Topic: PoW mining as a route towards achieving a Type 1 civilization and beyond? - page 2. (Read 478 times)

Likewise. I think the negatives of PoW are overstated.

Most people don't like POW because they say its a waste of power and global warming.

However you need to realize that with POS there is a centralization issue if the coins are not distributed fairly, and in the beginning life of a coin that usually means the early adopters hold most of the power. Basically the way how 1% of the population has 99% of the money like today.

Its true that POW like an Antminer is a huge waste of resources and power and leads to unwanted pollution but you need to realize that Sports are no different. Sports don't really serve any purpose, its for entertainment but the amount of waste that goes on with sports is high also.

Take NASCAR for example, the amount of pollution created and gas wasted to go around in a circle is also very high.

Hence I don't think POW is that bad as people make it out to be.

Population growth is by far the biggest threat to mankind and earth for that matter, assuming no nuclear holocaust will happen in the near future.
It's a big problem, far bigger than most will admit, as technology advances, less and less people are needed for mankind to function normally, more automation and less jobs to go around. 
On the flip side, inhabitable corners of the earth are shrinking daily, we have drought and femine in places people used to live happy ten or twenty years back, poverty is increasing all around the globe.
You see where this is going?
In the following years we will start to see mass migrations due to uninhabitable lands and soon earth will not be able to sustains its population for multiple reasons.
Unfortunately, there is not enough for everyone to go around at the rate the populations is growing, you can check the predicted population growth - its doesn't look good, its actually scary to say the least.
By the time we hit 2050-2060 there's gonna be huge problems, and there's not much options that can solve this.
Either we start controlling population growth or there's gonna be cleansing, either by viruses or world wars.....
No doubt there's organizations around the world already planning how to get rid of mass amounts of people 

And with modern medicine, you never know how much further our maximum lifespan can be stretched. You may see greater and greater blockchain solutions than you ever thought possible.

Perhaps not fund, but maintain solar power facilities? They do need repairs!

If we used pow mining to fund solar problem solved.

Lots and lots and lot of solar power available.

Power is not much of an issue for Earth.

Irresponsible use of fossil fuel for power is the problem.

That and population growth.

Although massive crash and burn seems right around the corner due to irresponsible burning of fuels.

Guess I am lucky to be 61 as I will most likely die before 2060.

I see no way for earth to continue population growth and increased fossil fuel burning.

Really, 40% I'd thought bitcoin was closer to 25% these days. Perhaps my data is old.

But lets go with the 0.5% then, of total power used by mining these days. We are of course trending away with Ethereum looking towards a PoS/PoW hybrid for ultimately PoS.


Is this tenable? Even 0.5% of the world's power is a monstrous amount of power, already close to infringing upon the power use of other industries. I hear tell that China no longer subsidizes electricity for miners like they used to.

Do you think we're contributing towards a type 1 civilization? That this essential pit of "wasted" electricity may demand greater and greater renewable electrical resources if only to keep costs low enough for profit?

Lets just do a quick sanity check on the 1% statement:

Total electrical power consumption globally in 2012 was 20,900 TWHs, with a claim that was up 5% by 2014 (21,945 TWH) per Wikipedia.  Charts from https://yearbook.enerdata.net seem to confirm a number in that range. 

Lets use Bitcoin as a basis for hashing.  Its hashrate is approximately 40 EH (40,000,000 TH) or about 3 million S9 13.5TH miners.  Round an S9 up in power consumption to 1500 Watts/hr to cover some incidentals like building lights.  So 1 miner uses 1.5KWh*24*365/yr or 13.1MWH per year.   3 Million of those would be 39 TWHs.  Bitcoin represents about 40% of global mining, so call it an even 100 TWHs for all mining.

1% of 21,954 TWHs is 219... so mining perhaps uses 0.5%.  Actually closer to 1% than I figured it would work out too.

Note this presume all serious amounts of mining of Bitcoin are used with S9 or better technology, since that has been around for a couple of years now.

As we know, a type one or PLANETARY CIVILIZATION

Has harnessed the entire energy output of its home planet or about 100,000 times the amount of energy we can harness. At this point, this civilization could control the weather on their planet and would not be phased by ecological issues. Natural phenomena could be altered and cities would likely be built wherever the civilization desired, like in the middle of the ocean. This is one self-preserving step in the direction of immortality for a civilization.


And a type two or A STELLAR CIVILIZATION,

Is a few thousand years more advanced than we are. This level of society would be able to harness all energy from its local star. This is where things start to get interesting and technology of this proportion becomes harder to fathom. A theoretical model that parallels Kardashev’s scale comes from Freeman Dyson, who conceived of the eponymous Dyson sphere. He formulated his theory in a paper titled, Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation, proposing a search for infrared radiation which could potentially be seen in civilizations harnessing the energy of their star with a Dyson Sphere. Dyson theorized a progression of levels in which a civilization could start to extract energy from its star ranging from a swarm of satellites to an actual spherical structure hovering around the star that could be inhabited.




And as of this moment it is believed that PoW style mining consumes close to 1% of all energy on the planet. The numerous ads we're all blasted with to sign up for some contract mining farm with over 1 million GPUs says that this is likely true. I've even worked for one and helped start another. Many, especially the newer ones found outside of Asia focus on using solar and hydro power in order to keep costs down and quite frankly that is just fabulous.

Could we be contributing to this push through demand for efficiency and overall consumption or are we more likely to reach a brick wall where our energy use infringes upon the planet's desire to produce electric power and we're outlawed globally in the same way that O-Zone destroying chemicals have been?

I think the former is more likely.