THE HARD MATH BEHIND BITCOIN'S GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM

[pscot]

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-global-warming/

In a report last week, the cryptocurrency website Digiconomics said that worldwide bitcoin mining was using more electricity than Serbia. The country. Writing for Grist, Eric Holthaus calculated that by July 2019, the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network—remember BitTorrent? Like that—would require more electricity than all of the United States. And by November of 2020, it’d use more electricity than the entire world does today.

That’s bad. It means Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 17.7 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, a big middle finger to Earth’s climate and anyone who enjoys things like coastlines, forests, and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases. Refracted through a different metaphor, the Bitcoin P2P network is essentially a distributed superintelligence utterly dedicated to generating bitcoins, so of course it wants to convert all the energy (and therefore matter) in the universe into bitcoin.

[hunter]

1. Bitcoin is the greatest Ponzi Scheme ever devised.

In a Ponzi Scheme you need to tell a story that makes sense to the people drawn in by the scheme. Usually it's a simple story, mostly that some personable fellow is a super smart investor, for example, Bernie Madoff. That person may be the founder of the scheme, but it's more common for them to be (or become) the witless front man and/or fall guy.

Basing a Ponzi scheme on the value of magic numbers with certain cryptographic properties, selling the scheme to sketchy people who don't want the law looking in on their business, and lighting the whole scheme off from a position of anonymity... that was utterly brilliant.

[lapfog_1]

2. I was hoping that the article would mention

what Quantum Computing might do to block chain and the SHA256 encryption.

Yes, it is still in its infancy, but serious players are now investing in it and reporting large strides.

I expect to see some serious systems on display at Supercomputing 2020 if not 2019.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. The environmental cost was pointed out at least 4 years ago

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10022660460