Whatever the motives of those that wrote it, the fact that cryptocurrency uses power wastefully to ensure validity is absurd when we want to reduce climate change.
The concept is great. The execution needs altering.
Is it? I really don’t see how cryptocurrency is a good thing for humanity. The name is a problem in and on itself, since it’s not currency and can not scale up to be used as one.
I mean this is exactly what the established banking system has spewed out in propaganda all of which have been thoroughly debunked. Only difference is Bitcoin is not a company and does not have a propaganda department to counteract. It relies on people educating and thinking for themselves.
This isn’t propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it’s closer to between 3 and 5) and I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).
You’ve clearly never tried to send money between countries that dont have an interconnected bank system. Or has your credit card stolen. Or has to make large transactions outside the bank system, say for a car. Or used PayPal.
The concept of sending money without requiring a third party to be trusted is great. It should not be a store of wealth.or a gambling machine. Enabling cash transfers is it’s only purpose. And that concept is good. And what is cash, but government sanctioned ways of transferring currency. The name is apt.
We need to shift to demand shaping. Storing power generated during the day to be used overnight is not particularly efficient, and requires massive pumped storage facilities. We need to use power at the time it is produced. If we do not have sufficient demand at the time of peak production, energy prices will go to zero (or even below zero!) during those times, and there will be no incentive to continue rolling out solar to meet demand earlier in the day, later in the day, and on cloudy days.
We need much more solar rollout to fully meet demand during marginal or even poor conditions, but that much generation capacity is far more than we can use at that time.
We need a massive load that comes online during optimal generation conditions, but which can be shed under clouds or at low sun angles. Something that will give the power companies an incentive to keep rolling out solar even when we have excess optimal generation capacity.
Reducing wastage, increasing base load of renewables, back up storage and peak load usage and interconnected grids are all used. This suggests reduce wastage, which should not be ignored. Bitcoin wastes the energy solving problems that are computationally difficult but not useful. That’s wastage.
The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network. If the power needed was minimal, 1 person or group could easily take over. Power is what keeps it secure and as we enter the AI and quantum computing age, blockchain tech and how they are secured is one way to protect ourselves. Centralized databases are sitting ducks as we have seen with the amount of hacks going on at an increasing pace.
No, it needs non-useful computation to make it more and more difficult to mine. This needs more and more power to do. The power wastage is not required, but is a side effect. There are other methods of securing digital currency. Bitcoin should be seen as a proof of concept at this stage, rather than a complete technology.
The problem is trying to prevent concentration of power and ensuring new good faith actors can enter the ecosystem at any time on a similar footing.
The irony is that the more widespread it is, the less likely for any one entity or group of entities to have control, yet the more total power is being consumed.
Ummm if you follow the links to the EIA’s report, it does not show their method of calculating
The report discusses a few methodologies for estimating the electricity consumption, and if you follow the trail of references, there’s a table of sales and use of electricity by sector. And the data in that table comes from "Form EIA-861, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report.”, Form EIA-861S, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report
(Short Form)” and Form EIA-923, “Power Plant Operations Report”.
So the report discusses a few possible ways to estimate the crypto consumption by using overall sales and usage data. And they give references on finding that data.
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Whatever the motives of those that wrote it, the fact that cryptocurrency uses power wastefully to ensure validity is absurd when we want to reduce climate change.
The concept is great. The execution needs altering.
Is it? I really don’t see how cryptocurrency is a good thing for humanity. The name is a problem in and on itself, since it’s not currency and can not scale up to be used as one.
I mean this is exactly what the established banking system has spewed out in propaganda all of which have been thoroughly debunked. Only difference is Bitcoin is not a company and does not have a propaganda department to counteract. It relies on people educating and thinking for themselves.
This isn’t propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it’s closer to between 3 and 5) and I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).
So you have not heard of the lightening network?
In practice, How many transactions are done on the lightning network before returning to the main network?
You’ve clearly never tried to send money between countries that dont have an interconnected bank system. Or has your credit card stolen. Or has to make large transactions outside the bank system, say for a car. Or used PayPal.
The concept of sending money without requiring a third party to be trusted is great. It should not be a store of wealth.or a gambling machine. Enabling cash transfers is it’s only purpose. And that concept is good. And what is cash, but government sanctioned ways of transferring currency. The name is apt.
We need to shift to demand shaping. Storing power generated during the day to be used overnight is not particularly efficient, and requires massive pumped storage facilities. We need to use power at the time it is produced. If we do not have sufficient demand at the time of peak production, energy prices will go to zero (or even below zero!) during those times, and there will be no incentive to continue rolling out solar to meet demand earlier in the day, later in the day, and on cloudy days.
We need much more solar rollout to fully meet demand during marginal or even poor conditions, but that much generation capacity is far more than we can use at that time.
We need a massive load that comes online during optimal generation conditions, but which can be shed under clouds or at low sun angles. Something that will give the power companies an incentive to keep rolling out solar even when we have excess optimal generation capacity.
Reducing wastage, increasing base load of renewables, back up storage and peak load usage and interconnected grids are all used. This suggests reduce wastage, which should not be ignored. Bitcoin wastes the energy solving problems that are computationally difficult but not useful. That’s wastage.
Agreed.
The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network. If the power needed was minimal, 1 person or group could easily take over. Power is what keeps it secure and as we enter the AI and quantum computing age, blockchain tech and how they are secured is one way to protect ourselves. Centralized databases are sitting ducks as we have seen with the amount of hacks going on at an increasing pace.
No, it needs non-useful computation to make it more and more difficult to mine. This needs more and more power to do. The power wastage is not required, but is a side effect. There are other methods of securing digital currency. Bitcoin should be seen as a proof of concept at this stage, rather than a complete technology.
The problem is trying to prevent concentration of power and ensuring new good faith actors can enter the ecosystem at any time on a similar footing.
The irony is that the more widespread it is, the less likely for any one entity or group of entities to have control, yet the more total power is being consumed.
This used to be true. Mining pools have now concentrated that governance and specialized hardware has removed the ability for the everyman to mine.
2nd and 3rd generation blockchains will provide the growth in use cases and adoption.
Bitcoin’s unique selling point it it’s price. It is tulips2.0
The report discusses a few methodologies for estimating the electricity consumption, and if you follow the trail of references, there’s a table of sales and use of electricity by sector. And the data in that table comes from "Form EIA-861, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report.”, Form EIA-861S, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report (Short Form)” and Form EIA-923, “Power Plant Operations Report”.
So the report discusses a few possible ways to estimate the crypto consumption by using overall sales and usage data. And they give references on finding that data.