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[n0nce]

Can you only imagine how much energy is wasted for all the wars happening constantly around the world for various reasons...

Not even wars; simply our fiat financial system is already responsible for a big chunk of pollution. Have you read this article yet?
https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-mary-for-the-climate-an-argument-for-bitcoin-adoption-1a695b668529
It's stunning what a huge negative impact the current system has on the environment.

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[BlackHatCoiner]

[...]

I mean think all of the central and commercial banks, ATMs, credit/debit cards, employers, transports, money issuance etc. Now think of bitcoin, wherein more than half of its waste isn't so environmentally damaging as it comes from solar panels and other renewable sources.

There was a report I'd seen from HSBC where they stated their environmental footprint of 2012. The link is surprisingly dead, but web archive is always there when you need it: https://blackhatcoiner.com/files/130521-hsbc-susreport-2012-online-ready-version.pdf

Total CO 2 emissions (Assured by PwC)*: 963,000

And that's just from one bank. But, I guess it's in no media's favor to get involved with it.

[n0nce]

And that's just from one bank. But, I guess it's in no media's favor to get involved with it.

The carbon footprint of a single bank, yeah, but I don't think it even includes the damage they are doing by keeping the coal and gas / fossil fuels industry alive.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, banks are the largest investors in fossil fuels. Not only this, but central banks who adopted quantitative easing (QE) in response to the 2008 financial crisis pumped $6 trillion globally, but this additional liquidity did nothing for “green” investment. Instead, according to the Institute, QE funneled money toward polluters. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve purchased nearly 100 million dollars worth of fossil fuel corporate bonds as part of their bond purchasing program. As of March 2021, the Federal Reserve’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility holds $469.9 million worth of oil and gas bonds, or 9.2% of the Facility’s bond portfolio. Buying up the debt of failing fossil fuel corporations allows them to emit more carbon dioxide and pollutants in the atmosphere than they would have, if they had been allowed to fail.

Financialization has weakened the so-called free market and the ability of private firms to successfully develop competitive low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies. According to the Bank for International Settlements, financialization harms innovation. Max Jerneck, at the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets, wrote in a study that this happens because innovative firms “operate by creating intangible future assets that are difficult to collateralize”.

The combination of the dominance of speculation over enterprise and the increasing role of the stock market in corporate control undermines our society’s ability to innovate its way out of a crisis like climate change. When the main goal of a corporation is for short-term enrichment of investors, what money is left for improving long-term technological research and development? Jerneck makes it clear, “Instead of serving industrial development, finance had come to serve itself.”

[BlackHatCoiner]

Substantiating this further:

The modern recession and the boom-bust cycle that drives it is entirely a creation of fiat money. Governments intervene in the allocation of capital, randomly starting and stopping a fire hose of credit that whipsaws the real economy and destroys real lives. Just as the cost of a five-second delay in a footrace can be measured in distance lost, the cost of a recession can be measured by the resources it will take to rebuild lost wealth. Bitcoin, by taking purchasing power out of central banks’ manipulation space, can reduce or even eliminate their ability to cause boom-bust cycles.

Even Bitcoin’s worst critics allege the distributed network consumes no more than 86 TWh per year, of which perhaps 16 TWh might be Americans, with much of that green energy. It would take between 500 and 1,000 years for Bitcoin’s energy use to even approach the 2008 crisis alone. With another recession permanently on the way, over and over again. That 500 to 1,000 years’ worth of energy goes on top of the 8.4% of GDP, the 80,000 bank branches and 470,000 ATMs and those skyscrapers.

These ratios suggest that central banks are vastly more polluting than Bitcoin, indeed more polluting than the worst industrial offender you could imagine. Bitcoin, by implication, is among the most green technologies humanity has ever invented. Indeed, if Bitcoin even slightly reduces central banks’ ability to cause recessions, it could pay back every watt many times over. For example, if Bitcoin reduces the odds or magnitude of central bank recessions by just 2%, Bitcoin would actually save us far more energy than it uses – it would be net carbon negative.

And that's just from one bank. But, I guess it's in no media's favor to get involved with it.

Which reminds me of how important transparency is. You don't need all this hustle and bustle to calculate the carbon footprint of bitcoin. Difficulty speaks for itself. You may not know the percentage of ASICs, GPUS etc., that is used, but you can calculate the true environmental impact much easier and more accurately.

[dkbit98]

Not even wars; simply our fiat financial system is already responsible for a big chunk of pollution. Have you read this article yet?

I think I saw it before when I tried to look  for objective truth and read both sides of the story, before making my own oppinion.

The carbon footprint of a single bank, yeah, but I don't think it even includes the damage they are doing by keeping the coal and gas / fossil fuels industry alive.

You know that killing this industries you are de facto committing mass suicide and you are not solving any real problems.
This would just mean that some other materials would be used instead of oil or gas, that would be equally bad if not worse, and it would require that most people stay at home all the time.
And of course, fake elite would still use all the ''dirty'' stuff and fly around the world in their nice private jets.

Which reminds me of how important transparency is. You don't need all this hustle and bustle to calculate the carbon footprint of bitcoin. Difficulty speaks for itself. You may not know the percentage of ASICs, GPUS etc., that is used, but you can calculate the true environmental impact much easier and more accurately.

Crazy thing is that some people are even calculating carbon footprint  of human beings, and they are saying it's bad to have kids because they produce co2...  
it looks like that same people that don't like Bitcoin with proof of work also don't like humans so much.
btw aren't all beings on earth including human carbon based life forms?

[stompix]

Yeah, it's pretty nice to use the heat since it increases the efficiency. If you could use all the heat, the efficiency could theoretically exceed 100%. I was thinking about putting ASIC chips into boilers for instance, instead of a plain resistance wire; the expended energy would be the same, but you would get heat + Bitcoin instead of just heat.

It's not a bad idea, but only thing that would be annoying in this case could be noise generated by mining.
This is not unsolvable problem, because I saw some special cases that are made to totally isolate all the noise generated by mining, in your case you would need to better isolate your boiler

I'm not 100% sure; because what's loud are the fans, but when you heat water with your ASIC, you don't need fans right? Since you transfer all that heat into the water.
I've also seen someone submerge S19's into those special oily non-conductive fluids and exchange the heat from the 'oil circuit' into the 'water circuit'.

The thing about insulating the miner is to divert the noise outside, you can't just make a soundproof box and put the miner inside and that's it, what you will have is one cooked miner in probably the same time as a thanksgiving turkey. You need to have a flow of air and you need tubes, basically redirecting with this the whole noise outside, and if your house is too close to your neighbor he won't be happy hearing a vacuum cleaner noise 24/7.

Oh and yeah, no liquid cooling heat transfer, immersion system uses fans, it would make no sense.
Immersion cooling is obviously the solution but those things don't really work with random heat consumption such as a boiler, you would need to scale it at the exact size to keep the water hot but at the same time to overheat, add more miners and what are you going to do, heat your pool constantly? The other aspect is the cost, is your heat exchanger system for hot water more expensive than what you would pay normally for it in ten years? Paying 10k for a bitcoin boiler with no Asics included? Not really a way to save money.

Anyhow, since both Micro and Bitmain are still betting on over 3kw miners and looking more and more at industrial miners like the mM53 that will come with 6.5kw consumption, the market share of real home miners as in mining in your own home, will probably go down well below 1% in the close future. That is, if we're not already there.

[PrimeNumber7]

These miners are still consuming electricity, however the electricity they are using would otherwise literally be burned if not for the miners.

If we take a look at a bigger picture, most of the energy produced in the world is wasted anyway, and bitcoin mining has just a tiny percentage of total energy productions, but it looks bigger when you zoom in and talk about that on MSM.
Can you only imagine how much energy is wasted for all the wars happening constantly around the world for various reasons...

Well for most wars, at least one side is usually fighting for their survival, so they would probably not consider that to be wasted energy.

I think the argument that bitcoin mining is "wasting" electricity is really just part of the PoW vs PoS debate. If you believe that bitcoin PoW is "wasting" electricity, the only solution is to switch to PoS mining. It is really as simple as that. I explained earlier that only less than 1% of bitcoin PoW energy consumption is duplicated.

I am not a PoW maximalist, and am willing to listen to arguments in favor of switching to PoS mining. However I have not heard a compelling argument in favor of switching.

[pooya87]

I think the argument that bitcoin mining is "wasting" electricity is really just part of the PoW vs PoS debate.

I have to disagree here because there never was any kind of debate about PoW versus PoS. I've said it many times but PoS died in early years when it was introduced and failed to provide security that was even a fraction of what PoW provides. It was only recently that they pulled it out of the grave and started creating a fake debate.

If you believe that bitcoin PoW is "wasting" electricity, the only solution is to switch to PoS mining.

Not at all. There are a lot of solutions and there could be more if the "waste" FUD was real. There is no reason to use a seriously flawed algorithm even if PoW were bad!
The only "solution" is only PoS when the coin has a massive premine and the devs want to make profit on those premined coins without having to sell them

[WhyFhy]

Us electricity consumption vs mining growth is quiet fascinating. Our usage really hasn't budged in the last 17 years.
This proves nothing really but it is hard to tell what industries effect what, Lightbulbs for example in lumens per watt have gotten incredibly efficient, even mining gear has  s19 was 34J/TH @95TH the new s19 xp hydro gear 20J/TH @ 255TH , but as this gear becomes more efficient they also want more out of it so it doesn't seem like change is happening but it is.
As I said in an earlier post "However the 1% that owns 99% of the network strength will probably not vote for such measures." consensus would have to vote by switching hashpower/staking a node or whatever concept someone conjures up to a new systems idea that promotes efficiency, guys that have spent 20k on a single piece of gear simply would laugh at you and tell you why it cant be done. The guys that where getting 100BTC block rewards on 45watt processors however might could/would.
Bitcoins smarter than me but ETH is incredibly complex in comparison, they also dont really care about the miners the miners dont have a vote if the dev's around telling people they can stake more and earn more this new way. But if ETH and its complexity's can actually pull of PoS, bitcoin could too I think but maybe not , there is a reason Bitcoin is king and all forks have ultimately failed in comparison.     I'm sure if Satoshi where around he would advocate a new system that advocates better decentralization but by his design he wouldn't have much say in it except a voice of reason.

[BlackHatCoiner]

guys that have spent 20k on a single piece of gear simply would laugh at you and tell you why it cant be done.

People that have spent 20k on a piece of gear follow the users' demand, though.

they also dont really care about the miners the miners dont have a vote if the dev's around telling people they can stake more and earn more this new way.

Well, miners shouldn't have a greater vote than regulars users generally, but in Ethereum it really doesn't matter. It suffers from far worse centralizing-kind of issues such as the dev team affects a lot as you said, there's a tendency towards PoS; lots of coins are also pre-mined.

I'm sure if Satoshi where around he would advocate a new system that advocates better decentralization but by his design he wouldn't have much say in it except a voice of reason.

What's wrong with the current system? I'm sure the reason he left was to avoid having a central point of Vitalik.

[WhyFhy]

-snip

1. Maybe but if that guy and his friends make up the 99% of the network (In theory) Why would they listen to the 1% of little guys running 2 or 3 units at home or a handful in a DC?
Majority of retail investors I'm learning have no clue at all how this works and are entering based on fomo or trusting the guy that does understand.

2. Eth to me is a way to get my bitcoin without running crazy loud gear and an expanding mining operation out of my control, no limits on how much eth there is ,is concerning considering the value, I've read an article a while back of a guy exploiting it and basically fabricating it out of thin air. Pretty unfair you have to stake 32eth to have a say so with the new standard.(last I checked I haven't been keeping up as much these days)

3. I've personally wondered if he left around when asics came out, the point of no return if you will. Asics essentially centralized BTC in a way , starting with suppliers in particular , bitmain. Lately I've felt the only clear winners in BTC are the guys that where in early or asic sellers. I personally don't think that was Satoshi's vision. What good is a decentralized currency if majority of it's owned by the elites already?

To be clear I'm a little guy, even with a pretty good understanding how bitcoin works I don't feel like I'd have any say so where it goes, because I'm not running 1PH or even have 1BTC to stake.
I run a few nodes though   in 2022 that's not saying much.

[Welsh]

1. Maybe but if that guy and his friends make up the 99% of the network (In theory) Why would they listen to the 1% of little guys running 2 or 3 units at home or a handful in a DC?
Majority of retail investors I'm learning have no clue at all how this works and are entering based on fomo or trusting the guy that does understand.

In reality they don't though, and ideally that situation never arises. Although, retailers might be entering due to fear of missing out, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It should bring in competition, and prices should actually lower due to that competition, which should be seen as a good thing, as it reduces the amount of centralisation at least partly.

We don't need the retailers to know every intrigue detail, we just need them to create efficient machines, that's all. Which, they definitely know how to do as they've been doing it before Bitcoin was around.

To be clear I'm a little guy, even with a pretty good understanding how bitcoin works I don't feel like I'd have any say so where it goes, because I'm not running 1PH or even have 1BTC to stake.
I run a few nodes though   in 2022 that's not saying much.

Ideally, we should all have a say, regardless of how much Bitcoin you have or what sort of equipment you have. If you have a good idea, I'd like to think it would be taken into consideration. Obviously, there are people with more power for a lack of a better word, but I don't think that's avoidable. There's always going to be some sort of pull in a certain direction, and usually the people making the changes are the ones to do it, but at least with Bitcoin being mostly decentralised it's easier to upset the apple cart. If you wanted changes to be made, you could put them forward, and see if they're adopted.

[stompix]

3. I've personally wondered if he left around when asics came out, the point of no return if you will. Asics essentially centralized BTC in a way , starting with suppliers in particular , bitmain. Lately I've felt the only clear winners in BTC are the guys that where in early or asic sellers. I personally don't think that was Satoshi's vision. What good is a decentralized currency if majority of it's owned by the elites already?

Asics were not yet out when Satoshi left but since the first GPU miner everyone should have seen the writings on the wall, it was clear that if the reward will prove to be enough incentive miners designed for this would appear, and they did so as early FPGA.
As for his own vision on decentralization, it puzzles me sometimes, he once talked about a gentleman's agreement when it comes to the hashrate race to have coins distributed equally but at the same time he talked about server node farms to take the burden of the network.
I think that he knew there was never going to be some sort of democracy in this and in the long run the ones affording better gear will prevail, even with CPU mining the threat as there.

Besides, he had some other ideas too, with which not so many will agree these days:

New users wouldn't really even need the Bitcoin software.  They could download a miner, create an account on mtgox or mybitcoin, enter their deposit address into the miner and point it at anyone's pool server.  When the miner says it found something, a while later a few coins show up in their account.

[BlackHatCoiner]

1. Maybe but if that guy and his friends make up the 99% of the network (In theory) Why would they listen to the 1% of little guys running 2 or 3 units at home or a handful in a DC?

Because he and his friends aren't the 99% of the population of the network. They may have much power, but they don't get to dictate what the users will do. If 99% of the users want a change, see SegWit, the miners ought to follow the crowd. Otherwise, they'll spend energy for a currency that has little demand.

I personally don't think that was Satoshi's vision.

Please, let's stop this Satoshi's vision nonsense; that's how BSV, that I know how we all hate, began. It doesn't matter what he might have thought of it.

Besides, he had some other ideas too, with which not so many will agree these days:

New users wouldn't really even need the Bitcoin software.  They could download a miner, create an account on mtgox or mybitcoin, enter their deposit address into the miner and point it at anyone's pool server.  When the miner says it found something, a while later a few coins show up in their account.

Lol. This didn't age well.

[pooya87]

New users wouldn't really even need the Bitcoin software.  They could download a miner, create an account on mtgox or mybitcoin, enter their deposit address into the miner and point it at anyone's pool server.  When the miner says it found something, a while later a few coins show up in their account.

Lol. This didn't age well.

You shouldn't read anybody's posts out of context least of which Satoshi's.
In short the discussion there is about whether the miners connecting to a pool need to run their own software (whether the original or modified or whatever else).
@ribuck explains why in a mining pool (the first of) only the pool runs the client and there is no need for others (the miners connecting to it) run their own Bitcoin clients. @grondilu is arguing that others can run their own [modified] software, connect to the pool and both mine the block to receive the block reward and receive the pool's reward at the same time.
To this Satoshi states that it is not possible due to the way pool is designed and continues to say users don't even have to run the software to use a pool, they can use a shitty centralized exchange to get an address and receive the funds. He isn't saying they should!

[WhyFhy]

In reality they don't though, and ideally that situation never arises. Although, retailers might be entering due to fear of missing out, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It should bring in competition, and prices should actually lower due to that competition, which should be seen as a good thing, as it reduces the amount of centralisation at least partly.
We don't need the retailers to know every intrigue detail, we just need them to create efficient machines, that's all. Which, they definitely know how to do as they've been doing it before Bitcoin was around.

A retail investor is an average user. Not a retailer. But I hope intel's new chip opens up some good door for us! It would be nice to see decent quiet units again like the R4

Please, let's stop this Satoshi's vision nonsense; that's how BSV, that I know how we all hate, began. It doesn't matter what he might have thought of it.

Whoah now thats not where I was going with that !   I have to clean coffee out of my nose now. Poor choice of words on my part no pun intended.

I'm just thinking out loud here 7 years ago I wouldn't have thought we would need 3 Phase for the newest stuff.

-snip

I guess your right , just because the wheel was invented doesnt mean it was made with the best materials.
 


 

[Welsh]

A retail investor is an average user. Not a retailer. But I hope intel's new chip opens up some good door for us! It would be nice to see decent quiet units again like the R4

Ah, I didn't realise you were talking about prospective miners rather than the retailers selling the rigs. Anyhow, again I don't think we necessarily need them to know much about Bitcoin. It's just like how investors aren't always clued up, they just see the opportunity to make some money. That isn't a problem really, not every adopter is going to be a believer in Bitcoin in the long term. Doesn't really effect us much in the long term, and probably does improve the amount of money short term investors make.

I don't see a problem with it personally. There's plenty of people getting into other markets that don't understand it, without actually being detrimental to it, and in similar vein I don't think the retail investors as you put it, will be detrimental to Bitcoin. Although, going back to the original point, I think it still stands, they aren't going to have the majority of their friends mining.

[PrimeNumber7]

I think the argument that bitcoin mining is "wasting" electricity is really just part of the PoW vs PoS debate.

I have to disagree here because there never was any kind of debate about PoW versus PoS. I've said it many times but PoS died in early years when it was introduced and failed to provide security that was even a fraction of what PoW provides. It was only recently that they pulled it out of the grave and started creating a fake debate.

I have explained above, that I don't believe it is possible to reduce electricity consumed as long as bitcoin is using PoW to mine. If miners become more efficient, electricity consumption will not decline because people will just buy more of them, or the difficultly will increase. Over the long term, the electricity consumed will be a function of the cost of electricity, the value of the total mining revenue, and a rate of return that miners want for the risk of buying the miners.

IMO, the only way to reduce the electricity consumed below the above is to switch from PoW to PoS. I noted above that it remains my belief that PoW remains superior to PoS.

If you believe that bitcoin PoW is "wasting" electricity, the only solution is to switch to PoS mining.

Not at all. There are a lot of solutions and there could be more if the "waste" FUD was real. There is no reason to use a seriously flawed algorithm even if PoW were bad!

Well I guess this depends on one's definition of "waste". I noted above that very little "work" that consumes electricity is actually duplicated, as orphaned blocks are very rare.

Three are plenty of people willing to pay for the cost of electricity consumed by the bitcoin miners via paying transaction fees, and allowing the price to not decline as more bitcoin is mined.

I don't think it is reasonable to say that electricity is "wasted" when mining bitcoin. One may argue that too much electricity is consumed by the bitcoin miners, and I would refer those people to my above points.

[pooya87]

IMO, the only way to reduce the electricity consumed below the above is to switch from PoW to PoS.
I noted above that it remains my belief that PoW remains superior to PoS.

You are contradicting yourself here.
Even if we agree that PoW should be replaced, the replacement is never going to be a weaker algorithm such as PoS that has many flaws. You see when you are trying to solve one problem you should do it in a way that it doesn't introduce 50 new issues.

[Amjado711]

Will bitcoin ever move to prove of stake? I’m sure all these waste of energy will be solved