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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but... the crypto algorithm chosen for Bitcoin is about as energy intensive as they come. Other algorithms which are more equipment intensive - scrypt etc - provide the same benefits but without the same disgusting externality of power consumption.

I wish I grasped proof of stake better. I’m not yet convinced it can be made to work as well as PoW.

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The investment in energy-intensive GPUs will also serve as a disincentive for any change to Bitcoin that does not require energy-intensive GPUs, which will lock us into this paradigm until something drastic happens.

EDIT: I stand corrected as to the terminology, but if you replace [GPUs] with [POW hardware], the disincentive will remain.

No one has seriously mined Bitcoin using GPUs since like 2013. By 2014, everyone was using FPGAs or ASICs. Now, only ASICs are used.

I thought there was a change to the protocol that prevented ASICs from being as effective?

Perhaps I misunderstood in the context of Bitcoin, but in the context of the investment in GPUs providing support to pricing, I think that is validated just from the news a few days ago that GPU pricing because of crypto demand was causing pricing issues in PC-gaming. And the same principle should apply to whatever "effort-based" mining technology is in use; any significant investment in hardware will be a disincentive to allowing improvements in the efficiency of said hardware.

A lot of altcoins have come up that are ASIC-resistant. A lot of these use memory as a bound, but GPUs sill have the memory bandwidth to make mining fast.

I must have mixed up some notes about ASIC-resistant altcoins with some older info about Bitcoin, its quite difficult to keep track.

Bitcoin is still using (and probably will always use) SHA-256 as the proof of work problem, which ASICs are great for since it takes negligible memory.

XMR/ETH use GPU

It seems like nobody really knows, yet. But Ethereum is about to run a $100bn experiment to find out :)

Market cap is very different from the actual money invested in the ecosystem. I don't know the exact number, but I bet it's a lot lower than $100bn.

Stupid example: I create 100bn coins. Then I sell one to myself for $1. Am I now running a $100bn experiment?

You don't need to explain the idea of paper wealth to me :)

Yes, marketcap is flawed, and examples like yours do actually pop up because of the usage of this metric, but are quickly smacked down if they're traded on markets with any liquidity. Ethereum isn't in that category. We can do a Wall St. pissing contest about what consitutes "real liquidity" but I'll stick to that statement for Bitcoin and Ethereum at the least.

It's just a matter of perspective: let's say you're invested in Google. You put in $1000 and now it's worth $100,000 on paper. Google announces they are closing their data centers and pivoting to cat food delivery: are they risking $1000 of your money, or $100k?

Right, and that's why Bitcoin has lost a huge amount of marketshare in the crypto space over the past couple months[1].

1. https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

I wouldn't suggest this as an explanation at all. Another, equally-plausible explanation, is that retail investors are looking for the next BTC before its price pops.

Maybe the more energy we consume, the more motivated we'll be to move to more efficient methods. And the available fossil fuels are projected to run out at some point, aren't they? So if we're going to use them all anyway before switching fully to 100% renewable/alternative sources, then using it up faster doesn't result in more total emissions, just more now and less later. After that, we'll be "wasting" hydro and nuclear etc., which doesn't really matter.

If I take all the pollution or greenhouses gases that we would dump in a 100 year period and dump them all today, it's possible that the impact from that would be unrecoverable.

Total emissions isn't the only important measurement.

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