A system like bitcoin but that only uses (all of) the CPU 10% of the time incentivizes a lot of cheap compute power for projects that need it. As an example. Algorithms that have similar loads to conventional software encourages more powerful general purpose computers instead of more powerful custom bitcoin ASICS.
There are much better things to incentivize.
This needs a proper source. As far as I understand currently only Proof of Work is sound enough to use in real-world scenarios. Also see: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/#is-a-work-indep...
It seems like people would want to bend thermodynamics and require that benefit is produced without spending energy...
By the way mining is already used to heat houses in Siberia: https://qz.com/1117836/bitcoin-mining-heats-homes-for-free-i...
If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining.
Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money.
Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
> Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.
That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?
Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.
Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.
- pixels are being optimised, with displays going closer and closer to true-off all the time
- pixels: even whitespace is important next to information
- RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.
- SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.
It's only logical they if we don't need to spend the energy to mine coins, we should stop doing that sooner then later.
And protecting money is not important?
> - RFC: we're wasting a few bits as a tradeoff for less complicated hardware and less processing power. Not sure if applicable anymore, but reserved fields and consistent parsing saved us some power/materials historically.
Well so the RFC reserved bits are waste but also a benefit? Maybe the same is true w.r.t Bitcoin mining?
> - SSL provides security and privacy in your communication at a cost reasonable for the outcome.
The cost is reasonable in SSL case but unreasonable in Bitcoin case based on what criteria exactly? Remember that SSL relies on PKI that has a lot weaker security guarantees (see Symantec, DigiNotar and your favourite Chinese CA in your OS's trust store).
Next to nonexistent cost per connection in standard case of SSL. We can saturate gigabit links using modern hardware with AES-NI. Outside of special deployment cases, the cost is a rounding error. We can't provide this capability in a cheaper way at the moment (or we would do that)
On the other hand, we've got Bitcoin which chugs energy/money by design, while other solutions like proof of stake / space / ... exist and are much more energy efficient. People concisely decide to burn money to keep this system running - that's why it's unreasonable.
They are only proposed solutions, not implemented in any existing systems so it's not fair to compare them. Proof of stake for example has numerous drawbacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
And Bitcoin does not provide service that is valuable to all parties?
> Bitcoin mining is done by people who want to get rich by not doing anything.
Calculating SHA256 is hardly anything because we wouldn't be arguing about that, right?
> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?
You're not concerned about SSL failing for some reason? Heartbleed?
> What if Bitcoin were to fail for some reason?
That's highly speculative. Besides Ethereum has several failures already and it's still doing fine because there are serveral mechanisms that can be used to resolve such problem (e.g. hardforks).
That is a totally different use case. A display is supposed to always be on, while a cpu should turn off while not in use. When a cpu has no work it slows down to conserve power and reduce heat output. What happens when a monitor has no input data? It goes to sleep. It doesn't just display the last thing and continue processing a stream of data from it's input.
or the Sun, what a waste of energy that is
I don't get it. Why won't you complain about monitor pixels, that don't display content using/wasting power or various unused/reserved bits transmitted every second (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abhi-covert-00) that also waste power. Proof of work uses energy to meet some strict guarantees.
This reminds me of complaining that SSL is computationally expensive and therefore plain HTTP is better. 10 years ago of course.