My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.
The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers
You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.
I have real time pricing from my utility. It works out well because we charge 2 electric cars overnight for a fraction of what they would cost to charge at the standard fixed kilowatt-hour rate. My house is heated by natural gas; I don't think the savings would be there if I also was heating my house with electricity as I live in the midwest, where it gets cold as fuck for the winter.
My Volt (and I assume other EVs) has a setting to charge when power is cheaper.
They don't produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very "progressive" and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.
My comment here is a much better use of energy
Recording my next fart would be a better use of energy than Bitcoin.
Even if you upload it as an 8k video
My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy
Pfft, my comment is the best use of energy
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.
If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.
Good job, totally missed my point.
You can buy/sell ones that arent dependend on mining. Not every crypto is the same.
Ah, you're referring to non-proof-of-work chains. There's no need to be snarky, your comment could be interpreted in multiple ways.
You're right, sorry, wrong destination
No problem.
Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.
Beats me, I'm only interested in the technology :D
Chia was plotted and not mined I think, but other then that ...
Ok I was kind of dumbing it down when I said “if the wallet exists”, but yeah, obviously a wallet and key “exist”, but whether or not anyone actually has them is unknown.
Really sucks for Satoshi, too. If the keys are still in someone’s position, they can’t use it, because people are watching those wallets like hawks and if they move, that means there’s a new billionaire. For a brief moment. Until Bitcoin takes a massive nosedive from which it’ll never recover.
That must be some special kind of hell. To be an actual billionaire (and truly of their own making, which is even more rare) but not able to spend a cent of it. Spending it instantly reduces its value and likely kills the very thing that created it. Man, that’s like a Monkeys Paw billionaire.
Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time
It's a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.
Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult.
You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.
Don't worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.
(Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)
I can't tell if these crypto people (comparing the energy use of banking to Bitcoin) are dumb, or if they think everyone else is.
Yes.
Banks use negligible electricity lmao
Yeah. 600k Branches, 1 million atms, data centers..
yup, tho they also serve more people than crypto bros, about 100,000 times as many
Including everything, about a million times less energy per transaction than crypto.
the banking industry
Might want to brush up on that reading comprehension.
I think this is the most forced 'lmao' I have ever read
Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.
Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.
You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
no, that's the magic of speculative market financing
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
They'd still need some type of battery to make solar work though. They want to mine 24/7.
Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don't want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.
dogecoin is top10
ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
>it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn't deflationary, it's cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.
the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I'm using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?
there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain's system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.
the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.
That's because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.
The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.
if they don't explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right
then there's no reason to believe they got it wrong.
also they're vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.
there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i'm dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i'm not going to believe them, and no one should.
what's the problem of estimating based on mined blocks and difficulty?
not everyone is merge-mining and even those who do may only be merge-mining specific chains.
it's a bit like clocking your gas mileage to and from work, and then saying thats how much gas it took you to get out of your driveway.
the work that goes into mining those blocks should be discounted by the amount of energy that goes into mining every other merge-mined chain
ok, so either ~1% figure already discounts this energy due to merge-mining, or it doesn't discount and the effective energy consumption of Doge is lower. The original point remains: Bitcoin is pretty much the energetic problem of crypto, .
asic miners are the problem with crypto's energy consumption. nothing is wrong the the bitcoin protocol, which is functioning as expected.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
Don't forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.
I'd say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.
dude you can totally ban it, it's not even difficult, you just don't let them suck up infinite power
Mineral resource mining as well
What year do you think we'll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we'll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there's already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
There may be some manufacturing processes that need microgravity or a good vacuum and could be be profitable, but I think you are being much too optimistic.
Maybe, it's so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.
AstroForge thinks they can close the business case for asteroid mining. Their concept is to launch mining satellites to near-Earth M-type asteroids to mine platinum group metals. These would go on 2 year missions to bring back $100 million+ in metal at a time. With launch and satellite costs dropping, it might just work. Their forge demo sat has been struggling but moving forward. Their asteroid flyby demo sat should launch later this year.
Redwire 3d printed a meniscus in space last year. That'll take awhile to get worthwhile scale and cost, but it's another interesting avenue.
Varda hit regulatory trouble, but their orbital drug manufacturing demo did its job.
Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that's really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool
Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it's commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.
That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.
Of course with progress on fusion it's possible there won't be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we'll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that's sold in small amounts for absurd prices.
The problem is still rocket launches are expensive and complicated. But if maybe we can get orbital tethers working then we may be okay.
I don't think this is true anymore. The cost of a rideshare with SpaceX is super accessible. Companies can launch for <$1 million. This has been huge for a lot of companies trying to launch a proof of concept or one-off, and even for some operational constellations.
Destroying the environment and not even for real money
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".
It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.
If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".
That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don't think it's valid, therefore it's not real money.
Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.
That's why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.
And father.
"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity"
"Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh."
Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products
Compare Wh vs # transactions. PoW is unsustainable and irresponsible. We need a different way.
I've always been a fan of having the USPS provide banking services to everyone. Make it a public service and it is no longer exclusionary.
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn't have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT "game" a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more "traditional" capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.
Ok fine lets look closer at those numbers, I don't think they mean what you think they mean....
On their own these numbers are completely useless, we need to compare something that exists in both crypto and in traditional banking.
One Bitcoin transaction can spend up to 1,200 kWh of energy, which is equivalent to almost 100,000 VISA transactions.
I suspect that is on the extreme end of the scale, so let's be kind and slash 50% off of it, even then the energy consumption would be 600kWh per bitcoint transaction, and if we use the same data for VISA transactions, this is the equivalent of 50 000 VISA transactions, if these numbers are correct, crypto is insanely energy inefficient.
I will make no secret that I dislike crypto, but I did try and find objective data and summarize it objectively, I will also note that while I dislike crypto, I am not blind to the issues with traditional banking, they absolutely needs to clean up their act, environmentally and otherwise.
nah the power use numbers you gave are not on an extreme scale, the point of how the bitcoin and most cryptos work is designed to keep using more and more power
I suspcted as much, but I wanted to show that even cut in half the power use of a single Bitcoin transaction consume an absurd ammount of energy, this to try and stop people arguing that I was being unfair against crypto
That doesn't make any sense unless it's the only transaction in a block
Electricity is too cheap for these uses.
Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.
Because companies > people in the eyes of the state.
It depends on which state, which is even more sad.
Something something job creators….something something trickle down
My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.
The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers
You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.
I have real time pricing from my utility. It works out well because we charge 2 electric cars overnight for a fraction of what they would cost to charge at the standard fixed kilowatt-hour rate. My house is heated by natural gas; I don't think the savings would be there if I also was heating my house with electricity as I live in the midwest, where it gets cold as fuck for the winter.
My Volt (and I assume other EVs) has a setting to charge when power is cheaper.
They don't produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very "progressive" and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.
My comment here is a much better use of energy
Recording my next fart would be a better use of energy than Bitcoin.
Even if you upload it as an 8k video
My lower-down comment is an even better use of energy
Pfft, my comment is the best use of energy
Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.
You should check out the impact of gold production also.
fuck crypto shit ffs
More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.
If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.
Good job, totally missed my point.
You can buy/sell ones that arent dependend on mining. Not every crypto is the same.
Ah, you're referring to non-proof-of-work chains. There's no need to be snarky, your comment could be interpreted in multiple ways.
You're right, sorry, wrong destination
No problem.
Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.
Beats me, I'm only interested in the technology :D Chia was plotted and not mined I think, but other then that ...
JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax
There is no good reason why this isn't illegal.
Not a good reason, but money.
Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.
The tech bros are convincing stupid people it is real money though. Just like they always have, whether it's this or something else.
Crypto is the digital coal of our times.
Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he's responding to the thought that he's personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.
Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.
If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined
I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.
The ONE PIECE is real /s
It's a bit more than just an estimate. If you want to know more, have a look here: https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
The keys to the addresses exist. Whether someone is in control of them is unclear. It can't be proven that they've been lost.
Ok I was kind of dumbing it down when I said “if the wallet exists”, but yeah, obviously a wallet and key “exist”, but whether or not anyone actually has them is unknown.
Really sucks for Satoshi, too. If the keys are still in someone’s position, they can’t use it, because people are watching those wallets like hawks and if they move, that means there’s a new billionaire. For a brief moment. Until Bitcoin takes a massive nosedive from which it’ll never recover.
That must be some special kind of hell. To be an actual billionaire (and truly of their own making, which is even more rare) but not able to spend a cent of it. Spending it instantly reduces its value and likely kills the very thing that created it. Man, that’s like a Monkeys Paw billionaire.
Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time
It's a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.
Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult. You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.
Don't worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.
(Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)
I can't tell if these crypto people (comparing the energy use of banking to Bitcoin) are dumb, or if they think everyone else is.
Yes.
Banks use negligible electricity lmao
Yeah. 600k Branches, 1 million atms, data centers..
yup, tho they also serve more people than crypto bros, about 100,000 times as many
Including everything, about a million times less energy per transaction than crypto.
Might want to brush up on that reading comprehension.
I think this is the most forced 'lmao' I have ever read
Modern day gold rush.
Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.
Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.
You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
they should be doing that, otherwise I don't get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn't worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
no, that's the magic of speculative market financing
Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you'll be on half of that.. With the amounts of electricity they use, they'll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It's simply not practical
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that's slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don't misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I'd rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
They'd still need some type of battery to make solar work though. They want to mine 24/7.
Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don't want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don't know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you're walking by one of the coin ATMs that's at one of my local stores I've watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top
109 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.dogecoin is top10
ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
>it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn't deflationary, it's cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.
the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I'm using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?
Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain's system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.
the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.
That's because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.
The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.
idk their methodology - source
if they don't explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right
then there's no reason to believe they got it wrong.
also they're vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.
there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i'm dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i'm not going to believe them, and no one should.
what's the problem of estimating based on mined blocks and difficulty?
not everyone is merge-mining and even those who do may only be merge-mining specific chains.
it's a bit like clocking your gas mileage to and from work, and then saying thats how much gas it took you to get out of your driveway.
the work that goes into mining those blocks should be discounted by the amount of energy that goes into mining every other merge-mined chain
ok, so either ~1% figure already discounts this energy due to merge-mining, or it doesn't discount and the effective energy consumption of Doge is lower. The original point remains: Bitcoin is pretty much the energetic problem of crypto, .
asic miners are the problem with crypto's energy consumption. nothing is wrong the the bitcoin protocol, which is functioning as expected.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
Don't forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.
I'd say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.
dude you can totally ban it, it's not even difficult, you just don't let them suck up infinite power
Mineral resource mining as well
What year do you think we'll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?
I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we'll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.
I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there's already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.
There may be some manufacturing processes that need microgravity or a good vacuum and could be be profitable, but I think you are being much too optimistic.
Maybe, it's so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.
AstroForge thinks they can close the business case for asteroid mining. Their concept is to launch mining satellites to near-Earth M-type asteroids to mine platinum group metals. These would go on 2 year missions to bring back $100 million+ in metal at a time. With launch and satellite costs dropping, it might just work. Their forge demo sat has been struggling but moving forward. Their asteroid flyby demo sat should launch later this year.
Redwire 3d printed a meniscus in space last year. That'll take awhile to get worthwhile scale and cost, but it's another interesting avenue.
Varda hit regulatory trouble, but their orbital drug manufacturing demo did its job.
Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that's really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool
Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it's commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.
That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.
Of course with progress on fusion it's possible there won't be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we'll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that's sold in small amounts for absurd prices.
The problem is still rocket launches are expensive and complicated. But if maybe we can get orbital tethers working then we may be okay.
I don't think this is true anymore. The cost of a rideshare with SpaceX is super accessible. Companies can launch for <$1 million. This has been huge for a lot of companies trying to launch a proof of concept or one-off, and even for some operational constellations.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Destroying the environment and not even for real money
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I'd argue it is "real money".
It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.
That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don't think it's valid, therefore it's not real money.
Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.
That's why I prefer Cardano, it has a good PoS (unlike Ethereum) and uses thousands of time less energy than Bitcoin.
And father.
"Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity"
"Traditional banks' total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh."
Not to mention banks impact on people's lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class.. to purchase disposable products
https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks
Compare Wh vs # transactions. PoW is unsustainable and irresponsible. We need a different way.
I've always been a fan of having the USPS provide banking services to everyone. Make it a public service and it is no longer exclusionary.
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn't have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT "game" a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more "traditional" capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.
Ok fine lets look closer at those numbers, I don't think they mean what you think they mean....
On their own these numbers are completely useless, we need to compare something that exists in both crypto and in traditional banking.
I found this page: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-mining-statistics/
I suspect that is on the extreme end of the scale, so let's be kind and slash 50% off of it, even then the energy consumption would be 600kWh per bitcoint transaction, and if we use the same data for VISA transactions, this is the equivalent of 50 000 VISA transactions, if these numbers are correct, crypto is insanely energy inefficient.
So I kept looking and found this page:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
This page claims that one Bitcoin transaction used about 700kWh in 2023, and 100 000 VISA transactions used about 150kWh in total at the same time.
So we have two sources showing that Bitcoin is an absolute disaster for energy use and therefore the environment.
So I kept looking, and found some data about Etherium, which claims that one etherium transaction consumes 0 kWh, which I naturally doubt...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
I will make no secret that I dislike crypto, but I did try and find objective data and summarize it objectively, I will also note that while I dislike crypto, I am not blind to the issues with traditional banking, they absolutely needs to clean up their act, environmentally and otherwise.
nah the power use numbers you gave are not on an extreme scale, the point of how the bitcoin and most cryptos work is designed to keep using more and more power
I suspcted as much, but I wanted to show that even cut in half the power use of a single Bitcoin transaction consume an absurd ammount of energy, this to try and stop people arguing that I was being unfair against crypto
That doesn't make any sense unless it's the only transaction in a block
If you have other data, please post it