You could invent a dramatically more efficient way to calculate hashes - after a short period of readjustment, the network would go back to consuming just as much power as it does now.
You could find a way of generating power more cheaply. The network will then use much more of it.
Energy requirements continue to grow until an equilibrium is reached. That equilibrium occurs when the energy cost to mine new blocks is commensurate with the value received from doing so.
However, miners who can externalise their energy costs will generally outcompete miners who cannot. Incentives to damage the environment and avoid taking resposnibility are built into the system.
Really, you mean the huge amount of greenhouse gases we release here in Iceland where our energy is entirely from renewable sources and we mine 11% of the bitcoin network?
There are many things that people actually need which could be done with that energy, but that would probably bring less money than burning it away on Bitcoin.
And make no mistake, these things are still being done, just soemwhere else in the world with more polluting energy. The energy supply of the world is limited, so mobile use cases will often move around.
You do realize that transmitting power via cable means moving it through large bodies of salt water (the ocean) that contribute to huge losses in EMF resistance. Not to mention a power cable from Iceland to anywhere else in the world would be 2x as long as the longest power transmission ever created.
It's more scary for me to realize you actually have no productive ideas for a country that mines BTC from renewables but STILL think you're insights are correct.
Did you know what we do with the electricity here before mining was popular?
Alcoa Aluminum smelting, Ever check out the environmental impact on smelting?
I'll add that I specifically mentioned scientific data centers, supercomputers, which would be much less affected by lag than an AWS region. For the power transfer issue, I specifically said that attacking the problem would mean being at the forefront of research on the matter.
And it is not my place to have productive ideas for how a country could use its natural resources. My claim was that bitcoin mining should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is driving an overall increase in power needs for the entire world, at a time we should be looking for every possible means to reduce our energy consumption. You came and brought up the extremely singular case of Iceland, as if it disproved anything. It's not like Iceland's economy is dependent on bitcoin, it's an extremely new industry that is not making a huge dent, while consuming more energy than the whole country's housing. In the end Iceland is irrelevant in the discussion of Bitcoin's impact on the world.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/4/15/iceland-is-a-bi...
[1] https://grist.org/article/bitcoin-gobbles-up-clean-energy-ju...
[2] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/02/14/iceland-bitcoin-ene...
As someone who lives and works here I can assure you there is absolutely no environmental group fighting the expasion of btc mining here in Iceland, we are however viciously fighting the increasingly destruction tourism influx that has been happening since 2012. It does far more damage that the dams that were built here well before btc mining even existed.
>while currently not paying much of anything to the local government[2] and hiring next to no people, like most tech industries.
This is also untrue, construction and remote hands as well as grid infrastructures resulted from them, the companies that run the facilities also incorporate here and pay corp and employee tax here.
>And it is not my place to have productive ideas for how a country could use its natural resources. My claim was that bitcoin mining should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is driving an overall increase in power needs for the entire world, at a time we should be looking for every possible means to reduce our energy consumption.
If you followed your own citations you'd see one of them linked to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption which shows est electric consumption going back as far as 2018. Notice the graph has not really changed since 2018 (since the last halving).
>You came and brought up the extremely singular case of Iceland, as if it disproved anything. In the end Iceland is irrelevant in the discussion of Bitcoin's impact on the world.
Again your OWN source has Iceland listed as one of the top mining locations in the world of course it's relevant. I've even read estimates that 40% of bitcoin mining is coming from renewable sources, most during off peak season where that electricity would be wasted otherwise.
You want to solve the energy efficiency problems of the world? Good, begin by linking the disparate energy grids amongst the world to eliminate peak usage and off peak waste, you'll save far more electricity just by that way.
Not by knee-jerk "I see no value in this so it must have no value" vague emotional appeals on the internet. All I see is you vaguely groping for why it should be treated differently than any other form of industry or innovation while insisting all the rest are somehow necessary and this not. You're not even consistent in your reasons from reply to reply.
Oil companies capturing the wasted natural gas, Hydro dams capturing the wasted water energy, etc. Bitcoin is a battery or energy credit where areas with abundant energy can benefit from their standing in the world and benefit the people of the region. Bitcoin has its ebbs and flows but eventually balances to where your typical american household cannot afford to mine bitcoin and profit.
The cloud computing companies and EV companies and every other company that spends large amounts of its budget on buying electricity is doing the same thing. The difference is that (at least some of) cloud computing or driving is doing useful work with the energy being consumed, whereas 100% of energy going into bitcoin mining is simply getting converted to bitcoin, a speculative asset, and heat.
And the greenhouse gases are the largest problem the civilized world has ever faced, they are not some small aside. We need to figure out ways to produce less energy while still powering the important parts of our economy (transport, production of goods, research etc). Bitcoin is doing the opposite - it is creating a need for more energy production to create and exchange money, when we already have much more efficient ways of creating and exchanging money (the whole banking infrastructure of the world consumes less electrical energy than bitcoin, while doing orders of magnitude more transactions per second than bitcoin can hande in a year).
yea is video games useful work?
youtube videos perhaps?
twitter?
It's nice that you have a sliding scale of what utility is that only you can define, you seem completely trustworthy.
But it is true and I pointed that out that there is a lot of waste going on in the cloud as well.
why?
Money is only useful in so far as it can buy the things that people need, but making those things still requires energy in addition to money. Burning energy to make money when you can literary just will money into existence is completely absurd.
> Because they bring enjoyment to people, and all that truly matters is the happiness of people.
my response was actually the politest way I knew how to respond to someone pulling argument after argument out of their backside without any introspection whatsoever.
I honestly think they're just trolling at this point.
Calling me a fucking moron without anything at all to add, after I took the time to reply to your 1 word comment (or to someone else's comment? I'm not clear if you're mr_woozy as well or not; I'm not leto_ii) then I have nothing else to add.
Oh, and accusing me of spewing inane generalities when the real value of art and entertainment has been called into question and vindicated throughout all of economic theory is quite rich.
This is completely circular login, if you're valuing those things as purely economic goods then you're ascribing a monetary value to them, which you could just as easily to bitcoin mining, startups and associated industries.
>and all that truly matters is the happiness of people.
This is the laziest argument I've seen on how to measure relevant value, I mean if I'm a murdered them murdering people is going to make me happy, so what does this argument even mean?
Should Bitcoin allow USD to continue? We will see.
The huge problems of the monetary system lie more in the direction of Bitcoin (the unbridled speculation of Wall Street) than fractional reserve banking and fiat money.
The attitude on this forum towards Bitcoin literally boggles my mind, at most maybe 5% truly understand it.
Each of these turns out to be a net-negative in my view:
- fixed supply means that people are incentivized to hold bitcoin instead of spending/investing
- algorithmic transactions mean that there is no way to reverse a mistaken transaction or a fraud; it also means that losing the key to your wallet is irreversible destruction of the money contained in that wallet
- pseudonimity means that it is very hard to track money laundering and other illegal financial schemes
- lack of centralized control enforces all of the others and makes it impossible to prop up the currency based on the current needs of the economy
I also understand the distrust of fractional-reserve banking and most complicated financial manipulations, and I wouldn't deny in any way that these have been misused very often at the benefit of the rich and powerful. But, at least with the current system, citizens have some amount of democratic control over their financial system, which they wouldn't in a pure Bitcoin world.
Why would that matter? The problem is the huge amount of greenhouse gases getting released because of this store of value. Whether it makes some economic sense or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be allowed to continue on environmental grounds.