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We seem to keep finding ways to fuck up the earth for pretty useless and unnecessary reasons. I lol'd at our obvious dumbassness.
by vajorie 13y ago
We seem to keep finding ways to fuck up the earth for pretty useless and unnecessary reasons. I lol'd at our obvious dumbassness.
- bachback 13y agowhat the are you talking about.. start with being more conscious and make more effort to explain yourself. thanks. a fellow human being.
- drcode 13y agoBitcoins require mining as a security measure, which is a lot more energy efficient than the security measures for traditional currencies.
- betterunix 13y agoHere's the difference: banks have every incentive to try to reduce their power consumption, Bitcoin miners have every incentive to increase their power consumption.
- kiba 13y agoWrong. The less energy mining equipment consume, the more money they make. It's the hashing rate versus the cost of power.
- betterunix 13y agoYou are pretending that miners somehow do not double their income when they double the number of mining rigs they operate. A bitcoin miner makes more money by devoting more electrical power to Bitcoin, regardless of the hashes-per-second-per-watt ratio.
- kiba 13y agoIncreasing hashing only increases the proportion you get from subsidy + fees. It's a zero-sum game. If the other guy increases his hashing rate, you will lose out. Eventually, at some point, energy cost dominates.
- betterunix 13y agoOK, let's suppose that everyone is already at the point where consuming more power is not economical. Then a new technology that would allow everyone to use only 1/10th as much power for the same hash rate comes along. Power consumption will not decrease in that scenario; instead, it will remain the same, and the hash rate will increase. My original point was that when a technology comes along that allows banks to be more energy efficient, the incentives are all in place for banks to adopt that technology and reduce their energy consumption. There is never an incentive for a Bitcoin miner to reduce their power consumption.
- skinnycow 13y agoNo, no they don't. Power is a cost for miners, so it eats into profits. They want to increase hashing rate and minimize power consumption.
- yafujifide 13y agoNot true. Since using more electricity costs more money, bitcoin miners have an incentive to use less electricity. Their incentives are to maximize hashes/s/watt.
- wmf 13y agoGiven that energy efficiency is mostly a function of the underlying silicon, miners don't have much control over it (especially once everyone has converged on 28 nm).
- Dylan16807 13y ago> /s/watt Well that's one way of writing /joule, I suppose.
- maxerickson 13y agoThis is true, but the reward is currently far larger than the electrical consumption, so mining is currently mostly a contest to bring more hardware online. (kicking CPUs and GPUs out of the contest probably did a lot to lower power consumption, but I wonder if the growth of the network has overshadowed that)
- sp332 13y agoThe reward for mining is currently 25 BTC/block, plus transaction fees. That's pretty high at today's conversion rates, but it will be cut in half continually over time. If miners spend more money in power and cooling than the reward, they're losing money. Even with deflation, the amount of money they can spend on power will go down.