Topic: Energy consumption will become an issue if bitcoin really breaks through - page 7. (Read 23459 times)

That is quite debatable. In fact, to think so is incredibly short-sighted with ASICs right around the corner. Maybe it's the largest cost *right now*, but are you familiar at all with the term amortization?

I mean we can use costs in $ as an indication of how many resources are being dedicated to bitcoin, can we not? You did the same by equating financial GDP with consumption.

I'm just going to make up some numbers here for second that I know are not real-world, but I that doesn't matter--as has already been explained and I will explain again in a second.

Let's say an ASIC and a GPU are both 100% guaranteed to mine bitcoin for 5 years straight and then fail. Let's say the ASIC costs $1000 and uses $1000 in electricity in that time. Total 5 year investment: $2000. Let's say a GPU costs $200 but uses $1800 in electricity. Total 5 year investment: $2000.

Your only counter-argument to this is "well the ASIC is 100x faster, it is therefore more efficient". Sure, in terms of mhash/joule, it is. In terms of resources consumed, there is no difference. All a 100x faster machine is going to do is drive up the difficulty and weed out GPUs. Now if the world were a static place, ASIC guy would win all the monies. Unfortunately for him, anyone with a computer has a built-in calculating machine that can figure out that there is a profit margin to be had by purchasing an ASIC.

Replace ASIC with "solar panel array" or whatever consumption activity that you prefer to make it sound better and you have the same thing. Resources must be consumed until there is only a small profit margin remaining from the mining system.

Your counter-argument to that is that this consumption will drive innovation (lol where's ur deflation economy now), but the innovation only drives to further consumption--expending the maximum amount of resources possible in the name of profit. Instead of acknowledging the fact that hey, maybe this is batshit, you must rationalize this epic fail in the most extreme of ways, namely hinging on the hope that oil will no longer be our dominant energy source in the near future. Pathetic.


Wishy washy, flippy floppy, bitcoin good bcuz i say so and if not good we change.

 

I don't think there's an eye-rolling icon big enough to convey my thoughts on this.  Silicon is extremely common.  The largest cost of production is energy.  I can setup some renewable energy source almost anywhere, sell when it's profitable, and use the excess energy to refine silicon.  But I won't even need to do that, because the amount of silicon used by Bitcoin mining doesn't even grow that quickly thanks to reductions in die size.

Listen, in 20 years, by the time Bitcoin energy usage matters at all, our problem will be that we have too much renewable energy at certain times and in certain places.  Bitcoin mining can make use of that energy.  Our other problem will be that we won't have enough energy at certain times, in certain (cold) places.  And Bitcoin can help to even that out, as well.

7% of electricity seems like a shocking figure.  But, really, it isn't.  It will be easily absorbed into the future structure of otherwise wasted energy when the time comes.


It's kind of hard to prosecute wars when they can't be financed.  "It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking."


It's not a design flaw.  It's an intentional feature.  And it can be changed if absolutely necessary.  But it likely won't be.


That's unfortunate, since the value of Bitcoin is in decentralization, not "efficiency".

You seem to assume that thanks to almighty bitcoin the world will be a better one and that there will be less wars. I do not share your belief.

Bitcoin has a serious design flaw being its potentially enormous energy consumption.I think bitcoin is an absolutely brilliant idea whose time has come. But I sure hope it will not be bitcoin that breaks through but a more energy-efficient successor.

Disclaimer: I hold Bitcoins. (But probably not for much longer).

Would this not be the best case under any scenario where crony capitalism or whatever term you want to give to the us government+MIC+financial sector loses a lot of its power? Electricity is only one part of bitcoin mining. Energy use encompasses every stage. Bitcoin is not more efficient with renewable energy if billions of tons of earth are being dug up to find silicon for circuit boards to produce devices designed to mine bitcoin in a more electrically efficient manner in an ongoing effort to compete for more of a fixed piece of pie.

You know, actually that just makes me want to underline this particular reason this argument is dumb.  Energy is not the same thing as electricity.  The electricity that is used in houses is almost completely irrelevant to the energy consumed by society.  It's something like 15%.  Yet, thanks to financialization and centralized money printing forced at the barrel of a gun, it's sold to you at 4 times the production cost.  That's the mark-up, for a technology that hasn't changed in a hundred years.

So, when you say "7% of electricity" as though that's supposed to be a big number, who cares?  It isn't.  The worst case is that it's slightly less efficient than the current economic system without, you know, subsidizing murderous psychopaths.  The best case is that it ushers in a new golden age of renewable energy and slightly subsidizes those living in colder areas.

Other than that, if OP doesn't know yet, there's also the "proof of stack" approach that doesn't require this kind of processing (but may have other problems). Or the "centrally issued and web of trust for consensus and less privacy" model that ripple.com uses for their XRPs.

I've been thinking for a while maybe it's possible to build fridges and air conditioners in a way that they need generated heat (for the compressors, or maybe some other idea) that could come from electricity spent for mining.

So the gist is:

1) People in the financial industry should never work again
2) People voluntarily choosing to waste energy is more efficient than not voluntarily wasting energy
3) Energy is centralized because of the financial system (I've always wanted 3 separate power lines from 3 companies running to my house...)
4) % of GDP = % of energy used

you forgot

5) The financial system also is the cause of cancer and many other incurable diseases

Okay, first of all, I'm going to voice a general objection to your using Switzerland as an example of anything.  Switzerland is completely irrelevant to the resources consumed by the global financial system.  Most are consumed by the United States military, which you haven't even begun to account for.  Who do you think, ultimately, balances all the ledgers of the global financial system in the same way that the Bitcoin network does?  I'll give you a hint, it's the world's biggest collections agency.

So, this argument strikes me as an example of Europeans holding themselves up as models of efficient economy, while actually being completely dependent upon Federal Reserve money printing that supports the largest military on the planet by an order of magnitude, and which has, additionally, directly bailed out Europe twice in the last century.  So, with that out of the way,


Why?  Why can't they go home instead?  This is like my arguing that Bitcoin mining doesn't waste energy because "what would the Bitcoin miners be doing otherwise?"  Same argument.

Are you sure they will disappear because of bitcoin breaking through? Which ones exactly?