this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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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?
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?
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.
not everyone is merge-mining and even those who do may only be merge-mining specific chains.
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.
it's just that PoW is trash when applied at scale for encouraging energy use to create consensus - and that's by design - so indeed, "there's something wrong with the protocol".
you seem to understand that the protocol can function without the massive power use but you seem to want to blame the protocol for the power use.
at this point, we have to agree to disagree.
have a nice day
At scale no, it can't and that'll never be the case because at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage - so as long as there's demand for that coin, PoW will always demand huge amounts of energy.
And yes, I do blame the consensus protocol because ultimately that's the culprit of causing this incentive to waste energy and targeting miners or any other actors is an utter waste of time.
> at any given time, someone will be willing to put more energy (work) into it to gain an advantage
that's not a problem with the protocol. that's a problem with people. that's like saying that houses are a problem because people rent them to exploit the working class. the problem isn't the house, it's the people who try to buy all the houses.
I never said there's a problem with the protocol - that's indeed, working as intended. There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this unsustainable environment.
As another comment put it: PoW is the coal burning of this era.
Using it for your bbq is no big deal. Using it to generate energy for half the world is awful.
>There IS a problem of using the protocol (at scale) though, because it creates this
unsustainable environment.
this isn't true. the protocol is still functioning fine. the problem is how people are using the protocol.
And there's no way to use it so that it doesn't consume huge amounts of energy because of greed and because of how computers work.
So very much a problem of using PoW.
you can certainly use it: using the protocol to transact doesn't contribute meaningfully to power consumption. power consumption is almost entirely in the mining.
>At scale
what does that mean?
meaning PoW is not such a problem when applied to create consensus in local or niche blockchains as the difficulty (and energy consumption) is orders of magnitude lower. For widely used coins it's a terrible choice.
PoW isn't a problem at all.
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.
a 51% attack means that 51% of the hashpower has agreed on a certain chain. this happens every 10 minutes.
That's not an "attack."
no, it's the protocol functioning properly.
Right. Which is not what I was talking about. This was about how a PoW chain would become useless if there was no cost involved in making blocks, ie, if the "W" part was missing. It would allow anyone to add blocks. There'd be no way to distinguish forks from each other and decide on a canonical one. Being able to agree on a particular fork as being the "valid" one in a decentralized manner is the fundamental secret sauce of what makes cryptocurrency work. All the various protocols boil down to ways of solving that one particular problem.
even a 51% attack is just the protocol following its prescribed mechanisms.
Yes. But failing at the intent of the protocol in the process. When a hacker exploits a buffer overrun to take control of a remote computer, the computer is following its prescribed mechanisms to the letter. But that's certainly not what the computer's owner wants it to be doing.
If adding blocks to a PoW chain had no cost then the chain wouldn't be functioning as its users desire - there'd be no canonical fork any more. It would fail to solve the Byzantine generals problem, which is fundamentally the purpose of cryptocurrency.