Topic: Environmental concerns of Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 1320 times)
Very much agreed OP! I have the same thoughts, they could have used some other way for mining. Easily $1,000,000s of electricity must be sucked out by mining everyday.
Honestly, I think it's an insane waste of computing power. Even just considering GPUs/ASICs, which are limited to parallelizable computations -- there are a LOT of good scientific applications that people have figured out ways to parallelize. (See, for example, the grid computing project Boinc: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) Why did the Bitcoin creators pick solving SHA-256 hashes over, for example, SETI@home? SETI@home predates Bitcoin.
Primecoin and its derivatives are at least doing something sort of useful. But still, finding Cunningham chains is about as close to the line of uselessness as you can get without falling over it...
Because 1) Boinc projects are not suitable for ProofOfWork (hard to find, easy to validate); 2) Boinc projects were/are centralized; 3) The Bitcoin creators 4 years ago did not anticipate and are not responsible for today's "insane waste of computing power"Primecoin and its derivatives are at least doing something sort of useful. But still, finding Cunningham chains is about as close to the line of uselessness as you can get without falling over it...
You should look at Curecoin for such an effort
Honestly, I think it's an insane waste of computing power. Even just considering GPUs/ASICs, which are limited to parallelizable computations -- there are a LOT of good scientific applications that people have figured out ways to parallelize. (See, for example, the grid computing project Boinc: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) Why did the Bitcoin creators pick solving SHA-256 hashes over, for example, SETI@home? SETI@home predates Bitcoin.
Primecoin and its derivatives are at least doing something sort of useful. But still, finding Cunningham chains is about as close to the line of uselessness as you can get without falling over it...
Primecoin and its derivatives are at least doing something sort of useful. But still, finding Cunningham chains is about as close to the line of uselessness as you can get without falling over it...
Hi all, first post here, please go easy on me. 
Looking at how the combined Bitcoin network hashing rate is around 88600 Petaflops/s (http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/), which is about 300 to 400 times the computing power of the Top 500 super computers combined, don't you think that Bitcoin and other Proof of Work based currencies will have a sudden loss of confidence as soon as the perils of Global Warming start becoming apparent? People are going to look at environmental alternatives, and see that traditional currencies or even some alternative crypto-currencies (such as Peercoin) have near-zero long term effects on the environment and could gravitate towards them...
I'm not sure if this has been discussed before on this forum, but could someone please tell me how Bitcoin aims to counter this threat to its long term usability?
P.S.: I know that SHA-256 involves enumerable calculations and not floating point ones, but still, even in Terahashs, a hash rate of almost 7000 Terahash/s seems huge considering Bitcoin has not yet taken off completely.
Looking at how the combined Bitcoin network hashing rate is around 88600 Petaflops/s (http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/), which is about 300 to 400 times the computing power of the Top 500 super computers combined, don't you think that Bitcoin and other Proof of Work based currencies will have a sudden loss of confidence as soon as the perils of Global Warming start becoming apparent? People are going to look at environmental alternatives, and see that traditional currencies or even some alternative crypto-currencies (such as Peercoin) have near-zero long term effects on the environment and could gravitate towards them...
I'm not sure if this has been discussed before on this forum, but could someone please tell me how Bitcoin aims to counter this threat to its long term usability?
P.S.: I know that SHA-256 involves enumerable calculations and not floating point ones, but still, even in Terahashs, a hash rate of almost 7000 Terahash/s seems huge considering Bitcoin has not yet taken off completely.
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