Bitcoin Forum

Why are Cryptocurrencies based on calculating power of a computer?

Why do Cryptocurrencies contribute to massive amount of electricity wasted and billions of BTU in heat generated?

Why couldnt the Crytp algorythem reward blocks based on easier things like time spent or better yet some form of human input that solves an actual problem like CAPTCHAs fix old books being scanned?

Let's not fool ourselves, we don't SOLVE any mathematical problems, we just submit random lottery tickets (called shares) and one gets the reward randomly. Since these tickets are FREE but take GPU power to generate then its up to you to buy more and more GPUs and send more and more and more tickets in hopes of betting a bigger number of reward blocks per day. Maybe if each share cost 1 Satoshi and that would go towards the next block then we wouldn't have ASICs taking over or GPUs heating up and still had a fair playground.

Was Satoshi interested in getting earth warmer? Or Oceans hotter to kill the fish? Or did he invest in Global Foundries? Did he invest in electrical companies? Did he invest in energy?

This sort of waste of billinos of watts of energy will probably go down in history as the most idiotic thing humans have done in the 21st Century. A simple change of logic couldnt swapped the random lottery winning system to a different one that doesn't reward those who throw more money at hardware and waste more of their local power grid (and their cash).

Couldn't coins just get rewarded based on a different system?

PoW (Proof of Work) was step one -- say hello to step two, PoS (Proof of Stake)

The OP asks a good question. Could be the best post I've seen since lurking around here for weeks.

I know ripple has/had a WCG team where you can earn Xrps.
There is another coin that promises to replant trees (name escapes me).

Would be interesting to know how many actually do something good.

Here are two examples that could be used to reward crypto coins instead of stupidly waste electricity (which I'm guilty of myself) and also are more interesting than some scanned old books:

1. Place a video cam in your car that records traffic and upload the video everytime if find free wifi. Place humans on the other end to decipher, draw a line around and name the objects in each say 20th frame and make recommendations on what to do if they were driving. Now you have millions of people drawing lines around humans, trees, buildings, curbs, etc in billions of photographs. You can feed the images + the human inputs TOGETHER into a massive database for self driving cars. This will propel humans tens of years forward in that technology. (NO Google autonomous driving doesn't do anything like that, its still an image processing algorithm subject to error specially in the dark, small objects and fast moving objects like a running kid). You reward those who work on these images with a new coin they can sell on Cryptsy. You put checks and balances so less accurate people (or those who corrupt the system with intentionally inaccurate data) are rewarded less or weed out by the next random person checking the first one's work like a peer to peer confirmation system before a piece of share enters the main database.

2. Every time a voice to text system (like Siri but open source) makes a mistake based on persons accent or background noise and types the incorrect word, you send the recording of the voice and the corrected text to a human who listens to these bits of audio and types what was actually said. The errors are easily found because the person normally touches the wrong word, deletes it and types a correct word. This corrected data can help the algorithm perfect itself just like a person learns how to listen to you in a loud rockconcert hall.

Examples in medicine and collective of symptoms and minor disease data where people dont visit the doctors office for them could be huge in tracking and preparing for pandemics and they could actually be done using a basic mobile phone app with little to no computing power.

Shame on you Satoshi for starting such a flawed system and wasting so much electricity and world computing power and making the earth 1 degree warmer every 15 years just from mining at an accelerated rate. There are people not too far from me who dont have or can afford electricity and here I am planning on buying 8 more GPUs and guzzle more. Shame on you for not coming back fast enough to correct its numerous other flaws. Shame on you for creating a system that rewards early comers more than late comers, just like the past 100 years humans split up the entire planet earth and "own" it using a piece of paper and every child is born having to work hard for years to "buy" a piece of it for himself. I use your system and I trust it but I don't have any respect for you. You created a system to fix fiat, but its as flawed as anything else before that. Some made 10,000 BTC in a day just 3 years ago and today some have to spend thousands of $$ and a month to create a mere 0.5 BTC. Just like in my town someone in 1920 bought ACRES of land for a few thousand bucks (still in few hundred thousand bucks when adjust for inflation) which is worth billions and billions of dollars now.

Are you seriously blaming Satoshi for "making the earth 1 degree warmer every 15 years just from mining". Maybe you should learn about thermodynamics a bit more.. Its easy to make accusations but rather difficult to come up with any meaningful ideas of your own.
Bitcoin system doesnt require the hashrate it has right now to function properly, a couple of asics would run the whole network just fine. The increasing energy consumption is caused by peoples greed, everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie. I bet bitcoin is and will be more energy efficient than current money transferring systems.

Lets do a little math here. DOGE network alone currently has 97 GIGAHASHes. Considering my tiny little 2.6MH RIG is burning 1250 including the fan next to it (no cooling fee as luckily its winter) then:

Total Watt Used = 97,000 MH  * 1250 / 2.6 MH = 46.6 MEGA WATTS

Now we have hundreds of altcoins. Litecoin alone has another 100 Giga hashes, thats another 47 GIGAWATTS. We are already up to 90 GIGAWATTS just with two coins. Say BTC is the same and all the other coins combines are 50GW so currently the power used to mine this crap is 200 GIGAWATTS.

How much heat does 200 GIGAWATT of power produce? Now multiply that exponentially in 15 years assuming the power usage will at least double every year. The results are staggering number that are unsustainable. The grid simply does not have this much spare power specially to waste doing nothing whatsoever.

Maybe Satoshi's fault was that he didn't anticipate his system becoming so incredibly popular and resulting in so much power usage so I give him credit for that. If he knew he could've factored in a couple of extra lines in the code to avoid rewards given based on power use so at min he could save the earth from overheating.

The fact however that creating cryptocoin using massive computing power contributes to nothing useful and is simply for creating lottery ticket system was just absurd to begin with.

He just recreated the same old human hierarchy system that elderly screw the young and human chop up the planet, use its resources and leave their crap for their kids to clean up. They also divided up the land among themselves and left an unfair playground for their kids to fight over.

Satoshi even failed to create a system that provides for instant payments, unlike fiat that you can pay instantly.

Heck, he didn't even provide privacy, any transaction can be traced back to its originator using the IP address. So for cops its a matter of submitting a standard judge signed request to the ISP and volla, they are at your doorsteps if they wanted to.

Why is it so popular? It baffles me, but meanwhile, just like all of you, I am burning my wallet on electricity bills and running the rat race making 0.020 BTC/day and I know I have to keep buying more hardware because just a month ago my avg daily was 0.024BTC/day. Time to upgrade my 1 month old rig or get a second one.

I'm bumping this thread because it deserves more attention. Altcoins have world changing power.

Gridcoin, solarcoin, cancercurecoin, curecoin are some examples. Are there more? Any other exciting projects in the works?

Someone is already in talks with SETI to put together an official SETI coin to look for alien life AFAIK. 

There are some interesting projects out there, but 80% of their success is in how well they are marketed, but more importantly how easily accessible / widely adopted they can be by communities outside of cryptocurrency circles.  That should be every non pump'n'dump coin's mission. 

Wondering, can't POS be added to a POW-only coin if it starts out as POW?

the difference between satoshi and brooklynite:


Satoshi had an original idea using known cryptographic primivites in a novel way to solve the byzantine general's problem, published it in detailed form, then implemented it and released it to the world.

Brooklynite had an unoriginal half-baked idea that doesn't really solve any problem, published it in half-assed form, then whined about Satoshi's idea on the very forums that satoshi started.


Seems pretty clear to me why POW is the standard.  Let me know when you have a working implementation of these "ideas" of yours brooklyn.

Good points johnfkennedy.

Great ideals will not make a coin succeed. "Paved by good intentions" comes to mind.

Good points and I accept your criticism. I am however playing devils advocate here. There is no whining. If we dont address these fundamental issues within our community how are we going to sell our ideas to the world? We are still starving for acceptance and fighting powerful governmental rejections. As one of the only people into Cryptocurrencies in my circle of friends and colleagues, I see we have a long way to go here with many left to join our cause. By starting this thread and arguing the counterargument, I am in fact soliciting responses from the community, things I have not thought of coins I have not thought about that rokkyroad for example noted above. Bitcoin was the "Orkut", Litecoin-Scrypt was the "myspace" and we dont have a "facebook" yet.

I do disagree with you in some areas. Satoshi's ideas may have been pure and ideal, but the implementation of it is far from perfect. The massive power consumption requirement and distribution of coins based on computing some useless math is an absolute mistake and is taking place every day in modern countries where in some poorer parts of the world people are struggling to keep a single light bulb in their homes and distribution of power to remote areas is still far from 100%. Furthermore, all of this electricity consumed, 100% of it, is turning into heat. Something our atmosphere cannot afford to keep.

The GPU computing needs, (as opposed to a base system that would distribute coins regardless of your computing power) is benefiting no one but these entities: 1) Global Foundries and 2) ASIC makers like KNC, Antminer and BFL. Not even AMD is profiting because most price gouging is done by retail stores. Global Foundries is also using the technology AMD spent billions on R&D on to create newer chips for 65nm, 25nm and 20nm SHA-256 ASICs and now gridseed for Scrypt. These are all based on the same technology AMD created and Golbal Foundries is utilizing (who knows if with license or not).

Maybe not...

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2393940