this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Objection. Proof of work negates this. By making rapid block solving intentionally more difficult in order to slow down said solving, energy wasted on solving increases exponentially.
More transactions means a new block is completed faster. Last block was solved too soon, so tack another zero requirement to the next hash. More computation and energy wasted when there are perfectly acceptable hashes almost instantaneously.
Which is balanced by decreased value of additional coins, so less interested miners should drop out.
But the energy itself is kind of misleading, because miners will flock to lower cost energy, which should primarily be excess green energy. If we actually adopt this at scale, I expect energy companies to help in mining crypto with their excess energy generation, which should work well since that excess should be fairly consistent I'm a global scale.
That said, I'm extremely interested in seeing how proof of stake works out for Ethereum, since it just seems wasteful to mine coins for verifying transactions. But I think it's a lot less wasteful than opponents make it out to be.
I like what you're saying, but I see it differently.
What people should do is not what people will do. Because of the hype, people are still investing into ever more expensive rigs and consuming ever more electricity competing in races they have no chance in until they realize they can compete in other races.
Yeah, it should, but it isn't. Personally I'd prefer excess energy drive electricity prices down, rather than demand increasing reliance on more stable and constant sources.
Well yeah, another problem is that there's always another cryptocurrency. Since there's no widely adopted coin (Bitcoin is closest), people jump to the next one hoping that they'll get in early before it takes off.
So the problem isn't that a given cryptocurrency takes too much energy, it's that speculators jump from coin to coin. I think that will settle down as well, and we'll be left with mostly serious miners looking for actual profit who optimize costs down with cheap excess energy.
So what we're looking at is kind of a worst case scenario. Bitcoin rewards halve every four years, and Bitcoin valuations are unlikely to keep up. Lots of cryptocurrencies are also switching to proof of stake. Both of these together should result in drastically less energy being used.
So I'm bullish on crypto energy usage falling going forward, even if it gains mainstream adoption as a currency (unlikely).
you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%
POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)
some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)
I wasn't going to reply because this conversation will likely no longer go in a positive or productive direction, but I'm quite peeved and decided to allow myself the gratification of issuing corrections.
I understand quite well, and I resent you for not only assuming me to be an uninformed commentator, but for also having the audacity to state it as if it were fact.
But it does imply it for every major coin on the market today, and said coin owners seem quite content with how things are, Only the fooled are interested in investing in another new block chain, which will likely turn into a scam as soon as someone realises the money they can steal.
What the world could be is not a rebuttal to its current state. Further it's quite disingenuous to tell people problems aren't problems because of what could be.
Please have a pleasant evening. Good night.