Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

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> urea is a major component of fertilizer

Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.

"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...

"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...

"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...

"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...

"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...

"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...

"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...

Hell in the handbasket here we come!

This is why I don’t buy the Bitcoin “mined with free energy” narrative. Put a fertilizer plant near that hydro dam instead of doing proof of work calculations.

Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.

> uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining

I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.

Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.

What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?

Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?

It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.

Because it's not really an efficiency upgrade like you've envisioned.

The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.

A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.

Well, because it's not like PoS is just making PoW more efficient. You have no way to turn that extra energy into more stake.

It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.

Thanks, I think I kind of get it now. But now my follow up question is, what stops me from just recruiting, say, nine other people at least as old as me, give them each 10 strawberries, and then collecting the payout afterwards?

Haha, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that as an analogy for PoS. Just to make the point that it's two resources which can't be converted.

Mining economics depend on the mining reward. It doesn't get bigger if more people mine. The rewards just get spread out over more/larger participants until profits are tiny via difficulty adjustments.

The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.

PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.

Non proof-of-work "mining" typically requires another resource. Proof-of-stake rewards you based on your holdings, so additional mining compute power doesn't help.

I don't think Ethereum PoS is ever coming anymore, or at least it will not displace the PoW version. It's been coming (TM) for a few years now.

Ethereum PoS is live now through the beacon chain. Merge just hasn't happened yet.

It's sharding that's probably never coming.

Why do you think sharding is never coming? Don't tell me that haha!

L2s like Polygon and Arbitrum are doing a decent job solving the scaling problem and don't require changes to the core protocol.

Well I own Polygon too, so guess I'm covered both ways.

I get this comment every time I post about it also. It’s the only ammo they have left.

The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no plans to fix its energy consumption.

As you see, even in a price spike, urea only costs US$1/kg. That really makes it hard to produce urea in the middle of the Sahara; shipping it to the ocean would cost more than the price it would fetch. Consequently there are lots of places where producing energy is economical if used for Bitcoin but not for fertilizer and other low-value-density products.

This is why Namibia is looking at making hydrogen (and presumably ammonia): the desert there comes right down to the ocean. There are desert sand dunes right at the shore.

I agree with your general point (that crypto mining does come at the cost of energy for other purposes) but I'm not sure that's a good example -- I thought the energy input to fertilizer plants was from all the oil they take in which is chemically necessary; the major input isn't electricity per se, so being near a hydro dam wouldn't help.

I agree but this seems bigger than finding arbitrary hash values - after all, China shut down crypto mining months ago I think and yet they had to shut down a phosphate factory in December.

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