Topic: Is bitcoin mining environmentally responsible? - page 2. (Read 3208 times)

+1

an ideal world exists only in each persons heads.  there is no ideal.

there is improvement though.

It isn't environmentally responsible in my opinion but there are so many other, much bigger, environmental problems in the world that I'd start there rather than mining bitcoins.

I do agree though. In an ideal world we wouldn't need to mine them.

if you combine your bitcoin mining device as a space heater and turn off that heater, then sure?

Guys, i read through looking for anyone making the most important points that come to my mind and didn't see it.  When i read this article a few days ago it annoyed me because.

1.  Method:  How green your electricity is depends on how you make it.  The world is gradually improving this.

2.  Comparison:  How is this different than all of the thousands of data centers operated by all of the worlds banks which I dare say are probably far less efficient than the mining rigs.  Also the block-chain doesn't require heated and ventilated branch offices scattered every 10 meters throughout every city on earth.  Who's green now?

3.  Future:  Mining has a real incentive to drive efficiency forward and reduce costs.  Traditional banks don't, we all can see how they endlessly keep raising fees to cover whatever private jets they desire.  Miners have no such access - no end consumers for them to rape.

Yes yes, I know the rising difficulty draws more and more power, but keeping things in perspective it's vastly greener than conventional banking when all things are considered.  Plus if the world ever goes full BTC in the far future, you can recycle every ATM on earth into beer cans or something.  Having access to the internet is already as important or more-so than where the nearest bank or ATM is.

Agreed- and when solar cells are readily available, this will disappear except the cost to manufacture mining hardware- which of course will be great, once the ASICs are readily available at the same price point as GPUs/FPGAs.

As fossil fuels get wound down it will become even more environmentally safe then smelting and printing currency

Someone mentioned all the paper used to print currency, and I would mention the administrative work that is required to keep traditional currency circulating; not just the staff, office space, computers, but all sorts of wallets and purses.  Even if purses were still used, we're talking about a lot of extra leather just for the cash slots and for men- if I could get by just using my mobile device as a wallet, I would, instead of all the cards and cash necessary.

To compare, let's think of bitcoin as a product.  How many useless ubiquitous products are on the market that require a large amount of energy to manufacture or maintain?  When I read media about bitcoin being an environmental disaster, I have trouble reconciling how it should receive so much attention, when any other thing that is needed or desired is churned out by factories without a second thought.

I definitely think we should be mindful of resources, and climate change is serious business- but... let's consider how bitcoin could have a positive impact in replacing currencies in the long term.

Big primes can be created easily, so no point finding em imho.

/rolleyes media driven narrative for ratings

Just want to add that ppcoin is also broken in other ways, so that's not the end solution either.

ppcoin and bitcoin share another unrelated misfeature, that the barrier to entry increases as time goes on.

This has nothing to do with difficulty and this is important to understand.  It has specifically to do with SHA256 and the fact that SHA256 was never designed as a proof-of-work problem.

The problem is that the electricity requirements of bitcoin means that transactions will have to be more expensive than for competing currencies.

The transaction volume is an upper bound on the goods and services sold in the economy, and with an incentive to do less transactions than in a competing currency, the goods and services available in bitcoin will be less than in competing currencies(*) 


(*) all other things considered equal.  Assume that for everything I say in this discussion.

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable for a currency but for a digital commodity I don't really see the problem with it. Compared to all the waste in general society worrying about a couple megawatts of electricity mining Bitcoin is far from a concern in my opinion.

It is better to reuse proof of work that has already happened.   A bitcoin is proof of work that happened in the past, and one concept that is put on top of this is to count the days since you received the coin, and that is your "integrated" proof-of-work.

Every block, all holders of bitcoin gets one "bitcoin-block" of voting power.  In ppcoin this voting power can be used to reduce the real proof-of-work/hashing required to win.

I often wonder this! It is quite a waste of computing resources really. What we need is a useful sum! The power is used to find massive primes and that leads to the creation of a new block! Primes are useful!

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable at all, and this is the reason why it will be overtaken by other better crypto currencies.


Just to give you an example. The M1 money supply in the US, the money "minted" by the FED is approx 2.000 billion USD.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1/

Each block mined in bitcoin gives 25 coins out of 11049125, or 6*24*25 = 3600 out of 11049125 a day.

That works out to 0.03258% per day.

If we used bitcoin instead of fiat with a total market value equal to 2.000 billion USD, the cost of mining will be close to the energy price of 2.000 billion USD * 0.03258% per day.  That works out to

$ 651 million in energy expenditure per day.

That is almost $240 billion a year.

Now make no mistake, that is simply the cost of reaching consensus on which transactions have happened. Thus the equivalent of this value in goods and services are extracted from the economy.

Instead of going to bankers, it is smoked by computers for the benefit of reaching consensus.

The thing is that there are actually cheaper ways of reaching consensus, and the ppcoin is one such method.  It uses proof of past work instead of constantly doing new work to reach consensus.  Thus the cost of running the network in terms of energy is radically different.  This means that it can scale to cover a bigger economy than what bitcoin can.

Is mining gold, silver, nickel etc environmentally responsible?

Short answer: No.

I'd really like to get solar panels, did anyone here get them just to mine?

I think you're right and you could reasonably claim HFT is a stupid zero-sum game, leading to flash spikes when algorithms go wrong real-fast.  The defenders might claim it adds liquidity but traders were trading before HFT and liquidity was fine, and what human needs sub-microsecond liquidity.  People should be investing not speculating by the day, minute or now microsecond!  A bit of short-term speculation helps liquidity and remove exchange differentials via arbitrage and reduce spread via volume, but there need to be sanity limits.

Adam

> ...

> this is the insulting robot

> all your lives are a waste of resources!