Topic: Crazy pow power reduction idea (Read 486 times)

Actually now with the mempool run-on the bigger threat is governments (not just any government, that Chinese mining province whatever-its-called in particular) ordering mining farms in their countries to shut down or otherwise cut off their power. Low fee transactions will eventually hit the 200MB mempool limit on most nodes and be dropped, and if this continues for more days then we could even see moderate-fee transactions hitting the wall too and this could be very disruptive until the next epoch.

1 sat/vbyte transactions already exceeded this cap. 60-70sats transactions are currently at 32MB according to johoe and coal plants are showing no signs of signaling an "all clear restore electricity now".

Which is generated by mining gear that can be bought with $.
If a government would simply print $ and offer 100k per s19pro they would be buying all the hashrate required in a matter of days.

odolvlobo is right.
The security is generated from the cost running this and all of what involved in it can be quantified and paid for in fiat.
The hashrate is an expression of that said cost, not a clear indicator of it, a 110th hashrate can be achieved with $10k and 5$ per day electricity consumption it doesn't mean that the network 5 years ago could be attacked with 5$.

As for the threat of the government, look at what's happening in China.
One order and all the mining is shut down, what could stop them from actually seizing those? Nothing!
Just because they haven't tried yet and in my opinion, they will never do it doesn't mean they aren't able to.

If people understood this and that the value created can be channelled into solar/windmills power consumption would be a topic of how btc saved the world from polluting coal/oil

If people understood the subsidies given to oil and coal and not given to solar and wind they would freak.  POW mining could create 3 watts of energy for every watt it burns.

I know this because we built and paid off a large solar array with BTC profits.

When I think of what is allowed with coal and oil and not done for solar and wind it is so freaking annoying.

See, I have to disagree with this assertion..
If it only took dollars $$ to mine blocks, then the US government and/or central banks could 51% attack Bitcoin at any time easily..
They have all the $$ dollars in the world, they could just print them, they have all the electricity they would ever need at their disposal..
The only thing they DO NOT have is access to enough computing power to come up with the needed hash rate..

Therefore IMO hashrate alone is what keeps Bitcoin secure..


BTW the US government has all sorts of nuclear reactor power plants that are military only and completely independent from the civilian power grid that can make ridiculous amounts of electricity..
Aside from ones at their bases and classifies ones, every modern warship and sub has a massive nuclear reactor they could use to power anything imaginable..

“measured by the cost of mining a block.”
I think this is a fine thing for energy consumption apologists to say, but isn’t very true..
Cost is no object when it comes to central banks and governments..
More like “security is measured by the difficulty of pulling off a 51% attack”, and the most difficult part would be amassing the computing power, not the money, nor the electricity..

Refute this..

It is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is just reality. Increasing efficiency is ineffective if your goal is to decrease energy consumption. Also, the security is not measured by the hash rate. It is measured by the cost of mining a block.

I fail so see how this is a bad thing..
Greatly increasing the security of Bitcoin at the same electrical cost sounds great to me..

HAHA I meant a tiny country. The power consumption is a lot and it is for a reason, the high security of a global decentralized money doesn't come cheap.

It appears that sometimes I terribly suck at math

Then it would starve the rest of the world and the accumulated demand means either the manufacturer leaves the country or other competitors in other jurisdictions come along to fill the gap. This also raises red flags for bitcoin community which would start planning for the possible attack before it happens (while the government is accumulating ASICs).

I hope I am not repeating what others have already written...

Your proposal is ineffective.

Regardless of how you structure it, PoW is designed such that the cost of mining approaches the value of the block reward. So, even if you only have 2 minutes of mining, a block reward's worth of energy will be expended in those two minutes.

Your proposal is similar to proposals that attempt to get useful work out of mining (such as generating useful information). That also does not work in general because the money gained by using or selling the PoW is spent on more hash rate.

Similarly, improving the efficiency of mining equipment is also ineffective because the money saved by efficiency is spent on increasing the hash rate. If a machine uses half the amount of electricity, the miner will run twice as many machines.

It costs about $3.90 per S9Pro, not $390k, lol. Each S9Pro consumes about 3250 watts per hour, or 78,000 watts per 24 hour day. To convert watts to kwh, you need to divide the number of watts by 1000, not multiply by 1000. The cost to power 1.5mm S9Pros would be about $5.85 million per day at 5 cents per kwh.

I think you are overestimating the cost of HVAC units. A HVAC unit has a very long useful life, and can be used for things other than cooling ASICs. In the past, I have also mined with ASICs and did so without having the air conditioning on due to the outdoor climate.

A government could also use the ASICs in a facility that is cold such as Northern China or Alaska. 

Wanna bet? If manufacturing is done in a country, the government gets to say what leaves the country. With manufacturing of ASICs done mostly in China, the CCP can force manufacturers to produce many miners, and prevent them from leaving the country via export controls. It could also seize the miners from the manufacturer.

You've missed this part:

Wait, are you saying that bitcoin mining is energy-intensive and rivals a whole country activity, of people eating, going to work, having fun, watching tv, and making transactions?  Infidel!


An s19pro burns around 90kwh of power a day, at 5 cents that are 4.5$, for the global network would be close to 6 million a day.
Not to mention that with 20% of the hashrate you would be making $10millions in profits from mining a day, a fact you completely ignored.


No, we're not!


P.S.
You're again ignoring the numbers in my scenario and it's a bit...you know..


10 years? More like 4 that counts and probably that one split in half due to faulty equipment and low hashing power of the older batches.
In 2014 (7 years ago) Bitmain released the S3, it was doing just half of TH/s, at that time just 1000 modern miners would have been able to launch a 300% attack

Your numbers are a bit off. Google tells me that s19pro price starts from $17,799 and each can produce 110 Th/s that means to get ~160 Eh/s you need 1,454,545 which costs $25.88 billion not 2.

You are also forgetting that just owning ASICs is not enough, they have to be run and that requires a tremendous amount of electricity. So basically the malicious government has to shut down their country (or a big part of it at least) to mine bitcoin with their 1.45 million ASICs! Not to mention that the cost of this electricity is also added on top of the cost of the ASICs.
That is about $390k daily per ASIC which $560 billion for all 1.45 million ASICs per day for 5 cent per kwh.

There is also cooling costs since you can't just let 1.45 million ASICs just run without cooling them or they'd blow up. The cost of that is also in the billions.
Now are are suddenly closer to trillion territory.

There is also another problem that the manufacturer can not suddenly produce 1.45 million ASICs and give ALL to this malicious government. It is also starve the market, you suddenly see globally that no new ASICs are coming to miners.

P.S. Getting current hasharate is 160 Eh/s to have 50% of the hashrate you have to have 160 Eh/s

The money may not be the issue but the logistics for manufacturing an equivalent of 10 years output of all the miner manufacturers would still be significant. If a Govt body ever attempted this, it would be hard to keep it a secret. Government agencies have gotten away with a lot in the earlier era when they performed nuclear tests and diverted the attention of a naïve citizenry from the ill-effects. I don't think it can be done in today's world.

With the benefits that Bitcoin and all of its spawns have given to millions of people worldwide, such a move to cripple Bitcoin would be hugely unpopular. Any potential hash-war between people and governments is basically a matter of perception. If they convince enough people that Bitcoin power consumption is a bad thing and that their centralized coins are better, we may have a problem at hand.

Those costs are overestimated, I've run in this discussion a lot of time.


Updating this, the price for miner stays the same as that's the cost to manufacture it, not what the current market pays for it, to make 20% with a  current 160exa you would need about 300 000 S19pro, that would be just around 750 million, powering them would require just about half of a modern nuclear powerplant full capacity.

And at this point, they would still mine coins for themselves, if people are getting profits at 10cents/kwh imagine how much they would be able to recover from the initial costs at 2-3 cents what power before taxes costs.


It would be more like the Anglo-Zanzibar War, fortunately enough no government has such plans, and hopefully, with the chip crisis going away the numbers in our favor will start to increase and with adoption people wanting to support the coin value and security might turn to non-profit mining, just for support.

The cost for trying to get that much hashrate would be so high that they ironically would have to print even more money just to do it, which hurts their own currencies and banks. [basically any commercial pool that attempts to cooperate with a government to do this will be dismantled by outraged miners.]

It would be some variant of mutually-assured-destruction from the Cold War era where the government's currency is crippled along with bitcoin.

If this is the US we're talking about, this'll also take down all the other currencies (at least temporarily) because of its status as the world reserve currency.

Dear author, do not buy Bitcoin energy consuption FUD distributed by deceptive PoS coins founders, their ignorant followers, and representatives of governments and institutions that feel threatened by a truly decentralized coin.

Who fail to mention that securing a monetary network with rent is just as energy intensive, ultimately. Because here, energy consumption can be postponed considerably, but it is just as inevitable (unless you believe that all capital owners are vegans who live in trees and never consume their profits).

If the level of Bitcoin security is to be maintained, the only thing you will achieve will be to increase the investment of miners in hardware and reduce their electricity bills, while the global economy will continue to use energy to produce this hardware (not to mention what a burden on the environment would be mountains of toxic waste resulting from the production of unnecessary additional mining units).

Now that the "green" energy revolution is underway and there are already countries producing electricity entirely from renewable sources, energy production and consumption does not always burden the environment.
Bitcoin mining overwhelmingly relies on the use of renewable energy sources (reducing renewable curtailment) and the use of stranded energy.

Bitcoin mining may ultimately accelerate the global transition to renewable energy and thus indirectly save the Earth and everything that lives on it.

Only applies to PoW-based cryptocurrency which uses SHA-256. If they plan to destroy another PoW-based cryptocurrency, they need to invest on different type of ASIC.


Good point, but also leads people to work on more secure alternative.


Or currently thinking solution that actually works on reality.

If they could outhash and destroy Bitcoin any other crypto would be a walk in the park to destroy next..
It would also destroy the confidence in all/any other crypto..

You don’t think the government would go to extreme lengths to secure their monopoly on printing/issuing money, with the full backing of banks?

I see hardly anyone is interested in protecting Bitcoin from governments anymore, but rather keeping it in compliance with regulations..
When on-chain KYC?

When laws become tyrannical the “good guys” become criminals..

What does that matter?
We may have to become criminals to use and sustain Bitcoin.. Good thing the entire point of Bitcoin is to be unstoppable and unregulatable no matter what silly laws they make..

Being a “good guy” has little to nothing to do with obeying laws..

The whole point of Bitcoin is to take power away from governments..


In 2013 we didn’t have the powerful ASICS we do now.. Neither did governments/attackers..
Our miners need to be able to beat the next top 10 most powerful governments combined to keep Bitcoin secure..
That’s why it’s not about electricity, it’s about hashrate..

Incredibly? Don't think so.
Just raw numbers in terms of hashrate tell only a bit of the story.
For example before the 2013 jump the total hash rate was well below what a s19pro can now deliver, was the network successfully attacked, or was it considered safe even despite the fact it had less than 1/1mil of the hashrate we have now?
The key behind those 160 and 800 in those two scenarios is the price required to acquire them, if this method is a flop and miners quit because of mining gears failure, contracts with powerplants getting suspended as drawing 10MW every 8 minutes from the grid are nothing any company wants to deal with the whole picture would change dramatically.

In case of a government attack, it will be the same stuff, how much it will cost them to do it versus how much can miners spend to protect the network, in the end, the numbers don't change. Besides, if I were in the place of an official tasked with crippling bitcoin I wouldn't go for a 51% attack, even a 20% of the hash rate used to mine empty blocks would trigger higher fees, enough panic to make the price go down, more miners out of business, more cheap second ger gear to acquire with the $ coming from mined and dumpedd coins, more empty blocks, rinse and repeat.


One thing I've earned about regulations and laws is that when you start making things complicated with hundreds of them it's the bad guys that manage to avoid them and get the upper hand.
Same here, one guy finding a weakness, and the "good" guys are screwed.
 

Nodes do not normally "reach a consensus" on anything. Nodes will validate each block according to consensus rules, confirming that each block is valid, and that no blockchain exists that has a higher total POW.

No matter what, someone will have the ability to know the "random number" ahead of time, and could use this information to their advantage, either by mining personally, or selling the information to a select group of miners. It is possible to prove that you knew information on or after a certain time, but it is not possible to  prove you did not know information prior to a certain time.

If the difficulty target block time is reduced, there will be more stale blocks because there is a higher probability that two blocks will be found in the time it takes for a found block to be propagated and validated by the network. This has nothing to do with a malicious actor.

In the case of competing blocks at the same height, the current status quo allows a "race" to be potentially resolved very quickly if a subsequent block is quickly found, however under this proposal, it will take a minimum of 8 minutes to resolve.