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Topic: Development for Bitcoin to reduce CO2 footprint (Read 1479 times)

legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination
PoS(from what I know) isn't really a good solution either. Too much power is given to people with large stake. I think this is technically centralization, because you centralize important decisions making with no checks and balances, and no quick remedies to potential violations.. Another potential problem with the staking model is that it will encourage wealthy people within a decentralized networks to have to much influence on things. This can be used by bad actors against the network... So, there should be ways to check any potential abuse from this. I believe reliance on principles will be one of the most important ways to help checkmate them.  Besides, if you are depending on principles, you probably will not allow that kind of Power concentration from staking model.

In regards to number 3, some kind of Proof of Work that is environmentally friendly can reduce/prevent the problem. Should probably be the most efficient pow available that does very important work. Decentralized networks need to avoid things that are energy(even good energy) demanding when there are better alternatives that do very useful jobs efficiently without sacrificing any Bitcoin/decentralization principles.  If a decentralized community focuses mostly on doing useful and good things, our energy usage will be justified, as long as it is good energy.

Before, we discussed about how to decentralize mining using ASIC-resistant algorithm, so that only corridor miners with free electricity and GPU can survice in the long run, and that will hopefully reach a high level of decentralization. But it proved to be unsuccessful, since there will just be large pools collecting and buying those miners hash rate, and those large pools will reach monopol sooner or later. So the centralization of power is always a self-strengthening trend, regardless of what mining mechanism you select. The only way to deal with that is coin competetion, e.g. at least you have 2-3 coins of the same type, so that one of them will not go rogue

But my point is, given same amount of electricity, instead of just burn it to get some coin, if you could first use those electricity to do other useful things, and then use earned money to stake and get same amount of coin, that is much higher efficiency from a pure energy utilization point of view
Ucy
sr. member
Activity: 2674
Merit: 403
Compare rates on different exchanges & swap.
PoS(from what I know) isn't really a good solution either. Too much power is given to people with large stake. I think this is technically centralization, because you centralize important decisions making with no checks and balances, and no quick remedies to potential violations.. Another potential problem with the staking model is that it will encourage wealthy people within a decentralized networks to have to much influence on things. This can be used by bad actors against the network... So, there should be ways to check any potential abuse from this. I believe reliance on principles will be one of the most important ways to help checkmate them.  Besides, if you are depending on principles, you probably will not allow that kind of Power concentration from staking model.

In regards to number 3, some kind of Proof of Work that is environmentally friendly can reduce/prevent the problem. Should probably be the most efficient pow available that does very important work. Decentralized networks need to avoid things that are energy(even good energy) demanding when there are better alternatives that do very useful jobs efficiently without sacrificing any Bitcoin/decentralization principles.  If a decentralized community focuses mostly on doing useful and good things, our energy usage will be justified, as long as it is good energy.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination


1. As explained elsewhere, the energy used in mining must be wasted because of the economic incentives. There is no way around it without changing how mining works.

2. Energy consumption of mining depends on the price only because of the subsidy. The subsidy is halved every 4 years so energy consumption becomes less dependent on price and more dependent on transaction fees over time.

The most direct and effective way to reduce the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is to raise the cost of the energy.

1. True, for PoW coin, energy is consumed in the mining process. But for PoS coin, energy is not consumed but stayed inside each staking nodes. Why waste it when you can preserve it?

Mining is just a way for fair competetion. Wether the energy input must be in form of electricity and consumed is to be debated. For example, if satoshi designed the bitcoin to have a chemical miner and require people to input petroleum to do the calculation, then it will create another type of synergy around oil industry. And maybe in future, when quantum miner is invented but require a special kind of atom to do the calculation, then this special material will become the core of mining success

So it depends on how you design this fair competetion model. I believe that fiat money is more decentralized than electricity, so using fiat money as energy input will make it more available for everyone



2. It is true that in future, fee income will replace block reward, however, is must be high enough to protect the network. For example, you have only a few million dollars income per block but the network carries transactions of billions of dollars per block, there is a high incentive to compromise the network to invalid some billion dollar transactions, since the cost will be 1/1000 of that. The BCH/BSV fork war just demonstrated that there can be backup hash power moved into a coin just to totally change how the network runs

PoS coin does not have this problem since the security from each staking node are equally higher when coin value is higher.
legendary
Activity: 4466
Merit: 3391
...
However, there are 2 major problems with mining:

1. mining is not a very effective way to convert energy into bitcoin: Most of the energy is wasted as heat. If ASICs were made of superconductive material and never generate any heat, then there is no inefficiency of the current mining model: The competition will always push the chip+energy cost to market value of coin, the waste is minimum, and the world climate will not be impacted

2. A forever increasing coin price will lead to a forever increasing energy consumption, which eventually exhaust all the energy supply on the planet and cause the government to ban the mining like IRAN just did. This will put a upper limit for how high a coin's value can be
...

1. As explained elsewhere, the energy used in mining must be wasted because of the economic incentives. There is no way around it without changing how mining works.

2. Energy consumption of mining depends on the price only because of the subsidy. The subsidy is halved every 4 years so energy consumption becomes less dependent on price and more dependent on transaction fees over time.

The most direct and effective way to reduce the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is to raise the cost of the energy.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination
This is always an very interesting topic

Fundamentally you need to put some valuable resource in exchange for the bitcoin, that's the best thing with cryptocurrency. It is produced at certain cost, not borrowed from GOD, like fiat money

However, there are 2 major problems with mining:

1. mining is not a very effective way to convert energy into bitcoin: Most of the energy is wasted as heat. If ASICs were made of superconductive material and never generate any heat, then there is no inefficiency of the current mining model: The competetion will always push the chip+energy cost to market value of coin, the waste is minimum, and the world climate will not be impacted

2. A forever increasing coin price will lead to a forever increasing energy consumption, which eventually exhaust all the energy supply on the planet and cause the government to ban the mining like IRAN just did. This will put a upper limit for how high a coin's value can be

So, although spend energy to exchange newly created money sounds very fair, but burning energy to exchange coin is not an optimal way.

I think eventually everything that has value should contain some kind of energy, since human are just energy thirsty animals: We use energy to fulfill all our demands: Food, cloth, house, travel, entertainment, etc... Energy is a fundamental part of anything that has value


PoS coin use another logic: Since energy always can be bought by fiat money, why not just use fiat money to exchange cryptocurrency, so that all the inefficiencies and capacity limitations in mining can be avoided.

So the core question for PoS coin is: Does fiat money also contains energy, just like electricity?

Maybe producing fiat money does not take a lot of energy, but to ensure its value takes police, armies and governments, banks etc complicated sovereign organizations. You can easily write a IOU bill, but the acceptance of that bill would need you to back it with valuable assets and contract etc..., lots of energy, especially when that bill is very large. Fiat money has wide acceptance, that ensures it can exchange any kind of energy

Then people don't need to spend huge amount of electricity just to win the game of poping coins, the same electricity can be used to do useful things, like cutting trees or pave roads, and these kind of jobs can receive fiat money as reward, then people use fiat money to buy cryptocurrencies and stake them

Given same amount of energy, PoS coin has much higher efficiency due to that it does not need direct energy input in exchange for the coins. It still takes energy to make money, but those energy will be used on other more meaningful things

Given same amount of fiat money, PoS coin has higher utilization, since PoW coin miners must convert those fiat money to energy first and lose a large part of it as heat in the mining process


Edit: BTW, I discovered in this thought process, that spending money also has different type of efficiency: The best efficiency comes from that your investment ROIed and generated some extra income, and the worst efficiency is that you just buy some fireworks and burn it
legendary
Activity: 1382
Merit: 1122
In the starting threat I mentioned that pointing on others is like kinderkarden.

100% agree. Reads OP  Roll Eyes SMH.

Don't like it? Do something about it. Good luck with that.
sr. member
Activity: 1554
Merit: 334
Good points. Bitcoin is still not a payment system when talking about global international payment standards, but could only be considered a way of transferring funds without limitations by banks.

Lightning Network is still anticipated, and while it solves scalability issues, it goes back to one root problem (or not), which is introduction of centralization in the network.

POS could be one solution, but needs a fork and the effects are still not guaranteed.
full member
Activity: 602
Merit: 100
Most locales offer approaches to buy power from elective vitality providers. On the other hand, you can purchase sustainable power source endorsements or their counterparts, which are tradable testaments compensating makers of sustainable power source.

Some expectation that the utilization of inexhaustible force on the bitcoin system will increase. The bitcoin mining framework is appropriate to renewables.
member
Activity: 637
Merit: 11

Bitcoin has currently a energeny consumption of 638 kwh per Transaction and a min of 51,92 TWh in total.
 
As I said simply stupidiy. As I said you can not eat money.

Fiat money is more expensive to create, because it's physical. How much energy is used to create and then move around one roll of nickels? The answer, is about as impossible to figure out as your 51.92 TWh figure. It's all guesses. What if part of that hash rate is some new ASIC that no one's ever heard of (happens a lot)?

Anyway, you create it and move it around. That's a huge problem with fiat, and you haven't even started! After the fiat is created and distributed (to the top 0.01% through quantitative easing) fiat money is then paid to the government (through taxes). The government then uses that fiat money to fund their wars. Wars use a massive amount of energy and also kill many many people on both sides. What happens when governments no longer print the money? They can't afford forever wars anymore.

Why not fixate on something that you can actually change, like governments wasting tons of energy on war, or creating a worthless currency? Why not fight against government subsidies on building highways? Your tax dollars paid for roads, so gas guzzling cars can buzz around and destroy our planet. Every statist you've ever met is the biggest problem with climate change.

Bitcoin, the new monetary system, changes all of that.
In the starting threat I mentioned that pointing on others is like kinderkarden.
Apart from that how many TX can be made with this piece of paper or even a metall penny. Lets say 1000 TX via paper and 10000 TX via metal money. And who says you need cash any more?

And of course its a guess. But when you look at the website I mentioned they explain exactly where the ideas come from. And thats a good estimated guess. Its even too good for Bitcoin to see all hashrate made by Antminer S17e, the newest one.
legendary
Activity: 1382
Merit: 1122

Bitcoin has currently a energeny consumption of 638 kwh per Transaction and a min of 51,92 TWh in total.
 
As I said simply stupidiy. As I said you can not eat money.

Fiat money is more expensive to create, because it's physical. How much energy is used to create and then move around one roll of nickels? The answer, is about as impossible to figure out as your 51.92 TWh figure. It's all guesses. What if part of that hash rate is some new ASIC that no one's ever heard of (happens a lot)?

Anyway, you create it and move it around. That's a huge problem with fiat, and you haven't even started! After the fiat is created and distributed (to the top 0.01% through quantitative easing) fiat money is then paid to the government (through taxes). The government then uses that fiat money to fund their wars. Wars use a massive amount of energy and also kill many many people on both sides. What happens when governments no longer print the money? They can't afford forever wars anymore.

Why not fixate on something that you can actually change, like governments wasting tons of energy on war, or creating a worthless currency? Why not fight against government subsidies on building highways? Your tax dollars paid for roads, so gas guzzling cars can buzz around and destroy our planet. Every statist you've ever met is the biggest problem with climate change.

Bitcoin, the new monetary system, changes all of that.
member
Activity: 637
Merit: 11
Anyone who still denies climate change after these massive bush burnings in australia is nothing more then stupid.

1) Its farwide consens of all scientist that this is mam made.

2) There is an actual work that the climate change even appear on local wether meanwhile


And we still mine POW Cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has currently a energeny consumption of 638 kwh per Transaction and a min of 51,92 TWh in total.
 
As I said simply stupidiy. As I said you can not eat money.
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
Until you find a way in which mining will require few resources and at the same time the network will remain reliable like Bitcoin, then you should not expect that at least someone will be able to move the BTC from the position of leader. I want ideal conditions, but so far no such methods have been invented.
member
Activity: 637
Merit: 11
One actual things we have to think about:

1) Many european country will involve somethink like CO2 tax for a good reason. These people producing the most C02 with driving big SUV will pay more.
Of course this will rise price of electricity and people more and more understand about the idea of POW not the best point.

2) Maybe i mention earlier , Eurpean Union had a "green" election . Maybe they simply forbid using POW Cryptocurrency

3) I read one article in a normally very conservative and legit newspaper:
   They say whe have to stop our behavior immidiatly, otherwiese there will be a point of no return in less then 2 years. So Bitcoin gets instable because of other technologie. Lets say yes and now we get to really importantent problems.
member
Activity: 637
Merit: 11
Its really like this 600 Watt GPU or 600 W ASIC....
legendary
Activity: 3122
Merit: 2178
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the ticket prices increase to cover extra costs incurred by the aviation industry
and one example of the 'tax'  is the corsia agreement

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the Corsia Agreement, thank you.


so excuse me if you took the word 'tax' too literal, thinking it meant vat. but any price increase due to government policy directly or indirectly we consider a 'tax'

I'm not taking the word "tax" too literal, it's just that the Corsia Agreement apparently isn't having people "pay more for aeroplane tickets" yet as it's been only obligatory since the beginning of this year with the obligations being:

..
as for atmosfair wasting money making a hotel/motel/lodge thing rather than reducing co2 via tree planting or other environmental methods of co2 absorbtion
https://www.atmosfair.de/en/die-letzte-und-klimafreundlichste-lodge-des-climate-treks-in-nepal-oeffnet-ihre-pforten/

So you found one project of literally dozens that you personally think is a waste of money. Good on you.


..as for bitcoins co2 reduction.
compare today to 2012's GPU era. imagine if ASICS nevr got invented and we were at 50exa via GPU's
the crypto industry IS ALREADY dealing with the co2 issue.
first moving from CPU to GPU in 2010. then moving from GPU to asic in 2013..

Which is a complete bullshit statement and having been around long enough you should know better.

The only thing that moving from GPUs to ASICs did was that mining from 600W worth of GPUs changed to mining with 600W worth of ASICs.


in short. even if we moved out bitcoins intrinsic valu of PoW costs and made bitcoins value pure speculation with zero underlying cost of production (imagine scenario of gold being mined for zero cost). then bitcoins value would decline.

On that I agree with you. Which is why I would neither move away from PoW, nor try to use PoW's work for "useful calculations" but rather introduce a CO2 fund that works similar to the developer funds of other alts.
legendary
Activity: 4410
Merit: 4766
aeroplanes are not taxed on the gallons of kerosene.
passengers dont pay an extra separate fee

the ticket prices increase to cover extra costs incurred by the aviation industry
and one example of the 'tax'  is the corsia agreement

in the uk without things actually being a 'tax'(vat) we define them as a tax if the price has increased due to government policy.
EG sugary drinks have increased in price. not due to VAT.. but due to a 'sugar tax'
plastic shopping carrier bags are now 5p/10p.. w call that a tax
so excuse me if you took the word 'tax' too literal, thinking it meant vat. but any price increase due to government policy directly or indirectly we consider a 'tax'

..
as for atmosfair wasting money making a hotel/motel/lodge thing rather than reducing co2 via tree planting or other environmental methods of co2 absorbtion
https://www.atmosfair.de/en/die-letzte-und-klimafreundlichste-lodge-des-climate-treks-in-nepal-oeffnet-ihre-pforten/

as for bitcoins co2 reduction.
compare today to 2012's GPU era. imagine if ASICS nevr got invented and we were at 50exa via GPU's
the crypto industry IS ALREADY dealing with the co2 issue.
first moving from CPU to GPU in 2010. then moving from GPU to asic in 2013..
the thing is that debates like climate change/co2 and even war on drugs is they are designed to be a never ending battleground used as an excuse to already/eventually introduce government controls.
take war on drugs. first cannabis, that got legalised, then cocaine, that then become less life threatening due to 'narcan' so now we are hearing everywhere about fentanyl... its just a debate that has no end as even if efforts are being made. goalposts are moved to just continue the battle

in short. even if we moved out bitcoins intrinsic valu of PoW costs and made bitcoins value pure speculation with zero underlying cost of production (imagine scenario of gold being mined for zero cost). then bitcoins value would decline. but not only that the co2 battle would just move onto counting the distributed ledger costs per full node, thus no end to the debate
legendary
Activity: 1382
Merit: 1122
Again pointing on others is like kindergarden   Wink

I couldn't agree more. Any news pointing out fabricated CO2 emissions (of an extremely useful network) is distracting newbs front the fact that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. If they don't believe it yet, that's not really my problem.
legendary
Activity: 3122
Merit: 2178
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Thats a really good idea. But not Altcoin new creation. there are many social project not supported. Simply 1 BTC of the Block reward goes to CO2 fund like DEV reward.

Yeah, but good luck with getting the devs, let alone the miners on board with that Smiley

Also that's the faintest of an idea with not much thought put behind it, so there's probably other reasons why such an approach might be problematic. Still, maybe this idea gets ahold of the right people and gets turned into something useful down the road.


Some other idea to change POW algo to something useful like SETI or the idea of Medicoin. Buit this not really work

Yep. Using PoW for "useful" calculations appears to be a fruitless approach at trying to eat your cake and have it too.


---


franky1's post is unfortunately completely beside the point but I'm still curious about a few things:

1. people already pay more for aeroplane tickets due to increased 'taxes' due to climate taxes

Kerosone is tax exempt on an international level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_fuel

Living in an European country I never paid any taxes besides various unrelated airport fees and VAT (YMMV, maybe some European countries have an environment tax, but I'm not aware of any in my country of Austria). Going by train within Europe is often 3-5 times more expensive than going by airplane (which is pretty fucked up if you think about it).

The US seems to pull in all sorts of taxes, but non related to the environment:
https://www.travelzoo.com/blog/information-air-fees-taxes/

So which taxes are you referring to and in which country? Serious question, I couldn't find anything.


2. donating funds to atmosfair.?!? did you even see what they bought with it. they made a motel/youth hostal. [...]

Did you even look at which projects they are supporting?

https://www.atmosfair.de/en/climate-protection-projects/

Which hostel are you talking about? O.o

Atmosfair is just an example, but one that has been very well vetted by both governmental bodies (BMU) and trusted, well known NGOs (Stiftung Warentest), supporting only projects that follow stringent standards (CDM-Gold-Standard):
https://www.bmu.de/themen/wirtschaft-produkte-ressourcen-tourismus/tourismus-sport/nachhaltiger-tourismus/tipps-zum-nachhaltigen-reisen/
https://www.test.de/CO2-Kompensation-Diese-Anbieter-tun-am-meisten-fuer-den-Klimaschutz-5282502-0/
https://www.goldstandard.org/

I've only recently heard from them but from what I've found about them so far that's about as vetted and transparent as you get.


That being said, to repeat:
1) atmosfair is just an example
2) even if there are countries that charge an environment tax on aviation that's a wholly separate issue from trying to reduce PoW's CO2 impact.

legendary
Activity: 4410
Merit: 4766

As for which environmental organization to support, there's already a couple of well-vetted non-profit organizations that help people off-set their air-traffic-caused CO2 emissions on a voluntary basis such as atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/

In theory one could also try to get this into a Bitcoin hard fork but let's not kid ourselves.

What would be everyone's thought on this?

1. people already pay more for aeroplane tickets due to increased 'taxes' due to climate taxes
2. donating funds to atmosfair.?!? did you even see what they bought with it. they made a motel/youth hostal.
seriously. if they wanna help the co2 'offset' thy should be planting rainforests or solar farms. not doubling their money making motels
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