Topic: Arguing that a coin with a very low energy usage or "efficient", cannot exist (Read 625 times)

And so the reason why miners will also sell their coins for the higher price regardless of whether they use green energy or coal, the price will still go up making the cryptocurrencies also go up. If the miners get these coins for almost no cost, like the ones we are just staking, stakers will also be selling them for less price.

BTC will always be the preferred coin this is why even if they find a way to ban or not accept BTC coming from Chinese miners, nothing is going to change.
1 BTC will always be 1BTC.

In a POW system, miners need to spend their coins mined to cover the cost eventually, which means a redistribution of coins.
However in a POS system, the cost of machines and energy is cut to an indifferent level. There would be no such forced redistribution as POW coins.

The agenda is more than a little transparent here.  You only pretend to care about energy efficiency and the environmental impact of PoW because you peddle a PoS shitcoin.  You want to shout from the rooftops, "hey, look at these (currently) successful projects and mine should also be successful by proxy for some reason".  Except it doesn't work like that. 



Spare us the 'Helen Lovejoy' routine.  Say, if they ever invented aircraft that ran on PoS, then you could pretend to care about the environmental impact of those too. 

Isn't it shameful how wasteful it is to burn jet fuel.  Won't somebody please think of the children?   

The people that struggle to pay increased electricity rates and their kids breathe in more polluted air because of bitcoin PoW miners have a different opinion than yours.   

Yeah, because it's like those seeking privacy and using dumb phones instead of smartphones. For them, it's the privacy that matters more than any other function today's smartphones have, so they trade new tech for old, more privacy-offering phones instead.

I honestly don't care about the energy that much. There are so many other activities governments do that pollute the environment. This definitely isn't a reason to block the world's fairest currency's supply from being created.

Here something for you to think on.
On CMK positions.

1. Bitcoin     PoW
2. Ethereum PoW converting to PoS
3. Tether ,   Token
4. Binance , Token
5. Cardano, Pure PoS
6. XRP ,       Consensus

Like I said earlier when a nonPoW coin sits on #1, only then will it sink in with bitcoiners how much energy efficiently really matters.  

As far as I know, ethereum is moving to POS for a few years already and they are still not there for some strange reason.

Cardano is another example, and I already conceded of deviations from the "normal" in the shape of XRP, or ripple coin.
So I think the best counter-argument would be ripple, because as far as I know XRP doesn't use POW or POS, and they still have value, at some point they were among the largest coins. But at the same time many people don't trust it, think they are a "scam", and I think XRP is almost like a product sold by a brand, like coca cola. People would buy a Coke for $2 even if the manufacturing would cost 10 cents.

Somehow things are different when the product is a "brand name". Maybe it's the same with Cardano, maybe they managed to make a name for themselves, almost like a brand, with clever marketing, or with good arguments and good innovations.

EDIT: and a few posts earlier we established that in fact POS also requires some type of investing, in the form that you are required to hold coins. I'm not sure what implications does this have on the whole economic factor, but I'm sure it has some implications and there's also a reason most miners don't move en masse to POS alt coins mining.

Who says they aren't, according to your thought process, just the idea of moving to Proof of Stake should collapse a coin price.
So how do you reconcile that ethereum that is moving to PoS is in the #2 position
and many market analyst predict that ethereum will become #1 coin on CMK.
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/buying-stocks/articles/why-ethereum-is-surging-and-could-surpass-bitcoin/


Cardano currently a Pure active PoS coins is in the #5 position on CMK, according to you , that can't happen.
Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash pure PoW coins have fallen outside the top 10 coins.

Energy efficiency matters, and no matter how much bictoiners want to deny it, the marketplace have begun showing it.
But I am guessing for the majority of bitcoin energy waste deniers, it won't really sink in ,
until ethereum or cardano are sitting at the #1 position on CMK.  


FYI:
PoS does use energy,
but it only requires a portion of the energy used by a node, which can easily be all renewable since it has such little requirements.
While Bitcoin PoW is using the energy resources of almost a midsize country, and what does all that increase energy get you,
nothing but increased environment damage and larger energy bills for people on the same grids.
*Notice as Bitcoin Energy waste increases there is no increase in onchain transaction performance.*
Bitcoin onchaiin PoW~ 7 transactions per second.
Ethereum onchain   ~20 Transactions per second
Cardano pure PoS  ~257 Transactions per second

I found another hole in the whole "let's mine cryptocoins using almost no energy" logic.

If that is a viable alternative, how come miners don't all shift to those magic coins which cost almost zero energy to produce but which you can sell with tons of dollars profit ? Or at least shift a large percent of their facilities to that.
I mean miners are focused on profit right ? They are not altruistic, concerned only with the environment.

If they don't do that, it means it's an economic impossibility, like a perpetuum mobile, as the title of this thread.

If it's a PoW blockchain cryptocurrency, I think you're right that it's impossible to make it sustainable in a way Musk imagines. However, I think there can be a few workarounds that could help with the ecological impact:
1. Legislation that boosts shifting from coal to renewable energy (not just for BTC, but for any electricity usage).
2. Using more coins and dividing the load between them. I'm not sure if this can really help, but perhaps if people used Bitcoin a little less and Ethereum, Litecoin, Doge and other coins a little more, there wouldn't be such a high demand for mining Bitcoin specifically. However, the demand will increase for other coins, so maybe it doesn't make a difference.
3. Using DAG coins like IOTA that solve the scalability issue in the long run.

Red & caps was because I did not feel like separating your quotes.

I get it , you're so smart, the news must all be wrong about the bans in sections of China & New York.

Note, we were talking about ACs not cars, but hey you're so smart.

In fact , you're so smart, their is really no point in us conversing,
because your smart mind is closed to the problems that PoW is going to cause, and the last thing I care to do is to change your mind.  
Keep your PoW is great mindset.

Have a nice day.  

When you know your opponents are not arguing in good faith then there is no point in engaging with them, if this was caused because of ignorance then we could explain to them why they are wrong but when we know they are exaggerating how much energy the miners are using, when they are misrepresenting the sources which in most cases are green sources of energy and when they try to make it seem as if the system in place is more efficient when it is not, you know there is no point in engaging with them at all.

The last time I checked it took A LOT of energy to mine precious metals.  Moreover how many banks, ATMs, machines etc operate to move fiat?  Massive amounts of "energy" are needed to process and hold fiat currency.

The only reason these fools are picking on bitcoin is that they don't understand it or simply hate it because they don't have any.

I understand that to mint/mine POS coins, you are not looking at investing $5000 in energy so you can sell the product with $10 000, but instead you need to invest in owning and staking a certain amount of coins so you can get a certain amount of returns. What percent of returns vs the investment percent, it seems it's not known. But the concept is clear so far.
  But how do you get the initial coins ? The first batch ?

Because in the case of POW coins even the very first coins you obtain by paying for the energy.
Is the first POS batch of coins generated "for free" or something like that ?

Got triggered? WHY THE SHOUTING IN CAPS AND RED?

1) China has not banned mining as you can easily see from the current hashrate, and last time I checked New York wasn't a country.
2) What waste?
3) Bad analogy, cars have become 10 times more efficient that doesn't mean world fuel consumption has gone down.
4) Well, at least we're not arguing on this one?
 

FYI:
MAR 5, 2019
Plattsburgh Ends Cryptocurrency Moratorium

Do your research better next time.

PoW , Proof of Waste is becoming a PR and environmental problem, and so far none of the bitcoiners have offered a solution.
And the excuses made to why energy waste is not a problem for bitcoin, has made no inroads with anyone.


FYI:
One of the 1st places to ban bitcoin mining
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/16/17128678/plattsburgh-new-york-ban-cryptocurrency-mining

BTC Energy waste is a real problem, and ignoring it , won't make it go away.

Name the increasing number of countries that have banned bitcoin mining


If energy prices go up it's fairly obvious that bitcoins' energy consumption will go down.
Use logic, if one kwh would be 1$, even assuming no other costs no nothing and only the most efficient gear the hash rate would drop to one third in an instant.
It's not the poor persons who would be affected by an increase of 10% in something that is less than 10% of their monthly expenses, but a few miners for who such an increase would mean shutting down.


Just how we are protecting them from all the traffic in the cities, all the coal burned for air conditioning, and watching pornhub.
 

Carbon neutral is a bullshit expression and anyone who has done at least 1 year of chemistry knows that. Just because you plant one thousand trees like some are claims is doing, doesn't make you carbon neutral, when those trees die the entire carbon that has been sequestered is released back in the atmosphere, goodbye neutrality. Using only solar panels? How are those made? How much they last? How many components are rendered obsolete in all datacenters every year and thrown away? There is no such thing as carbon-neutral activity in human society.


PoS is a Piece of S#$%

I suggest you look at ethereum #2 on CMK , and cardano #4 on CMK,
Ethereum is on a track to convert to PoS , and Cardano is already fully PoS.
So it appears the markets have started to notice, and no one is worried about their security structure, so maybe join us in 2021 ,
where the PoS coins have been used since 2013 without any of the misplaced fears propagated by PoW supporters coming to fruition.

PoS is one solution, don't want PoS,
then you need to come up with something else, before most politicians ban mining to protect their citizens.
Claiming their are no problems with bitcoin's energy waste won't be looked on as a solution.

Answer the following
1. how do you plan to stop the increased banning of btc miners by cities and countries?
2. how will you compensate the poor for their increased energy prices , when they are competing with rich btc miners?
3. how will you protect the poor with respiratory problems that suffer from increased air pollution from the extra coal burned?
4. how can you make bitcoin close to carbon neutral before 2050.

If you can solve the above 4 problems, then no one will care if Bitcoin stays PoW,
but if you can't, well then , the trainwreck of an energy waste reckoning is coming.  
So what say you?  

Since negativity will always have a stronger grip in the mind than the positive side of things, news will never have no negative headlines in it. This happened with crypto where they do their best to find a rough edge that they can capitalize on and exhibit to those who aren't aware of what cryptocurrencies are, to of course put the industry in a bad light. It's up to the viewers if they will fall easily to this trap or if they are to conduct their own research.

When you need to create a new negative news background, you should just start telling something like that. And it doesn't matter that it is illogical and defies logic - just tell millions of people about it and they will tell their friends, and they, in turn, will tell theirs - and the job is done. We observed this week how the markets are being manipulated and the cryptocurrency market, unfortunately, is no exception. I would very much like everyone to remember this lesson for a long time and in the future we would rely on some objective information and not this "news".

Taking into account that the main current usage of bitcoin is as a store of value then securing the network is of the utmost importance, moving to another way to secure the network not only will deny miners from a source of revenue and will make them lose their investment but it will also put the network at risk, people are complaining about the energy consumption of bitcoin simply because they think bitcoin is optional while fiat currencies are not, once they face a financial crisis like what we have never seen before I am sure they will change their tune relatively quickly.

Just google a search using "power usage of internet" and you will find that mining uses just a fraction of what other things - mainly streaming services - use. At one time not so many years ago using the same FUD data it was said that streaming would use all available power. Well it hasn't. Mining energy usage is just the latest media clickbait to garner eyeballs.

People never stop talking about this wasting energy thing. Well I do understand the reason why they are always complaining about it. Maybe by the time that renewable energy sources are everywhere, things are going to change and people are going to see it in a totally different way. Although another thing I do think is that everything has their disadvantages. It's just like the other day I was discussing all these different sources of energy with my friends and they were all pointing out the disadvantages of each source.

I believe that solar energy is the right source of clean energy and wouldn't do no harm to mother nature, though one of them did make a statement that solar energy is associated with pollution and indirectly affects our environment. But I think it's far less than what others can cause.

If the energy use serves a purpose, it is not "wasting".


Many? Perhaps.  An overwhelming majority?  No.

It's not going to happen. Get over it.  If you prefer POS, go find a shitcoin.


They don't.  GPU was FAR more energy efficient than CPU.  ASIC were FAR more efficient than GPU.  Today's ASIC are FAR more efficient than the ASIC of the past.  Bitcoin equipment is CONSTANTLY getting more efficient, that's WHY old equipment is useless.

Does Bitcoin use more total energy now than in the past?  Sure.  But that's not because it's less efficient.  That's because it's more secure, and because it's securing more value.  Securing the same amount of value with the same level of security with CPUs would use millions of times more electricity.  Bitcoin has only gotten to the value and security it has today BECAUSE it has gotten more efficient.

Efficiency is NOT a measure of how much energy something uses.  It's a measure of how much energy something uses PER UNIT OF WHATEVER THAT ENERGY IS ACCOMPLISHING.  As an example, which vehicle is more efficient, the one that burns 10 gallons of gasoline, or the one that burns 50 gallons?  That's not an answerable question.  If they both drove 1000 miles on that that gasoline, then sure, the 10 gallon vehicle is more efficient.  However, if the 50 gallon vehicle drove 1000 miles on that 50 gallons, while the 10 gallon vehicle only drove 100 miles on it's 10 gallons, then the 50 gallon vehicle is much more efficient.

There was a time when I used to think that PoS was superior to PoW. But the more I studied about these algorithms, I came to know that PoS is a less secure system, where decentralization can be under threat. And you are right in saying that if PoS was actually superior, then some of these coins might have already overtaken Bitcoin in terms of usage and market cap. PoW may be more energy consuming, but it makes sure that Bitcoin can't be controlled by some organization or individual.

And yet, in the same breath, you completely fail to acknowledge a single downside, flaw or compromise to PoS?  Snake Oil Salesman much?  It's not all rainbows and sunshine, so stop pretending otherwise.

It's a completely different security model, different type of trust level and different alignment of economic incentives.  It's unwise to change the foundations of a robust and stable structure at a whim like that.  If PoS really was better, the market would have noticed by now.  Have you considered that maybe you're not in a position to insult our collective intelligence and act like just about everyone in this multi billion dollar industry is some sort of mindless drone?  Seriously, who the hell do you think you are?


//EDIT:
Troll identified:  This user is the latest incarnation of Zin-Zang and Khaos77.

All PoW coins "suffer" from this, dogecoin consumes less energy just because the reward is smaller, not because it has after blocks or bigger blocks, it's a simple thing of how much miners earn. No PoW coin will ever be able to achieve higher security without an increase in reward and in power consumption.
Just look at the attack on BSV, so yeah, there is no point in arguing one PoW coin is less power-hungry than the other.


I think that the environmentally friendly thing is just as stupid as treating pigs well before your slaughter them and thinking you're a good person, a way of lying to yourself you're making things better by not actually doing anything and not changing your lifestyle at all. Let's be honest on this, I doubt more than 5% of the people who are thinking of buying an electric car with efficient light bulbs are doing so because they want to save the planet and not because of government subsidies, the fear of not being allowed to drive their car in city centers or taxes.

As for the design of a coin, there could actually be a solution. Not bulletproof but still might be a way to solve the consumption a bit.

A miner has two things to worry about, running costs which are mainly energy consumed by the miner, and cooling and getting his investment back.
So the only way of determining a miner to consume less energy would be to make him get his investment back far slower limiting the amount of gear that can be thrown at a coin. How could you do this? Finding an algorithm that is fitting a normal computer as much as possible, making it impossible for an ASIC miner to be cheaper and highly more efficient than a normal desktop. Of course, it will not work completely killing ASICs but it will prevent a bit of the mining rush we're seeing now.
It will also help decentralization as home miners might be able to compete with their computer running a miner in the background and basically not experiencing extra costs while mining farms would still have to think of ROI and power usage.

Of course, you would still have to deal with botnets, huge data centers that might use their spare capacity to mine it, and so on, that's why we don't have such an algorithm yet.
The other way around would be to go the Monero way and update it when the dev teams want to, but that things are a no-go from my point of view because of security, you might end with a drop so huge in hashrate and one flaw might allow a single miner who has spotted it to execute a 51% attack.

I don't have any numbers on that , but IMO, market forces and number of coins will cause a variance between coins price verses fiat.
Cardano was only like .10 cents last November, and now is over $2 bucks per coin, so profit is there.
It is sitting at #4 on CMK, so the era of Proof of Stake only coins is beginning.

One main advantage, is where as PoW miners do go bankrupt, no one will go bankrupt from just running a PC.
Input costs of buying new coins can be more variable, than the monthly energy costs required by the electric utilities.

There's another way you could mint or mine coins without investing money in energy. Being Ripple, or a private company generating 1 billion coins in a night. You bought 500 dollars worth of energy and sold those billion coins with much much more, but that's private company and you can say you pay for that brand, or they are scamy, or who knows what special sauce hides there. Plus they are a company, and it's not like every individual on earth can replicate that easily.

But with bitcoin everyone can start minting or mining coins, and if the cost would be very cheap, everyone would enter and become millionaires. And when everyone is a millionaire, no one is, to quote The Incredibles

But you are saying, with POS you don't pay for energy, so the planet is saved, but you pay instead in holding coins, or a stake.
So it's still a kind of investment required from the miners/minters, just not an investment in ASICS and power.

Do you know if the ratio between investing and profit is similar for a miner involved in a POS operation ? I mean similar to the POW coins.

IF you believe the miners are what is holding the price up, how do you reconcile with the price swings of just $15k lower in just 2 weeks.

The actual argument for bitcoin price is due to it being scarce of only 21 million coins, conversion to another algorithm does not have to change that.

If you look at the billions spend on warehouses / ASICS / Energy, all of that could be used to buy bitcoin for miniting, and could potentially make bitcoin more expensive verses fiat, as bitcoin itself would replace the energy wasting ASICS, and could cause more to Hodl since holding would earn more bitcoins. In the eyes of many moving to PoS would make bitcoin more valuable not less.

FYI:
The reason Christmas lights are not an energy problem , is because of distribution and efficiently evolution.
If we took all of the old incandescent Christmas lights in the world and placed them all in a few warehouse,
Additional Cooling would now be required, Coal Plants would have to make up the additional energy required and
they would also overload the energy grid of that region driving up the energy cost$ for everyone in that region.
Christmas lights used to be incandescent and have evolved to super energy efficient LEDs.
So Christmas Lights have evolved to be more energy efficient ,
why does anyone think bitcoin gets a pass on evolving to be more energy efficient.
  

I understand what you wrote, thank you for the explanations, and I understand how big usage of energy could be perceived as bad, although it could be argued like someone here said, why do Christmas lights and water fountains and many many others get a pass even though they might consume equally as much ?

But that was not my dilemma. As far as I understood from your post, conversion to a POS system would not affect anything, bitcoin would still remain the same, with the benefit that it would be environmentally friendly and media would no longer hate us. Great.
But miners would still "mint" 6.25 bitcoins per block.
How could a miner sell a bitcoin for 50 000 dollars, if he did not pay for a lot of energy to mine that coin ? Since minting the coins would no longer require insane and wasteful amount of energy.
But at the same time there can't be for the miner such a huge return of interest. From almost zero energy cost to selling a coin for let's 50 000.
While with POW, a miner would have to spend maybe 25 000 dollars (with approximation) to get "in his hands" a bitcoin which he could sell for 50k.

All of the waste is in the PoW Mining, which is what includes the transactions.

Their is no mining in Proof of Stake, it is called minting.

Minting produces new coins and includes new transactions, with only the nodes and coins they hold.

So if bitcoin converted to PoS, all ASIC Warehouses would be unnecessary, as they are what is wasting all of the energy.

Converting from PoW to PoS does not affect the # of new coins created unless you change the code.
So the 21 million bitcoin limit would stay untouched and therefore it's value verse fiat would stay at market price.

Media and general populace don't want their local energy prices increased or environment damaged just because of bitcoin refusal to evolve.
That will cause the majority to begin dumping or banning btc as many have dumped/banned other products they consider damaging to the environment. Banned bitcoins won't be worth anything.

FYI:
No one expects bitcoin to convert to PoS overnight, however since ASICS lose value at an insane rate, 1-2 years, before they are paperweights.
BTC could easily modify the code to transition from PoW to a Hybrid PoW/PoS for 2 years, and then transition to Only PoS by the 3rd year.
By the 3rd year energy and carbon footprint issue solved forever.

But this energy efficiency of converting let's say bitcoin from POW to POS - refers to only transactions ? Or to the mining of coins ?
Because even though transactions would be better (debatable), the mining of coins would cost as much as before, right ? And the power usage would still be similar to before. The btc energy global consumption would not change that much, no ?

And I was mostly arguing and asking if it would be possible to mine a coin with a low price (that's what media seems to want) and sell that coin with 50 000 dollars. Even though you paid a fraction to mine that coin.

Dude, you really don't understand how energy efficient Proof of Stake is.

Any Proof of Stake coin is Millions of times more energy efficient than Bitcoin PoW.
https://u.today/charles-hoskinson-cardano-is-16-million-times-more-energy-efficient-than-bitcoin

FYI:
A PoS network could actually use a few solar panels connected to a battery and run a Laptop 24x7 with a zero carbon footprint.

It might, but they'll find something else to complain about. Like mining fees.

The average Joe has no idea about all this stuff mainstream media talks about, so they take their words for granted. The media has this strong advantage that they can manipulate easily, especially these days.

I do feel like Bitcoins can itself become energy efficient because it all depends upon how the person is actually doing the Mining. I do think that the person can actually use green resources more, they could have their own energy farm, self sufficient and at the same time it could pay the person much more per week..it would definitely need some prior investment but at the end of the day for the long term it would be much better.

I do think a coin can indeed exist, the energy can be actually changed in the way so as where it's coming from. Plus there are actually countries where it would be more efficient. The solar energy would be much more common.

Maybe my post was too long, but I feel like no one replied to or addressed the title:
a crypto-coin with a very low energy usage or "efficient", cannot exist

Not even with proof of stake, unless that proof of stake would make bitcoin or a new coin just slightly more energy efficient.
But I was talking about something like 100 times more energy efficient, or a coin using just 1% of how much bitcoin uses, while having the same market cap. I feel like only that percent would shut media and critics up.

I'd be curious to know how much pollution and energy consumption all financial institutions and the worldwide money printing machines create. I'm quite sure they're much, much higher than the one that comes from BTC mining, but we cannot pretend that there aren't other systems that are more energy-efficient than Bitcoin's.. although at the expense of other stuff such as security, which is perhaps more important than energy consumption is! Proof-of-Stake is an option but it's in more of a testing ground right now. Bitcoin is more solid than ever before and it's been 13 years since its inception. If PoS works well enough, Bitcoin will move to it. It's not like we want to pollute the air and use as much energy as possible. It's just that we want security as well, not just an eco-friendly environment..

All Proof of Stake coins created since 2013 have Greater Utility than Bitcoin in ONCHAIN transaction capacity and energy efficiency , as they can be run as an side app on a running PC.

The top contender at the moment is Cardano, which will be smart contract capable in it's next update.
Cardano is #4 on CoinMarketCap and growing as a very fast rate.

But some of the original PoS Only coins were MintCoin, Blackcoin, Elite ,  Zeitcoin, Inflationcoin, BeanCash, & Sprouts.
All of which are still running & working blockchains.

Problem is PoW is inherently flawed to eventually compete in energy consumption with all of mankind,
because the energy consumption of PoW grows geometrically not linearly, so the energy manufacturer never have time to catch up in energy supply production.
While many here like to make comparisons of energy use between PoW  and other industries ,
the fact is all of those other industries grow linearly, so their energy consumption is more sustainable, as their growth rate is much slower, and their drain is more easily spread across multiple power grids. Where as PoW requires geometric growth that outpaces the energy sector ability to meet demand, causing price increases for everyone, and requires massive areas where they draw too much power for a given power grid.
Which is why you see some communities starting to ban PoW mining.

Problem is Bitcoiners see any energy waste issue pointed out to them as a flaw in Bitcoin, and that they refuse to accept.
The energy waste issue is not an attack on bitcoin, because at  any time since 2013, they could have begun the transition to Proof of Stake, and have refused due to some cultist belief that is totally inaccurate.

Advantages to switching Bitcoin to PoS are the following,
increases decentralization , as anyone owning bitcoin will stake and run Full Nodes
in fact, this is the reason bitcoin core dev have limited BTC onchain transaction capacity.
allows for the increase in onchain transaction capacity
Lowers the cost of transaction fees for everyone, since insanly high input costs are no longer required.
Puts the mining/minting back into the hands of the majority not just the rich elite.
Removes the energy waste argument from the Public arena.
Can go to a carbon zero footprint on PoS, something that will never be possible with PoW.

So will bitcoiners eventually see the truth, as have the founders of Ethereum who are already beginning a transition to Proof of Stake.
Or
Will they hold on to the false belief that a flawed PoW system is Bitcoin?

Time will tell.  

Proof of Stake. Ethereum has plans to shift from PoW to PoS but the security of that is actually quite debatable, IMO.

The complexity of PoW attacks lies with your ability to amass sufficient resources to attack the network in the first place. As the current mining climate is dominated by ASICs, there is no use for them after an attack and thus making pretty much all of the ASICs useless as the price is bound to tank after any successful attack. It really doesn't make sense for people to be able to mine by not incurring any real costs and would definitely be weaker than PoW.

Bitcoin having a huge electrical consumption by its nature is not incorrect. However, there are far more activities that incurs more carbon footprint than Bitcoin and provides far less utility as well. If we were to replace all of the financial systems with Bitcoin, the energy consumption could be far lower while providing numerous benefits. Any more efficient algorithms will probably not replace Bitcoin's PoW as it is pretty much impossible for the community to gain consensus on this issue. It is important to note that you're not wasting electricity by mining, you're being compensated and the benefits that arises from mining is the security of billions of dollars of transaction volume each day. The argument weakens as Bitcoin gets more adopted and its utility increases.

It doesn't have to do with Bitcoin directly. Yes, Bitcoin is the first mover and thus, most of the miners and these huge mining rigs work on extending its chain. You shouldn't be faulting Bitcoin, but the whole block chain concept. Truth be told, the blockchain technology is inefficient. A distributed ledger that is kept on every node of the network can't be characterized as something efficient, that's the cost of decentralization after all.

I believe that as long as mining with renewable energy sources becomes more widespread (and more profitable), these folks will change their mind, or if they don't, they'll stop pointing out this excuse.

Mining is structured in a way to always be more damaging, if the coin's value increases, until governments put their hand on. For example, if China illegalizes the use of ASICs, it will be environmental friendlier AND network attackers will still be outpaced.

The post is quite long so this is the tldr:

Despite news media crying that bitcoin is using too much energy, it's impossible to create a new crypto-coin which uses the same mining principles (so no private companies like Ripple or Visa) but at the same time will use 1% of bitcoin power usage. 1% forever, and not just in the beginning when only 50 people are mining.
Because that would mean that magic coin would cost let's say 1 dollar to mine a day but you would be able to sell it with $100, and that's just not possible. From an economic standpoint.


-------------------

I'm surprised that people like Elon Musk and even big bitcoin proponents do not talk about that. Or at least I have not read about anything like this from them, or in the media which constantly compares bitcoin's energy usage with different countries, and how this and that coin uses much less energy.

I also have smart educated friends who argue about the same thing, that there should be a more energy friendly coin, it should use much less power. They are not able to explain to me how that could be, because they are not technical and I should ask people who are technical. I tell them that this is a logic and human nature problem and not a technical one.

I'll not pretend that I know the inner subtle details of bitcoin programing, but I don't have to, since as I said, this is an economical or logical dilemma.

And logic tells us that btc is not inefficient. Of course this and that coin uses less energy, since they also have a much smaller market cap. When people and news articles talk about how bitcoin uses x kilowatt-hour and that other coin uses less, that's meaningless. This term should be always used as a ratio, you can't just throw that term around.
It's like I would say I have two vehicles and one uses 3 liters and the other uses 20 liters. Without mentioning any metric or ratio like using 3 liters of gas per this much distance. And without mentioning that one is a small car and the other is a truck.

What if a new coin would appear and it would cost only 1 dollar per day to mine 100 coins. Great, it uses so little power. So efficient wow great joy, much green.
But the miner will be able to sell those coins somehow with 100 dollars. Everyday.
Success right ? What the news people and maybe Elon Musk is talking about, has been achieved.
Of course this is impossible, because in the next moments everyone and their doge will struggle to buy all the machines they could find to put them to work to mine that magical coin. And the economies of scale and logic tells us that price will soon equalize and lead to a similar ratio as bitcoin or ethereum has today. It will fluctuate - that energy/selling price coin, as it also fluctuate for bitcoin, but it would still be around that same ratio. Maybe a similar ratio with a lot of other assets in the world which are mined or built.
So no longer that "green". Unless this new coin is using power from renewables. Or excess energy which we know sometimes can't be stored and is wasted in the air. Or instead of being wasted, it is captured and used for mining.
 But that has nothing to do with this debate. Any coin can use energy produced from any kind of source.

There's always gonna be this relation between mining cost and profitability. If there's no profit, no one's gonna mine the coin. If there's a lot of profit, many more people will mine until a balance will be reached. A fine balance, sometimes right on the line between profitability and bankruptcy.

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And just to put a crazy or outrageous idea out there… there could be a way for a crypto currency to be environmentally friendly and also maintain the same necessary difficulty of mining, difficulty and balance which is necessary for the whole thing to work.
But it would be probably difficult to build and design. And I'm not sure how tamper proof a system like that would be. Or if it will not be abused or leave room for corruption. It would have to be done in a completely automatic way, without any human hand, just like bitcoin works today.

 Instead of doing increasingly difficult mathematical calculations which serves only to secure btc or make it tamper-proof and as a barrier of entry, and uses a certain amount of energy which also gives value to btc - this system would use the same GH/s of computation, except a variable percent of this "brain" power could be lend somewhat or donated automatically for no profit or certain medical research institutions or institutions doing general purpose research the kind which benefits everyone, as opposed to only a particular group or certain countries. The whole system would have to be built in a way that for those external institutions - they will only see a certain amount of available "CPU" power, while internally for a software and hardware miner that would equal mathematical usage which would serve as the same purpose of securing the bitcoin network with heavy processor usage and calculations.

Another way, perhaps even more difficult or unfeasible would be for this percent of lend power to be used by absolutely anyone, except it would be allocated randomly maybe away across half the world to this and that person/group/or even company. Randomly so a certain miner would not be able to re-use that computational power for his own purpose and generating coins for free.
What would be the benefit of this scenario ? The benefit would be that in this way, it would be maintained the necessary ratio between power usage/ and profit. So you would not be able to generate profits from thin air, as that would never work. But at the same time that energy would not be wasted with meaningless calculations, but used instead for general computing which will be translated or virtualized and used like the old models of mainframes and terminals.

So again, in this scenario miners would still use a lot of energy to mine, the same as before, like spending this x percent of energy to make an extra 5% of profit.
But that energy used for calculation would not be released into the air in the form of heat, but will be sent somewhere else to be used.

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Does anyone know how there can be a crypto-coin with the same utility as bitcoin or ethereum, but is designed to be many more times more efficient ?