yeah I thought home mining was a waste of time for a while now but that suggests I could make £9 per day which isn't bad
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Bitcoin Mining Energy Consumption Surpasses Energy Consumption of (Another) Country
- Thread starter Caz
- Start date
yeah I thought home mining was a waste of time for a while now but that suggests I could make £9 per day which isn't bad
The idea is that the weight of computing power to secure the ledger has to be stronger than the computing power to usurp the ledger could possibly be in order to maintain trust, I believe? I'm fuzzy.
Is the point of the math problem just to create scarcity or does it work towards something else?
Because if it's just to increase scarcity it seems like an incredibly pointless and wasteful system to have set up.
Now of it was all working towards something like folding at home and actively helping some scientific modelling etc that would at least make something worthwhile come out of it other than making rich people richer.
A secure ledger. But also scarcity in a way, yeah. Because the difficulty of the problem is specifically chosen such that it will take 10 minutes for the currently dedicated computing power to solve. Every 10 minutes, another problem gets solved, the amount of computing power dedicated to solving gets measured, and the difficulty of the problem gets adjusted to maintain this rate. If bitcoin was just as easy to mine now as it was in the long long long ago, in terms of hash per coin, I imagine you'd have like... absolutely ridiculous hyperinflation. Or nothing and a dead currency. As a reminder, the first guy to spend bitcoin on a purchase spent 10k btc on two pizzas.
EDIT: I was mistaken. I said 15 minutes, but it's 10.
Thanks for the explanation.
Just seems like such a waste. Like I said previously, it should be set up to solve problems that would feed into something bigger and more meaningful. Of course then you run the risk of that being absurd by someone in charge of it with regards to rights etc but I'm sure something could be worked out to give it some meaning.
That's worrying. I think bitcoin is mostly a false solution at this stage. Hasn't really contributed much of anything to solving the major problems that most people face. Particularly becuase most people with the most pressing issues, don't use it or benefit from it anyway. It is mostly a far more limited to solution than some who live mostly virtual lives would like to believe. In most cases, we need to encourage more concrete solutions to problems, rather than rely every more heavily on the virtual.
I mean, BTC is over 46K right now. All time high before that was 19K in 2017 and mean was around 10K.
Cryptocurrency with zero fees and much, much, MUCH less energy use than Bitcoin. I love the tech but it isn't nearly as valued as Bitcoin(and honestly never will be)
To be fair to bitcoin's creators they did not foresee the insane speculative bubble that has led to people sucking up entire power plant's worth of electricity to mine every last bitcoin as fast as possible
To counter that though, how else could it have gone?
I can't foresee any other path than either it failed to take off or it became successful and those with the money and resources to take advantage of it would do so.
So.. we're using up a load of fossil fuels and shooting tons of CO2 in the atmosphere to.. what? Normal payment processors can process millions of transactions for the cost of one bitcoin transaction, and if you want a "store of value" then Gold doesn't just sit there spewing out toxic fumes. It's gambling for tech bros, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing of value is being created here and the quicker it goes down to $0 the better.
A lot of naivete was involved but it's important to remember that bitcoin was intended to be a currency -- bitcoins would be mined slowly by individual users and then enter into circulation to be used the same way dollar bills are. Unfortunately, the fact that bitcoins have a hard total limit means the currency is under constant deflationary pressure, which makes it more valuable to hold them then to spend, and speculators soon moved in and now it's just another financial commodity. It's original purpose is pretty much completely ruined, and I knew the first time I heard a bitcoin FOMO story ("He'd have X now, if he hadn't spent!") in like 2012 I knew bitcoin would never be a viable currency.
Well, I think this statement depends on the energy grid / mix of the area where the miners are located.
Is it possible for Bitcoin to ever transition to a Proof of Stake mechanism instead of Proof of Work?
If Bitcoin is going to replace banking, it is also going to need all of that on top of the current energy usage.
There's absolutely zero love for technology or innovation involved here; it's all love for one thing, and one thing only:
What will trigger that though? Crypto is mostly used for speculation and crime, speculators like the way its exchange rate moves. Like any fiat currency it won't be replaced until people lose trust in its monetary value and prefer something else. Since mining costs are externalities that users don't see they're not enough to make people stop using Bitcoin.
I mean, look at Elon Musk, putting billions specifically into Bitcoin when he had the chance to promote a better system instead.
Unless I got something very wrong, that's not where the works goes, though. The work itself is indeed "useless"; it's just a verification against a single party creating a fake ledger through distributed means vs everyone else in the world.
I don't have any background in cryptocurrencies so I have no clue if it would be feasible for one of them to actually distribute useful work to miners, e.g. protein folding. I'm guessing not or someone would have already done so.
Depends on the crypto currency? XRP is premined is its much more environmentally friendly
Unless you have a small farm you'll lose more money on energy demand than you make at this point
but your electric bill is going to counter that. If you figure out how to get free electricity....
just ship me the card.
edit:
For those that know, does mining take up 100% of GPU so its maxed out/max heat the entire time its mining?
I feel like this is more a failure to move to clean and renewable energy as opposed to anything else, honestly. I am biased as I own some BTC, but not enough to consider myself a major stakeholder in it.
they'll just buy carbon offsets
yup!
US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must
If the US military were a country, its carbon emissions would rank between that of Peru and Portugal.
theconversation.com
Cheerful Mathematician: "I'd like to publish my formal proof of P = NP."
*Bitcoin market immediately collapses.*
*Bitcoin market immediately collapses.*
Never used that site before but just checking their calculation for energy costs comes nowhere near close to my PC (which includes a 3080).
You know your PC consumption and energy cost you can calculate it yourself. The number they used would be reached after 5 1/2 hours for me
