I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even need it for a class they're taking), and might also want to play the occasional game, have to pay an arm and a leg to get their (remaining) hands on a modern, efficient card?
I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.
The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product.
Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is a pyrrhic one when you look at the externalities.
If you can call a digital gold rush a victory, anyway. The physical one in the US was pretty bad for a lot of people.
That's putting it in the best possible light. Mining gold leaves the world with physical blocks of gold, which has no continuous upkeep cost. "Mining" cryptocurrency leaves the world with an asset that requires continual upkeep (further "mining") in order to maintain that asset. Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks.
The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportional to the value represented by Bitcoin.
But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining. If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).
In other words, if you just mine a physical gold block, you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.
Those same apparatus are also needed to maintain a global internet without which Bitcoin is useless. You can also just bury gold to keep people from finding it, which is one of the reasons it’s maintained value throughout history.
Upkeep of gold doesn't scale at the same rate as Bitcoin. If we suddenly had 1000 tons more gold, we could put it in existing vaults and very little increased cost.
> But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining.
This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude:
>> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin.
Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin.
C.f., gold:
> If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).
I don't need continuous mining of bitcoin to protect my non-bitcoin stuff.
However, I do need the "state apparatus of violence" to protect my non-gold stuff, including things like my house and my body, and oh yeah, my fucking mining rig!
If all gold disappeared tomorrow, would anything about the "state apparatus of violence" change? No, of course not. That is absurd.
I never understood the "violence" argument against government. In that sense of the word "violence", there is no alternative that does not at some level also come down to the threat of force. The "state apparatus of violence" won't look so bad after you've dismantled the state in favor of something approaching anarcho-capitalism and are then close to Hobbe's state of nature: nasty, british, and short.
>you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.
This describes Bitcoin too.
I think it's facially absurd to claim that the existing financial system (including military, police, etc) costs anywhere near what bitcoin does, but even if it does, it's irrelevant because bitcoin doesn't provide the same things. Bitcoin is a virtual bar of gold or piece of currency, not a financial system.
"Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis"
"“Even sophisticated investors have been completely incapable of doing any kind of management of private keys,” said Diogo Monica, the co-founder of a start-up called Anchorage, which helps companies handle cryptocurrency security. Mr. Monica started the company in 2017 after helping a hedge fund regain access to one of its Bitcoin wallets."
"“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way, ‘Do you make your own shoes?’” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
And there's a great PBS spacetime video exclusively covering the creation of heavy elements, and why they no longer think it's solely the result of supernovae [0].
This comment is probably sarcasm, but just in case it was meant seriously, I just want to make it clear that expending the energy of another supernova to create a currency would be, overall, a Bad Thing at this point in time.
Unless you've got some dyson spheres lying around that you're not telling me about, I'm going to politely request that bitcoin advocates not expend more energy than we have in the entire world just so that they can diversify their investment portfolios.
Actually though, I wonder if there's an analogy that could be drawn between the real origin of gold (supernova) and bitcoin (mining a block). Both are created as dense byproducts of a large compression event (bitcoin: transactions; supernova: the rest of the star). ?
There's nothing special about gold, every other heavy element is also a by-product of supernovae. So, the analogy only works on a dully contrived poetic level, unless you also want to compare Bitcoin meaningfully with lead.
>"Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks."
I was curious about this. What would "significant" be? What is it based on - the number of outstanding blocks? Is this vulnerability mentioned anywhere in the protocol spec?
Did you know that vanilla financial securities also require upkeep? Approximately 0.5% of the value of all financial assets is burned every year (and potentially an order of magnitude more, depending on what asset and packaging you're talking about).
That's a heck of a figure you're not providing a reference or explanation for at all. Or even an explanation of what you mean by financial securities and "burned".
Mutual funds, the most legible way to get an estimate of the holding cost of securities (since they are required to transact at net asset value) routinely charge between 0.2-1% fees, depending on size and asset class.
Clearinghouses, transfer agents, and cash management firms don't work for free, which is the problem that cryptocurrencies explicitly solve; neither do compliance, KYC, fraud, etc., which most cryptocurrency protocols elide altogether.
They also have an entire corpus of regulation surrounding them and coordination overhead that allows sovereign states to compare apples to apples, and ensure that these respective sovereign State's financial systems are not utilized to facilitate patterns of behavior those respective State's citizens define as criminal.
Oh wait.. You don't want that functionality, and you're still using up the energy footprint in the event you are correct. One of these delivers significantly less versatility than the other for the same energy investment.
I agree that the analogy does not extend past the surface look, but that's the point of calling it a skeumorphism: a new thing that tries to perform the function of an old thing, under a facade that mimics the old thing in a shallow way to ease transitioning.
this is correct, I think solidity doesn't even run on a gpu at all
The energy usage of ethereum comes from the proof-of-work DAG, not the solidity execution. You can easily see this by running a (non mining) ethereum node, any decent CPU will churn through the transactions in blocks in a matter of milliseconds (~200 ms per block), not the 13 seconds it takes to generate that block
It's a calculation, but not a useless one done just to simulate gold mining, unlike Bitcoin. Look deeper into what Ethereum actually is, it's not just a cryptocoin, it's also a computing platform.
They’re not really making a point that needs evidence. If you have no idea what Ethereum is, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that you take a quick look at their website before participating in an web forum discussion about it.
This is different than people blithely spouting “it’s not my job to educate you” when asked to give some support for their controversial, unsubstantiated claim.
Since we've gone meta anyways... Why do so few people value simply linking to and quoting directly from primary sources? From random internet comment #37846399, to sms chats, to user stories on a scrum board, and even news articles these days, nobody cares to drop a link to or actually quote the thing they're referring to. Docs, articles, code, journals...
Yes, it's work to back up your claims with direct links to a source. But maybe that's a reasonable minimum bar to hurdle to stand behind ones statements.
I am not the first one who made a claim in this thread - your reply would be better placed under that comment talking about gold. Surely opening the homepage is reasonable minimum before posting a negative comment.
I’m firmly of the belief that Bitcoin (and it’s ilk) should be illegal. There’s many reasons for it - Sometimes because it’s an unregistered security, sometimes because it falls afoul of laws against paying people in scrip, sometimes because it’s outright fraud.
There’s real uses for Merkel trees in finance - Cryptographically secure history is valuable. I’ve yet to see any problems that blockchains solve that merkel trees do not[1]. Finance and interchange works just fine with just Git - Interchange done via simple published balancesheets with countersignatures by both parties, then merged into “head” on the regular by any form of rollup. It doesn’t have the (well overstated) pseudonymity advantages of bitcoin, and that’s a feature in a well regulated financial market.
[1] With one ridiculous exception: In Iain Bank’s “Excession”, a mothballed war-fleet is resurrected by a traitor who presents enough cryptographic signatures of coconspirators to burn the keys of the real C+C chain. Blockchain would make this much harder - But not necessarily enough harder, even if they had to effectively recreate the military history of an entire total-peace (through superior firepower) civilization.
Modern day California, and by extension Silicon Valley, would not look the way it is today without the California Gold Rush [1], as horrible as its externalities were.
Great prosperity often comes at, or with, a great cost. California today doesn't make a great picture when you look at the homelessness and inequality, and the exorbitant cost of living anywhere near where the action is.
Electricity usage will forever be a human need and people need to realize and accept that. Taking down bitcoin because it's software that runs on computers that uses electricity is not the answer here - renewable and sustainable energy is the answer.
Everybody is just echoing the same headline they read on some news article about bitcoin using a lot of energy without thinking it through properly.
I think you are the one not thinking it through properly. Yes, humanity will use energy. But it is kind of by design that bitcoin uses more and more energy, and that just doesn't make sense. Sorry.
Bitcoin is not humanity using energy. It is humanity flushing energy down the drain.
Bitcoin doesn't have to keep halving until 2140, their governance could decide to stop mining early once it becomes an existential crisis for the network. Bitcoin is code and there could be special cases made so long as they can get the miners to agree. The miners can name their price on processing transactions on the network in lieu of continuing to mine. The transaction processing is much less onerous in terms of power consumption.
I was indirectly referring back to my original post above if you did not notice. And no I'm not high, just having a conversation about Bitcoin energy usage in relation to renewable and sustainable energy technology.
I find the "Bitcoin burns energy" argument completely laughable. With all due respect, your skepticism appreciated; let me explain.
A more useful perspective is "humanity uses more and more energy for computation". The many devices which enable us to post these comments burn energy. The astronomically high video-traffic these days burns energy. Modelling early universe, protein folding, advanced chemistry... every damn thing we compute has the cost of burning energy.
As an aside, let's not forget how much electricity gets used simply for heating. There's no shortage already of "smart heaters" with a nice side effect of mining you some coins while they keep your house warm. Anything environmentally wrong with that?
See, it's not the endgoal of cryptocurrencies to burn energy; it's simply a cost. Now, thanks to bitcoin, we can have economies of scale drive optimization of that cost: improving the core compute-per-joule ratio of our technology. With all the collateral improvements across the globe with regards to environmental impact.
Could you say that porn distribution industry "kind of by design" lead to people watching more and more porn? Regardless of the answer, thanks to that we can have fast internets now. Similarly with bitcoin: thanks to it, we'll pack more & more bitflips into every joule, up to the thermodynamic limit.
Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox is that significantly advanced civilizations discover crypto currencies and then furiously burn through all available energy sources until they go extinct.
I realized recently it feels like pogs did. Really hot for a minute and then poofed out of relevancy. People also had high value on certain pogs over others ala the hoarding seen in Bitcoin.
I don’t even agree with the scarcity argument. Every Bitcoin represents 100,000,000 traceable assets. The “supply” of an entire Bitcoin may be artificially limited, but practically speaking there are infinite Bitcoin satoshi to trade.
Is there any reliable data on the actual environmental harm? I've heard so many times that it's renewable energy being used because it's so cheap. There was something about mining near dams.
> I've heard so many times that it's renewable energy being used because it's so cheap.
It's a myth from the pro-cryptocurrency crowd.
With recent price spikes, mining is profitable even if you have to pay relative high prices for electricity. You don't need to have cheap energy.
Also, it's another myth that we have an abundance of hydroelectric power that would otherwise go to waste if not for Bitcoin. With modern power transmission it's trivial to send power through the grid to other locations, and nobody is building power plants in the middle of nowhere without a way to send that electricity somewhere else.
Finally, Bitcoin's power consumption is additive. Energy that goes into Bitcoin mining is energy that isn't being used to power cities and other infrastructure, which must still get its power from somewhere.
Don't believe the whitewashing campaigns to downplay Bitcoin's energy usage. It's very bad.
The upper bound on environmental harm is the damage that would be done by the most harmful energy production method used: any renewable energy spent on mining could be used instead to replace that harmful production.
(It's only an upper bound because energy isn't perfectly fungible.)
Renewable energy is also better than fossil energy in terms of environmental damage, but it's not free from damage. A dam is a massive localised environmental impact, and a huge amount of concrete. A solar farm requires (holes-in-ground) mining and significant industrial processing to build. The lower bound on environmental harm is the cost of building renewable energy sources that are used for something so unproductive.
Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).
You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity.
If a billionaire hoarded manufacturing plants and kept them shut down, people would probably be mad, since resources were being wasted, even if it was a net positive on greenhouse gas output.
Each hour 430 quintillion Joules (430 exajoules) of energy from the sun hits the Earth.[1]
It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so.
The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage. This gives people real incentive to build the tools we need to harness the energy on our planet.
Since we're firmly in the ridiculous arguments camp already, it may as well be pointed out that all of that energy leaving the planet is a good thing. It's why the earth isn't a barren hellscape like venus, whose atmosphere captures energy much more efficiently. Most people would actually prefer that we capture just a bit less than we currently do.
So you are saying we will capture so much energy from the sun that the entire planet will become inhospitable. Do we then just keep burning fossil fuels until earth becomes inhospitable instead? Or do we kill ourselves and stop the need for energy use entirely? Remember that humans will forever have energy needs as we advance.
Absolutely yes, at a sufficiently big-picture view the eventual problem is energy expenditure itself. Capturing more energy from the sun, or more realistically something like large-scale fission/fusion utilization still results in an increased amount of energy being deposited into the earth's atmosphere even aside from the greenhouse effect.
I am obviously not an expert but I looked at the magnitude of the energy itself vs the greenhouse effect and it's about 10-100x less potent than the greenhouse effect. But that means that even if we had 100% clean carbon-free energy, we can't continue increasing our energy utilization forever. And we still have a huge portion of the world that is below a first-world living standard and will eventually want automobiles and air conditioning and vacations using jet travel too.
IF we do not level off the energy consumption of the "first world" standard of living sometime within the next 50-100 years then we are on a course to cook ourselves to death even with 100% clean energy.
What I am really getting out all of this is that at some point we will hit the human population limit that earth can sustain, even with renewable energy sources.
Whether or not that limit is actually reachable and something we should actually worry about I don't know. i.e: is there enough physical space for that many people on earth where each person uses X amount of renewable energy where the sum of X is greater than the amount of energy the earth can actually capture without being negatively affected.
The point is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Using a renewable sources has their own side effects.
Solar? It heats the atmosphere, because it captures solar heat which would bounce back.
Wind? Obviously it slows winds down, and who knows how it affects the existing ecosystem. We know how important the gulf stream is, you wouldn’t want to slow that down..
I've been just casually browsing this discussion, but your comment stands out as an example of the kind of mental gymnastics people are playing to try and justify something so obviously wasteful.
As was pointed out upstream, capital and resources are required to get a solar panel, and if its output is directed to something frivolous like crypto mining, those inputs are being wasted. The fact that there remains unused energy from the sun is completely orthogonal to the waste that is happening.
To be clear, I'm less passing a judgement about the efficiency of crypto than I am pointing out that crafting objectively absurd arguments about why it is not actually wasteful helps nobody.
A) the environmental impact of manufacturing a solar panel is 0 and carbon neutral itself (it's not),
B) there's an excess of solar panels available too (not really),
C) the bitcoin miners aren't often running on coal power during the nighttime hours (they often are), and
D) there's nowhere better for mankind to deploy the capital used in deploying miners and renewable power production than for cryptocurrency mining (dubious).
Solar panels and GPUs use rare metals of which there are a finite quantity, and are also mined through the use of slave labor in some parts of the world.
Nope, no, don't go that way. Yes, the Sun does bathe the Earth with a constant stream of energy, a stream that remains mostly unused. The point is, that it is also mostly not useful energy, energy we have technology to convert into forms we can make use of. And that is a fundamental quality of that Energy.
The infinitesimal portion we do manage to convert with the currently available technology shouldn't be pissed away in the wind so lightly.
There's still the environmental costs related with creation of the panels and cards. Making Circuit boards and Silicon is a costly endeavor in and of itself from an energy and waste standpoint.
ultimately, it's a fraction of miners doing what you say. so as a green miner your personal contribution might be 0, but you're supporting a system that does considerable harm.
as long as a majority of bitcoin mining happens from non-renewable resources, the network as a whole is damaging.
the vast majority of mining happens off renewable energy, because it doesn't make economic sense to mine on non-renewables. its why 'mines' cluster near hydro plants and places that have good solar.
It comes out positive using energy prices from virtually anywhere.
The idea that mining is powered purely by renewables that would somehow otherwise go to waste (that is, not take fossil fuel plants offline) is pure FUD.
Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.
The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency domain vs seconds to minutes).
For reference, Visa does thousands to tens-of-thousands of transactions per second. The cost to run one of these transactions is negligible because it can be handled so quickly. Contrast with BTC, which struggles to hit 10 transactions per second on a good day. I used to work in a facility that monitored debit transactions. Our SLAs were ridiculous. Certain customers had requirements that if a single transaction took more than 100 ms, we were to open a ticket and contact their help desk immediately. This is the type of rigor it takes to maintain a financial payment network that consumers will have confidence in using.
This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
For completeness sake: The BTC network is, by design, setting the difficulty of mining a new block so that its 10 min on avg. Currently there fitting ~2200 transactions in one block [0].
That makes 3.6667 transactions per second. BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically.
So you were actually quite generous with 10 transactions per second...
> BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically
Which was proposed, and shot down by core Bitcoiners.
They aggressively do not want to increase the transaction limit.
Miners want transactions to be expensive, because that's where they'll get their money when the mining reward falls again.
It's mind boggling that people will complain about banks conspiring to charge them hypothetical fees, then rush to use a cryptocurrency that has double-digit transaction fees when nobody is really using it for anything other than speculation. The reality is that Bitcoiners don't actually want people using Bitcoin as a currency, they just want you to buy and hold. No selling, no spending, just buying. That's the only thing that drives the price up, and that's the only thing they want you to do.
Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?
Once all of these cryptocurrencies and exchanges become fast, the price doesn't actually matter. If I can buy the crypto, transfer it, and exchange back out of the crypto to my target currency in seconds, it doesn't matter if SOL is at $0.01 or $100 per coin. If I'm only in it for a few seconds, I just buy and then immediately sell however many coins are needed to move my value from Point A to Point B.
The reason Bitcoiners don't want larger block sizes is that they don't actually want spending. They want Bitcoin to be an asset that only goes up in price. Spending and selling drive the price down, so those need to have high hurdles to discourage that behavior.
> Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?
I might be answering the wrong q, but the separate currency represents the cost of a transaction in the network. I.e. the amount you're willing to pay to send a transaction in the network and the amount a staker is willing to receive in exchange for validating your transaction
How else would you represent that cost in a crypto network? Some kind of currency needs to represent the transaction cost.
For those that aren't cryptocurrency enthusiasts it literally doesn't matter. As long as bitcoin and ethereum mining remains they'll always have something they disagree with to point at.
Unlike enthusiasts they don't see it as a necessary step and haven't been following the long and arduous journey of developments and breakthroughs to get here.
Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.
You don't do bitcoin. Bitcoin is impractical. We are talking about crypto in general, not just bitcoin. Nowadays you can for example get xlm from a cex, move it to your wallet and send that. It's fast and with very low fees( lower than paypal etc). There's even a stablecoin you can exchange it for so you dont have to worry about price swings.
How low are you talking about? And hidden fees such as the spread do matter. Last i checked, which was a while ago, paypal wasn't that flash compared to alternatives.
Couple cents with current prices. Ada is reasonably low and nano is feeless but the network is supported by rainbow farts and unicorns so I wouldn't trust it much.
If you stay in crypto (e.g. usdt). Buying in is easy. Cashing it out in viable amounts is very problematic even for individuals, at least where I live. Transferring a usd-crypto-usd million would take a couple of weeks and unclear risks. In US, can you accept usdt from an exchange and grab the cash right away?
Does it give you paper cash? Because I can receive money back from Kraken to my bank account too, but that means 100% local perverted KYC AML trouble even if it’s clear that I sent the exact amount to Kraken from the same account recently.
They wire the money to my bank, of course. I've done this pretty regularly with several different banks for years, and have never been asked even a single question by any of those banks, or ever had them delay the availability of my funds.
I can't tell you from personal experience if it would be the same if my amounts were a million plus, but they are not insignificant amounts either. I'm quite sure that attempting to deposit similar amounts of physical cash at a bank would be at least somewhat challenging.
Try handling millions of automated machine to machine micro transactions per second on the Visa network. The Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin can handle this today.
Because it really doesn't work -- one payment channel works, but that only allows balance reconciliation between two parties (which isn't terribly useful). Lightning aims to construct a routing network from individual channels and there is where things go awry. The channels on each side of a node must be kept in balance. That turns out to be non-trivial to achieve. Today there is no "visa scale" traffic on Lightning. So what you say is both questionable from a theoretical perspective, and certainly not proven in practice yet.
I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.
Bitcoin (and the other coin systems) ultimately need to be able to handle transactions by a large number of users if they are to gain widespread acceptance. If I want to buy something with my coins, I don't expect to see "Sorry your transaction timed out. Please try again in a few moments". That is NOT confidence inspiring to me as the coin holder, and certainly not to the person/business expecting to receive my coins.
Bitcoin needs to be able to handle at least a few hundred transactions per second as a first goal.
transactions that are not chosen for inclusion in a block (likely due to low transaction fees) do age out of the mempool eventually, so there is a network-enforced "timeout". It's not a hard number but it will eventually happen.
Also obviously there is a human-imposed "timeout" too. Like, if you buy something with Bitpay they expect your transaction to be included in one of the next 3 blocks. If it's not, they will "timeout" the transaction and it bounces. If it is eventually mined for inclusion, they will voluntarily return it to you minus whatever fees they choose to charge (average transaction fee is $24 right now, so you will lose $24 sending it to them, then $24 for them sending it back to you, and $24 to send it again).
(of course they don't have to send it back to you, there is no network-enforced mechanism for this, they could bounce the transaction and then if it gets included an hour later they could not pay you back, the money is under their control once you've signed the transaction. They could even maintain a separate mempool of these "dead" transactions and use a friendly mining pool to process those transactions preferentially...)
Bitcoiners don't actually want people spending Bitcoin.
The entire Bitcoin narrative has become buy and never sell (HODL). The more friction around transacting with your coins (other than buying) the better it is for the asset value.
>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.
Okay, does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Then it's an apples to oranges comparison isn't it...?
By the same logic, trucks are useless and inefficient because my moped burns 1/100th of the fuel per km.
> This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
This is demonstrably false. Newer-generation coins offer better tps, and even bitcoin itself can manage due to things like segwit and lightning.
> does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority?
Ok, I’ll bite.
No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for?
The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies.
Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits.
Any regime with a banking system can implement a KYC-type of policy that will can make interacting financially with anything related to BTC difficult or impossible. Need a modern example? Look no further than online wallets (e.g., Neteller) and online poker sites after the UIGEA.
I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system, it will be trivially easy for them to make that currency an extremely inefficient store of value. The measures will be draconian towards coin holders, but most people (rightly or wrongly) won’t care.
> I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system
This fear is greatly exaggerated by people who have bought into the false idea that Bitcoin is the only way to escape inflation.
The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up. You can escape inflation by simply buying assets, or basically anything other than cash.
If someone truly believed massive inflation was coming, they would want to take out USD-denominated mortgages and buy houses. Inflation would increase the value of the houses and reduce the value of your loan repayments.
It's silly that so many people are afraid of the government devaluing their cash that they've decided the best way to escape it is to pile into an asset with an extremely lopsided distribution in favor of early adopters. The average person stands to gain more from recent stimulus than they stand to lose from inflation in their cash accounts. Doubly so if they invest their cash in stocks or assets, which doesn't even require Bitcoin.
> The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up.
The definition of inflation is typically that consumer prices go up due to there being "more money". The only kind of asset that people consume is housing, and even then they don't really - housing as an asset (purchase price) can be disconnected from its consumption price (rent). Besides that, you can't eat stocks so you don't get poorer when the price goes up.
Assets can actually increase in price because of deflation. For instance, technology getting cheaper has made all the stockbrokers drop their transaction fees and add fractional shares, so now everyone can bid up the same stocks.
Ownership. It's the difference between "I own 20 quatloos because the Bank of Endor says so" vs. "I own 20 quatloos". It supports actual ownership instead of representative or proxy ownership.
In the same way that you can have $20 in the bank or $20 in your wallet. When it's in your wallet, it's actually yours and you own it. When it's in your bank account, then you don't actually own it, you must trust that your bank will do the right thing and give it back to you when you ask for it. That level of trust has been wavering for decades.
Remember that Bitcoin was started as a rebellion against the "second bailout for banks".
A buddy of mine mined ~160 BTC (currently about USD $8.1m) back when it was fairly worthless. He left it on a hard drive on one of his many machines. BTC became worth something. He look for said machine and HD. Couldn't find it. That BTC is effectively gone forever. So... who owns it?
Situations like this point to a desire for many/most people to want some sort of custodianship so that they don't accidentally lose something that might be worth millions one day... or even hundreds or thousands one day. At that point, one is looking at banks and banking systems, so we're back at square one.
If one is looking at an alternative to banks, we sometimes/often get stuff like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex -- a situation in which a group of people who want to be independent of the banking system learn the lessons of the value of the banking system the hard way.
So I guess where I am at is that I appreciate a desire to rebel against banks -- they wield way too much power. That said, I don't think that it's particularly prudent (or maybe even possible) to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this matter. The banks definitely do some fairly nefarious stuff, but they also do a metric shitload of very pedestrian-but-useful stuff extremely well on a daily basis. Until a coin can replace that pedestrian-but-useful system with equal grace, I doubt that a coin will be able to replace our current system. Furthermore, somehow if it does, it will be because the current system integrates coins into the current system rather than coins usurping the current system.
So again... what is distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority actually useful for?
Really? Ignoring the philosophic debate, ownership in terms of BTC deals with the capacity to modify the ledger using an agreed-upon protocol -- but you already know this, and I don't know why you're asking that question. What do _you_ think ownership means in terms of BTC? Do you think you can implement a public system for ownership of digital assets without a distributed consensus system? Or Verifiable transactions? Maybe you can, and if you do I'd love to see it. Good Luck.
How is the thrust of this story any different from someone losing paper cash? How many millions/billions have been lost from physical currency becoming inaccessible?
The issue at hand is the potential value of “distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority”.
My point is that most people seem to prefer having a central trusted authority, specifically for custodianship.
That’s why most people put money that is significant to them somewhere in the banking system rather than a shoebox or a tin can somewhere. They want that money to be be traceable, accessible, and recoverable.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMO.
I can't help but think that the "accessibility" is doing most of the work here. Handling cash is a pain in the ass. Giving a merchant a series of 23 numbers over the computer is comparatively easier.
Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over"
Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.
With the recent defi boom and the increased trust and popularity in oracles serving off chain data I'd say that you can find a cryptocurrency project for most promises.
100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?
Today: several thousand tx/sec in "rollups," just by compressing transactions to minimal information and using zero-knowledge proofs that everything is valid. That's in production. The same transaction data is available on chain but e.g. instead of a sig on each transaction you have a compact proof that every tx had a valid sig.
Later: data sharding, where you're doing the same thing but each Ethereum node only has to store a portion of that data. That will multiply rollup capacity by 23X.
Last thing a "crypto" user wants is his account being put on hold for months for various reasons (i.e paypal style), usually "for his own protection". I believe it's a mistake see crypto payments like a replacement for visa/mastercard. It's good to have some competition.
Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical “solution” to a socio-economic problem, and while this remains the case associated problems (regulatory constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are relegated to the “don’t care/won’t fix/too hard” basket at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best. That’s before we even get to the hardcore libertarian mindset that is incredibly prelevant in crypto-currencies.
It's more than that, they view existing outside the reach of the legal system and consumer protections as being a benefit. "No chargebacks" is a major selling point that the community uses to evangelize to merchants, and the flip side of that is that it's much less protections for consumers.
The Internet doesn't have built in mechanisms for regulation or fraud and nor should it. Cryptocurrencies obviously don't solve the problem, but can be used to create a stricter set of guarentees than the current sustem.
Just to name two examples. Cryptocurrency like cash won't stop you from falling to fraud or illegal activity but communities and regulations could enforce a safe subset of projects with stronger guarentees than the current system.
How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other technology that does this.
And don't come back with "you shouldn't want to avoid KYC and regulation" as that's a different topic. Others find those properties useful even if you don't.
When the whole conversation starts by talking about environmental externalities, you don't get to hide behind totally-not-criminals who are happy to pay the cost to avoid regulations; we are all paying the costs.
Ok, but that wasn't what the comment I was responding to was talking about at all. An equivalent example would be me saying the value proposition of guns is not that they are pretty but that they propel objects at high speed, and then you arguing that I'm wrong because criminals use them. I'm not arguing the moral dimension at all, but the mechanism.
I'm not a fan of using so much energy, just as I'm not a fan of guns. What does that have to do with discussing how they work and why people use them?
Until you want to turn bitcoin back into useful things, you better hope whoever is on the other side of what you want accepts bitcoin. Other wise it's just a number online that you can't eat with.
My knowledge of this technology isn’t very deep. From my understanding, mining is essential to facilitate transactions, which in turn makes cryptocurrency a currency. Mining needs computing power, which needs energy. More energy translates to more rewards, which incentivises parties to keep mining and keep the network running. Even if you make the underlying calculations more energy efficient, miners are still incentivised to spend more energy to capture more of the reward(?).
Agreed, but that is complete a different matter to the comment I was responding to. The point is that people don't understand why PoW is not going away because they don't even understand the value proposition of PoW cryptocurrency.
If you can't see the practical utility of cryptocurrency in 2021, you're being willfully ignorant.
If you actually believe what you're saying, then short it[1]. If you really think that the practical value is non-existent, then put your money where your mouth is, and take out a short.
This isn't some academic theory where the best you can do is throw tomatoes at it, and ridicule it from a distance. This is an economic theory, where if you are correct, and everyone else is wrong, you can profit significantly from it.
Maybe once you're faced with actually taking a stand on a belief like this, you'll come to understand why cryptocurrencies are beginning to dominate the global economy. It's also totally possible that you're right, but I think it's far more likely that you just like to ridicule things you don't understand because you get some sense of power from shitting on people who you consider to be beneath you.
Nothing you said addresses the core and critical issue that Bitcoin and most blockchain currencies have terrible limitations on transaction-per-second, and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide.
And thinking that bitcoin is a terrible idea is not the same as thinking you can predict its market value. When something is as volatile as bitcoin, shorting it is almost as bad as going long; eventually its value will likely drop but being early is the same as being wrong.
Bitcoin doesn't need high transaction volume to provide value to its users, which is obviously apparent by looking at the current transaction volume.
PoW is also the most efficient way to do what Bitcoin is doing. Attempts to displace PoW have all failed, because the required trade-offs are always too high, and detract from the value of the network.
If you can figure out a fair way to seed value on a network that doesn't require burning energy, then please let the people know, and your new magic cryptocurrency will dominate the crypto-ecosystem overnight. No one would love that more than me. I could talk for hours about the various ideas people have had in the past, and why they failed, but I don't think this is the right place for that rant.
It's also important to recognize that there isn't a single watt of PoW power that's wasted. The power utilized reflects exactly amount of value that Bitcoin is providing to the world. Satoshi also made the mining rewards get cut in half every 4 years, so the value to power usage ratio gets better and better over time.
I could also go on about how mining facilities overwhelmingly are using excess power produced almost entirely from clean power sources. If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, there are so many serious offenders that are massively more wasteful.
Exchanges will provide staking rewards (APR yield) for deposits of ETH. Very quickly they will control enough of the stake to enforce whatever rules they want on the system. As regulated entities, they can be leaned on by the state to change aspects of the system to appease their regulators (KYC, censorship, freezes, etc). Checkmate.
> and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide.
As I've said elsewhere: doing one transaction on bitcoin uses approximately the amount of electrical power that an average US household uses in 2 weeks.
I'm not buying that for a second, unless that calculation includes the power it took to mine the coin in the first place (which is not consumed by the transaction any more than cash changing hands consumes cloth and ink).
How do you think transactions are verified? There's a limit to the number of transactions per block, and each block takes ~10 minutes to mine. So; ~2000 transactions/block, 600 seconds, 0.3 seconds/transaction. How much energy does the global bitcoin network use in 0.3 seconds?
About 700 KwH, far as I can tell. (Based on 76.87 terawatt hours annually in 2020, as an estimate for bitcoin). A house uses ~1000/month, ballpark.
"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
If I could short bitcoin over a 20, 30, 40 year timeframe I absolutely would, unfortunately that's not possible. There might be utility in some cryptocurrencies for some applications, but bitcoin as it currently exists is worse than useless, it's actively harmful.
Moving money over the internet without needing a central authority.
It really doesn't matter if you don't recognize how big of a deal that is, but to A LOT of people, it's a complete game changer. If you don't need a service like that, well that's fine, but obviously a lot of people do, which is why the network is where it is today. Massive amounts of value is being moved through the network daily, and the fees that people are paying to utilize the network are not at all trivial. It's worth it to them though, or they wouldn't be using it.
If I recall correctly; they already do this by really limiting mixed precision performance on the GeForce line. I believe Titans typically where excluded, but otherwise for full FP16 support you needed a Quadro or Tesla card.
Yes, that is worrying. But, they already have license in place to ensure no one uses their gaming GPUs in the cloud, where the big money is already. (And it worked, I cannot find any low-cost cloud providers with gaming GPUs for GPGPU computing).
I hope they don't, given that there is limited upside and a lot of push back from dev community.
So let’s wait until BTC hits $100k and a generic videocard for any purpose costs $5000. That would be much better than paying extra $200 over MSRP for ML. /s
That would suck in the short term, but it would also be a HUGE incentive to massively ramp up chip fabrication capacity, leading to long term cost decrease due to economies of scale.
I don’t, that was a blind guess that missed. Insert a real extra and compare to the prospect of crypto prices rising and nvidia doing nothing. What would ML people gain from that while gamers lose all?
Yeah, the ML example doesn't really work because we're already paying through the nose for the privilege of running GPU's in production processes. This development is really nothing new, Nvidia and ATI (and Intel and AMD) have always charged extra for their "professional" lineups usually enforced through software alone or even just the EULA.
> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
Sounds like a good opportunity for the US to significantly expand its domestic chap manufacturing industry. I don't care if the lag time is 5 years or more before the first chip rolls off the production lines - because I don't anticipate demand for chips will significantly reduce in the future.
Development of domestic chip manufacturing might even start to become a national security concern, leading to even more money flowing in on top of the money coming from crypto miners.
TSM is slammed with chip demand from Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and others. Like, 100% booked for the next year or two. They have been heavily investing in state of the art manufacturing facilities for decades and it's still not enough.
I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
> but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
Getting started with ML doesn't require a GPU at all. Realistically, any video card or even a modern CPU is more than sufficient to get started with ML learning.
It's a myth that $1000 gaming video cards are necessary or even helpful for learning basic ML.
>I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
My argument is they should and could have scaled up the production rather than just shuffling around which group they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing', it just helps the group you prefer on this round.
You do understand Nvidia is a fabless company, correct? Scaling up demand isn't just calling up some factory manager and telling them to work harder, it's getting into a massive cagefight with AMD, Apple, and every other company out there that needs silicon all for the amusement of Samsung/TSMC
Ask AMD why scaling up to mining demand is a bad idea.
A sudden implosion of demand combined with a flooding of the used GPU marked. Better not plan on bringing out any new GPU architectures when your warehouses are still full of the previous generation.
Except with NVIDIA there's already extra demand if they need it - they can allow GeForce into data centers which are currently artificially disallowed.
Fundimental supply issues aren't going to be solved by releasing a mining variant and artificially limiting a gaming variant. At the end of the day this is still a supply and demand problem. I bet that we'll still see 3060s being scalped and brought at ridiculous markup.
Just becuase your use case is more noble doesn't change the fundimental issue of supply and demand. Nividia also already has artificial restrictions on their GTX and RTX lines to produce a product for your use case: the Tesla series.
I think it absolutely makes sense for them to customize their products for the market they want to serve, even if it is artificial, that is their prerogative. But the product is just for gamers that want better games. I think it's funny that is the moral high road here.
They should be free to create products that foster the community they believe will give them the best returns in the long run. Clearly they don't think that is crypto, they probably think it is either a fad, or that it will move to proof of stake, and that the demand will subside. So if they leave their core community high and dry during that time they could lose favor. I don't know if that's right or wrong, they clearly have way more insight than I, but either way I support their right to make the decision. They aren't the only company in the world, others should step up if they see a frothy market.
ML is a bit different in that the applications are probably here to stay, and the applications are "legit". But, the ML market will not have the same brand loyalty that the consumer gaming market will. Consumers like brands and they stick with them. Companies spending money on ML are going to flock to the cheapest TCO, and a lot of this will also be abstracted through cloud offerings.
In short, they don't want to piss off what they believe to be their cash cow for years to come.
I see that as just another hardware manufacturer limiting what people can do with their hardware. And "creating tailored products for customers with specific needs" ? Just regular old market segmentation as they've always done, to extract more profit. Don't be mistaken, thus is about money, Nvidia does not act in the interests of the end user but their own. "think of the gamers" is just a way to put their foot in the door.
It would be very suspicious of nvidia if it acted in others interests. What bugs me most is that in many win-win situations (specifically, nvidia takes more markets, I get a videocard for much less than $2500) there is a guy who proclaims freedom über alles, stretching good intentions ad absurdum.
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using?
My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious here. But at least at first glance, it kind of baffles me that so many of them are using seemingly arbitrary hash algorithms to calculate proof of work, when they could instead be tied to distributed projects -- folding@home, for instance -- and measuring actual work.
Actual work can be monetized. The waste demonstrates commitment to the truth. Any non-waste reduces the security of the commitment, as you're getting paid no matter what.
It exists, it's called GridCoin. It's a proof of stake chain that disburses coins based on work units completed on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
There's a few others that take different approaches like Golem Network Token, Nym, Oxen, etc.
It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for double the price I originally bought it from the same retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.
When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700 plus shipping.
It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trouble because lol at getting ahold of GPUs right now.
A year ago I bought a RTX 3070 when I rebuilt my entertainment rig. I replaced a GTX1080 and got rid of it. I should have kept it and resold it. It's crazy and I wish there were two categories of cards. Mining cards and Gaming cards. Looks like NVidia feels the same and is making dedicated cards for the basement farmers.
Besides, a Syrian refugees who can manage to get their liquid assets into a digital store like bitcoin could probably alsoamage to get them into a commodities account and buy gold. Bitcoin isn't the only way, or even most convenient way, of moving assets across borders.
Cryptocurrencies are supposedly popular among Venezuelans, although I wonder what the advantage is of using them versus any fiat that isn't the bolivar.
Anyway, seems easier for them to obtain crypto than getting a commodities account and buying gold, since presumably one would have to deal with KYC/AML in that case, and one can continue to use crypto as a currency within the country (though I doubt Bitcoin, since the transaction fees probably amount to more than a typical Venezuelan earns in a month).
That is why there is the need to at the very least discuss government taxation over the mining and transaction of cryptocurrency without evoquing heated but unfruitful debate
Im curious to know how much more in taxes you think I should have to pay on my mining profits above and beyond the capital gains taxes I already have to pay.
I'd understand if you wanted all economic activity to have to figure in the negative externalities before a profit could be realized by stake/shareholders, but your comment implies to me that crypto should have some kind of special tax because you're upset you cant buy a gpu.
This is exactly the kind of antagonism that is detrimental to everybody. Read op comment again:
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I am not "upset I can't buy a GPU", mining uses a lot of power[1] and its environmental impact is not being taken into consideration. So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
> So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
Replace 'mining' with 'anything' and I fully understand as I'd said.
If I'm running 3,000 watts worth of GPUs at home to heat my house, and you're running 3,000 watts worth of space heaters at your house, I'm certainly not damaging the environment anymore than you are.
We should both pay the FULL cost of the toll the generation of the required electricity cost to run our equipment. Why I should pay taxes above and beyond what I already do because my heater makes money is where you totally loose me.
The environmental impact of mining is quite substantial and I agree that this calls into question whether cryptocurrencies are of overall benefit to society.
However, it is important to note that mining does do something useful: it secures the network from attack. To my knowledge, there is no known alternative solution to the distributed trust-free consensus problem.
> does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity
Not yet, but don't presume current economical status quo is working flawlessly. The current monetary system is kind of a joke, it no longer is backed by gold, in fact it's not backed by anything. So if you think about it for more than a minute why should it be that currency in the US should have any value? Creating an alternate store of value that is not just printed or made up and can be proven to exist at the very least provides something not too dissimilar to a database backup in case of a complete meltdown of fiat currency. It, however, does need to be allowed to get sufficiently big for a future restore to work. That is worth a bit of electricity. Yes, a bit, as a percentage of the GDP.
Yeah the shortages of RTX 3000 series cards are likely actively reducing AI/ML innovations in the short term. I have no idea what to do about these shortages - but it seems to be something that needs more regulation so that crypto miners don't continue to hoard the cards.
Isn't there an incentive for the world if NVDA continue s innovating in their GPUs such that they use less energy to achieve the same result as years prior?
Someone clearly hasn't figured out what Ethereum is, or Ethereum 2.0 in how proof of stake actually makes most of your weak premise completely evaporate.
Is that easy? I assume they are going to have Syrian pounds as cash. Then I guess you need to put them in a local bank account and use that account to buy BTC. Can you buy BTC with Syrian pounds? If yes, wouldn't the exchange rate be dreadful? I'm not sure exactly who would want SYP.
You need someone to accept Syrian pounds for the nvidia gpu too, and you need to buy electricity and have functional internet service... there’s really no reason to mine instead of buy in this case.
Good question. I don't know the details, but early on in Assad's war against Syrians, the situation was easier than it is now. In 2012/2013, a lot of cash was taken to neighboring countries.
I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.