Thankfully, cheap energy fit for Bitcoin mining is increasingly not found in fossil fuels, but in renewables, wasted and “stranded” sources of energy, as we’ll dive into next. [1]
[1]: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-will-save-our-e...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...
[3]: For example, to illustrate the point, I currently mine BTG on a spare GPU I had because my house needed to be heated anyways. I turn the miner on when I want heat in my house (about 600w) and turn it off when not needed... This is a micro example of what could be done across our entire society "Recent data suggest that space heating accounts for about 42 percent of energy use in U.S. residences and about 36 percent of energy use in U.S. commercial buildings."[4] . Every one of those space heaters could actually be a processor doing computation. In the future the "waster" will not be a miner but someone who turns electricity straight to heat without intermediate chains of value (such as computation or light).
[4]:https://www.epa.gov/rhc/renewable-space-heating#:~:text=Rece....
Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat. Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
New grid renewables (#CleanEnergy) are now less expensive than existing baseload; which makes renewables long term environment-rational and short term price-rational.
"Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
> No, all space heaters are equally efficient. They all have perfect 100% efficiency, because they turn electrical power into heat. When your work product is heat and the waste product is also heat, then there really is no waste.
This heat must be distributed throughout the room somehow (i.e. a batteryless woodstove fan or a sterling engine that does work with the difference in entropy when there is a difference in entropy)
> Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat.
See "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" re: a possible way to delete known observer-entangled bits while reducing heat/entropy (thus bypassing Landauer's limit for classical computation?)?
> Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
Each n-symbol sequence in the hash function output does appear to have nearly equal frequency/probability of occurrence. Indeed, is Proof-of-Work worth the heat if you're not reusing the waste heat?
The externalities of energy production are what must be overcome if we are to be able to withstand wasteful overconsumption of electricity. Eventually, we could all have free clean energy and no lightsabers, right?
So, we do need to minimize wasteful overconsumption. Define wasteful in terms of USD/kWHr (irregardless of industry)? In terms of behavioral economics, why are they behaving that way when there are alternatives that cost <$0.01/tx and a fairly-aggregated comprehensive n kWhr of electricity?
TIL about these guys, who are deciding to somewhat-responsibly self-regulate in the interest of long-term environmental sustainability for all of the land: "Crypto Climate Accord". https://cryptoclimate.org/
"Crypto Climate Accord Launches to Decarbonize Cryptocurrency Industry Brings together the likes of CoinShares, ConsenSys, Ripple, and the UNFCCC Climate Champions to lead sustainability in blockchain and crypto" (2021) https://bit.ly/CryptoClimateAccord
> What are the objectives of the Crypto Climate Accord? The Accord’s overall objective is to decarbonize the global crypto industry. There are three provisional objectives to be finalized in partnership with Accord supporters:
> - Enable all of the world’s blockchains to be powered by 100% renewables by the 2025 UNFCCC COP Conference
> - Develop an open-source accounting standard for measuring emissions from the cryptocurrency industry
> - Achieve net-zero emissions for the entire crypto industry, including all business operations beyond blockchains and retroactive emissions, by 2040
Similar to the Paris Agreement (2015), stakeholders appear to be setting their own targets for sustainability in accordance with the Crypto Climate Accord (2021). https://cryptoclimate.org/accord/
Someone who's not in renewables could launch e.g. a "Satoshi Nakamoto Clean Energy Fund: SNCEF" to receive donations from e.g. hash pools and connect nonprofits with sustainability managed renewables. How many SNCEFs did you give this year and why?
#CleanEnergy