US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.

Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    163·
    10 months ago

    “The System” is not really that intelligent. The statement that “It will always cost a little less than one Bitcoin to mine a Bitcoin” is only correct because the incentives in the system steer everyone toward that. There’s no direct link between the two. Bitcoin Miners are intently aware of how much energy they consume, and if the price of Bitcoin dips below what they are paying for electricity, they likely will shut down their rigs, because no one wants to mine at a loss.

    The real issue with Bitcoin is that the algorithm used to find more Bitcoins is kind of basic in terms of its difficulty mechanism. It was the first one ever used for cryptocurrency. It was originally envisioned that owners could mine more bitcoin with spare cycles on their CPU, but since it was first designed, people have come up with custom mining chips that can mine faster and much more power efficiently. But paradoxically, this has made things worse, because the bitcoin mining difficulty simply scaled up to account for all that. So now the only way to mine Bitcoin is to have this custom hardware – it’s too hard to do any other way – and you need so much of it that you are just as power hungry as before.

    There are other algorithms that don’t have these same problems. They have been designed to use other computing resources (like gobs of memory) that are much harder to concentrate on custom chips, making it much more expensive (monetarily and spatially as well as computationally) to simply spam more of them. Ethereum uses a totally different model now that doesn’t rely directly on power consumption at all.

    OG Bitcoiners seem to think that the massive power consumption is a net benefit, because it is spent in making the overall network more secure, and less likely to be attacked. So they will never try to change their block algorithm, even though other projects are just as secure with less power consumed. And if that opinion holds, the only way to eliminate this source of power consumption would be to crash the price, and cause the Bitcoin miners to have to mine at a huge loss to continue.

    • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      Instead of using an independent RNG to determine the next block producer Bitcoin miners are essentially flipping coins and whoever manages to flip like 78 tails in a row gets to create the next block. How crazy is that?

      • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        What’s even more astonishing is that when someone creates a new Crypto wallet, it creates an obscenely long random number as a seed, and just starts using it. As long as the number is sufficiently random, the chance that someone else has generated the same random number is so small as to be functionally zero. So you don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission first before using Crypto. You only have to ask the Universe for some of its entropy, and off you go.

        It’s the same math of large numbers that leads us to conclude that every time we shuffle a deck of cards, the result is a deck that nobody in the history of the Universe has ever seen before. 52! is an insanely large number, which is on the order of 10^67 .

        https://quantumbase.com/how-unique-is-a-random-shuffle/

        The math behind Crypto is sound, and ensures that everyone’s wallets stay secure. Noone but their owners can move funds out of their wallets, and once a transaction is sufficiently confirmed, it can’t be undone. The only real threat to this is Quantum Computing, which might be used someday to Crack the relationship between public and private keys which is unassailable now. We’ll see whether the people who run these Crypto networks are able to change their algorithms to be Quantum resistant in rhe future.

        • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Oh yeah, Quantum computing won’t ruin crypto. Cardano already has plans to transition to quantum resistant crypto primitives. We just need to wait for some standards to form around which algorithms should be used in the future instead of current ones. I’m not worried about quantum computers at all.

          • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Oh, I have confidence that we can develop quantum-resistant crypto. My concern is in the governance of all the projects. Cardano seems to be in good shape, but it put some thought into how to make decisions that have at least some community involvement. But the market is driven by BTC mainly, and they have some issues in how they run themselves.

            • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              BTC’s protocol has gotten steady, incremental improvements for 15 years without a single hour of downtime. Lightning was deployed a few years ago and continues to grow each year and get easier to use and deploy. Migration to quantum-resistant algorithms is in the interest of all parties who use the system including miners, banks, hedge funds, developers, users, etc. It’s a very easy problem compared to other questions they faced around blocksize, taproot, etc.

        • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Quantum computing is not a threat at all tbh. Computers that can crack public key encryption are “20 years away” and require some fundemental shifts in our ability to control physics. And that’s the lab production version, not one available on the open market.

          Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist and continue to be refined. Things will get migrated long before they become a realistic threat.

    • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      the massive power consumption is a net benefit, because it is spent in making the overall network more secure

      I really have trouble understanding this argument. Joining a mining pool secures nothing.

      • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        10 months ago

        The whole point of mining is to arrange transactions into blocks, and then generate a cryptographic hash of the block that meets some difficulty criteria. It costs some small amount of computing to do that. But an astonishingly large number of hashes won’t meet that difficulty criteria, which is why miners have to try a gazillion times to find one that works.

        However, once a block has a valid hash, it is added to the chain. Then, the hash of that valid block must be used in the next block, which will be equally hard to find.

        By “security”, what is really meant is “How can I be sure that a transaction can’t be undone once it is committed”? And it’s because all these blocks are stacked on top of each other, and cryptographically related. Once a transaction appears in a block, and a few blocks get mined on top of it, it becomes prohibitively difficult to un-do it, because someone would have to put in the computing power to re-authenticate a string of blocks, all while the rest of the network is adding blocks to the valid chain at a faster rate.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          10 months ago

          The security of this whole arrangement has so far been working good as well.

          In order for someone to try and perform a 51% attack, they’ll need to either compromise a large swathe of existing miners (e.g if the government seized control) or create/acquire hardware totaling more than 100% of the existing network today plus growth while you attempt to build more than 100% and then maintain growth over the rest of the network.

          As the network grows that becomes exceedingly more difficult to perform.

          I have really high hopes for something like proof of work stake, but it’s not without it’s own problems either, and with Ethereum, it’s the first massive scale test, so it’s not as battle tested as proof of work yet, although it’s been used in smaller projects so there has been some testing. With more money on the line though, comes more will to try and break it, or use an exploit you may have held back beforehand.

          One interesting difference with POW/POS is that if a miner/entity does somehow perform an attack, they keep the hardware and can continue to try. With POS, they should get slashed in which case the money is gone. But with POW you have the barrier of actually acquiring the correct amount of hardware, meanwhile in POS, you just need the money so there’s no manufacturing/lead time and will be easier to achieve by state actors.

          • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            My main issue with Bitcoin isn’t even the POW vs POS angle, it’s the fact that the core devs see no problem with their current POW algorithm, which is not designed to put any bounds at all on energy consumption. But I also think they should have increased the block size, and you can see where that discussion went.

            • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
              4·
              10 months ago

              I sometimes have a weird vibe like someone somehow crippled Bitcoin by making it not able to evolve and develop. I mean… If I wanted it gone and couldn’t just destroy it, I would cripple it. Idk, just feels sus.

              • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                Anything that makes bitcoin more valuable is a financial benefit to all people holding bitcoin. Anyone who has a brilliant idea is financially better off by making their own coin.

                Miners, who have money tied up in bitcoin-specific hardware, have a vested interest in maintaining the POW system or else their capital loses value.

                There are probably exchanges short on bitcoin that stand to profit from a decreasing price.

                So yeah. Someone crippled bitcoin. That someone is Satoshi.

            • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              I have really high hopes for something like proof of work

              I just realized I wrote the above, but if it wasn’t clear, I meant proof of stake.

            • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              10 months ago

              Fuck the core devs is really all i have to add to that without going into it…

              Luckily things like Ethereum and others were born due to them.

          • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            Bitcoin has literally 2 pools who have more then half of the block production. Also not all PoS systems have locking and slashing btw.

              • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                Well… Cardano has like 30 different pools that add up to 50+% of the block production.
                If something sus was happening with one or more of those - people can just leave them.
                Same thing but 30 is better than 2.

                • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  10 months ago

                  Definitely agree, 2 isn’t ideal, and there’s some level of trust happening there because of it.

                  There’s been pushes over the years to get people to split apart more, and I’m pretty sure there was a significant split due to this at least once in the past.

                  It’s gotta be either something like reliability, ui/ux, ease of setup, otherwise all I can come up with is a larger pool pays out smaller amounts more consistently and people prefer that?

                  • TypicalHog@lemm.eeEnglish
                    2·
                    10 months ago

                    We in Cardano have a “saturation” limit per pool. So if you have more than like 70M ADA, you don’t get rewards for anything above that. This encourages people with a lot of ADA (either theirs or delegated to them) to run multiple pools. We call them multi pool operators. Cardano community has a really strong sentiment against delegating to multi pools. And if you are wondering if that figure I mentioned earlier (30 pools to reach 50+%) is just a few entities with many pools. No - this is actually 30 individual MPOs (multi pool operators).