Divided_Pi

Do you think your technology will help kill off the human race? When I first tried in a VR headset I basically decided when we can "feel" VR, humans will just live in VR and eventually starve to death or something. Do you think your dolls will cause birth rates to drop and human to human relationships numbers to drop?

Sorry if weird question

So yes, proof of work is inefficient by design, but I think the power consumption argument gets used as a blunt hammer against BTC too often.

Miners need cheap electricity to be profitable, in some cases this is coal power, but in a lot of cases this also means renewable energy sources. A Cambridge report stated that 76% of crypto miners had some renewable energy in their power mix. (Not all their power comes from renewables but some of it does). This same study found that about 39% of all proof of work power came from renewables. It would be interesting to compare this to other industries.

There’s also the idea of “banking” extra energy. With nearly all renewables you run into an issue where power generation may not sync with usage. Maybe your solar panel produce peak electricity during the day, but peak usage is in the evening when everyone is home and turning on lights and cooking. So you can install large battery arrays to store that power. Or maybe you use the excess power to mine crypto, then used the mined crypto to offset costs when you need alternate power sources during peak times.

Then just a lot of the fear around the power consumption seems to imply “if left unchecked, Bitcoin mining will consume all available power on planet earth, and earth will become an ecumenopolis dedicated to Bitcoin mining”. This seems ridiculous to me. The rate of energy growth for human civilization is increasing basically exponentially for the last like 150 years. Bitcoin mining is small fraction of total energy consumption, and the entire power grid needs to be carbon neutral to fight climate change. I don’t think it’s fair to look at a 10 year old technology and be like “this will prevent us from stopping climbing change”. The fact is, energy consumption isn’t going to decrease as civilization progresses, and all our energy sources will need to change going forward to meet those energy demands, and go green.

I don’t think cryptomining will keep us on dirty fuels longer, especially considering they need the cheapest power available and coal and other dirty sources are being priced out of that equations slowly but surely.

It accomplishes the ability to have a decentralized ledger without someone double spending. That is what the proof of work is used for. It’s energy intensive and inefficient so it’s prohibitively expense to attack the network with computing power.

And American Christmas lights use more power than several small countries as the other poster pointed out, and they don’t even secure a financial network

Hey, sorry for such a late question, (also sorry if this has already been answered in another thread). Were you at Stalagluft III with any of the "Great Escapists"? And if you were, were you involved in the efforts to build the tunnels or was it before/after your time there? And of course, thank you for your service