A case for Burst's Proof Of Capacity

[pinkflower]

I opened a url for an article in motherboard.vice.com and I was hit hard at the moment I read the title, "One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week".

This is what the Burst community and the PoCC have been fighting for. A more energy efficient form of mining because securing the blockchain and the blockchain itself is inefficient. I hope some of you can see beyond your potential earnings and start supporting a project that wants to make a difference.

Here are some notes from the article.

• Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
• Bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.
• At a minimum, worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes.
• global Bitcoin mining represents a minimum of 77KWh of energy consumed per Bitcoin transaction.
• Digiconomist's less optimistic estimate for per-transaction energy costs now sits at around 215 KWh of electricity. That's more than enough to fill two Tesla batteries, run an efficient fridge/freezer for a full year, or boil 1872 litres of water in a kettle.
• That problem is carbon emissions. De Vries has come up with some estimates by diving into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in Mongolia. He concluded that this single mine is responsible for 8,000 to 13,0000 kg CO2 emissions per Bitcoin it mines, and 24,000 - 40,000 kg of CO2 per hour.
• As Twitter user Matthias Bartosik noted in some similar estimates, the average European car emits 0.1181 kg of CO2 per kilometer driven. So for every hour the Mongolian Bitcoin mine operates, it's responsible for (at least) the CO2 equivalent of over 203,000 car kilometers travelled.

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[BluRPie]

Not agree with article. There are so many depends, what kid of energy spending for mining? Some mining farm placed in the locations with overage of energy and it is not possible to get money from this energy in other way

[amrulshare]

yes, it is possible
because hashrate and difficult increase day by day and it is not in line with manufacturers CPU or GPU

[pinkflower]

Not agree with article. There are so many depends, what kid of energy spending for mining? Some mining farm placed in the locations with overage of energy and it is not possible to get money from this energy in other way

But wastefulness is wastefulness, and its not practical that all mining farms can collocate in a single area to take advantage of an untapped energy source. Theres also the problem of carbon emissions and pollution. We are destroying the planet and proof of work, while a leap forward for decentralization when applied on blockchains, is making things worse for the environment.

• That problem is carbon emissions. De Vries has come up with some estimates by diving into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in Mongolia. He concluded that this single mine is responsible for 8,000 to 13,0000 kg CO2 emissions per Bitcoin it mines, and 24,000 - 40,000 kg of CO2 per hour.

[pinkflower]

Heres another proof that Proof of Capacity, or some call it Proof of Space, is the future of mining. Bram Cohen, creator of the Bittorrent protocol, has announced his new project called the Chia Network.

But its release is still one year away, so for now theres only Burst for HDD mining. Please support it to help its development on PoC go on further. The planet will be better off for it.

[andthereyou]

I think that is impossible. However if that is true then people will lose faith in bitcoin because the transaction fee will surely become high. People will forget bitcoin and they will invest in altcoin instead of bitcoin.

[pinkflower]

I found another study about BTC mining's power consumption and how much higher it can go next year. Its simply not sustainable from my perspective, and reasonably, it should be your perspective too. But why do we keep denying it?

Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than 20+ European countries

• Researchers from British energy price comparison platform Power Compare have discovered that the total volume of electricity required for mining Bitcoin – the computational process that keeps transactions on the blockchain moving – now amounts to more consumption than 159 individual countries.
  
  
• Power Compare further notes that Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05 TWh – the equivalent of 0.13 percent of the world’s overall electricity needs.
  
  
• According to Power Compare, Bitcoin mining has seen a nearly 30 percent increase in consumption over the last 30 days alone.
  
  
• Assuming Bitcoin’s electricity needs continue growing at this rate, the global mining consumption could be greater than the UK’s entire electricity supply by October next year.

Save the planet. Support Proof of Capacity.

[Crypington]

Yeah, I don’t think this fits with Saotshi’s vision, to use the equalvent of 100s of kWh mining one transaction ... and each block has few thousand transactions.  Lots of energy being used for a process that should use a tiny bit of electricity ... sending a few bytes on the Internet. 

It makes a stronge case for POS, Proof of capacity, GPU only aglos, etc....

[rico666]

When it comes to this topic, I remember this infographic

https://www.burstcoin.ist/2017/09/22/how-burst-puts-bitcoin-to-shame/

and because it might be biased, did some computations and estimates on my own.
The "ca. 400x times more energy efficient" figure is founded though.

So if Burst blockchain was met with the same mining vigor as BTC is met today, the energy consumption would be 60 Gigawatt-hours  annually (164 Megawatt-hours daily), or the equivalent of ~ 6.8 Megawatt for continuous operation - worldwide.

6.8 Megawatt is already in the range of a single luxury mega yacht.

[pinkflower]

When will the wasteful use of energy end? The answer is never, as long as the price is of a PoW cryptocurrency is going up. But it doesnt have to be like this forever. Help us rally the cause for energy efficient alternatives like Burst's Proof of Capacity.

BITCOIN MINING GUZZLES ENERGY—AND ITS CARBON FOOTPRINT JUST KEEPS GROWING

Reddit Discussion

• Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the US for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers combined.
  
  
• The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge—an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
  
  
• This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can’t continue.

[pinkflower]

No, Bitcoin Won't Boil the Oceans

I highly disagree with that article. They are trying to justify it by reporting that BTC's power consumption is less than what the whole world's banking system energy consumption. While this is true, it doesnt mean we can change the financial system to use only BTC. But they will say anything to up the price.

[stripykitteh]

I opened a url for an article in motherboard.vice.com and I was hit hard at the moment I read the title, "One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week".

This is what the Burst community and the PoCC have been fighting for. A more energy efficient form of mining because securing the blockchain and the blockchain itself is inefficient. I hope some of you can see beyond your potential earnings and start supporting a project that wants to make a difference.

Here are some notes from the article.

• Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
• Bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.
• At a minimum, worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes.
• global Bitcoin mining represents a minimum of 77KWh of energy consumed per Bitcoin transaction.
• Digiconomist's less optimistic estimate for per-transaction energy costs now sits at around 215 KWh of electricity. That's more than enough to fill two Tesla batteries, run an efficient fridge/freezer for a full year, or boil 1872 litres of water in a kettle.
• That problem is carbon emissions. De Vries has come up with some estimates by diving into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in Mongolia. He concluded that this single mine is responsible for 8,000 to 13,0000 kg CO2 emissions per Bitcoin it mines, and 24,000 - 40,000 kg of CO2 per hour.
• As Twitter user Matthias Bartosik noted in some similar estimates, the average European car emits 0.1181 kg of CO2 per kilometer driven. So for every hour the Mongolian Bitcoin mine operates, it's responsible for (at least) the CO2 equivalent of over 203,000 car kilometers travelled.

Bitcoin mining is probably going to increase the electricity bill for the people in Bitcoin dominant countries.

[pinkflower]

I found another article trying to defend BTC's huge power consumption.

Yes we are polluting the planet, we are killing it in fact. But that doesnt mean that BTC or any cryptocurrency has to let everything stay the same. Why dont smart developers do some research and development on other mining algorithms that lessens the power consumption but maintaining the same security?

Ludicrous Headlines About Bitcoin Mining Will Kill Us All

• Unless you’re living in a mud hut and recycling your own urine, you’re damaging the environment. We all are. From the moment we emerge kicking and screaming into this world till the moment we disclose our wallet seed with our dying breath, we pollute. Eating packaged food; taking public transport; using the internet; it all takes its toll on the environment. Bitcoin mining is no exception. There’s expressing concern about energy consumption, however, and there’s issuing apocalyptic warnings about how bitcoin will turn our planet into a smoldering molten rock.

[rico666]

I found another article trying to defend BTC's huge power consumption.

Yes we are polluting the planet, we are killing it in fact. But that doesnt mean that BTC or any cryptocurrency has to let everything stay the same. Why dont smart developers do some research and development on other mining algorithms that lessens the power consumption but maintaining the same security?

Ludicrous Headlines About Bitcoin Mining Will Kill Us All

• Unless you’re living in a mud hut and recycling your own urine, you’re damaging the environment. We all are. From the moment we emerge kicking and screaming into this world till the moment we disclose our wallet seed with our dying breath, we pollute. Eating packaged food; taking public transport; using the internet; it all takes its toll on the environment. Bitcoin mining is no exception. There’s expressing concern about energy consumption, however, and there’s issuing apocalyptic warnings about how bitcoin will turn our planet into a smoldering molten rock.

1st german "state TV":

https://boerse.ard.de/boersenwissen/boersenwissen-fuer-fortgeschrittene/umweltsuender-bitcoin102.html

Google Translate says

ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVES TO THE BITCOIN

Some mining farms now rely on electricity from renewable sources such as hydropower, the so-called "green mining". This is praiseworthy from an environmental point of view, but does not change the immense energy demand of Bitcoin. The Burstcoin based unlike the Bitcoin not on the provided computing power of the miners, but on free hard disk space. While the Bitcoin network currently requires just under 280 kilowatt-hours of electricity per transaction, Burstcoin consumes only 0.5. When you mine the Burstcoin, the computer does not use more power than it does during normal operation. And as soon as a new block of the burst blockchain has been found, the space of the miner is free again. Very similar to the Burstcoin is the Chia-Coin. Again, it depends on the free hard disk space and not on additional computing power. However, chia coins can not yet be gemined. Only at the end of 2018 is the start of the new eco-coin planned. In addition, the miners are no longer miners, but farmers. But: These are relatively small projects that have not yet established themselves on the market. And that's exactly where there are risks.

And I would like to add, that even the burstcoin.ist - a site where one could assume a pro-Burst bias, does not speak of 280 kWh versus 0.5kWh, but 195 kWh vs. 0.5 kWh per tx.

https://www.burstcoin.ist/2017/09/22/how-burst-puts-bitcoin-to-shame/

[pinkflower]

A small reminder that the energy our planet produces is limited. It is time for a new mining algorithm. A time for Proof of Capacity.

We know its not perfect but with your support, Burst can be better, more efficient and greener than it is today.

The Proof of Capacity Consortium has invested a lot of their resources into the project. Lets show our appreciation by downloading Burst, trying it, and post what you hate aboutit , post suggestions on how to improve it, criticize it. Its the only way to improve.

Having said all that. Dont buy Burst, its risky. But do try it.

Bitcoin's sky-rocketing energy use is a viral story.

• Eric Holthaus wrote for Grist that “by July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.”
  
  
• de Vries puts the network’s energy use at 35 terrawatt-hours per year, close to the annual energy consumption of Bulgaria and enough to power more than three million U.S. homes.
  
  
• Dutch professor Harald Vranken used figures from January to estimate that the global network drew 100 to 500 megawatts, or between .88 and 4.4 terrawatt-hours per year. But he updated his numbers in early December and increased that by an order of magnitude, to somewhere between 9 and 35 terrawatt-hours per year.
  
  
• The most current and widely cited estimates put bitcoin’s yearly energy use at somewhere between 4 and 35 terrawatt-hours. To put that in perspective, all of Google used about 5.7 terrawatt-hours in 2015.
  
  
• According to the ECB, it takes .025 kilowatt-hours to produce a banknote. That means it takes about the same amount of energy to produce a 50 euro bill as it does to power a 60-watt lightbulb for roughly half an hour. Producing the same value of bitcoin would require enough energy to power your house for four days.
  
  
• Digiconomist’s de Vries estimates the carbon footprint of a single bitcoin transaction is 118 kilograms of CO2, about the same as driving a car 300 miles.

[pinkflower]

How long would it take for us to really be concious that BTC mining is not sustainable? The BTC Asic producers and Chinese miners which really is a cartel has become so powerful that if they are stopped, almost all mining will be stopped. The centralization of BTC mining has become a weakness and I hope all of you understand the situation fully. It will fail unless BTC changes its mining algorithm to oblige CPU or GPU mining again. But that still burns too much electricity.

Having that said, invest in the future, invest in Proof of Capacity.

China To 'Shut Down Three-Quarters Of The World's Bitcoin Mining Network'

• Thanks to cheap electricity, Chinese miners are estimated to be responsible for producing around three-quarters of the world's supply of bitcoin, but stringent measures that look set to be put in place over the coming months could see that number shrink dramatically.
  
  
• A leaked January 2 memo from the 'Leading Group of Internet Financial Risks Remediation' - the country's internet finance regulator which initiated the clampdown on bitcoin - said that bitcoin miners are to make an 'orderly exit' from China because they have consumed 'huge amounts of resources and stoked speculation of virtual currencies'.
  
  
• In the documents, authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to tax, environmental protection, electricity pricing and land use.
  
  
• It's also possible that a blanket ban on bitcoin mining in China could impact the price negatively.
  
  
• A likely spike in transaction times and in turn increased transfer fees would see the digital currency become even less practical to use.
  
  
• Pan Gongsheng recently predicted the death of bitcoin, so it's unsurprising that the decision to ban mining has been taken in the country.

[pinkflower]

I know BTC users will argue that mining uses less electricity than the whole banking industry. But thats not the point. The point is Proof of Work mining is still wasteful and its having an negative impact on our environment.

Proof of Capacity and HDD mining which use less energy is the future of cryptocurrency mining. Everyone has to start accepting that fact.

Bitcoin Consumes 30 Times More Electricity than Tesla Cars

• In 2018, Bitcoin’s power demand is set to more than triple, consuming as much energy in a year as the entire nation of Argentina, according to a new report by Morgan Stanley (MS, +0.50%).
  
  
• The bank’s analysts forecast that Bitcoin mining could use up more than 125 terawatt hours of electricity this year, a level electric vehicles globally won’t reach until 2025. Last year, Bitcoin consumed 36 terawatt hours of energy—as much as the country of Qatar, Morgan Stanley estimated in a research note published Wednesday.
  
  
• By comparison, all the Tesla (TSLA, +0.96%) cars on the road (about 280,000 at the end of 2017, according to company statistics) likely used less than 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity combined for the year, a Fortune analysis found. The analysis assumed each car drove 15,000 miles—roughly the national average—at a rate of 30 kilowatt hours of electricity per 100 miles, based on the median mileage rate for Tesla Model 3 and Model S vehicles, according to figures reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

[pinkflower]

I call upon you again to support Burst and Proof of Capacity for a more sustainable cryptocurrency future. I love BTC, but we have to face the reality that Proof of Work mining is not sustainable for a greener, more healthy environment.

You dont have to buy and hold millions, or you dont have to buy Burst at all. But I ask, make everyone, especially developers, more aware that Proof of Capacity is here and worth working and researching into as an alternative.

Opinion: How Bitcoin works, and why it’s a menace

• Because the mathematical problems are increasingly complex, ASIC miners run constantly and the result is an extreme amount of energy consumption that is only slated to rise.
  
  
• Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimates a rate of around 32 terawatt hours of energy a year, which, for scale, is closest to Serbia’s annual rate (meaning it’s larger than that of 159 other countries).
  
  
• Digiconomist also reported that one Chinese Bitcoin mine emitted carbon dioxide at the same rate as a Boeing 747.
  
  
• Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist, expects that at the current rate, the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption will be at US levels by mid-2019 and by 2020 will be comparable to that of the world.
  
  
• With this trajectory, Bitcoin mines causing frequent blackouts (as they already do in Venezuela) will soon become commonplace. This troubling unsustainability can no longer be ignored and potential coin connoisseurs ought to look towards utilizing more energy-efficient consensus algorithms for transaction validation or, at the very least, reinvest their revenues in development of more environmentally-friendly mining technology.

[pinkflower]

Why do I keep rallying for Burst and Proof of Capacity? Because it matters.

Why do I think it matters? Because saving the environment matters and we should not add further damage to it.

What else? Because the crackdown on BTC miners has started in China and wasteful use of electricity is one of the reasons for it, and it will become the main reason on why every country's government will start going after it.

Final words? We need to show them that there is a more efficient, cheaper and a more distributed way to secure blockchains.

Support me in rallying for Burst and PoC. Ty.

Proof-of-Capacity, The Green Alternative?

• PoC is not so very different from PoW except for one major differentiator, in PoC, rather than doing a large amount of work in order to verify each block, the work is done up front in the process called “plotting” and the results from this process are used later to verify each block.
  
  
• The basic idea to take away from this is that in PoC the “work” is done once during plotting rather than with each new block, allowing PoC to realize a huge efficiency savings over PoW systems. The amount of “work” a miner will end up doing depends on the amount of free disk space they have available to devote to the plotting process.
  
  
• Plotting is the process of generating plot files, which are just files storing a large number of pre-computed hashes. Each plot file contains one of more groups of 8192 hashes, these groups are called nonces. A nonce is exactly 256KiB in size (8192 x 32 bytes per hash). Additionally, each nonce is divided into 4096 pairs of hashes, the pairs are referred to as scoops. Each nonce can also be identified by its index number, ranging from 0 to 2^64.
  
  
• Once the plot files have been generated, the actual mining process can take place. The miner will first fetch the relevant information from the wallet for the current block, this includes a 32 byte hash called the “generation signature” from the previous block, the block height (index of the current block), and something called the “base target” which is calculated based on the last 24 blocks and can be considered as the “difficulty level” of the block.
  
  
• Burst PoC2 and PoC3 are mentioned in the recent Burst Dymaxion whitepaper. Development of PoC2 is already underway as part of the Dymaxion effort. The primary change in PoC2 will be relegated to the formatting of the plot files in order to provide protection against the “time-memory tradeoffs” as outlined in the SpaceMint whitepaper. The authors of the SpaceMint paper suggest that a miner doing a bit extra work could potentially have an edge on other miners while using less space.
  
  
• Burst PoC3 is considered a Post-Dymaxion change. It proposed to build on PoC2, but with the ability to store dual-use data (i.e. Burst plots and non-plot data).

[pinkflower]

Let me begin by showing you this quote from a miner who says that we are failing in looking at the big picture.

“Labeling Bitcoin mining as a ‘waste’ is a failure to look at the big picture,” Marc Bevand, a miner and analyst

Is that his argument? But how big is his "picture"? Because my big picture is the Earth, and how we as a species are collectively trying to destroy it. For what? Tokens, digital gold, riches, wealth.

I am not trying to tell you to stop supporting BTC, but all of you should start supporting Proof of Capacity as an alternative instead of supporting the other PoW planet killers.

There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite

• The total network of computers plugged into the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy each day as some medium-size countries — which country depends on whose estimates you believe. And the network supporting Ethereum, the second-most valuable virtual currency, gobbles up another country’s worth of electricity each day.
  
  
• The energy consumption of these systems has risen as the prices of virtual currencies have skyrocketed, leading to a vigorous debate among Bitcoin and Ethereum enthusiasts about burning so much electricity.
  
  
• The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is leading an experiment with a more energy-efficient way to create tokens, in part because of his concern about the impact that the network’s electricity use could have on global warming.
  
  “I would personally feel very unhappy if my main contribution to the world was adding Cyprus’s worth of electricity consumption to global warming,” Mr. Buterin said in an interview.