We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale".
A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1].
Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT to allow for situations in which a limited amount of energy could be expended to either increase the hashrate further or to get closer to the limits of computation [2].
Edit 2: the more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the Universal Paperclips game.
Can we please start regulating crypto currency mining? This is insane. I think it needs to be global mining regulation. Can the UN do anything else? If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency. Not ok. I know this is controversial but we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.
I would like to ask you why start with cryptocurrencies, that only account for 0.6% of world energy consumption, when we can dream big and tackle the issue once and for all by banning air travel. BOOM! In a heartbeat you are consuming -20% of world energy. Or why don't we ban actual mining? Another 10% plus reduction of unspeakable crimes perpetrated daily on vulnerable people.
Why cryptocurrencies of all the energy hungry sectors? There are way lower hanging fruits than crypto.
If miners cannot sell their coins, they can't pay the electricity bills.
Bitcoin will always be around, but with sufficient fiat blockages the value plummets.
Governments should announce that people will have a year to sell all their coins (the price will tank immediately anyway), and then buying and selling of PoW coins will be banned.
> we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.
Are you Kim Stanley Robinson? If you aren't you'll enjoy his latest novel "Ministry for the Future", which follows the line you describe and posits a post-apocalyptic future with less machine labour and more manual labour, abandonment of air travel, no meat consumption by humans, a solar array covering much of India, etc. He then proposes replacing Proof of Work with Proof of Carbon Sequestration.
---
Aside: MftF is, to me, an appalling unscientific low effort bit of propaganda (at least for the first 60 chapters) but perhaps there is a way to steelman KSR's theses.
The entire purpose of cryptocurrencies that they and their economies cannot be regulated by any government. A regulated cryptocurrency is just fiat with more steps and a contradiction in terms.
Do you have any reason to feel so despondent without any real evidence? There's already plenty of people mining with renewable/stranded energy sources, all mining will head this way. My prediction is that the "energy consumption" arguments against bitcoin will disappear in 5 years.
People are gonna tell us (bitcoiners) that the USD is secured by the powerful military of US behind it and we're supposed to accept it as a positive, but if we say that we're going to use electricity to secure the network with nothing but math and computation, we're instantly hated by the same people. What gives?
How can you be ok with wars and threats of violence to enforce the value of a currency, but not computation and electricity? I just don't understand it.
Love "Universal Paperclips"--'completed' it multiple times in one session. It's the core game without the fluff, uselessness at its best. You've been warned:
I am curious how long after renewable energy displaces conventional methods combined with the predicted big reduction in pricing before heat becomes the next pollution bogey.
the cheaper it gets will just increase its use which for much of the world is a great improvement in quality of life but there is always some costs involved
Renewable energy is heat-neutral, at least the solar/wind types. The electricity is created from heat. Energy in photons that would otherwise strike the planet and become heat is turned into electrical power. In converting fast moving air to slower moving air a wind turbine extracts heat from the atmosphere and turns it into electricity. So now matter how many turbines and solar panels we build, they aren't pumping out any net heat.
I believe this holds true for hydro, but not so for geothermal as it moves net heat into the biosphere.
Frozen conflict zone, not unlike Transnistria, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh. The border is militarized, except the Georgian side which doesn't seem to consider Abkhazia a threat. Lots of abandoned infrastructure because the native Georgian population was killed and/or fleed, and hasn't been harnessed for some reason. Abkhaz cross the border daily to buy basic stuff from Georgia. Only approved vehicles can cross, so most people do it walking with "taxi drivers" servicing both sides of the border. Most of the foreigners there are Russians looking for a cheap seaside vacation. There are streets named after Shamil Basayev (!).
Actually I left Abkhazia illegally, since you have to collect the visa inside (as there aren't diplomatic missions anywhere) after crossing the border, and the offices were closed all 3 days that my visa was going to be valid for. So yeah, arguing with soldiers for 4 hours in my rudimentary Russian wasn't great.
It's worth noting that the Georgian majority population was ethnically cleansed (with >5000 civilians killed) from Abkhazia by separatists, with full support and encouragement of Russia[0]. The preeminent Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, later responsible for Beslan school siege and other attacks, took part in this war on the Abkhaz side, after being trained for the purpose by the GRU (Russian military intelligence of the Salisbury/Novichok fame)[1]. I guess they kind of lost control of him afterwards, oops.
> They made me delete the picture but LPT: keep the SD card aside for the rest of the trip, then run an undelete tool on it.
Undeleting photos from an SD card saved data for me once. Just shut it off once you've noticed you messed up, and don't touch it. Thank goodness for FAT32.
Electricity is free for them, because Georgia considers it's as part of Georgia. Abkhazia right now is local mafia-run region by Russian occupant forces (Russia actually has military bases there).
Nothing is going on there economically, it is slow decaying society so their only income is mining operations like this.
Funny enough, the name immediately jumped out to me because of video games ;)
The free map coming with the DCS World flight simulator is a large part of the eastern Black Sea and western Caucasus, and there's quite a few missions and campaigns in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions (some with a heavy Russian narrative, some from Georgian and NATO point of view, so all in all quite balanced I'd say). Having never heard of Abkhazia and Ossetia before either this lead me to read up on their (mostly troubled) history.
People are pretty poor there, and Russia supports them a lot (you can have russian passport if you live there). I assume most infrastructure is supported using russian help. It is logical Russia does not want her money spent by miners, who are probably not even from Abkhazia.
There is Russia and then Russians there running things. They have different goals. If Abkhazia is anything like I think it is...you just pay someone up and you can do whatever you want. That includes stealing electricity, or killing someone.
"Now I'm in power so it's my chance to grab something" is the mentality in a lot of countries.
The speaker doesn’t mention any blackouts, she only describes how they shut down few illegal crypto farms (only 230 units of unspecified model or power consumption).
I believe there is more to the story and that doesn’t mean that there is no blackouts, but for completeness sake this video is incoherent with this thread’s headline. Blackouts may be caused by e.g. shitty, cheap, unmaintainable grid, or by local corruption that feeds from these farms and doesn’t officially demand higher loads from energy providers to cover the difference. My (completely subjective) opinion is that not taking it at the face value is a pretty safe move. (Disclosure: russian, non pro-crypto guy)
This seems like the wrong approach. I don't see how closing large-scale mining facilities will suddenly solve the problem.
As long as the energy remains cheap, mining will just move underground. I could see miners offering ordinary villagers kickbacks to "host" a few miners on their premises as to conceal the energy consumption behind what appears to be legitimate usage.
You cannot move "underground" when you are sucking that much power.
The government did what they should have done, and what all governments should have done a long time ago and shut this nonsense down. It's sucking up resources and only adding to wealth inequality.
Bitcoin rewarded a small group of very smart people very very very well. It then rewarded morons... hordes and hordes of morons very very well too. We will be living with the consequence of this for decades to come.
Instead of trying to remove the symptoms, the government should focus on increasing their peoples productivity to put them in a position to pay higher electricity prices
Idea to solve the crypto energy problem - sell space heaters as dual purpose crypto miners. People need space heaters. They buy them, but they also mine crypto (as a free byproduct of the space heating). The number of crypto mining space heaters out there dilute the value of dedicated mining so much that people don't bother with it anymore. Even buying the space heater to make money from mining crypto doesn't make that much money - due to the fact that so many space heaters are crypto miners. Problem solved?
Edit/Multi-Reply: Heat pumps are efficient, but they don't replace all practical use cases for a space heater.
"Pumping water down hill is more efficient than pumping it sideways"
The CoP of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature potential across the heat pump. Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house: the very scenario your post suggests they should be used.
Heat pumps are great for increasing thermal potentials and moving heat across them (not for sourcing energy). They're also great for balancing an internal thermal state that is, on-net, in balance (think of a large office building in the morning, one side is being heated by the sun, the other side is frigid -- heat pumps can balance the internal energy demands instead of simultaneously cooling one part of the building and heating the other)
That needs good insulation first, or am I missing something? Usually space heaters are warmer, but less efficient. Heat pumps are great if you have time to warm up the space but if it's insulated like an open field, you'll be always cold.
I live in an area of Canada where home heat is pretty much provided exclusively by natural gas but electricity comes mainly from nuclear and hydroelectric sources.
Interesting to think about, but by firing up a miner on my graphics card at off hours I'd probably lower my overall fossil fuel consumption and make some money on the side.
There's a few companies that already do that, they rent out servers / processing power (probably via a spot market) which are in people's homes chooching along. The spot market will always be loaded because at some point one of the many cryptos will find it worthwhile.
people do that, but it's not an efficient way to heat. The most efficient heaters pump heat from somewhere else, even when the source has a lower temperature, like the way a fridge pumps heat from inside the cold fridge to the air in your house. (my apologies for assuming you live in a house if you are actually a 12 dimensional entity that lives on a space whale)
This can't work because it just raises the efficiency of mining. That means mining will become cheaper. That means your reward is higher. That means you can mine more for the same money. That means every miner does that, increasing the part of the heat that's wasted.
In the end, the exact same amount will be 'wasted' as before.
Consumers that are already using (electric) space heaters are already paying $X/mo in electricity.
If they are getting value out of a bitcoin-mining space heater, it is justified to run at any time you want heat, because by getting a BTC rebate of any amount would make it cheaper to run than a space heater.
If enough miners are mining for the purpose of heat, it will push non-heat miners out of the market, because the heat-miners are rationally willing to mine at any price (any 'rebate' on expected electricity->heat costs is useful), whereas the non-heat miners can only rationally mine when btc reward exceeds electricity cost.
(We are a LOOONG way from the majority of miners using the heat, but just wanted to point out there is a hypothetical future where the market could eliminate heat-wasted mining)
So now the developing world will start using their energy to mine BTC instead of manufacturing goods for us to consume.
Will this ultimately cause inflation then? Because demand for goods will not be met?
This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results.
"This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results."
I completely agree. I don't pay attention to a lot (or any) online economic circles, but I'm astounded at the pushback of high profile economists (Krugman, et al) against the shear novelty of the moment for their discipline.
Regardless of whether or not someone "believes" in bitcoin, the reality of the times is that cryptocurrencies are creating fantastically interesting economic experiemnts right under our noses. This seems like it would be the dream come true for an economist from an observational/curiosity perspective
These “experiments” have real life consequences on ”subjects” who never agreed to be part of it.
We should maybe create a crypto-country where crypto-currencies fanatics are free to experiment all of this on themselves instead of all of us… (it’s a joke, please don’t create a crypto country!)
Typical case with russia occupied territories, no law, criminal business. They supply electricity to this region but locals just do not pay and do illegal connections. Mining business controlled by Russia-Abkhazian criminal clans and FSB-backed pseudogovernment structures, so this video is an episode of internal war between them.
Readit News
A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1].
Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT to allow for situations in which a limited amount of energy could be expended to either increase the hashrate further or to get closer to the limits of computation [2].
Edit 2: the more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the Universal Paperclips game.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
"overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.
I'm sorry I didn't understand this. Could you explain?
Why cryptocurrencies of all the energy hungry sectors? There are way lower hanging fruits than crypto.
If miners cannot sell their coins, they can't pay the electricity bills.
Bitcoin will always be around, but with sufficient fiat blockages the value plummets.
Governments should announce that people will have a year to sell all their coins (the price will tank immediately anyway), and then buying and selling of PoW coins will be banned.
Are you Kim Stanley Robinson? If you aren't you'll enjoy his latest novel "Ministry for the Future", which follows the line you describe and posits a post-apocalyptic future with less machine labour and more manual labour, abandonment of air travel, no meat consumption by humans, a solar array covering much of India, etc. He then proposes replacing Proof of Work with Proof of Carbon Sequestration.
---
Aside: MftF is, to me, an appalling unscientific low effort bit of propaganda (at least for the first 60 chapters) but perhaps there is a way to steelman KSR's theses.
People are gonna tell us (bitcoiners) that the USD is secured by the powerful military of US behind it and we're supposed to accept it as a positive, but if we say that we're going to use electricity to secure the network with nothing but math and computation, we're instantly hated by the same people. What gives?
How can you be ok with wars and threats of violence to enforce the value of a currency, but not computation and electricity? I just don't understand it.
Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself.
Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.
Life transforms matter and energy into increasing structure and complexity.
A classic pathological life-like process is the paperclip maximizer.
The paperclip maximizer transforms matter and energy into a regular structure of low complexity.
Crypto is one step worse than the paperclip maximizer. It converts matter and energy into pseudo-random numbers.
The only structure discernible within the randomness is the mechanism that induces organic lifeforms to work on behalf of crypto.
[1] https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...
Deleted Comment
[0] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
the cheaper it gets will just increase its use which for much of the world is a great improvement in quality of life but there is always some costs involved
I believe this holds true for hydro, but not so for geothermal as it moves net heat into the biosphere.
Knut Svanholm: https://medium.com/hackernoon/bitcoin-and-thermodynamics-63f...
Andy Poelstra: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf
Deleted Comment
There's even been a war in 1992-1993, after the collapse of the USSR [1].
Sometimes I'm still surprised of my ignorance about important facts that happened during my lifetime.
Anyway, the next question for me was: why is electricity so cheap there, and should I assume it's cheap 24/7, and therefore generated with hydro?
Electricity is largely supplied by the Inguri hydroelectric power station located on the Inguri River between Abkhazia and Georgia
there's even a study on Electricty consumption, if you really want to dig deeper into it. [2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Abkhazia_(1992%E2%80%93...
[2]: http://iccn.ge/files/energy_study_results_abkhazia_2019_eng_...
Frozen conflict zone, not unlike Transnistria, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh. The border is militarized, except the Georgian side which doesn't seem to consider Abkhazia a threat. Lots of abandoned infrastructure because the native Georgian population was killed and/or fleed, and hasn't been harnessed for some reason. Abkhaz cross the border daily to buy basic stuff from Georgia. Only approved vehicles can cross, so most people do it walking with "taxi drivers" servicing both sides of the border. Most of the foreigners there are Russians looking for a cheap seaside vacation. There are streets named after Shamil Basayev (!).
Actually I left Abkhazia illegally, since you have to collect the visa inside (as there aren't diplomatic missions anywhere) after crossing the border, and the offices were closed all 3 days that my visa was going to be valid for. So yeah, arguing with soldiers for 4 hours in my rudimentary Russian wasn't great.
Border crossing: https://i.imgur.com/dFMnwsJ.jpg
They made me delete the picture but LPT: keep the SD card aside for the rest of the trip, then run an undelete tool on it.
AMA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Georgians_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamil_Basayev
Undeleting photos from an SD card saved data for me once. Just shut it off once you've noticed you messed up, and don't touch it. Thank goodness for FAT32.
Could put a micro SD card in a SIM card slot in your phone maybe.
Nothing is going on there economically, it is slow decaying society so their only income is mining operations like this.
The free map coming with the DCS World flight simulator is a large part of the eastern Black Sea and western Caucasus, and there's quite a few missions and campaigns in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions (some with a heavy Russian narrative, some from Georgian and NATO point of view, so all in all quite balanced I'd say). Having never heard of Abkhazia and Ossetia before either this lead me to read up on their (mostly troubled) history.
Who says video games aren't educational.
"Now I'm in power so it's my chance to grab something" is the mentality in a lot of countries.
If it weren't for its current situation, it would be a great destination for tourists.
- Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
It has a lot of fun stuff about how the Abkhazia communist party and their interaction with the main party in Moscow. A lot of interesting history.
I believe there is more to the story and that doesn’t mean that there is no blackouts, but for completeness sake this video is incoherent with this thread’s headline. Blackouts may be caused by e.g. shitty, cheap, unmaintainable grid, or by local corruption that feeds from these farms and doesn’t officially demand higher loads from energy providers to cover the difference. My (completely subjective) opinion is that not taking it at the face value is a pretty safe move. (Disclosure: russian, non pro-crypto guy)
There are a lot of articles in Russian on this subject.
In English: https://www.rferl.org/a/bitcoin-blackouts-russian-cryptocurr...
The government has closed around 300 mining facilities in order to reduce energy shortages.
There are tens of such videos on the Youtube channel.
As long as the energy remains cheap, mining will just move underground. I could see miners offering ordinary villagers kickbacks to "host" a few miners on their premises as to conceal the energy consumption behind what appears to be legitimate usage.
The government did what they should have done, and what all governments should have done a long time ago and shut this nonsense down. It's sucking up resources and only adding to wealth inequality.
Bitcoin rewarded a small group of very smart people very very very well. It then rewarded morons... hordes and hordes of morons very very well too. We will be living with the consequence of this for decades to come.
Edit/Multi-Reply: Heat pumps are efficient, but they don't replace all practical use cases for a space heater.
The CoP of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature potential across the heat pump. Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house: the very scenario your post suggests they should be used.
Heat pumps are great for increasing thermal potentials and moving heat across them (not for sourcing energy). They're also great for balancing an internal thermal state that is, on-net, in balance (think of a large office building in the morning, one side is being heated by the sun, the other side is frigid -- heat pumps can balance the internal energy demands instead of simultaneously cooling one part of the building and heating the other)
Interesting to think about, but by firing up a miner on my graphics card at off hours I'd probably lower my overall fossil fuel consumption and make some money on the side.
Anything I'm missing here?
In the end, the exact same amount will be 'wasted' as before.
If they are getting value out of a bitcoin-mining space heater, it is justified to run at any time you want heat, because by getting a BTC rebate of any amount would make it cheaper to run than a space heater.
If enough miners are mining for the purpose of heat, it will push non-heat miners out of the market, because the heat-miners are rationally willing to mine at any price (any 'rebate' on expected electricity->heat costs is useful), whereas the non-heat miners can only rationally mine when btc reward exceeds electricity cost.
(We are a LOOONG way from the majority of miners using the heat, but just wanted to point out there is a hypothetical future where the market could eliminate heat-wasted mining)
1- https://www.coindesk.com/inside-irans-onslaught-on-bitcoin-m...
This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results.
I completely agree. I don't pay attention to a lot (or any) online economic circles, but I'm astounded at the pushback of high profile economists (Krugman, et al) against the shear novelty of the moment for their discipline.
Regardless of whether or not someone "believes" in bitcoin, the reality of the times is that cryptocurrencies are creating fantastically interesting economic experiemnts right under our noses. This seems like it would be the dream come true for an economist from an observational/curiosity perspective
We should maybe create a crypto-country where crypto-currencies fanatics are free to experiment all of this on themselves instead of all of us… (it’s a joke, please don’t create a crypto country!)