Topic: Bitcoin minting is thermodynamically perverse (Read 31001 times)

In your difficult case, Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, which hinders its growth. In fact, minting's high energy use may be harmful. Initially, your statement about squandering energy looks true, however your thinking is wrong.

First off, Bitcoin mining requires electricity and computer tools that are not always comparable to its value. Disconnect: worth is personal and depends on numerous variables. Also, your "compucoin" example is a good one, but its not a Bitcoin comparison.

Since usability, security, and popularity determine competitiveness in the real world, the claim that Bitcoin is less competitive because it uses a lot of energy is absurd. The energy issue is significant, but it won't determine Bitcoin's success.

BIT HEAT DAY 2023  on SAI NODE Marietta, OHIO

Next month on Aug. 9th, we gonna host 2nd bitcoin heat day in memory of Satoshi's prediction, we will show how we could heat the greenhouse through the bitcoin mining process.

The Asic Miner chips could transfer 100% electricity to heat, and we could reuse nearly 90% heat to provide heating services through liquid cooling system.

Well, I'm still not convinced in allowing anonymous third parties to use my computers behind my back,
even for cancer research computations, or whatever else.

And I will be against any position, that tolerates that behavior.
There is no such good, that will be good enough to allow socially unacceptable behavior.
Because that "good" is in one's mind, but it harms the others, not that one. Simply.
Make your any good, but at your personal expenses. Is that clear?
The other is socially destructive.
Democracy, laws, freedoms - completely unrelated to this subject.
It is just about social structure self-organisation (destruction).
You may, however, disagree, that social destruction is any evil at all.

The rules of law is a crucial factor in the creation of a wealthy society. Anything that does not fit shall be terminated with extreme prejudices. If that mean taking out the power of the government so be it. If that mean no tolerance for the idea of democracy, so be it. If "diversity" itself should be terminated, so be it.

tldr: Jesus loves you... but I think you're a twat.

To whom are you referring? And to which part of their post? I may be blind, but I don't see where anyone says that you must to come to the same moral conclusion as them. You are the one that condemned us for disagreeing with your moral absolutism when you suggested that we don't have a moral right to make moral judgments based on benefits and harm to society. You say that diversity is the key, and I agree, but you're words sure paint you as a bigot.

I and all people, including yourself and psychopaths, are and should be in possession to do whatever we think is desirable according to our own conscience in any and all situations. That doesn't mean that we give anyone a free pass to harm anyone else. The whole purpose of the rule of law is not to enslave, but to protect and preserve according to the common consent of the people in democracies and the ruling authority in non-democracies. Yes, you may disagree with me about my beliefs. That's the whole point. I am not your lord and I am not your conscience but neither are you mine. If a person feels that nuclear power stations are evil, he has the personal right to try to hack into its computer system, but society as a whole has every right to forbid such action and lock him away if they catch him doing it. In any case, wouldn't you agree that it would be less harmful to society for him to brute force bitcoin generation than to brute force a nuclear power station's computer system? You don't have any moral obligation to answer yes, but if you don't answer yes, society has every right to be of the opinion that the best place for hypocritical self-contradicting crazies like you is in prison or a mental institution.

Wait, so you don't care if the botnet steals cycles from a computer that was won in a sweepstakes because that isn't real?

If that would be your harm against your benefits, then you are in possession to do whatever you may think is desirable with that situation.

But you try to impose your decisions of good and bad on people's minds.
May I disagree with you about my benefits? Oh, why not? Sorry, sir. Forgive stupid me, lord.

I think, you just taking that situation too externally. Just imagine, someone, with his own notion of public benefits,
just decides to use your equipment for, say, bruteforcing some access point to the nuclear power station control system.
Just imagine, that such exists and he is sure, that >nuclear< is >evil<, and as you do, he is sure that it is a common sense.
Many, many of your beliefs may seem strange to some societies,
while you think your opinion is the only right possible, other people have their own minds and there is no main true, no consensus.
Diversity is the success of society.

Real, because he had to work hard to earn that money, not just picked it up in a lottery or stole that from other's pocket.
He has spent part of his life for that, which he would spend doing something better, if he could.
Real, because that is a life of a real human, that is stolen, not just abstract "computational resources".

Often. Ofcourse.
Why do you ask?

Sure, in exactly the same way the existence of credit cards motivates behavior of stealing credit card numbers from innocent credit card users.

Or the existence of bank accounts motivates hackers to try to break into your system to find out your bank account number.

Or the existence of cars motivates some people to steal gasoline from innocent service station owners.

I believe the benefits of Bitcoin will outweigh the harm, and I further believe that I am capable of making that moral judgment.  I might be wrong, and I might regret I ever got involved, but if I only ever did things that I was 100% certain were going to work out for the best I would never accomplish anything new and interesting.

Do you routinely worry about tempting people to steal things? Should you feel badly when your company invents an awesome new product because people now have more incentive to steal money to buy it?

This is ridiculous.

Why is 'real' in all caps? You think money is only real if it has magic faces printed on it? If this victim was losing airline miles you would care less?

How often have you worried about botnets in the past? Have you done anything about it?

I definitely consider it the lesser of two evils. Either they steal electricity while brute forcing corporate passwords in order to extort payments to cover up the security breaches or they steal electricity while providing a valuable service to the bitcoin community. It of course would be better for the botnets to not exist than to have them generating bitcoins, but that is neither here nor there.

As for bitcoin encouraging people to start botnets, I don't think that will happen. Although botnet operators can benefit from generating bitcoins, they're still subject to the limited size of the bitcoin economy and competition from other botnet operators and from the bitcoin community. There is a fairly limited number of total dollars being offered at any time for bitcoins at the current exchange rate. This puts a bottleneck restriction on the speed at which they can profit from their bitcoins. This limited supply of dollars coupled with the extremely low operating costs for the botnet operators themselves is a ripe condition for competing botnet operators to have to constantly undercut one another in order to get their hands on the dollars available. There is also a bottleneck for creating bitcoins since botnet competition, including competition from a growing bitcoin user base with the collective power of a botnet, cuts directly into their ability to generate bitcoins.

All this demonstrates that botnet participation in the bitcoin network reduces criminal activity without significantly increasing the amount of electricity that is stolen and that bitcoin provides considerably less incentive for people to become botnet operators than the preexisting vulnerability of big businesses and home computers.

Edit: In response to your last question, not only do all people unequivocally have the moral right to make moral judgments based on their perspective of social harm and benefits but we also have an important moral obligation to do so.

I think the discussion have eventually lost the ethic aspects of motivating the botnet creators to
invest even more resources in their business in case when BTCs generated will deliver the value,
 comparable to the current uses of botnets.
What if Bitcoin operation will outperform the other activities?
How can you imagine, that botnet building process is done in a way, that benefit the community?

Yes, but only when it is not against the computer owner's will, he pays the electricity bill.
If it is, then he loses REAL money for an extra power consumption caused by 100% CPU load.
So, Bitcoin motivates behavior of stealing computing power from innocent computer owners.

Well, you may now try to compare the social harm to the benefits, but do you really feel you have the moral right to do so?

And it's scarcity is a product of its demand. Therefore, owing to the law of supply and demand which derives solely from human desires of turning "what is" into "what I want," any gold pulled out of the ground is a product of human desire, and, by definition is NOT WASTE.  If the price and quantity demanded by the market are below the extraction cost for the miner then that demand will remain unmet.  Again, this is the opposite of waste.

Ta,

Not necessarily, digging out a little bit more gold just makes the existing gold a bit less valuable since the supply is increased. That is because its value is mainly derived from its scarcity. Its utility IS its scarcity. However, it is not a waste for the miner if the cost of mining can stay below the price of gold.


I suppose that if anybody (as opposed to a single trusted entity) can produce bitcoins then the production costs will converge close to value of the produced bitcoin itself. If that were not true then it would make sense for someone to invest resources to produce as many bitcoin as possible. Since we dont want to let the value of bitcoin to go down then the production costs need to rise to the value of bitcoin.

The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.  If you're using electric heat where you live, then your computer's heat isn't a waste.  It's equal cost if you generate the heat with your computer.

If you have other cheaper heating than electric, then the waste is only the difference in cost.

If it's summer and you're using A/C, then it's twice.

Bitcoin generation should end up where it's cheapest.  Maybe that will be in cold climates where there's electric heat, where it would be essentially free.

The power used is not wasteful.  It is simply what the owner is willing to commit to the project.  Even so, it may be used even as "waste heat".  I am an electritian by trade, and years ago I had the following idea form, while installing a 'heat trace' network on insulated sprinkler lines inside an open air parking garage.

The 'heat trace' is a fairly expensive cable that has a continuous resistive core to produce low intensity electric heat along the length of the pipe that it's taped onto.  Insulation is then wrapped around this assembly.  The best, and most efficient, systems have a temp reactive core; so that the closer to the freezing point that the cable itself becomes at any given length, the lower the resistance across the core becomes, resulting in an increase in heat output along the colder and less well insulated sections. 

At the time, I was playing with an early form of distributed computing called "Condor", which allowed single processes to be exported to other computers upon a network and their disk I/O shipped back across the network to a master server without the process being able to tell the difference.  I thought then that a small "computer on a chip" wired upon a flat network cable would be able to effectively perform the same functions of keeping the pipes above freezing with local temp sensitivity while also crunching numbers in exactly the same way that bitcoin requires.  Such an idea would require a network that permited quite a bit of power in order to not need an unacceptable number of power points along the pipe, but imagine the usefulness of such a system for companies that have such needs in very high (or very low) latitudes.

What if such a system were retrofitted onto the Alaskan Oil Pipeline, for example, one mile at a time?

I really I understood the point of this thread but I guess I didn't.

I assumed that if you could design to do the exact same thing in the same commodity quantities and at the same protection level, BUT consuming less energy and producing less BTUs of heat, then that would be less wasteful.

You can mine gold in lots of ways, some require less resources than others. If two processes produce the same amount of gold then no point in optimizing anything else?

I agree with nearly everything you said, but I disagree, fundamentally, with the bolded.  Gold mining is not a waste of energy.  It is the opposite of waste, it is the measure of value people place in the 'utility of having gold as a medium of exchange' or a store of wealth, jewelry around their body parts or connectors on their home theater system.  If there was no demand for gold, the price would be zero.  Hence it is not a 'waste,' by definition.

I object strenuously to this idea, promulgated by the Monetarists, that the production of money is wasted capital which could be spent on other wealth-building projects.  It's a short-sighted argument which does not fully encompass the value we place in our money.

It's semantics, yes, but the negative connotations associated with the word "waste" is a tool of the money masters designed to confuse us and elevate their bankrupt system.

Ta,