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  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 30th, 2023
  • raktheundead@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages
    11·
    11 months ago

    You’re disingenuously ignoring the opportunity cost of having to build additional power plants - resources required not being usable elsewhere; environmental impact of those resources or, especially in the case of hydroelectric power, of building the power plants themselves, since cement has significant carbon dioxide emissions, along with the fact that proof-of-work algorithms have a tendency to expand in a grey-goo style and suck up as many resources as possible.

    The former is a reason why energy conservation efforts and regulations have been put in place. The fewer power plants you require to run everything, even if they’re renewable energy, the better. Proof-of-work mining threatens that, because when your incentive to mine is more money, that encourages people taking more than their fair share of energy. It also encourages power theft.

    Proof-of-work mining doesn’t do a thing to solve the issue of green energy, since there’s no sort of quality-of-service system in place which bumps cryptocurrency miners down to the bottom of the pile when it comes to prioritising power usage and even if there was, it’d create an arms race between power plant operators and people trying to subvert those controls so that they can use more power for mining, cf. Nvidia’s graphics card limiters versus Ethereum miners. You’re either naïve or disingenuous if you’re expecting cryptocurrency miners to just cede power when there’s money on the line if they keep their operations going at top priority.

    Furthermore, even if every single watt that Bitcoin requires to mine was generated by 100% clean energy, the network would still be creating nation-state levels of e-waste.

    This is just another one of those techno-libertarian pipe dreams about an efficient free market which don’t bear fruit in the real world, just like the “why do we need emissions regulations anyway? Surely, the free market will sort that out, brah” bullshit. It’s the fallacy of the broken window writ large.

  • raktheundead@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages
    21·
    11 months ago

    The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.

    So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.

  • raktheundead@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages
    4·
    11 months ago

    That’d be the same Lightning Network with NP-hard issues with routing and a whole host of problems right down to the fundamentals, right? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

    And even beyond that, having to stack another layer on there is a technical non-starter to begin with. For one thing, adoption of the Lightning Network is fundamentally bottlenecked by Bitcoin itself - if the entire Bitcoin network was dedicated entirely to onboarding people onto the Lightning Network, it’d take 28 months to onboard all of the people in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world’s population.

    There’s a saying by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery that’s rather relevant here: « Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher. » Roughly paraphrased, it means, “It appears that perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.” Trying to stack extra layers on top of a precarious base goes against any sound engineering principles. In this circumstance, Bitcoin would be the thing to take away - it offers nothing and is in fact detrimental to an efficient system of exchange.