Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there.
> The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc.
Absolute insanity straight out of postapocalyptic SF.
"The ancients destroyed their civilization by funelling an ever increasing share of resources towards some kind of elaborate game of numbers".
> Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there.
That's the main point. There's no inherent incentive to use clean energy for mining. There's opposite stories about obsolete aluminum plants staying alive in China by just using their energy allocations to mine Bitcoin.
We use hydropower because it is clean and cheap. Those are the incentives.
The aluminum plants shut down... not stay running. Both mining and plants use huge amounts of continuous power. Bitcoin mining is far more profitable... no need to keep the aluminum going.
I’m very interested in reading about it though
I've read it some time ago. I recalled it as less speculative than it seems now.
The premise is that energy is a large part of aluminium production cost and the plants work on small margins. An over-investment into energy production provides cheap energy and allows the aluminium plants to improve their margins via crypto mining.
These dams are built in such a way that they need to continue to provide power or the equipment starts to fail.
It is also literally too expensive to build and maintain the lines to ship the power elsewhere.
Alcoa was more than happy to lease their space to someone who was going to use the power going to their facilities. There isn't much industry at this point that would fit.
All of the successful facilities that I know of (including my own) seek out cheap power... which happens to also be clean power. Hydropower. Most use existing facilities that were otherwise going to waste.
People in 100 years will be saying this about social media, not Bitcoin
The difference that I'm keeping an interested eye on is even if gold mining ceases, the energy required to produce a new gram of gold doesn't really change so a gram of gold still proves as much as it ever did. It isn't so clear yet that Bitcoin proves anything without an active mining network.
Gold is valuable because people buy it. People don't buy it because of some hypothetical amount of energy that went into producing it, they buy it mostly because it's shiny and rare (and sometimes because it doesn't corrode much or conducts well).
The energy cost to produce is relevant to its price only in so far as it feeds into the supply / demand equation.
These things are true but not necessarily so. Things can be scarce without being difficult to refine from raw materials (a stamp). Things can be difficult to extract without being particularly scarce (aluminium). Things can be valuable without being scarce (TVs), things can be scarce and not valuable (an original artwork by my 4 year old daughter).
The only thing that makes something valuable is that it is valued by people. People are weird and have lots of different reasons for valuing things. There are lots of things I could burn an insane amount of energy and money on that would not result in anything valued by others.
The idea that something should be valued based on the work that went into creating it is interesting as a hypothetical idea but not something that is very relevant to the actual world we live in.
If anything, you've got it backwards:
> it's scarce because it requires a lot of work to extract
It requires a lot of work to extract because it was so valuable that all the easy-to-extract gold was taken and put in jewelry and vaults.
– boring grey in colour
– not a good conductor of electricity
– not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either
– not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose
and one special, magical property:
– can be transported over a communications channel
If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it.
-Satoshi Nakamoto, August 2010
Prices depend on supply and demand. Gold is scarce, thus supply is low, and is useful (beautiful, can conduct electricity), thus demand is high.
Bitcoin is scarce, yeah, as it requires a lot of energy to produce it. But it's not really useful for now, people buy it only for speculation. So demand exists, but it might fluctuate a lot.
Platinum for instance was at one point considered the level "above gold", but it has since been overtaken. Gold simply is the better brand. It's the same for Bitcoin versus all other digital currencies.
> But it's not really useful for now, people buy it only for speculation.
Speculation itself is useful. Bypassing the financial system is useful.
A price of $18,000 per unit of Bitcoin might sound ridiculous, but it needs to be considered that the market cap of Bitcoin, representing most of the world's cryptocurrency market, is only $200 billion. That is comparable to the assets of a medium-sized US bank.
Uranium fuel takes a lot of effort to refine, but it's still cheaper than gold; partially because it's simply more common in the crust.
If Bitcoin mining becomes unprofitable, Bitcoin users could incentivize it through increased transaction fees.
Of course, what you say about transaction fees is true too - if miners are receiving less in 'mined' bitcoins, then they are likely to demand more in fees. You can already see this happening - when I first used bitcoin, nobody charged any fees at all, relying only on the mining rewards for covering their mining costs.
Robust because the phenomenon can begin detached from the energy grid by profit-seeking entities with capital to invest. Doesn't need permission, can be smaller, independent and eventually have something to offer back to the grid, but don't require it initially. Ability to bootstrap outside of regulation as a result. More nodes, more competition, shared excess. Fewer singular points of failure, more redundant, less fragile.
"Future," because that's a great vision for the future.
Nuclear energy has high fixed costs but then scales pretty well. As crypto currencies with PoW become a major industry, it's not difficult to imagine it might be cost-effective to build huge nuclear plants in some corrupt African country. (Africa has also huge untapped uranium ore deposits)
Nuclear works in stable, rules-following countries like France where its high energy paybacks subsidise good salaries for an army of bureaucrats enforcing the rules.
We are literally stuck with 50 year old technology in nuclear energy, as unfortunately progress has been slow.
With the fuel cost being basically free (thorium), the and the operational cost low because the system runs with little human intervention energy should actually end up incredibly cheap once we engineer these system in a better way.
Nope! Putting more energy is not going to make more money into the system, is just makes it more likely that you get to be in the front of a firehose that drips money into the system in a constant rate.
Putting more energy into the system just increases the cost of money itself. But no one wants money, what people want is the what money can buy. Instead of spending ever more energy to get into the front of the line, one could just use the energy for something productive and then sell it.
This doesn't negate what I'm trying to say. That the energy amount is variable but the currency units output on the other side are static doesn't change the fact that energy is being turned into money. By contributing a higher fraction of the input, you get a higher fraction of the output.
If anything, higher energy input can only be justified when the money being made as a result has an equivalent value or purchasing power. You're confusing units of currency for the actual purchasing power they represent, which actually is variable.
> no one wants money, what people want is the what money can buy
This is wrong. People want the option to have things in the future, which is exactly what money is.
There are other ways to get a "higher fraction of the output" that do not involve contributing to the input. That is the point you are missing.
You are treating this is a some function of fundamental physics. It's not. We are only talking about "conversion of energy into money" because that is what the best current implementation of a BFT system is using.
It's accidental. You are focused on the "Work" part of "Proof-of-Work", when what we care about for solving consensus in distributed part is the "Proof".
Yes, that's my point isn't it? I said "Bitcoin's proof of work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money." I did not say "all systems for ensuring the soundness of proofs in blockchains are a conversion of energy directly into money."
What we care about is trust minimization. It just happens that the first system utilized, proof-of-work, provides the best-yet incentives for ensuring trust minimization, and the most equitable distribution of coin. It being accidental does not mean it is not the the best method for securing "proof." (Which isn't to say that it is necessarily the best of all possible methods, only that the simple fact of it being first and accidental does not negate that it may be.)
And the costs of achieving those.
> provides the best-yet incentives
At an ever-growing prohibitive cost.
> most equitable distribution of coin.
Hardly true when you have more than 50% of the hashing power coming from farms ran in China on subsidized power and not paying for externalities.
By equitable distribution, I mean that mining is on average only marginally profitable; the bulk of mined coin needs to be sold on the open market, which means there is always liquidity and availability to those seeking to enter or exit.
Hashing power centralization and coin distribution are different topics. Decentralization of hashing power will continue to increase as the renewable energy costs continue to lower, because they will eventually match and then lower beneath the subsidized rates currently available only in specific jurisdictions. Costs will shift to initial capital investment rather than energy supply.
No, you have it backwards. A BTC that is already mined has as much value as a BTC that is yet to be mined, whether now or twenty years in the future.
Again, the fact that we spend energy to get more BTC is just accidental. There is no absolute law that postulates that the cost of energy and price of the asset need to be correlated.
> Decentralization of hashing power will continue to increase as the renewable energy costs continue to lower.
You are talking about spherical cows, I am talking about actual implementation of the system. Renewable energy costs mean jack shit when you have big central entities subsidizing dirty energy and if no one pays for the externalities. Also, it doesn't matter how "clean" a source of energy is. Unless you find a way to break the law of thermodynamics, the best way to be sustainable is to not consume the energy in the first place.
There are already plenty of market incentives for us to be more efficient and produce energy, we don't need to have an artificial component added to this system for it to work.
The problem is arguing a correlation between computation and work for price of BTC and/or cost of energy. That is the mistake from OP.
What a fucking dystopia that would be.
But I think by the time Bitcoin becomes so universal that all energy companies are mining companies, it is likely to already be at the scale of USD/EUR, or even become the reserve currency of the world, in which case it would not fluctuate nearly as much as it does now.
Sure, people who can afford energy storage themselves would be sorted. (Most of the time) Anyone below that wealth threshold would be at the mercy of "am I more important than the monetary gain today".
Bitcoin's success has more to do with its monetary policy and hard-money aspects than with the way it consumes energy. Monetary policy isn't something we've seen any innovation with at all in the crypto space. Different coins have different inflation curves, but inflation curves exist in all currencies. They're not a new concept, they've just got specific variants.
But also, Bitcoin isn't static. It's still being developed. And I think its focus on slow stability and payments makes it more attractive, not less, in the long-term.
It's already been here 11 years, 20 is not so many more. I fully expect it to still be around then, and almost certainly in the top position in crypto, if not globally among all currencies.
Energy will become cheap even for malicious actors, so bitcoin hash difficulty will have to go up in order to keep it costly for them to fake transactions. Which means energy usage goes up too. There's no way to avoid "work" in a proof-of-work scheme.
Or you could just skip the Bitcoin part...
In this scenario there is NO SUCH THING as 'excess' energy. Or reducing dependence on fossil fuel, so long as that can still be used to produce energy to mine bitcoin with.
You're right about competition and market dynamics, but it is utterly and completely dedicated to converting ALL the energy into money without any left over. To fail to do so is to fail to be competitive. I really do not understand this talk about 'excess' energy.
Could that energy go to better (which is subjective of course) things? Sure, but if it's not and there is demand as well as excess supply it incentivises energy companies to at least _keep up_ with what they currently provide.
Then of course there is the whole notion that using a lot of power is in and of itself a big evil, which is ridiculous. Even from an environmental perspective, big industries are by far the biggest offenders. By shifting the perspective of the discourse away from the real offenders towards other "problems", we are doing a disservice to the actual issues.
At this point I'm convinced it's a movement composed primarily of people who don't understand what they're talking about, sprinkled with a light dash of actual malicious actors. This makes sense, as that's a realistic cross-section of the internet at large.
Even if you want to put predatory lending practices that are at the very heart of those networks aside (why would you, but hypothetically) you are left with networks that disproportionately disadvantage certain classes of people: a good example is sex workers, it being the case that these networks are managed inside the US they are fundamentally puritanical. Usually these arguments are couched in environmental euphemisms such as "there is higher risk". These measures are proxied into networks that run on top of the lowest network, but they are positively stimulated to keep them that way.
If those things don't bother you, you may be swayed by the fact that they're both based inside the US. Broadly speaking, we don't need to get into why that is an entity that tends to spread suffering around.
TLDR; custody banking model keeps people out of control of their own property.
There is a big problem with private property rights and safety guaranties of your capital today in most of the world. There are three problems: unstable govs in 3rd world countries, capital moving restrictions and QEs.
I'm, for example, not from developed country, so I have several restrictions on my own money, some of which may be applied to US/Europe citizens and some may not:
1) my gov, speaking softly, is not stable. I have no guarantee on my bank accounts in the long term (eg 20+ years). I can assume that funds can be at least inflated in several times, if not withdrawn in the name of some "patriotic" gov initiative. It would be much better to have my funds away from such jurisdiction. It's safer to have the funds out of **any** jurisdiction due to some political conflicts and attacks. US and their banks are likely to freeze Russian/China/Iran citizens funds as well when another conflict will arise.
2) Capital moving. Even if someone assume that some jurisdiction is safe - there is another problem - not any country makes capital flowing outside its border legal. You just **can't** move your **own** funds somewhere where you see it fit the most. Domestic banks may be completely controlled by the gov and too much cash can be easily arrested on its way by customs.
3) QEs, which is my favorite part and applied to any human on the earth today. Your money is used to "save" someone without your direct permission even if you live in good country, paid your taxes and did nothing wrong. Just by printing more money - practically making your hard-earned money cheaper and less useful. They'd say that you can move your money to stocks (US, by the way, there is no stable stocks but theirs), but you both will need to pay tax from your so called profits (the hell, on SP500 I won't even earn on the long run, I barely save initial funds considering inflation!) and forced to invest in american economy, which not everyone (surprise!) want to do. And stocks can fail badly.
Currently, crypto traders are busy learning that all the rest of the financial world, including things like credit and financial derivatives (encapsulated in smart contracts), can still apply to cryptocurrencies.
Things like consumer credit and fractional reserve banking will show up in crypto soon (if they haven't already). It's just a matter of trusted entities offering specific smart contracts.
The one thing I really dislike about most crypto is the traceability: unless you use privacy coins (which themselves have dubious security claims), every transaction is 100% traceable.
Before there was a viable alternative to POW for achieving the goals of a decentralised currency, it was at least debateable about whether the benefits of the decentralised currency were worth the cost of POW compared to the alternatives, but now that it appears POS is a viable alternative, there can be no question - POW costs too much power.
Wasteful, why not put all their power output into Bitcoin mining then? Sounds like a version of the nano machines story multiplying and eating the planet, in this case for the sole purpose to mine Bitcoin, leaving a carcass of the Earth and nobody to spend those coins.
There also physical limits to efficiency of energy transformation and slightly less heat loss per unit of energy with much more energy production is not exactly what climate needs right now.
So even if Bitcoin mining were to cause global electricity production to increase by an order of magnitude, it would still be a rounding error compared to the amount of global warming caused by the Sun directly.
Thinking about it thermodynamically, though, in a future where Bitcoin mining uses only excess solar and wind energy, it wouldn't be adding any heat to the planet because that energy would have become heat anyway.
Also what about the Manufacruring/production of devices to convert solar/wind energy to electricity and to mine bitcoins? It’s based on non-renewable elements (of course any chemical process is reversible given enough energy but Entropy still grows mercilessly) and requires a lot of extra energy.
EDIT: as far as we know, thermodynamically all energy will become heat at the end (although not sure if it should be called heat, since there will be no flux). However, we as humanity are/should be quite concerned first about decades and earth’s atmosphere/oceans (and connected parts) not millennia and energetically balance Earth as whole to come.
In principle energy from sun could also be stored in form of chemical bonds energy (as it’s the case for biomass) or even nuclear energy (yup, sun-powered nuclear fusion sounds unlikely but why not ;). Then biomass (less efficiently) or nuclei/atoms could be ejected from earth allowing to disperse sun’s thermal energy somewhere else.
It's a conversion of energy into coinage which can be used by people to repay their debts to others.
Wow. This is beyond delusional.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money. This pushes competition towards cheaper and cheaper sources of energy. First it's finding jurisdictions that subsidize it, then it's creating your own cheaper energy sources. Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment.
The penultimate phase is custom off-grid mining farms that power themselves via their own renewables. The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc.