Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

The absolute figures are bitcoin uses about the equivalent of Sweden’s energy consumption every year. Renewable energy isn’t free and should be replacing legacy sources, not being used to do pretend work. Environmental is a huge factor.

View on HN

That's assuming Sweden's power grid is up 365 days a year, but we should subtract a few days to account for bitcoin ransomware attacks.

> The absolute figures are bitcoin uses about the equivalent of Sweden’s energy consumption every year.

Even using those sources I believe it's "electricity" consumption not "energy" consumption.

Why should renewable energy be replacing legacy sources rather than bitcoins sources?

Can you make me a list of real vs pretend work so I can base my ethical decisions on it?

It's not a comprehensive list, but a good rule of thumb is that any computer spinning around computing a number that no one cares about the value of is pretend work.

so BTC would be real work because a lot of people care about those numbers, right?

No, no one cares about the final numbers - they are just, as the Bitcoin paper explains, Proof of Work. The only point of doing those calculations is to prove that you have spent X processor cycles in service of Bitcoin. You could entirely replace the calculation (and checkers) with a different calculation and nothing whatsoever would change about bitcoin, because no one cares about the values.

Conversely, if you found an algorithm that could compute those same values in microseconds on a calculator, bitcoin would plummet in an instant, because suddenly anyone with a calculator could run 99% attacks on the bitcoin network. The numbers aren't improtant, the busywork is.

Well yes, the values existing are important, the values semantics aren't, that's why its a proof of work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com