Bitcoin & PoW is a waste of energy & destroys nature

[mdegreffe]

Canada, before and after tar sand mining looks too different. Are that true photos of the same place?

[Adrian-x]

Canada, before and after tar sand mining looks too different. Are that true photos of the same place?

they are not photos of the same place, but I kid you not the Canadian tar sands have destroyed the natural environment on monumental scale the destruction and resulting pollution is mind blowing. It also is responsible for making Canadians the no.1 carbon emitting nation per capita.

[pandher]

I see bitcoin bagholders defending their positions from a truth attack

[Adrian-x]

I see bitcoin bagholders defending their positions from a truth attack

Truth be told it is only fractional reserve banking in fiat that makes environmental destruction of this magnetude viable. With a fixed or deflationary monetary unit it would be more cost effective to save and postpone the oil mining untill it was absolutely nesesary. 

[cbeast]

I see bitcoin bagholders defending their positions from a truth attack

Truth be told it is only fractional reserve banking in fiat that makes environmental destruction of this magnetude viable. With a fixed or deflationary monetary unit it would be more cost effective to save and postpone the oil mining untill it was absolutely nesesary. 

Fractional reserve banking has done a pretty good job of destroying the Earth without any other experimental monetary system's assistance. This entire thread is a strawman argument.

[Crindon]

This is why many are flocking to conis like Mintcoin. Mintcoin is a great coin that gives 20% PoS in the first year, then 15% in the second year.

[superresistant]

There is a high competition for specialised hardware. When Bitcoin started, everyone could mine it on CPU, then GPU, then FPGA and now only an elite can afford the $10K ASIC. The production of the hardware is highly centralised and the people that have access to it are decreasing everyday.

That's partly because we are at a special time in Bitcoin history. It will mature fairly soon (over the next 5 years). ASICs will plateau in power as they catch up with mainstream chip technology. Then they won't be superseded so quickly, so they'll be kept longer. They'll be produced in greater quantities. They'll become cheaper. We'll go back to more people being miners.

How come ?

As time goes, it is getting more and more expensive to build the best ASIC chip.
It is getting harder and harder for new competitors to enter the manufacture market.

It is also getting worse for miners that have to take more and more risk.
Today, if you want to be competitive you have to make contract directly with the manufacturer, 6 months in advance and that require ordering over $200K - $1M.
Even with this, we see mining group going bankrupt (COGNITIVE).

[gollum]

Please think outside of the box instead of holding to the current outdated mining model -
Progress comes from questioning the current solutions and improving them.

We must admit that there are several alt-coins with better functionality than bitcoin.
But bitcoin has first-mover advantage as a brand and got the gretest ecosystem in terms of dollar value and userbase, therefore we should learn from the alt-coins and improve bitcoin.

[Brangdon]

As time goes, it is getting more and more expensive to build the best ASIC chip.

Because, as I said, we are at a special time in history. Today ASICs are new. in 5 years time they'll be old. Today, the state of the art advances so rapidly that current designs become obsolete quickly, rendering investment in them moot. That's partly because their technology is lagging behind the mainstream, and their rate of progression is largely how quickly they can adopt technology from the mainstream. In 5 years they'll have caught up with the mainstream, and then they'll advance at the stately pace of Moore's Law, which itself will slow down. It's partly because they are so new, and the benefit of ASICs is so large, that any old design yields big improvements, and then finding a better design is easier. There's lots of low-hanging fruit, relatively easy to pluck. After 5 years of this, finding new improvements will be hard because all the easy ones will already have been found. You'll be able to licence a proven design that any chip-maker could produce. They'll become more like commodities. Having your own ASIC will be like having your own hard disk drive. Sure, cloud storage exists, but it doesn't use some magic technology that isn't available to the general public.

Today, if you want to be competitive you have to make contract directly with the manufacturer, 6 months in advance and that require ordering over $200K - $1M.

I'm not talking about today. I'm trying to predict conditions in 5 years. I might have that wrong, but clearly, today mining is in a state of flux which will not be typical.

[mgburks77]

Do ASICs have any other use rather than mining cryptocurrency?

I just don't see mining crytocurrency as something that will become as ubiquitous as using a hard drive.

It seems to me mining is on it's way out and all of these chips are going to end up in a landfill.

[anonerd]

gridcoin.

[Beliathon]

> Re: Bitcoin & PoW is a waste of energy & destroys nature

Just like your mother.

gridcoin.

This particular shitcoin is actually a little bit intriguing. Science funding? Hows it work?

[Epiphany]

SolarCoin.org

That is all.

[beetcoin]

well, the energy it costs to mint coins and print dollars is also a complete waste of energy too then. while a lot of energy is used to secure bitcoin, there are way bigger fish to fry.

[bitsmichel]

It is insane to waste energy on mining bitcoin in the age of peak oil where greedy energy companies destroy nature for profit.
Right now all bitcoin miners consume the amount of the energy produced by an average US nuclear power plant (30 million KwH/day), or the total oil production of Phillipines (12,000 barrels of oil per day)

You compare only one variable : energy - with one single nuclear power plant.

We are made out of matter. Radioactive matter however has a very unique property:

An atomic nucleus emits a particle, and thereby transforms (or 'decays') into an atom with a mass number decreased by atomic number.  If you would imagine this (as analogy) in daily life situation, once upon a time a part of your body falls off. Many other types of decays are possible.
There is an amount of time radioactive substance to decay to half of its initial value;
The Half Life of Uranium-235 is 713,000,000 years. The Half Life of Uranium-238 is 4,500,000,000 years.
So far, I have not heard of any technology to speed up this process.. but until that time has passed, this material is very deadly. This is not a fair comparison  

Everything is atoms/electrons/protons, so everything is nature. You are nature, I am nature, bitcoin is nature, oil is nature. Electricity will not go away any time soon (say 5 billion years).

tl;dr; Humans will go extinct, if we do not change the way our society works. Nature will continue.

[GenTarkin]

I absolutely hate hearing this argument over and over.
Once I did the calculations on how much roughly the ATMs, in the USA alone, use more power 24/7 then the entire Bitcoin network. It was nearly 2x the amount of power.

Talk about a wasteful infrastructure!

Bitcoin is the least of our concerns.
The benefits gained w/ a system like Bitcoin largely outweigh its power footprint.

[Ron~Popeil]

I absolutely hate hearing this argument over and over.
Once I did the calculations on how much roughly the ATMs, in the USA alone, use more power 24/7 then the entire Bitcoin network. It was nearly 2x the amount of power.

Talk about a wasteful infrastructure!

Bitcoin is the least of our concerns.
The benefits gained w/ a system like Bitcoin largely outweigh its power footprint.

Benefits or not I pay for my power and get to decide how I use it. We in PA like to call that freedom.

[kooke]

Proof-of-Resource cryptocoins aim to solve the problem of wasted resources by rewarding people who share drive space and processing power with coins. There's a few already in the works like maidsafe. Shame they botched their IPO, but I'm sure someone will fork it once it's released.

[Beliathon]

If you're genuinely concerned about energy waste and natural destruction, OP, logic dictates that you start by opposing capitalism.

[Adrian-x]

If you're genuinely concerned about energy waste and natural destruction, OP, logic dictates that you start by opposing capitalism.

If exponential growth in Bitcoin value continues, the profit motive will take electricity from less profitable economic activities today. The result is energy costs will cause market players to choose how to invest the energy they use, and we will have large energy shortfalls in the growth economy capitalism will stop waste.

The silver lining is we won't be cold but we are about to learn how to become efficient, and in about 10-16 years from now after a number of halvings mining profits won't sustain the demand and humanity will emerge with the skill to be energy efficient. Bitcoin will have prepared us for the other side of peek energy, we will be making maximum use of our resources.

Satoshi's worked it all out, and it's now unfolding or there really is a god   and he loves us and doesn't want us to go extinct.
The other options are horrible and I'll ignore them.