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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

What a utter waste of energy.

Instead of energy consuming work, you could have a cryptographic lottery.

Every zero-sum adversarial system would be a lot more efficient if they accepted the judgement of a third party instead. How much energy could we save if we dismantled the court system, elections, and pro sports?

I think DAG coins could be a lot more efficient, but I'm not totally solid intellectually on how they achieve consensus on conflicting spends so I'm not sure it will work as a general solution. The only one I've used, nano, has I believe no mining reward, and I think consensus is achieved based on a voting process weighted by proof-of-stake among online nodes -- the incentive for participating in the system is that the system has value for you in other ways. I'm not closely following ETH PoS research, but it will be interesting to see what they can accomplish, it could create a huge reduction in energy consumption.

> Every zero-sum adversarial system would be a lot more efficient if they accepted the judgement of a third party instead. How much energy could we save if we dismantled the court system, elections, and pro sports?

None, since players would devote their energy to influencing or becoming the third party instead of playing these games.

DAG coins just distribute the mining work across the entire network including edge nodes. That's not necessarily more efficient but it is more decentralized. Of course it remains to be seen if DAG systems can be robust against attack. I'm familiar with several attacks against DAG-type cryptocurrencies that don't seem to have really good answers.

What would be the real world cost extrinsic to the system? How do you translate dollars into the system so that the miners have something to lose?

Or are you referring to proof of stake?

Elsewhere in this thread I posted this:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

If this is correct then if we had a cryptographic lottery players would devote the same amount of "work" to attempting to game the lottery that they presently burn by pumping electricity into mining ASICs.

The point of cryptographic lottery is that it's not proof of work scheme where dong work can improve changes and be profitable.

It's possible to define a decentralized objective consensus without PoW and make it unprofitable to use sybil attacks and other methods to game the system.

If the waste heat could be harvested and used for another purpose (district heating? cooking?) that would more or less curtail the waste, yes?

Only problem is the second law of thermodynamics but sure, why not.

If you could do that so easily, you'd already do it in aluminum plants, which are kinda like bitcoin already -- electricity in, aluminum out. Suffice to say, it doesn't really happen.

It would help a bit, but electric resistive heating is not very efficient.

to the extent it's taking away from mining gold, it's a positive thing

I don’t follow. Can you explain?

gold mining uses a ton of energy, more than bitcoin mining. To the extent that people substitute gold for bitcoin in financial portfolios, this is positive since net energy waste is lower.

How do you know that gold mining uses more energy than bitcoin mining?

I mean, I don't know it for sure, that's why I said "to the extent..." but here is one article

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...

Gonna need a lot of citations to believe that

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i...

It seems like a bad comparison, since you don’t need to mine gold just to move it around. Transferring ownership can be accomplished for the amount of energy it takes to send a small electronic message.

to move it around you need trucks which use gasoline

You don’t need to move it to transfer ownership of it.

by that logic, same thing applies to bitcoin. on a centralized exchange ownershp is just an entry in the database

It would apply to bitcoin if that were the usual way to transfer it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

what do you mean? most bitcoin volume is done on centralized exchanges, so that's exactly the usual way of trading it.

From some quick searching around, volume on the exchanges is around 500,000/day while volume on the blockchain is over a million. If that’s accurate (and it may not be, I’m not an expert on this and the sources I found might suck) then most volume is on the blockchain by a pretty good margin.

I don’t know how much gold is actually shifted around physically, but the trading volume in a year is several times the actual amount of gold that has been mined, so I suspect the proportion of that which involves physical movement is tiny.

https://blockchain.info/stats

total USD transaction volume according to above about $1.3bln

trading volume, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ - 6.7 bln

most bitcoin volume is virtual, not generating actual transactions, by 5 to 1 margin. Not sure where you got your numbers

What is the difference between “Total Output Volume” and “Estimated Transaction Volume”? The former is pretty close to what I found.

40% of gold consumed is in investments, 50% in jewelry, and 10% in industry, so I'm not totally sure how it works out in terms of energy per unit of gold, but it's likely some mining of gold would be necessary even if you stopped using gold for jewelry and investing. But you could get rid of bitcoin (and other crypto currencies) without any real impact.

perhaps. you could get rid of most of things in our society without much impact, since we basically need food, water and shelter. but lots of things are nice to have, so that's kinda irrelevant

I think cryptocurrencies have very few practical applications at the moment. So getting rid of them would have much less effect than getting rid of gold for example.

yes, that's because they are 10 years old as opposed to 10,000, but I am not sure where you are going with this. At the very minimum, getting rid of them would cause investor losses of hundreds of billions.

As opposed to the utter waste of multiple resources and everything included in the pipeline between dollar issued and dollar spent?

Hm, how much energy DOES it take (how would I compare? not sure) to produce equivalent number of dollars? Is there maintenance cost? Interesting line of thought to me.

Most dollars are virtual, so the energy cost is just sending some small messages around. It’s orders of magnitude less than needed for a bitcoin transaction.

Physical currency probably takes more energy, but printing is an old and cheap technology, so I doubt it’s comparable.

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