I would imagine the vast majority of bitcoin is not mined using clean energy, so yes, something far worse.

When the electricity prices are demand-driven, the question is meaningless.

If one thinks that the energy can be put to a better use, they can set up a shop next door and start paying slightly more per kWh than the miner, thereby destroying their margins.

Except that the resources here are finite, and using them has side effects.

Gosh this is ridiculous, why do I even have to explain it. If someone starts wasting fire extinguishers by emptying them out a window, do you proclaim that "if one thinks that the fire extinguisher can be put to a better use, they can start using them for that better purpose next door"?

Where do they get the money to buy new extinguishers?

Depends on who buys them. The point, to completely overdraw the analogy, is: Fire extinguishers are finite, and using them damages everybody's house. So wasting them excessively on pointless activities might not be the smartest thing to do, even if you just waste your own money on them.

You still don't get that if that electricity had a better/profitable use it would be used for such a purpose rather than Bitcoin mining.

I don't think it's that simple. Most energy is produced without any regard for externalities. So it isn't necessarily about a better use for the energy, but the fact that it is being used at all.

But the power plants are producing the energy anyway. What would be the benefit if it wasn't being used?

Power plants produce more energy in response to increased demand.

Some do. With hydro, nuclear, solar or wind the production is driven by other factors and can lead to market imbalances at times http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/germany-excess-power/

Can you elaborate on how this process works? How the fuel gets used based on demand?

Last I checked, a majority (plurality?) of peaking power plants[1] burn natural gas. When demand increases enough, the base load[2] increases and more power plants are added to the grid.

The grid is not a battery; generated power in is always close to the current demand output. Any claims that crypto-mining uses "clean" power just indicates the claimant doesn't understand that power is patently fungible[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

I'm not an expert, but I think the broad strokes are pretty straightforward. Let me take a shot.

It depends on the type of plant.

There's a concept in power generation of "base load", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load , which is the minimum usage. Some plants are expensive and slow to start up and shut down. If they're cheaper per kwH, then it makes sense to use them, but only for base load.

Then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant , which are halfway compromises. They spin up and shut down perhaps twice a day. If load starts falling (or grows more slowly than predicted), these'll definitely get spun up less often. If load rises (faster than predicted), more of these will be used while plans are made to bring up more base load power plants.

Then there're peaker plants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant . These are expensive but responsive. They spin up and shut down within seconds of a change in demand.

This is all controlled by auctions, at various timescales.

A example that might be popular among the Musk fanboys of HN (e.g. me) would be https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/23/tesla-bat...

Hmm, I bet the auction process could use a blockchain.

Happily. I used to work at a power company.

So the power company has a grid, and they monitor the amount of power generated with the amount of power consumed.

They know this because they have sensors at the substations that can tell how much power is being used.

If too much power is being generated, they can sell the power to another company, or turn off excess capacity.

If not enough power is being generated, they can buy the deficit from another company, or increase the generation.

It's really straightforward.

How does the fuel in your car get used based on demand?

In all seriousness, there are many types of power plants, the exact mechanism depends on how the actual energy is produced. It is true that for some renewable energy sources like e.g. solar energy, you cannot regulate production and need to store excess energy. But for fossil fuels, you (roughly) produce by demand.

No they don't?

Not so much setting up shop next door as an advantage, but moving miners closer to the pool you mine with would. If that happens to be near chearper hydro power, better. But I don't think that power companies mind being able to make more money. With ASICs and GPUs being the constraint against a competitor, power is a lower concern.

Is Bitcoin efficient? Perhaps not. But it's no worse than the alternative - banks.

Story 1. I went to Taipei to meet someone from HN. He wanted to pay me back for my train tickets. His American bank card didn't work in the ATM. I suggested, half-jokingly, "Why not Bitcoin?" When he was back in the US, I set up an account, and the transaction was easy.

Story 2. I wanted to donate to a webcomic: http://blog.mixflavor.com/p/donate.html

First I tried PayPal. "We're sorry. You cannot use your PayPal account registered in Taiwan to send payments to, or receive payments from, other PayPal accounts registered in Taiwan."

This lunchtime I went to my bank, to try to make a transfer. The guy at the entrance saw the screenshot, and asked a colleague. She and he then made a phone call. A third person came downstairs, and she spoke English. She couldn't understand the written Chinese, and told me it's not their bank's problem. She told me to go to another bank down the street.

The second bank involved 3 people reading, translating, discussing, searching Google Maps, to then send me on to a third bank.

The third bank had a security guard at the entrance who asked what I was trying to do, and took me to an ATM to make a deposit. He navigated the Chinese-language menus, asked for my phone number, took cash, and finally made the deposit.

It took 45 minutes and 8 people to try to send money to someone, and I was late to come back to the office.

Bitcoin is doing well, not because the blockchain is so hot right now, but because banks are just awful.

I don't know. My bank account doesn't drop %20 in one day.

> Now, the nation’s hottest investment is buying money. And the investment rush is raising questions about whether one reason for the slow pace of economic growth in recent years is that the nation is busy distracting itself. I can't stop laughing at this sentence. Oh the boogeyman!

Bitcoin is a first iteration of a greater group of technologies. Latest versions do not require extra energy at all.

But even Bitcoin uses much less energy for transmitting money than bank buildings etc.

As a New England resident I was always curious about the heat output efficiency of a miner compared to electric resistance heating. Somebody really wants that waste heat. If only it were useful in warm weather...

So moving an electron generates heat. While we use transistors at the low level to do the computation, the method they work by is shuttling electrons through substrates, which have some kind of inherent resistance.

So it's all I^2R heat losses.

Is it any worse than burning the electricity with electric cars? The energy burned is never coming back in either case... I mean, why one is environmentally friendly and the other not?

Electric cars are moving a person from one place to another, often displacing fossil fuel engines that would otherwise be used. Bitcoin miners are... facilitating one of the least useful currencies for doing transactions?

"Is wasting a fire extinguisher on making pretty foam angels worse than using it to extinguish a fire? The used up fire extinguisher is never coming back in either case... I mean, why one is considered a sensible use of a fire extinguisher and the other not?"

Electric cars are replacing a definite fossil fuel with something potentially renewable.

Bitcoin is a brand new, utterly pointless use of electricity.

But you have moved mass.

I agree bitcoin is an extreme waste of electricity, but plastic bottle caps... maybe it's "good" plastic and most of it is recycled

Why is this flagged?

My guess: Someone with flagging rights either likes Bitcoin, or feels that it's a divisive topic.

This headline is a good example of getting the target (you) to think past the sale: if you deny bitcoin is "something worse" you are implicitly conceding it is, in fact, a waste of energy (when contrasted with HFT server farms, I suppose?)

Trump did this with the "and mexico will pay for it" addendum to building the wall. By getting people to say "Mexico will never pay for it!" they are mentally conceding the wall.

I dislike these sorts of verbal tactics, but they are effective manipulations.

This might sound weird, but we should teach rhetoric in schools, which includes these kinds of dishonest player verbal tactics, because my thinking is that if we can name and speak openly on a meta level about these types of manipulative tactics, we can defend against them more effective.

Similar to teaching people how to hack for the sake of improving computer security, or maybe more similar to the old fantasy trope of the monster / sorcerer or whatever losing it's power if you know it's name. I feel like most people know of these tactics, but they can't call them out effectively, because it's cumbersome and awkward to do so.

We used to: the ‘liberal arts’ originally referred to the ‘quadrivium:’ arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; and the ‘trivium:’ grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

"Thinking past the sale" is not a thing. It's some gibberish Scott Adams made up to sell books and podcast ads.

Let's take your example. Is there a documented case of someone who started out being against the wall and then got confused into supporting it by the "Mexico pays" canard? I'd love to see that.

There are various rhetorical tactics and yes they can be effective... but none of them amount to Jedi mind tricks.

edit: to test my assertion, google that phrase. then google it with only results from 2015 or earlier. Scott Adams all the way down.

Much of news is based on the same style of rhetoric. You're asking both the pro and con positions to be neutral in their speech. That's not going to happen.

Media with positions I agree with do this, I recognize it. It's not going way. NPR likes to say during their pledge drives that they only give us facts... Uhhuh. I mean Innskeep is notorious.

Tangent and slightly off topic... but I'm interested in the thinking here.

Maybe I take propositional statements a bit too literally? I don't see the trick, or it's not even a good trick.

Is bitcoin a waste of electricity:

  1. No. something worse? No.
  2. No. something worse? Yes. <-- doesn't make logical sense.
  3. Yes. something worse? No. It's just a waste of elec.
  4. Yes. something worse? Yes. <-- really hate bitcoin here

So in case 1, how is it conceding that bitcoin is a waste of energy? Case 3 & 4 already agrees that bitcoin is a waste of energy regardless of "something worse".

Maybe the better statement is "Bitcoin is worse than wasting electricity"(???) Then the target needs to deny that it's "worse" before considering "waste of electricity".

Thoughts?

Move over Betteridge!

“Has Bitcoin Stopped Beating Its Wife Yet?”