Topic: Is bitcoin mining a problem of wasting energy? No - page 2. (Read 552 times)

This is a fair point. PoS is not better at everything, just like the Lightning Network. Moreover, I don't think the attitude of reducing electricity consumption is something we should adopt in general as a strategy to fight global warming. Reducing waste makes sense, but energy consumption seems to be something different. Perhaps it's just because I was influenced by the idea of the Kardashev scale where energy plays a crucial role. I am not a climate skeptic, at the same time, so I think that something should be done. Namely, we should work on clean energy solutions. Some research suggests that mining largely uses clean energy, by the way.

1. The 4 mining pools actually needs to coordinate the attack and mutually agree to everything.
2. The attack would work only assuming that the individual miners don't switch off their miners or switch mining pools to prevent the attack.
3. Because the pool owners clearly know that manipulating the chain is going to have a positive effect with the price right? ? ?

Nope, your analyses are off.
The Costs to mine gold, are based on human payroll , equipment costs, petroleum to run the equipment,
all of which have variable factors.
This means the price to mine gold can increase or decrease , but the final decision is always , is the mining currently profitable.

In BTC, Miners with older rigs always stop mining, no more than 2 years after purchase, as the ASICS are no longer profitable.
You confuse a running network with bitcoin earning a profit.

A network can be run at a loss, if the miners or stakers have the personal resources to do so.
Problem with PoW is the hardware costs and energy wasted exceed the average man's ability to continue ,
you can think running a non-profitable ASIC for heat is efficient ,
but the truth is running an better heater is more profitable and cost efficient on a personal basis.

PoW miners go bankrupt all of the time,
You have never heard of a Proof of Stake Staker ever going bankrupt from staking.
Reason being the energy efficiently means that for less than $80 per month (less than most people cable's bill),
an individual can continue to support a strong and secure PoS network.

The Money losing Bitcoin running from your basement, will be neither secure or strong.
And a $50 electric radiator would be better at heating your basement.  

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https://lifesly.com/mining-companies-in-bankruptcy/
Mining Companies In Bankruptcy


Proof of Waste is turning out to be Proof of Financial Losses  

FYI:
BTC price is in $7k range even lower than when the article was written.

How do you relate this to your findings? Currently, miner get paid 12.5Bitcoin for validating new transactions on the Blockchain, which I see as profitable compared to their energy consumption in the process of validation. We should always get some facts straight before share them to other members who understand the system. Bitcoin as PoW algorithm made it more decentralized than others and power consumption matches the reward for the Miners.

You seems proved my observation: Gold miners stopping their mining or not, does not change the mining difficulty of gold, thus the energy barrier for mining one ounce of gold stays the same regardless what miners do

However for bitcoin, if lots of miners with old rigs stopped their mining due to unprofitable, the difficulty will go down significantly, thus the cost of mining one bitcoin will become much cheaper. It is self-adjusting, depends on how much people join the competetion. True, if not a single person on planet join the competetion, then the price will drop to zero, but I can guarantee you that won't happen, since I have my mining rigs running 24/7/365 heating my basement

Nope,
when actual physical mining operational costs does not match the current price,
miners temporary close the mines which stops all energy used to mine new gold.

They just cease paying for people and resources to mine the gold, they still own the gold mine,
once the price of gold returns mining into profitability they start mining again.
This also does not stop current gold owners from trading gold.

Contrast this with bitcoin flawed design, if the BTC miners take a month pause due to not being profitable the whole network stops.
No bitcoins can be traded with anyone.
Gold does not have that critical flaw,
plus it has uses in the real world that always use up excess supply once prices fall, bitcoin does not.

So yes Virginia, Gold is a better store of value than bitcoin could ever pretend to be.  

FYI:
Contrast Proof of Stake coins, their energy efficient design means they can run 24x7 and no one ever goes bankrupt doing it.
While many PoW miners go bankrupt at every halving, due to the wastefulness in PoW design.

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For the Clueless such as your self.

https://hackernoon.com/bitmain-now-has-more-than-50-of-bitcoin-network-hash-rate-trouble-ahead-cfd5ea9cf101

No one has complained that gold mining wasted too much energy, since that is a must. You must overcome certain natural energy barrier to mine gold, there is no other way.This energy requirement is fixed regardless of gold's price

However, for cryptocurrency, you don't need to overcome a fixed natural energy barrier to get bitcoin. The only barrier of getting bitcoin comes from competition, it is other people that created an energy barrier for you to successfully mine bitcoin. And this energy barrier changes depends on coin value. During early days of mining, the barrier was very low

Given it is a barrier generated from competition, the competition model can also be designed so that it takes other type of energy input. Besides electricity, is there any other energy input that is more efficient?

Since fiat money can be regarded as universal form of energy (it can exchange any kind of energy source like petroleum, coal, nuclear material, etc...). By design a competition model based purely on money itself, like bidding, it will achieve the same effect but without any waste: You win the bid, you get new coin, if you lose the bid, you lose nothing. While in traditional competition model, the one who lose the competition also wasted lots of energy

For maximum decentralization, in my opinion, still PoS coins are better suited, because. with them there is an opportunity for mining even on very low-power computers, unlike PoW, which was first on computers, and then evolved to ASIC's level.

Here's the deal, people are generating energy from energy sources just to supply electricity, telephone, business services, and allot more. And that consumes energy. Bitcoin mining is consuming huge amount of electricity, burns tons and tons of coals just to make sure we have our transactions being verified, and new blocks are being produced consistently. All of that is for the sake of providing us services. Meaning to say, that if we have a reason why we need bitcoin mining, how come could we think of reasons to say that mining is a waste of energy?

Though, what we can do is to make the way how we consume energy through mining more efficient, thus, considering the use of other consensus algorithm.

Bitcoin is worth mining for and will really make you earn a lot of profit. As the news are coming, they say that bitcoin is again going in a downward movement and it is really so sad to see a news like that. Most people are hoping for the bitcoin that it will make them richer and grow a lot more but they should know first the advantages and disadvantages of it. In this country, bitcoin isn't that popular because they aren't knowledgeable and the promotion of bitcoin is limited. The electricity used in mining bitcoin is not a problem if you're in a well-developed country like US, Japan, Singapore, and etc. There's no problem and energy wasn't wasted because of the productivity of the bitcoin miners and how they work hard.

Sometimes it's just a waste of energy because the thing is the amount of bitcoin that they are mined was just bigger than the electricity bill of the used energy by the bitcoin mining so I say that somehow it is just a waste of energy because there are a lot of kilowatts that is used by but not suitable enough for the bitcoin mining so it is kind of wasting some of our energy especially right now that the electricity supply was not enough to sustain all the needs of the people.

No need to imagine, it's already been done -- at least with Delegated POS. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1234522463129800709

Poloniex, Binance and Huobi were caught staking customer STEEM and using it to attack the existing DPOS consensus. They've done a pretty good job of brushing the attack under the rug, but the evidence is rather damning.

POS hasn't been solved yet. It may never be. POW is the best we have, for now and the foreseeable future.

Of course not. Bitcoin mining is not a waste of energy because of this bitcoin mining we will be able to mine bitcoin and make a supply of for all the world and this is a way of earning money so I can say that it is not a way of wasting energy, perhaps those people who are saying that it is just a way of wasting energy is just like nothing happens but in bitcoin mining people are earning by doing this.

I really understand the security aspect of PoW, which is why am a bit careful when PoW is being criticized. I just think this shouldn't be ignored at the expense of the environment, decentralization and earth natural resources for making mining hardware.
We don't need to hold on strongly to something that could become worse in energy consumption than alot of other similar things... and worse still, make the community filled with guilt when confronted.

No,it's not cheap,convenient and affordable.It's still expensive and the production of such solar panels damages the environment.
Launching artificial suns in near orbit?WTF is this BS,OP?I've never heard about this science fiction BS.
The future of energy production is in geothermal energy and the nuclear reactors that use thorium instead of uranium.Thorium is more affordable than uranium and produces 10 times less nuclear waste.
Anyway,BTC mining isn't wasting energy.BTC has value and the electricity used to produce BTC has value.
If we use your kind of logic,then turning the lights in your house is actually wasting energy.

Nowadays, energy production technologies are being actively developed using alternative sources. This is especially true for solar panels. The technology of their production is constantly being improved. I recently read that the Chinese have switched to the production of larger panels with a side of 210 millimeters, while their efficiency has increased. The production of such electricity is very cheap, convenient and affordable for everyone. Therefore, I do not think that the extraction of bitcoins will be a big problem in terms of energy consumption. The sun is enough for the next several billion years. In addition, humanity is already approaching the possibility of launching artificial suns into near-earth orbit. It will be a ball with a diameter of only six meters. A few of these "suns" will make it possible to provide light and heat to our entire planet.

CPU computation was perfect for creating a decentralized global crypto currency. But people went on making dedicated device to outperform CPU and the crypto mining has been a whole new industry. No longer can a person mine any bitcoin in his home. POW is not decentralized anymore. And it's too late for bitcoin to make a change.

So.. AntPool + BTC.com = 51%? Math checks out lmao.

Imagine being Bitmain, the largest ASIC manufacturer having the latest ASICS months before selling to the public.
Not only will they always be able to outmine the general public, the stupid public pays them to continue their monopoly.
Bitcoin is already centralized, Bitmain just splits their over 51% dominance in multiple pools, so the clueless stay clueless.

Staking Coins don't require all new hardware every 1½ years,
ASICS all require complete replacement every 1½ years, that is a hugh investment in wasted boat anchors.  

*Note to Profit, you have to sell coins.
In PoS, this lowers the % you control.
In PoW, you can sell every coin you mine and never lose any % of control.

Yes, but it could end up making Bitcoin centralized. Think about it. Imagine being a huge exchange with a lot of PoS coins in custody? Solely from being a whale, you automatically have a significant influence over the network. In contrast to PoW whereas you'd actually have to dedicate money to buy hardware.