Google to ban cryptocurrency advertising from June

[kompukare]

That's why I just don't get it. I get that both money systems are basically held up by belief that the notes/coins are worth something even when the material worth of a coin is a fraction of its face value, but the energy expended on blockchain is just a horror and by design can only get worse.

While that may be the case for £1 and £2 coins (and €1 and €2 coins) it is very unlikely to be the case for 1p and 2p coins (or 1c or 2c coins).

As for the energy usage of the bitcoin network, is that the whole energy used currently including the work of mining, or just the energy used to keep the nodes on which the network depends going?

Because if it includes mining, then eventual cryptocurrencies using PoS (proof-of-stake) rather than PoW (proff-of-work) should be way more efficient. Currently with PoW, the amount of new coins in each block is constant, and if (big if), for example, only 10 nodes were mining their energy use would be quite little. But since so many are mining, the rewards for each block are shared out among each miner in proportion to the effort they put in. In such competition, lots of energy is wasted.

[sedition666]

I think people complaining about the energy usage of Crypto are not getting the big picture. The making of cash is not the only energy use. Just think of all the high street banks all over the world who look after that money. Think of all the back offices who then support those banks. Think of all the countless data centres all over the world who run all the systems these banks use to track the money and the business administration. Now think off all the energy spent getting to and from work by the staff of all these offices and data centres. You only have to look at the buildings in New York or London to see how much time and effort goes into these systems!

It isn't all about financial transactions either. Cryptos like Ethereum are actually designed to run little snippets of code on millions of different nodes like a decentralised supercomputer. The crypto Sia is a decentralized storage platform storing little pieces of data all over the world. And we are only in the early stages of blockchain so we don't know what other cool ideas will evolve. We just need to weed out all the money grabbers creating useless coins with no purpose!!! The hype is all about people trying to make a fast buck but the blockchain technology behind it will definitely be revolutionary.

[Zhaoman]

It's important to note that the amount of mining (i.e. energy consumption) only affects the security of a proof-of-work blockchain and not the throughput. There are scaling solutions that will allow bitcoin to process many more transactions per second than VISA and will bring down the transaction fee and time to negligible levels. All of this can be done at the current levels of power consumption and less, it doesn't matter. But the current level of power consumption already makes the bitcoin blockchain the most secure ledger in the world. Any increase in power consumption would be driven by greed and because the reward for that greed is linked to the price of a bitcoin and also that the blockchain will adjust the difficulty automatically depending on mining power, "Satoshi" has come up with a complex economic system based on game theory, race conditions and human behavior which will find its equilibrium somewhere. It's also interesting to note that in order to be profitable, miners are forced to find the most efficient solution so most mining farms are located in places where electricity is cheap or free, such as Iceland (geothermal) or beside hydroelectric dams in Washington or China for example, so they are incentivized to locate (typically) next to and use green energy. The energy consumption problem of proof-of-work blockchains is a concern that should be addressed (and is continually discussed - Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake is an example) so I would urge caution before thinking the story is quite so black and white.

[badass]

I think people complaining about the energy usage of Crypto are not getting the big picture. The making of cash is not the only energy use. Just think of all the high street banks all over the world who look after that money. Think of all the back offices who then support those banks. Think of all the countless data centres all over the world who run all the systems these banks use to track the money and the business administration. Now think off all the energy spent getting to and from work by the staff of all these offices and data centres. You only have to look at the buildings in New York or London to see how much time and effort goes into these systems!

Apples to oranges there - those institutions don't just manage case and exchange of cash. If you want to include them, you have to include all they do value wise

As per https://www.marketwatch.com/story/th...art-2015-12-18

The total value of all contracts, debt, derivatives etc is between $544 Trillion and $1.2 quadrillion. Scale up bitcoins energy usage to those values and you get around 8700 times as much value as bitcoin.

Scaling up bitcoin to those levels and you get energy consumption of over 29 Terawatts - or 254,000 TWh per year. That's around 2.5 times total global energy consumption last year.

So bitcoin is still rubbish for energy usage by that measure. Just like for every other measure.

Of course, people will continue with their apples to oranges comparisons to try to justify their belief in blockchain but ultimately time will be the judge.

Bitcoin has no future. The warring factions can't even agree on a mechanism to increase throughput without a hard fork!

Blockchain however does. It facilitates transactions between untrusting parties where honoring of a contract can be measured by all (or almost all) nodes. I have seen so much rubbish hypo around what blockchain can do and so far every use case I have seen there is already a way more efficient way of achieving the same thing without blockchain.

[DanceswithUnix]

I think people complaining about the energy usage of Crypto are not getting the big picture. The making of cash is not the only energy use. Just think of all the high street banks all over the world who look after that money. Think of all the back offices who then support those banks. Think of all the countless data centres all over the world who run all the systems these banks use to track the money and the business administration. Now think off all the energy spent getting to and from work by the staff of all these offices and data centres. You only have to look at the buildings in New York or London to see how much time and effort goes into these systems!

It isn't all about financial transactions either. Cryptos like Ethereum are actually designed to run little snippets of code on millions of different nodes like a decentralised supercomputer. The crypto Sia is a decentralized storage platform storing little pieces of data all over the world. And we are only in the early stages of blockchain so we don't know what other cool ideas will evolve. We just need to weed out all the money grabbers creating useless coins with no purpose!!! The hype is all about people trying to make a fast buck but the blockchain technology behind it will definitely be revolutionary.

That isn't the big picture, because those banks etc are not going away. Most of what happens in the banking system is already electronic token passing, nothing to do with cash.

Bitcoin isn't magic; it doesn't stop people needing loans and other financial services, and banks now have blockchain technology too on top of everything they had before. Bitcoin won't break the system, the useful bits are already integrated into the system because banks aren't some static dinosaur they are evolving platforms with enough rather bright people involved trying to keep ahead of the competition to make it a meaningful race.

There are scaling solutions that will allow bitcoin to process many more transactions per second than VISA and will bring down the transaction fee and time to negligible levels.

Like Lightning? Meh, I've worked in credit card transactions, they are pretty lightweight. That was years ago, and I had a core2 duo running Linux doing thousands of transactions per second, probably enough to switch the VISA transactions for the whole of UK retail judging from the figures I saw at the large retailers I was involved with. These days I could probably manage that throughput on a raspberry pi. Really, bitcoin needs to aim higher than a level already easily achieved by existing systems.

[Zhaoman]

@badass Blockchain is just a distributed database or ledger. The key differentiators from an ordinary database/ledger are it's decentralised, immutable, secure, relatively anonymous and there is a single truth based on the consensus of all parties. If you don't care for the above differentiators then a centralised database or ledger is a lot cheaper and more efficient. But you can't buy decentralisation, immutability, security or anonymity in a traditional database held by a central authority so you are comparing apples to oranges really and blockchains open up new use cases that are impossible with a centralised database or ledger.

The hardfork is exactly what demonstrates the decentralised nature of the consensus and its power. Even when the majority of miners wanted one solution (and a group decided to hard fork) it was the users that rejected it and so the miners had to come back into the fold because it's more profitable to secure (i.e. mine) the blockchain that has more users. Saying bitcoin has no future is a bit premature because a lot of the hypothetical roadblocks are happening and being overcome every step of the way and, being the most secure blockchain, it has potential for many possibilities and benefits to society which may or may not be realised. It's also wrong to extrapolate the energy consumption because, with appropriate scaling solutions, the current energy expenditure is enough to secure and transmit all of the world's transactions and more. The amount of mining power determines the security of a blockchain not its throughput so there is no inherent need for energy consumption to rise - it just comes down to greed of miners currently and the greediest ones will get rekt in time.

@DanceswithUnix Anything banks or large institutions do will be centralised because they would want to retain control so they would not be true blockchains (just inefficient databases) with none of the benefits of a true blockchain and many of them completely miss the point. Blockchains have the potential to bring efficiency, decentralising of power and trust not only to the financial sector but also to construction, transport, energy, democracy etc. It also has the potential to allow Web 3.0 and be the platform for IoT to truly take off which enables a circular economy. Of course none of this potential has been realised yet and if it all sounds a bit too hypothetical then the optimist would say the internet looked pretty limited when every computer had to receive every packet of information before scaling solutions came along so there is still time and the most beneficial possibilities probably haven't even been thought of yet.

[DanceswithUnix]

@DanceswithUnix Anything banks or large institutions do will be centralised because they would want to retain control

No, they want to make money. They wouldn't control their own grandma to make money; they would sell her, short or mortgage her but control isn't actually profitable. You sound like the banks are somehow working together, but from what I have seen nothing could be further from the truth. The banks can afford all the top maths graduates they want, all the encryption expertise they need. If you don't think every bank is individually trying to work out how to use blockchain (not a database, because they absolutely *do* get it) to gain competitive advantage over the other banks by being first with a new product then you aren't paying attention. In my last job which was nothing to do with payments or even at a payment related company I could have been sent on a in-depth blockchain training courses to learn the principles behind the technology because they wanted as many people as possible to learn how machine learning and blockchain work. They are the current hot technologies where new products can fall out, and the more people who understand them the better chance the company has of someone having a bright idea how to use these techs.

But blockchain works by everyone having a copy of every transaction ever added to the chain. That is almost the definition of inefficient.

Edit: Oh, and as a user long before the WWW was a thing I have to say the Internet never looked limited. Part of that was it was clearly designed to scale, withstand abuse and evolve.

[Corky34]

I think when most people allude to banks being centralised or controlled their conflating a few different things, primarily that normal banks are not the same as the central bank (Bank of England in the UK, federal reserve in America) and secondly that monetary policy (set by the central bank) and fiscal policy (set by the government) are two very different things.

[badass]

@badass Blockchain is just a distributed database or ledger. The key differentiators from an ordinary database/ledger are it's decentralised, immutable, secure, relatively anonymous and there is a single truth based on the consensus of all parties. If you don't care for the above differentiators then a centralised database or ledger is a lot cheaper and more efficient. But you can't buy decentralisation, immutability, security or anonymity in a traditional database held by a central authority so you are comparing apples to oranges really and blockchains open up new use cases that are impossible with a centralised database or ledger.

I am fully aware of what a blockchain is. When combined with the nodes performing checks/running code and submitting the results into the blockchain you get things like Siacoin and Ethereum

However what I haven't heard yet is a genuine use case. So far, every use case I have heard can be done better without blockchain. Do you have any use cases where using blockchain is better?

I do fully expect that eventually someone will come up with a genuine use case. Just not heard one yet.

[wazzickle]

Do you have any use cases where using blockchain is better?

I do fully expect that eventually someone will come up with a genuine use case. Just not heard one yet.

Aha! I didn't actually realize anyone did this! http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/s...20180312145785

It depends on what you consider 'done better'. Bitcoin has advantages and disadvantages over fiat, and depending on who you are and your worldview, bitcoin could be either much better or much worse than fiat.

The 'apples compared to oranges' thing is getting tired. Fiat is apples, crypto is oranges, you can never get a direct comparison, but they share certain characteristics, such as tastiness, nutritional value, and hardiness. There is a time for oranges and a time for apples. One example would be that looking at the total energy expended and saying 'fiat uses less therefore is better' has its' faults, i.e. some of the energy used can be recouped in the form of heating for your house.

Lightning will surely reduce the environmental footprint of each transaction.

Lastly, in the context of all the different ways in which we pump crap into the atmosphere, crypto mining is surely right down there (couldn't put a %age on it).

[fynxer]

Step in the right direction.

Its worrying how much electricity crypto currency miners are now using.

The sooner they stop the better.

Like you know what you are talking about.

Our gpu farm uses ONLY 100% renewable energy, water, wind and solar.

You should refocus on societies infrastructure that pukes out CO2e and at the same time everybody turns a blind eye to just because those massive emissions are heavily integrated in everybody's must have day to day life.

Nobody really want to change how they live so they accept destroying the world in the process and at the same time deflecting the problem toward other areas calming the problem lies elsewhere.

The BIG problem is YOU not wanting to change your lifestyle.

You should check out this to get a real picture of where emissions come from and be careful where you put the blame next time.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet

[DanceswithUnix]

Our gpu farm uses ONLY 100% renewable energy, water, wind and solar.

And if gpu farms all switched off then all that renewable energy could be used to power hospitals and farms and other stuff that actually matters. All the power saved, perhaps we could switch off another coal powered power station or two.

[wazzickle]

Without knowing the numbers (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but only if you can prove it) that switching off all the gpu farms in the world would probably power a hospital or two at best. Like the guy above said, it's a drop in the ocean compared to all the ways we just take energy use for granted and don't have the appetite to change.

[DanceswithUnix]

Without knowing the numbers (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but only if you can prove it) that switching off all the gpu farms in the world would probably power a hospital or two at best. Like the guy above said, it's a drop in the ocean compared to all the ways we just take energy use for granted and don't have the appetite to change.

CO2 emissions in the UK are thought to be down to a level last seen in 1894:

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ry-study-finds

that's brilliant, and seems to me like perhaps there is an appetite to change at least amongst enough ageing hippies like me.

Now of course there aren't any firm numbers on crypto mining activity, it is an arms race and like any competition keeping quiet about what you are up to has competitive advantage. But there are clues. First up we have the old Digiconomist estimate of "as much electricity as Denmark" which is discussed quite well here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ion-explained/

I shall make another estimate, and I am doing this off the cuff so please feel free to pick holes. Nvidia did $1.74B in GPU trade last quarter (https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidi...e-major-buyers). As someone who failed to buy a graphics card I think I can confidently say that a lot of gamer sales have been displaced with mining sales recently. There is a lot of slop here, on the one hand many of those gaming GPUs actually ended up in the hands of gamers. But that is Nvidia's revenue and they only sell the chips not the entire cards, so card sales revenue is higher than that. I am also completely ignoring AMD's sales. So that chip revenue could be $3B worth of cards, lets say two thirds of those cards ended up with gamers and only $1B worth of cards got bought by miners. So $1B worth of cards at an average of $250 per card, that would be 4M cards. If the average power consumption of those cards is 100W, you are looking at 400MW just from the cards sold in that one quarter.

Of course you don't mine Bitcoin with GPUs, and you don't mine Monearo with an ASIC, so these two estimates are in parallel. Add the consumptions together. Now go back to the first headline I posted, some people think we are doing surprisingly well on cutting carbon emissions, but imagine if we were hundreds of MW lower in global consumption.

I would dismiss this as silly miscalculation, but if I go to a site such as Amazon and look for a Vega 56 to see if they are getting back towards their £400 RRP then I get a face full of "and you will want to buy this open frame, this 1KW PSU, a mining motherboard and a pack of 1xPCIe cables. I have never bought mining kit in my life, but such is the market that what used to pop up gaming stuff now assumes I am into crypto currency. Then I hear that New York are looking to charge cryptocurrency miners more per unit of electricity to try and cut demand.

There is big money in this, hence very big power consumptions, so I will continue considering mining to be ecological vandalism.

[kompukare]

CO2 emissions in the UK are thought to be down to a level last seen in 1894:

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ry-study-finds

that's brilliant, and seems to me like perhaps there is an appetite to change at least amongst enough ageing hippies like me.

That is indeed good news, but I suspect that those figures do not include external CO2 emulsions and since most manufacturing has been outsourced mostly to the Far East, that is a very major part of this and most Western countries.

As for calculating the power requirements of all mining, a more accurate way would be to look at those crypto sites which show the global hashrate of the various major currencies and work back from there. Of course, even with the global hashrate, there is the unknown of trying to guess which card is likely to be used for a given coins/algos hashrate and guessing what (if anything) most miners have done to max hash/watt etc.

A fair bit of work, of course.

EDIT: Googling finds a few hits with actual estimates:
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...cryptocurrency
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-b...y-in-2020.html
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
but those don't seem to be for all crypto and I guess in some places cold like Iceland all that energy isn't being wasted if people would alternatively use electric heating.

Also, whattomine.com (currently offline, but Google's cached has a copy) shows that their default 3 x 480 card setup earns $2.40 per day with 10c electricty so can't see anyone investing currently.

[DanceswithUnix]

Seems the US has experienced a drop in power usage as well, which has come out of fossil fuel use as renewable sources come online.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...f-the-us-grid/

Another blow for blockchain though, apparently giving people the ability to embed whatever they want in it means they embed child abuse images. That possibly makes mining a possession offence.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...llegal-content