
| up water for example but what if no one need warm water
| there? Also often additional energy is useless just to
| move the heat away fast enough.
| whb07 wrote:
| The tangible hard money equivalent is gold. It is also a
| battery one can store value across time. Yes, the raw energy
| that went in to feed the miners was lost via heat etc but the
| brunt of it was stored.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The problem with analogizing Bitcoin mining to gold mining is
| that Bitcoin mining secures value in the past and gold mining
| secures value in the future. If you stopped mining Bitcoin,
| all previously mined Bitcoin would lose value due to the
| decreased security of the block chain.
|
| It's like if gold began to sink into the ground the moment
| you stopped mining it, and you had to keep mining and
| smelting it at a ever-more furious rate to keep it above
| ground.
| hinkley wrote:
| More like potatoes than gold, then.
| mmastrac wrote:
| You can still eat a potato though.
| whb07 wrote:
| The same happens if people stopped caring about the yellow
| rock.
|
| People stop mining gold only because it's valueless.
|
| People stop mining bitcoin because it's valueless.
| Liron wrote:
| > There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into
| heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery.
|
| You can regain the energy where it's needed by using Bitcoin to
| purchase it
| dmitriid wrote:
| You don't regain energy this way. You're buying _new_ energy.
|
| That's not how batteries work.
| Liron wrote:
| Someone else was going to use a unit of energy to mine
| Bitcoin, but you supplied it instead when you mined it. You
| don't get "new" energy, you get "that energy", the energy
| that the person somewhere else would have used to mine the
| Bitcoins that you mined. That's the energy you stored.
| scotty79 wrote:
| The point is, why do you store energy at all.
|
| It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can
| sell it later.
|
| If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack
| storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And
| since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them
| less desirable than they should be.
|
| Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But
| please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of
| glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times
| when there's not much demand for window repair additional
| glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building
| glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
|
| Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the
| glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much
| renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our
| power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy
| generation methods.
|
| The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money
| earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's
| not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be
| oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial
| enterprises economical.
|
| It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value
| to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to
| funnel more money into education, especially to the places
| where it's most needed.
|
| If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new
| teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on
| the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional
| teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to
| 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
|
| Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and
| sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to
| be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such
| nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the
| gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.
| zaphar wrote:
| It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can
| sell it later.
|
| This gets the cause and effect completely wrong. The only
| reason you _can_ sell it later is because someone will need
| it later. As a society you store energy precisely because you
| will need it later. Whether you do this by creating a market
| for it or not is purely an implementation detail.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Yes. But as an energy storage company you don't care
| whether anyone will be needing it later. Only thing what
| matters is if and for how much you'll be able to sell it.
|
| If you have no way of selling it it doesn't matter how much
| it is needed.
|
| So you will set up energy storage company only if you know
| you'll be able to sell energy you store later at high
| enough price.
|
| Form the point of view of the economy it doesn't matter
| what will happen to energy. And economy is not just direct
| effect of physical causes. It's separate system that to
| some degree is synced with physical world. But not all that
| much. Much of our wealth is locked up into capital that is
| being gambled to get more capital without any connection to
| physical world. And when those connections occasionally
| crop up it might even be dangerous like in the case of
| global food prices recently when investors figured out a
| new game using food prices for them to gamble. You probably
| think that crypto is one such dangerous connection, but I
| believe it might be a beneficial one.
|
| Crypto is not an electrical battery. It's economical
| battery. It turns energy, potentially any amount of it,
| into value. Even the worthless energy, that is produced
| when conditions are excessively good for energy production.
|
| The beneficial effect of crypto is that it is variable load
| that can turn any amount of nearly worthless localized
| energy into globally transferable value.
|
| You can use the value later to purchase energy (and energy
| generation equipment) anywhere else.
|
| As such it incentivises building energy sources that might
| generate a lot of excess energy on peak production, like
| windmills or solar panels, or that are too remote to
| transfer their excess energy to places where it could be
| utilized.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak
|
| Viewing aluminum as a battery isn't even valid, unless people
| start oxidizing it for energy. It's more like economic value
| added. Bitcoin is only a "battery" in the sense that it could
| be turned off on-demand to free up power generation capacity.
| tonetheman wrote:
| GD... why did anyone bother reading this crap. Excessive energy
| usage from my made up currency is driving innovation.
|
| Gah. Crypto and the people hyping it need to be quiet or at least
| be honest about what is going on.
|
| We are draining energy really quickly so we can make sure someone
| isn't double spending the imaginary money...
|
| What a horrible article.
| smashem wrote:
| > ...made up currency...
|
| Welcome to reality. https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-
| slaves-of-money-2...
| mrits wrote:
| I thought the article is bad. But what you said is also not
| true. It sounds like you are complaining about the high energy
| use of Bitcoin. Crypto does not have to use a lot of energy to
| work, it just happens that bitcoin uses a proof of work
| algorithm.
| noxer wrote:
| crypto and crypto people != BTC and BTC maxis
| gus_massa wrote:
| I like the analogy with Aluminum, but I don't like the title. As
| far as I know nobody oxidize Aluminum to get electricity back.
| And nobody undo Bitcoins mining (whatever that means). So
| Aluminum and Bitcoins are really similar, but not a battery.
| mrmanner wrote:
| Aluminium and BTC are not at all similar. Aluminium is a useful
| commodity. It's used to build things people need and want, and
| to wrap falafel rolls. BTC is a currency with no value in and
| of itself.
| gerbler wrote:
| It's more like "embodied energy" than battery
| noxer wrote:
| It definitely not. The energy used turned to heat and
| eventually radiated away into the universe. Just like the
| energy used to find the largest prime number. Unless you think
| that energy is embodies in the number somehow but then where
| was the energy before the number was found? Because the number
| clearly already existed before it was found.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| If you have embodied energy in something of no intrinsic value
| except as proof that you wasted some electricity, what you have
| is mere entropy. Burned toast.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Sometime, I think that " _Proof of Work_ " is very similar to
| " _Proof of Burn_ ".
|
| Usually in " _Proof of Burn_ " you "burn" some cryptocoin
| sending it to an invalid address, and the blockchain has a
| proof that they are unrecoverable. (It was popular before
| someone notice that with an ICO you can have your cake and
| eat it too.)
|
| In " _Proof of Work_ " you "burn" a few barrels or petrol to
| produce electricity and then make some hash with the
| electricity, so if you find the correct hash it is a
| probabilistic proof that you burned the petrol. (You can
| cheat with other source of energy, like solar or wind, but
| they also have a cost.)
| Nursie wrote:
| If anything it's a record of energy transformed from
| electricity to heat, little else.
|
| The energy isn't still present in the Bitcoin.
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| The "battery" in the article is misleading. I wouldn't call
| bitcoin a battery any more so than I would call aluminum a
| battery.
|
| The point the article appears to make is that bitcoin mining is
| much more elastic in its energy use and is therefore uniquely fit
| to fill some niche energy markets.
|
| That's completely different from and quite a far cry from being a
| "battery".
| Fede_V wrote:
| Whenever I read something this far off the mark, I genuinely
| wonder if it's total lack of intellectual honesty, or, having
| drank so much kool aid that this argument genuinely makes sense.
|
| Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless
| and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY
| DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE.
|
| In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer
| chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure
| and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an
| obvious bubble.
|
| In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and
| the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple
| carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin
| makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin
| literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and
| bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will
| always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those
| chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to
| actually be put to use in productive sectors.
|
| IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care
| about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this
| bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of
| humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a
| single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will
| help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly
| shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global
| warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.
| leventov wrote:
| Correction: we need to solve climate change in a short term,
| not long term.
| Fede_V wrote:
| You are right, I should have used short term and very short
| term.
| kneel wrote:
| This essay checks out.
|
| Thermodynamics and its higher order effects have profound effects
| on our modern world. We've been fooled into thinking otherwise,
| but new forms of money are clearing the fog. This is very
| exciting.
| h4kor wrote:
| It's astounding how much mind mending crypto bros have to do to
| justify the energy waste of their pyramid scheme
| ldbooth wrote:
| Bitcoin as a flexible load has utility, the misappropriation of
| the word 'battery' does not.
| fnord77 wrote:
| imagine the thermodynamic losses.
| hinkley wrote:
| We are going to be able to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere more by
| afforestation (terrestrial and marine) than by covering the
| planet in solar panels and turbines.
| coding123 wrote:
| I can't figure out how to charge a battery with bitcoin. Just
| working for a few hours drains my 12.6 to 12.2 at night. Lead
| acid is a battery. Lithium is a battery. Btc is not
| macawfish wrote:
| This is anti-scientific gaslighting and it does a disservice to
| all the people working hard to bring the actual benefits of
| applied cryptography and distributed tech to the public in ways
| to that actually provide public good. There are alternatives to
| wasteful proof of work schemes. Proof of space and time & proof
| of stake. Neither are perfect but clearly Bitcoin's
| hyperdeflationary raccoon trap proof of work scheme isn't either.
| Bitcoin advocates had better get it together.
| pmuk wrote:
| Bitcoin is more like a black hole than a battery
| adav wrote:
| Cheap energy into aluminium results in useful material to build
| things with. Cheap energy into bitcoin results in some more
| bitcoins of questionable use?
| Nursie wrote:
| It doesn't even result in more bitcoins. The emission rate is
| fixed.
| hackernudes wrote:
| But miners are competing for bigger slices of the pie. So
| more energy does mean more bitcoin (for a specific miner).
| Roark66 wrote:
| The only way PoW crypto is superceded is if someone finally
| implements PoS. There is a lot of hope in ethereum "moving to"
| proof of stake, but I think a move will never happen. Miners will
| not allow it. It'll be a fork.
|
| Then, if it has to be forked why not start from scratch with
| something better? I imagine/hope many people are working on
| better crypto protocols at the moment.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It will happen, because the developers will get the same fees
| what the miners get right now without spending energy (which is
| a risky and low margin industry).
|
| Good luck getting real institutional money getting into PoS
| based systems though, PoW took 10 years to get accepted as a
| secure store of value for the tresuries.
| cfcosta wrote:
| Both Cardano and BNB use proof of stake, with Cardano being
| much more decentralized (but smart contracts are coming next
| few months), and BSC/BNB being the most popular currently. You
| can also use BTC as a wrapped asset (backed by a smart
| contract) on both the BSC/Eth networks.
|
| PoW is going away quickly, but Bitcoin is not going to move,
| the "difficulty" is by design at least in the current concept
| of it as a storage of value.
|
| Edit: By the way, it is possible (or will be in the future) to
| run staking pools on Cardano on Raspberry Pis, and get the same
| benefits as bigger hardware. Currently it needs 4~8gb of ram
| afaik, but pis are getting faster every release, next one might
| be good.
| wrnr wrote:
| Etherium has a grim trigger in to form of a future parabolic
| increase in difficulty that is perpetually delayed by a signed
| patch to prevent miners from being too conservative.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic.
|
| Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have
| trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines
| and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage?
|
| The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to
| create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped
| storage hydroelectricity installation closed due to lack of
| demand. There are too few ways to turn excess electricity into
| money. If we are going to have fully renewable energy in the
| future, we need to produce way more energy than we need so when
| conditions are bad for power generation we still have enough. And
| for that we need incentives. We are struggling to create
| artificial, law based incentives on global scale.
|
| Cryptos are currently the best way we have to organically create
| those incentives. There were already instances of crypto miners
| selling energy they contracted, back to the grid, when price of
| energy briefly exceeded the gain they could have by burning that
| energy to mine.
|
| When prices of crypto rise again in few years and hardware
| hashrate plateaus we may reach a point when miners will be
| building/buying new windmill and solar panel installations on
| mass scale, because their costs will be dominated by the energy
| costs and the cheapest energy will be excess energy renewables
| produce.
|
| We don't lack resources to reach the green future, we lack
| incentives, and if we are lucky meteoric rise of price of crypto
| can provide those.
|
| EDIT: And the post is flagged into oblivion. I'm no longer happy
| because interesting observation got silenced. Well I guess see
| you all in few years.
|
| EDIT2: .... and now it's unflagged. :-) A hot topic.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's not because we consume too little electricity: it's
| because it's not convenient just yet (but we're getting there
| thanks to tech advance).
|
| The less energy we use the better for now, given that part of
| that energy will be "dirty".
| scotty79 wrote:
| Main reason we don't develop renewables faster is storage
| capacity.
|
| And storage capacity technologies we can create are
| oscillating around break even point economically.
|
| There's no gold rush to place energy storage system
| everywhere and it's not obviously economically profitable.
|
| However variable load such as crypto mining provides similar
| incentives as energy storage. And there is a crypto gold
| rush.
| bootlooped wrote:
| I think the flaw in this is that crypto mining will take place
| regardless of whether the source of the electricity is green or
| not, and regardless of whether the electricity is excess
| capacity or not.
|
| Crypto mining is a business; they may find it beneficial to
| mine during both peak and off-peak hours, and they're unlikely
| to care whether the electricity is coming from wind or coal, so
| long as it's cheap enough to turn a profit.
|
| So as a side effect, yeah, it may make building new renewable
| sources more feasible, but it's a big shotgun and there's a lot
| of collateral damage.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| What about training ML models as another example? It requires a
| lot of energy as well (and I expect it to be more significant
| in the future), and the optimal power draw should depend on the
| price of energy. Of course it requires GPU/TPU pricing to
| change depending on clock speed, which is hard to sell to
| customers. So yeah, for now Bitcoin mining is a more scalable
| solution.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models
| so easily that everyone can participate.
|
| It's already being done to some very small degree by few
| companies that locate their ML server farms in places where
| energy is cheap and renewable.
|
| I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for
| computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will
| be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money
| into green energy.
|
| I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much
| energy as Australia".
|
| If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be
| so cool.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,If you could create crypto based on ML training it would
| be so cool.''
|
| That would actually be a bad thing: the real value in proof
| of work is that it doesn't have any extra value to the
| miner, which stops miners from gaining a huge edge over
| other possible future miners. What's behind all the
| controversy is that proof of work has to be totally useless
| work, that's what makes it valuable for the blockchain :)
| aetch wrote:
| This is a joke, right? You can't convert Bitcoin back into energy
| no matter how you look at it.
| kneel wrote:
| You can convert it to other forms of organized energy, like a
| Tesla.
| [deleted]
| SkipperCat wrote:
| A ham sandwich is a battery....
|
| Bitcoin is not a battery. Its fiat currency that uses a lot of
| energy to perform a fraction of the transactions that would be
| needed for it to be used for normal day to day transactions
| (filling up your gas tank, buying a coffee, etc).
|
| If anything, I'd say Bitcoin is the exact opposite of a battery,
| it's an energy sink. I say that because its fiat money. With the
| example used of aluminum, you've taken energy and made a durable
| good/commodity. You don't need to have faith in aluminum that it
| exists, it just there. Drop it on your foot and you'll have
| proof. With Bitcoin, it will just take a lack of faith and the
| whole thing becomes worthless.
|
| Bitcoin is interesting, it might become a reserve/hedge
| investment like diamonds or gold. But let's not put it in the
| halls of the Duracell bunny.
| randomopining wrote:
| Bitcoin cannot be stopped by a government. The crypto math makes
| it so valuable to lock in your wealth.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I'm gonna say 'proof needed here'. What you're really saying
| is, if a government or all governments do stop it, you're
| boned.
| noxer wrote:
| Had to flag this not because it break any rules its just 100% too
| dumb to be on HN. I had to double check if this wasn't satire.
| deepinsand wrote:
| Bitcoin is an amazing wedge to install distributed solar and
| storage throughout the nation. Right now, utilities and
| governments make it hard to monetize these assets, and bitcoin
| provide an easy alternative.
|
| This builds the supply chain and labor force that are needed to
| perform a full clean energy transition. I don't have a strong
| opinion on cryptocurrency, but I have a strong opinion on energy
| supply chains.
|
| Plug: I'm building https://cryptoclean.energy/ with this exact
| thesis. Check it out to get a renewable energy system for your
| mining rig.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Argument for PoW breaks down once PoS is proven battle tested for
| years. Ethereum will lead the way proving this.
| kilovoltaire wrote:
| There's a discussion of a rebuttal to this here-
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612952
|
| (Also it's newer and more upvoted but for some reason no longer
| on the front page?)
| peterbonney wrote:
| I used Bitcoin to buy milk, therefore it is a cow.
| microtherion wrote:
| Even if one accepts the underlying assumption that bitcoin
| "store" the energy wasted on "mining" them, the theory espoused
| in the article simply does not hold water.
|
| If a new energy source becomes available, so 10x as much energy
| as before gets put into aluminum smelting, you end up with 10x as
| much aluminum.
|
| Bitcoin "mining" does not work that way. The computations are an
| artificial hurdle erected to hit a predetermined level of
| scarcity/difficulty. If 10x as much energy as before gets put
| into bitcoin "mining", difficulty levels will adjust, and you end
| up with exactly the same amount of bitcoin as before.
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| If more energy is spent on bitcoin, it is usually because the
| value of the miner reward grows and attracts more mining. Miner
| reward value grows due to either 1) the market value of the
| coin itself grows or 2) the miner fees grow. Both are market
| forces and ultimately depend on demand for bitcoin
| transactions. So I don't see a contradiction here.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| What happens when you print 10x the money... let's see shall
| we, they are doing it now!
| johbjo wrote:
| In that case, everything is a battery. Just radiate heat into
| space and call the night sky "a battery".
| scottmsul wrote:
| Bitcoin enthusiast here. Pretty surprising how antagonistic the
| HN crowd is to bitcoin.
| bootlooped wrote:
| Why? The downsides are obvious and the realized upsides are
| extremely limited. The best thing I can say about it is that
| it's enabled cheaper international money transfers for some
| people. The worst thing is that it consumes an entire nation's
| worth of electricity. Compare those two things; is it worth it?
| Applejinx wrote:
| Hackers are capable of thinking through an argument and, at
| their best, coming up with disruptive and/or unexpected
| solutions to a situation. This is of course how Bitcoin came to
| be in the first place.
|
| That's also why hackers may be the first to figure out the
| catastrophic failure of cryptocurrency, or perhaps ALL
| cryptocurrency as a class, or the exploit to disrupt the
| disruptor and render cryptocurrency a useless dead end. It's
| founded on assumptions both explicit and implicit. One of the
| implicit ones is that capitalism will continue to be the force
| that checkmates any argument against crypto: get enough capital
| into it and the capital will seek to protect itself, honestly
| or dishonestly, peacefully or violently, with no consideration
| for any other concern.
|
| Hackers are capable of thinking through that scenario and
| asking whether, by contrast, something like bitcoin might be
| the exploit that destroys capitalism by increasing its
| efficiencies until they're untenable.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Dollar bills are closer to batteries than BTC.
| mojomark wrote:
| >>And in a way, aluminum is a battery. Of course, while
| traditional batteries start and end with energy directly,
| aluminum's battery is economic, converting energy to value. And
| that value can be re-used elsewhere (even converted back into
| energy!)
|
| To the authors latter point, Aluminum isn't just 'like' an energy
| battery - it IS in fact a very energy dense battery. Aluminum
| alloys are used to liberate large amounts of Hydrogen at the
| point of use, which can be used in fuel cells. This is currently
| used as an air independant energy source for some underwater
| vehicles. The oxidized byproduct (which is about 8X less dense
| than the Al3 alloy itself) can be re-smelted to "recharge" the
| Al3+ battery. Apple actually developed a very low-Carbon aluminum
| smelting process, so the total cycle is very clean as long as
| renewable energy is used in the smelting process.
| kummappp wrote:
| Crypto currencies offer non-repudiation and that is it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation
| jasonlaramburu wrote:
| The analogy makes no sense. The mining reward for BTC is fixed
| (6.25 BTC every 10 minutes) regardless of how much electricity is
| burned in the process.
| danuker wrote:
| I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast (disclaimer: I even own some).
| But I find this article fallacious.
|
| > if we think of Bitcoin as a battery, what can we do with it?
| The key properties of Bitcoin's battery are: 1) always on and
| permissionless (no need to find customers, just plug and go)
|
| I think it is a very wasteful transformation of the power put in.
| You can get it to be always on and "permissionless" without
| burning this much energy: check out [Bitcoin Cash, Dash,
| ZCash](https://www.crypto51.app/) and other, cheaper-to-mine
| (still proof-of-work) currencies.
|
| The actual benefit you get is security via out-costing: "you have
| to burn up this many resources to double-spend".
|
| Because of the simplicity of this out-costing, lots of people
| trust it, because they can understand it (even though it's
| wasteful).
|
| > and 2) naturally seeking low-cost electricity: it will always
| buy when the price is right.
|
| Just because electricity is cheap in some places doesn't mean we
| should bid it up pointlessly.
|
| ----
|
| I would love to see a PoS scheme that I could understand enough
| to trust. But they are much harder to create, and until then, I
| keep my money in PoW ones, in spite of the cost of transacting.
| specialist wrote:
| My metaphor:
|
| Just like governments mint currency from bullion, miners mint
| bitcoin from electricity.
|
| While I think it's weird to consume so much energy to create
| something so ephemeral, I'm still unclear about the
| externalities, eg negative ecological impact, driving
| electricity prices up. Is all this effort worthwhile? Maybe? It
| feels like a tulip bulb craze, south sea bubble. But I've been
| so wrong so many times, I question my own certainty.
| megameter wrote:
| I think there are two angles on Bitcoin that make some sense:
|
| 1. The true believers like labor theory of property a lot,
| and see having a mining rig as an extension of
| that(falliciously or no - there are plenty of critiques of
| labor theory of property itself). A bitcoin represents the
| "same amount" of effort relative to its value at a given
| moment in time.
|
| 2. As a lower margin use of energy premised on maintaining
| consensus, it has qualities that resemble perfect
| competition(in the economist's sense of that phrase) but
| actually go BEYOND perfect competition. While you can own a
| large part of the distribution or mining power, if you try to
| monopolize Bitcoin as a rentier you just end up forking it,
| as has been demonstrated by various events over the years. If
| people don't like your particular imposition of scarcity,
| they pull the rug in short order.
|
| The second part is rather more important than the first,
| IMHO. Mining's meting out of energy usage as credit and the
| resulting price deflation is a way to get people on board
| with consensus and start engaging in speculative action, but
| there's a sense among the people interested in other
| cryptocurrency that that's just a starting point, and the
| development of distributed consensus tech itself is what
| makes this a "railroad" and not a "tulip".
|
| "No rentiers" is really a pretty earthshaking concept, to the
| point where most of the people in the space can't see that
| light and look at the shadow puppets instead. But it does not
| seem to be refuted by anything I've encountered. While
| onramps and offramps to crypto are mostly controllable, this
| is still a huge upset to our models of what markets are or
| could be.
| specialist wrote:
| Nice. Will now read about "no rentiers". I'm curious about
| the consensus use cases.
|
| Most of my interest is around authenticity. Provenance,
| verifiability, identity, and so forth.
|
| Ian Goodfellow articulated my own hunches, beliefs about
| this: Detecting fraud, fakes, lies is a non-starter.
| Authenticity has to be out of band. So sign your works, and
| then record it on some trusted blockchain.
|
| Ian Goodfellow: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) |
| Lex Fridman Podcast #19 [2019]
| https://youtu.be/Z6rxFNMGdn0?t=3329
|
| Goodfellow is the first person I've read (or heard) that
| espouses this pretty basic, obvious position. There's
| apparently still a giant cohort who utterly reject
| authenticity. Even as opt-in. Because something something
| Freedom Speeches(tm).
|
| I intend to learn about the consensus stuff. Like you seem
| to already grok. That's clearly a necessary enabler for
| authenticity use cases.
| danuker wrote:
| At least long-term holders believe it's worth it.
|
| You can judge that there exist such people by the fact that
| the bottom of crashes (at the maximum fear), do not continue
| until zero.
|
| I suspect cryptocurrency fills a need for hard money - not
| like fiat, that loses purchasing power at the whim of
| unelected central or commercial bankers.
|
| Of course, there's lots of volatility, but I suspect that's
| normal for an asset class this new. Do you research, discount
| its future value to you, try to come up with _true and
| relevant_ inflation rates, and only buy when the market is in
| a fear cycle.
|
| About the externalities, they are the same as with any other
| human endeavour. Government should help internalize
| environmental costs.
| incrudible wrote:
| The energy usage of a PoW scheme is in direct proportion to its
| usage (transaction fees), block reward and price of the
| underlying.
|
| As such, I don't see that Bitcoin Cash, Dash or ZCash would be
| fundamentally more efficient if these factors were to rival
| Bitcoin, even if parameters such as block size were to change.
| For the longest time, Ethereum transactions were far cheaper
| than Bitcoin transactions, but today they rival Bitcoin.
| danuker wrote:
| Transaction fees are not just proportional to usage. They are
| a price set by demand (usage) and supply (block space).
|
| Currently Bitcoin limiting the block size to 1MB is
| artificially lowering supply.
|
| Recently, Bitcoin Cash has surpassed Bitcoin in transactions
| per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-
| btc-bch.ht...
|
| Their blocks are larger, so there is more room for
| transactions, so miners are not so well rewarded, so they can
| afford to waste less electricity in total.
|
| Of course, this reduced waste implies reduced security
| (instead of securing >$700k/h, it's "only" $8.5k/h -
| https://www.crypto51.app/).
| incrudible wrote:
| What I'm trying to get at is that _all_ of these factors
| matter, not just one of these factors in isolation.
| Ethereum also has larger block size over time, and I 'm
| sure it processes far more transactions than Bitcoin.
|
| Suppose that Bitcoin Cash were to increase in price ten-
| fold, then logically it would make economic sense to burn
| ten times as much energy to mine it, no matter how many
| transactions are processed.
| danuker wrote:
| You are right. I suppose a fair target to tune would be
| the cost-of-51%-attack instead of an arbitrary block size
| or percent fees.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| The energy consumed per transaction to produce the PoW to
| earn the block subsidy decreases as the number of
| transactions increases, because the two are independent of
| each other, with rising transaction volumes not increasing
| the block subsidy and the associated energy consumed to earn
| it.
|
| Moreover, the energy consumed per transaction to produce the
| PoW to earn the transaction fee decreases when the
| transaction fee decreases.
|
| So for both of these reasons, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin
| Cash, that can process thousands of times more transactions
| than Bitcoin, has the potential to be orders of magnitude
| more energy efficient.
| gidam wrote:
| this guy really understand thermodynamics and physics of
| batteries... We are safe! I propose to entrust him with the
| solution of all the energy problems of the planet.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It is crypto. It does not have to make sense.
| arithma wrote:
| Bitcoin is more of ash rather than a battery in this analogy.
|
| I like bitcoin (the idea, not the burning of the planet, even
| though it's only a temporary hack to bootstrap the whole thing).
| And hey, maybe it will encourage building nuclear mining farms,
| that will give their owners free bitcoin, and then we can use the
| nuclear plants.
|
| The only defense I can stomach for Bitcoin's unfathomable energy
| consumption is that it might be only temporary. Is it worth it?
| So far, not that much, but I think developed-countries under-
| estimate the value of bitcoin, since they have more stable
| economies, and thus currencies, and enjoy freedom of moving their
| money, and data privacy...
| henearkr wrote:
| Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere
| "battery" then...
| ketamine__ wrote:
| The fact that said thing produces a lot of CO2 is not going to
| stop anyone from doing said thing if they enjoy it. Source:
| population growth.
| quotha wrote:
| That cannot continue, pop will drop significantly if we don't
| stop producing so much CO2.
| paulcole wrote:
| > will drop significantly if we don't stop producing so
| much CO2
|
| Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade
| from now? 2070?
|
| Everybody knows there are problems with producing too much
| CO2. However, nearly everyone's hoping (but not saying)
| that the bill doesn't come fully due until they're dead.
| And by "fully due" I mean "directly effects their day-to-
| day life in a truly drastic way."
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Next Tuesday? Sometime this summer? Next year? A decade
| from now? 2070?
|
| There's a reasonable case that this gained force _last_
| summer, i.e. in 2020
|
| source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-
| canada-56288038
|
| But yeah, it takes a few decades for the bill to come
| fully due from a "decline in birth rate".
| user-the-name wrote:
| People don't ruin the environment with bitcoin mining because
| they "enjoy" it. They do it because they can get money out of
| it.
|
| Stop the supply of money, it goes away.
| xbar wrote:
| These are just hand-wavy rosy ideas.
| raverbashing wrote:
| People claiming bitcoin is a battery understand nothing about
| batteries. It's just fake rethoric designed to greenwash it.
|
| Batteries are batteries, fair enough.
|
| Load shifting "are batteries" because you're not using the
| electricity now, but later. So it's equivalent to storing it now
| and using later. Fine
|
| Aluminium smelting "are batteries" because you're shifting the
| location. It's like putting a battery in a ship, charging it then
| shipping it somewhere else (as long as it doesn't get stuck ;) )
|
| Bitcoin mining is... ? You mined your coin now, using
| electricity, cool. Then to use it you need to spend more
| electricity. 812.74 kWh per transaction to be exact
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
|
| This is ridiculous. This is not a battery.
| thesausageking wrote:
| This is the new "blockchain not bitcoin". Why do VCs feel the
| need to post reductive grand statements like these?
| audunw wrote:
| What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to
| redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT
| fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by
| definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being
| a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is
| more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the
| energy being put into it is basically pure waste?
|
| There is no way to make aluminum other than putting huge amounts
| of energy. Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just
| those invested in it. There are plenty of ways to do digital
| transactions, or even to do proof-of-work cryptocurrency (if you
| feel that's necessary), besides using Bitcoin. With aluminum you
| can even reverse the process and use it as an actual battery.
| With Bitcoin you can't. The energy is burned forever.
|
| I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is
| cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.
| [deleted]
| hackernudes wrote:
| You don't think bitcoin should be valuable. Your point is fine,
| but it really doesn't address the article at all!
|
| Assuming bitcoin stays valuable, does it make sense to use
| bitcoin mining to augment some power projects? Like using
| otherwise wasted energy to mine or to mine in places where it
| might not be easy to transmit the electricity?
| [deleted]
| verdverm wrote:
| Actual batteries would be a better choice than consuming the
| energy at the time it is created. Investing in better
| transmission infrastructure would increase this benefit.
| ftlio wrote:
| Bitcoin is P2P software. Every model that doesn't start there
| is wrong. Certainly most hype pieces start somewhere else. All
| critiques do. It's easy to ignore them.
| TheBlight wrote:
| >First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the
| most fiat currencies by definition)
|
| What is your working definition for fiat currency?
|
| Mine is:
|
| "Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed
| by a commodity such as gold."
|
| Government doesn't issue bitcoins. Stopped reading after that
| as you seem uneducated on the subject.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think of the government part as largely an accident; my
| definition of fiat money is "money that has value solely
| because the transacting parties say it has, and not intrinsic
| uses" - historically the way to get people to agree something
| intrinsically value-less has value was by government decree,
| but there are lots of exceptions. I think of the Yapannese
| rei stones as fiat money, for example (though there is some
| question about them having inherent value). Basically any
| money that isn't commodity money (or directly redeemable for
| commodities) is a fiat money.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
| Empact wrote:
| I think your definition is faulty: are you aware of shell
| money? This served as money enabling international trade
| for thousands of years[1], and can you say these shells
| have intrinsic uses?[2] These shells had value because of
| their properties: compact, scarce, unforgeable.
|
| In contrast, fiat value is held because an authoritative
| party says value is held, e.g. Chucky Cheese tokens, or the
| USD. Fiat requires this authority, as in its definition:
| "An arbitrary order or decree."
|
| There are no authoritative parties declaring that Bitcoin
| has value, rather the market is arriving at that conclusion
| through decentralized operation, just as has occurred for
| thousands of years with gold, shells, etc.
|
| [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
|
| [2] To say that a store of wealth also has uses as jewelry
| is redundant, IMO - storing and displaying wealth are age-
| old desires.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Shell money began as commodity money according to most
| sources- shells were inherently valuable because of body
| ornamentation as you mention (similar to how gold was
| useful to easily work into soft metal jewelry).
|
| If Chucky cheese tokens are money at all, they are
| "representative money" because they can be readily
| exchanged for various commodities by the issuer (the
| prizes and games).
|
| A central authorities decree is not required for money to
| be fiat, it just simply can't have intrinsic uses like
| commodity money or be directly redeemable for commodities
| like representative money. It has value purely because we
| have confidence it will have value in the future - and
| historically the most reliable way to do that is by
| government decree, but it could also be by a mass
| consensus that a particular crypto coin will still be
| used in the future.
| Empact wrote:
| I expect economics textbooks in the future will refer to
| this time as the time this question was settled: were
| shells and gold money because of their intrinsic ability
| to be used as jewelry etc., or was it jewelry because
| their other properties (particularly scarcity /
| unforgeable costliness) made them natural monies?
|
| Hard money advocates have been arguing this point
| recently, and IMO it can only be settled by the market
| and observation. Only if the latter is true, does Bitcoin
| have a valid claim to become money.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology
| is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting
| insane.
|
| I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the
| true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly
| shit.
|
| > There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions
|
| Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital
| transactions". It was made to be able to do digital
| transactions without any trusted 3rd party. The distinction is
| important, because that's why Proof of Work exists and is
| energy intensive in the first place.
|
| Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some
| alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof
| of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can
| work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I believe that this will follow the usual technobubble
| pattern, pump energy (money) until it blows, gather the
| remaining working bits on the ground afterwards and come back
| in 10 years.
| danShumway wrote:
| > It was made to be able to do digital transactions without
| any trusted 3rd party.
|
| Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are
| claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is
| a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.
|
| They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons
| why the technology was built in the first place. But if
| people don't actually care about having distributed payments,
| and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment
| processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in
| the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.
|
| Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being
| used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular
| transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most
| other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps _least_
| suited for technologically.
|
| I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I
| don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care
| about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of
| this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a
| speculative asset. If they did care, they would have
| abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin --
| anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction
| fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the
| dollar, or that had better privacy.
|
| I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin
| matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the
| technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's
| not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't
| be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk
| about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about
| technology.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying
| that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest
| proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any
| evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an
| excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they
| would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any
| other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to
| reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that
| fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.
|
| To be fair, a large part of the ecosystem doesn't actually
| deal with Bitcoin at all. The total market capitalization
| of cryptocurrencies seems to reach up to 1.5T USD at this
| point. Bitcoin is 1T USD of that, with the rest of the
| ecosystem quickly catching up[1]
|
| It's really hard to generalize that everyone in any given
| ecosystem are the same way or act with the same interest.
| Yes, most people in the oil industry probably don't care
| about the environment either, but I'm sure there are many
| in the oil industry who actually care about the environment
| as well. Same goes for cryptocurrencies.
|
| - [1] "Percentage of Total Market Capitalization
| (Dominance)" graph - https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
| danShumway wrote:
| That's fair, but how much of that 33% of the overall
| cryptocurrency ecosystem is going onto forums and arguing
| specifically about Bitcoin?
|
| I don't necessarily want to generalize about all
| cryptocurrencies or all crypto-enthusiasts -- there is
| genuinely interesting technology here. But I find it
| increasingly hard not to generalize about the subset that
| shows up in these discussions arguing that _Bitcoin_ is
| the future.
| verdverm wrote:
| BTC at times has had less than 50% of the total market
| value, so if it is now 2/3, then the rest of the market
| has lost ground, the opposite of catching up
| smashem wrote:
| > Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are
| claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin
| is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.
|
| Who's claiming this? The Lightning Network is gaining
| popularity as a decentralized Layer 2 solution, for
| example.
|
| You mean like Cash App and PayPal?
| capableweb wrote:
| I think things like centralized exchanges doing trading
| with centralized technology also "claims" this. Some
| people seem to be fine with using those as well, even
| though it supposedly goes against their interest of a
| payment network without trusted 3rd parties.
| bingbong70 wrote:
| Efficient decentralized exchanges are not easy to build
| but an increasing number exist with the aim of solving
| the centralization issue (overreaching regulation
| attempts will push this into hyperdrive).
|
| We can't act like a 12 year old invention should arrive
| with drop in decentralized replacements for every
| component of the legacy financial system...this is all
| being built from scratch as we criticize its
| shortcomings.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually
| being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for
| regular transactions, which is ironically the task that
| (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's
| perhaps least suited for technologically.
|
| I agree that many cryptocurrencies are not suited for
| this... but some are, and of those, Cardano is proof-of-
| stake from launch, has ~50 billion USD market cap, 20s to 1
| minute confirmations (up to 10 for complete
| irreversibility, but one confirmation is really reliable
| already), an amazing community, relatively low fees (about
| $0.20 USD right now but hopefully decreasing in the
| future), ability to support 1 million transactions/s
| without fee increasing, and extremely high
| decentralization.
|
| I agree that many cryptocurrencies aren't suited to real
| use at scale as a transaction layer, but I think the hype
| about the power of this when done right is very fair.
| danShumway wrote:
| I should clarify, Proof of Work/Stake _for Bitcoin_ only
| matters if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless
| and anonymous payment system for regular transactions.
|
| I agree that there are other parts of the full crypto
| ecosystem that are leveraging blockchain more
| effectively. I don't know how optimistic I am about them
| overall, but at the very least on the technology side of
| things they certainly have a lot more potential to turn
| into real payment systems than Bitcoin does, and I don't
| mean to disparage the people working on them.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| You need to have a triadic understanding of bitcoin, this is
| what allows it to be a flat currency, a store of value, and a
| battery at both one and the same time, through the act of
| transubstantiation of the coin a quantum state is triggered
| that allows the individual coin to choose which form it will
| manifest itself as.
| sgt101 wrote:
| You had me there!
| funkychicken wrote:
| I wish I could give this comment HackerNews Gold.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm actually surprised at the reception, I was expecting a
| -3, but I wanted to say it anyway.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Parody & sarcasm are very effective tools for
| illustrating how hyperbolic a situation has become.
| berkes wrote:
| 'Pure waste' is very much a point of view. If you dislike porn,
| the entire energy to create and distribute that, is 'pure
| waste' in your view (last time I looked, streaming porn
| consumes about the same amount of energy as Bitcoin. This
| probably changed by now). If, like me, you dislike billboards,
| all those giant flaring screens, burning neon, or LCD pixels,
| screaming to make you buy Pepsi, is 'pure waste'.
|
| If you dislike Bitcoin, obviously any kilowatt used by it is
| 'pure waste'.
| IMTDb wrote:
| The vast difference here is that the energy consumption
| required by Bitcoin is integral to its model. The stated goal
| is to make massive amount of otherwise useless computations.
|
| If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity,
| we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any
| way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we
| consume less electricity.
|
| As soon as there is a new way to do bitcoin related
| operations using less electricity (eg: ASICS), the security
| of the network decreases. And everyone moves to the new
| model, in order to go back to consuming a lot of electricity,
| in order to restore trust in the network.
|
| On a macro scale, Bitcoin _has_ to consume lots of
| electricity, any possible improvement in that area _needs_ to
| be wiped out by just people going back to consuming more
| electricity, otherwise the model fails. The whole bitcoin
| trust model revolves around people being ready to waste a ton
| energy for it. That 's not the case of porn, or billboards:
| the energy consumption is just a side effect and not a
| requirement, they have value outside of the consumed
| electricity. Bitcoin entire value is only dependent on how
| much people are willing to invest in it, which roughly
| translates on how much electricity is wasted.
| capableweb wrote:
| > If there was any way to stream porn using less
| electricity, we would consume less electricity for that
|
| In a perfect world, yes. We would use less electricity if
| we realize we could. Unfortunately it doesn't work like
| that in the real world. In reality it has to make economic
| sense, as capitalism is "the way of life" in the western
| world (and many other places), otherwise it won't be
| thought of. We're slowly changing this.
|
| Bitcoin is capitalism modernized, fully on the internet and
| on our computers. Since computers and the internet tends to
| multiply everything, we now have capitalism as a protocol,
| intensified like never before. Since being environment
| friendly is not a benefit for the participant in the
| network, it won't be a consideration.
|
| A big fault in the protocol, and hard to see how it can be
| solved in Proof of Work. Luckily there are some people
| working on alternatives but we have yet to see if they
| actually work in practice on the same scale as Bitcoin.
| klyrs wrote:
| Data centers and cloud providers are optimizing flops per
| watt, not flops per second. Energy providers are finding
| that wind and solar have become incredibly cheap, and
| transitioning as fast as they can. It took us a while to
| overcome political hurdles erected by the carbon-burning
| industry, but it turns out this stuff just makes sense on
| an economic level.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not sure it's happening as fast as you seem to indicate
| here. And if it is, what's the problem with Bitcoin and
| energy consumption, exactly the same thing will happen,
| but faster since Bitcoin is all about money?
| user-the-name wrote:
| It will not. Bitcoin is literally designed specifically
| to make sure this never happens.
|
| Again, as soon as you manage to develop a way to mine
| bitcoin more efficiently, the difficulty of mining will
| automatically go up to make sure you are still wasting
| just as much energy.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| the diff goes up for everyone, not just you. you still
| have a relative advantage over all the other miners who
| do have not yet reproduced your efficiency gains.
| klyrs wrote:
| Where did I indicate a timescale (outside of "it took us
| a while" -- wherein I said that progress is slow)? As
| many others have pointed out, energy efficiency is seen
| as a bug and bitcoin has repeatedly increased hashing
| difficulty in order to offset increasing efficiency.
| Likewise, if a locale is known to have cheap power,
| miners move in until the power isn't cheap anymore.
| Eventually we'll be on 90+% renewables, and it won't be
| as bad, but ultimately, bitcoin is a space heater, and
| never a battery unless you devise a system to capture,
| store, and generate electricity from that heat.
| klyrs wrote:
| On the topic of space heaters, though... if you replace
| your gas furnace with a bitcoin mining rig, and your
| electric is 100% renewable, then that's fine by me.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A waste by most societal measures. Purely imaginary point
| backed by nothing that is easily defrauded and highly
| volatile. With no societal or personal value. And we've
| chosen to burn gigawatts of energy on this foolish game. Its
| easy to see it as enormous waste.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| A waste by _your_ societal measures. It 's easy to see it
| as enormous waste, _for you_
|
| Speaking of "burnt gigawatts", if our society is still
| using coal to produce energy, are you blaming also Bitcoin
| for this? Too easy, sorry.
| africanboy wrote:
| it's a waste for 99.9% of the World population, assuming
| that bitcoin's 6 million wallets represent 6 million
| different people.
|
| So yes, it's arithmetically a total waste.
| atmosx wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but this part is way off:
|
| > [...] despite being one of the most fiat currencies by
| definition [...]
|
| FIAT currencies are by design inflationary to enhance spending.
| Bitcoin is deflationary _by design_. Since there's no bank or
| state backing Bitcoin, the only way that bitcoin makes sense
| was/is deflation. This quality makes BTC an asset and that's
| what it is, a digital asset. As a currency BTC has already
| failed.
| agumonkey wrote:
| how would you quality VISA and Tesla accepting bitcoin ? does
| it qualify as asset tranfer or currency ? (open question)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Governments want you to think of crypto primarily as an
| asset and not a currency, because they don't want to give
| up control over currency creation. The fact that you have
| to file capital gains for every crypto will be the giant
| silent hurdle that stimies wide spread use. The only way to
| overcome this is if so many people ignore the law that it
| becomes unenforceable. Only time will tell.
| atmosx wrote:
| > Governments want you to think of crypto primarily as an
| asset and not a currency, because they don't want to give
| up control over currency creation.
|
| According to Adi Shamir[1] 98% of bitcoins belonged to 2%
| of portfolios in 2012. So... The government is "bad"
| because you can actually express your opinion in monetary
| policy, you know who's who, etc. and BTC (or any other
| crypto) is good because you have absolutely no idea who
| the 2% is? I'm not following...
|
| Regarding the gov and BTC. The government will tax BTC
| the same will tax any other asset, so in reality, the gov
| doesn't care. You can choose to hide profits from BTC and
| you'd choose to hide profits from any other financial
| activity. I don't really see the US Gov fighting bitcoin,
| if anything the gov tries to put BTC into perspective.
|
| If you are anti-gov because "gov is bad (by default)" I
| get the feeling but has little to do with BTC.
|
| [1]: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
| atmosx wrote:
| I'm not sure how is this relevant. Would you really buy a
| Tesla with BTC, when you can buy it with USD? If I give you
| 10 BTC today, you'd hoard them or go on a spending spree?
| lottin wrote:
| A fiat currency is any currency that isn't backed by a
| commodity, i.e. it's not redeemable for a certain quantity of
| the commodity by the issuer, and bitcoin falls squarely into
| this category.
| smashem wrote:
| > ...Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those
| invested in it...
|
| A sound monetary system has more value than anything else on
| this planet. There's a lot of information out there, but here's
| one article to illustrate my point:
| https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...
|
| > The energy is burned forever.
|
| Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example.
| "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the
| energy is not lost in a bitcoin.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| > Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example.
| "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the
| energy is not lost in a bitcoin.
|
| That moves the definition of battery far away from normal
| usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery,
| whether it's cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold.
|
| Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from
| another source, such gasoline or food.
| smashem wrote:
| It just depends on which parts of the system you're focused
| on.
|
| We'll continue to bridge the gap between monetary ->
| electrical energy. A bitcoin is a store of monetary energy,
| and the bitcoin network is readily available. We're
| building solutions on top of the network to more quickly
| and easily convert that monetary energy to electrical
| energy.
|
| It's somewhat analogous as converting readily available
| wind (kinetic energy) to electrical energy. There is a
| large gap between the two forms of energy, but we're
| continuing to close it.
| [deleted]
| Cantinflas wrote:
| It is not a battery if you cannot get electricity out when
| needed. It's a weird analogy for something that does not store
| energy in any form
| smashem wrote:
| Since a bitcoin is a monetary form of energy, and since the
| bitcoin network is so readily available, we could build layers
| on top of the network to enable quicker conversion of monetary
| energy to electrical energy.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Literal energy isn't the same thing as capital.
| notum wrote:
| A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to
| produce the same type of energy that was put into it.
|
| While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter
| bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this
| instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from
| aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of
| the battery scope.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Not "a bit". It is just absolute and complete nonsense coming
| from the sociopathic cryptocurrency fraudsters.
| eloff wrote:
| Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically
| you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum.
| It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the
| refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people
| suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid.
| But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it
| off or you miss out on the returns from the investment, and the
| process runs at high temperatures and can't just be turned on
| and off (in fact if that happens unintentionally it makes a big
| mess!)
|
| I agree with what you're saying though.
| notum wrote:
| You're right. If we further expand the idea we can extract
| energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll
| refrain from calling my dog a battery though.
|
| Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
| eloff wrote:
| There are aluminum batteries you know. There are practical
| reasons they're not in wide use, but they have incredible
| energy density, one of the highest of any battery.
| [deleted]
| latexr wrote:
| > we can extract energy from anything flammable or
| otherwise reactant.
|
| You don't need that either. Stacking concrete blocks can
| work as a battery:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk
| Roark66 wrote:
| Actually we can extract electricity from aluminium. A while ago
| someone proposed a "battery" that would consume aluminium as it
| provides electricity. Supposedly this battery was going to have
| 10x the energy density of today's li-ion batteries.
|
| Edit:as for crypto you're completely correct. If one set out to
| invent the most inefficient energy use possible in computing
| the result would be crypto proof of work that grows all the
| time.
| Liron wrote:
| Imagine that as you mine BTC, you're instantly paying that BTC
| for someone to drill some oil and put it in a barrel wherever
| you plan to use it. The system of you and your BTC plus that
| other person and the oil in the earth is a battery. Ok now just
| delay the other person's actions in time.
| clomond wrote:
| Agreed - calling it a battery is definitely a massive
| conflation with calling it an "energy sink".
|
| While you could call it (generously) a form of embedded energy,
| it fundamentally can not turned back into a form of energy
| directly, making the comparison very silly.
|
| As others have mentioned, Aluminum can actually be turned into
| a battery to get the energy back. Bitcoin only if you traded it
| for energy....(still not a battery)
| scotty79 wrote:
| Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They run
| on money.
|
| Crypto is a weird kind of battery, where you can put in energy,
| take out money, and when you need energy later, buy energy for
| that money.
|
| Analogy doesn't make sense at all if you skip the money part.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They
| run on money.
|
| You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an abstraction
| of energy and resources used by a human organization. Remove
| the money and the organization can still function. Remove
| energy and resources and the organization can't function.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an
| abstraction of energy and resources used by a human
| organization.
|
| Money is a separate system that often but not always flows
| hand in hand with the flow of energy and resources.
|
| > Remove the money and the organization can still function.
|
| Not every organisation. Remove money from the stock market
| and you have barely anything left. Large portion of money
| circulates in organisations that have very little to do
| with energy or resources.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > Money is a separate system that often but not always
| flows hand in hand with the flow of energy and resources.
|
| It is an exception when money doesn't flow hand in hand
| with energy and/or resources not a rule as you are
| implying
|
| > Not every organisation.
|
| You are moving the goalpost here. Your claim wasn't that
| few organizations don't run on energy and resources. Your
| claim was that no organization runs on energy and
| resources.
|
| > Remove money from the stock market and you have barely
| anything left. Large portion of money circulates in
| organisations that have very little to do with energy or
| resources.
|
| Stock market is an organization which has everything to
| do with energy and resources. Money is just used as an
| abstraction of those. Remove energy and resources of
| companies whose stock is being traded and you have
| nothing left.
|
| Considering that your claim was that human organizations
| run on money and not on energy and resources I'm sure you
| won't have a problem naming a few of those organization.
| Just pleas don't name those where money is just an
| abstraction of energy/resources because those
| organization do actually run on energy and resources.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's rational for people invested in bitcoin to try to justify
| its wasteful architecture.
|
| I sympathise with the need to break off governments and giant
| like Visa and MasterCard. But we need to be better than them
| before transitioning.
|
| Btc is pure speculation and fomo
| noxer wrote:
| see XRPL.org its basically BTC but better and actually usable
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Batteries can release energy. Bitcoin cannot. Neither can
| aluminum.
|
| Bitcoin consumes vast amounts of energy, far more than
| "traditional" payment systems (per transaction), and denying that
| reality helps nothing. Bitcoin is an energy-wasting system. Fix
| that problem if you want to see wider adoption; don't just
| pretend there is no problem.
| noxer wrote:
| Aluminum actually can. Its made form aluminuum oxide + energy
| and you can oxidize (for example burn) aluminum back into
| aluminum oxide which releases energy. Certainly not what the
| author meant and certainly not possible with bitcoin where the
| energy is turned into heat and no chemical reaction happens at
| all.
| quotha wrote:
| Interesting idea, not sure battery is the word for this, and
| there are already strong forces at work driving away fossil fuel.
| sanbor wrote:
| Reducing damage to the environment should be a core goal of
| cryptocurrencies. As things stand now in most countries, miners
| can get away with burning fossil fuels to mine and profit,
| without paying the cost of the contamination produced. But others
| will pay the cost for sure. The pollution byproduct of crypto
| should be fixed ASAP, not rationalized.
| knl wrote:
| Ah, I love how people love to paddle flawed ideas in order to
| protect their mindset.
|
| This article goes into great depths to explain all the fallacies
| when it comes to energy and bitcoin:
| https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c....
| tl;dr is that bitcoin is just wasting energy and no amount of
| text will help improve that situation. It should be outright
| forbidden.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| At first I thought the author makes fun of Bitcoin fanatics, but
| it appears he's actually serious? This is just insane.
| [deleted]
| kneel wrote:
| Author is 100% correct with his assessment.
|
| I don't see a single coherent argument against in this comment
| section, just incredulity trying to defend itself. Real
| dynamics at play here.
|
| We're still a ways off from realizing what's going on but I'm
| happy to see others articulating what the code can only
| describe.
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