Digiconomist

"Norton is installing a Cryptocurrency miner" sounds like when 10-15 years back it made the news when one app or one OS installed adware or spyware. We did nothing, and now it is becoming the norm.
If that's the trend, then, ladies and gentlemen, we're screwed: every piece of software will attempt to monetize from user's hardware, no matter the cost, particularly when cost is on the users. Name one reason why they shouldn't do that, there's no law forbidding it except common sense.

Cryptocurrency is cancer. It doesn't scale, it can't scale, it's becoming a huge unsustainable environmental disgrace, and it's the #1 reason why certain hardware is harder to find and overpriced, followed by energy, of which we have plenty but decided to waste it in mining farms.

Here are some numbers, just look at the trend: from 77 TWh to 204 TWh in one single year.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-than-google-2021-9?r=US&IR=T

Now just picture what will be like 5 years from now with possibly one PWh of miners worldwide pumping heat in the atmosphere 24/7, and energy prices skyrocketing because it will always be allocated to this task, therefore demand will always be higher than offer. Seriously, WTF!

Of course I expect downvotes from users with vested interest in cryptocurrencies, however I politely ask others to reply with "You're wrong because ..." followed by a believable explanation. I want to be…

This is one of many reasons why Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS) and ditching Proof of Work (PoW). The already functional Ethereum 2.0 chain has Bitcoin's security guarantees for a tiny fraction of the electricity costs.

Bitcoin's yearly electricity consumption is now estimated at $3.8 billion. This must be sustained indefinitely, and is a huge target for regulation and nation state interference.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Bitcoin's "store of value" has a forever price tag in the billions yearly. This doesn't make economic sense.

If Ethereum can fulfill Bitcoin's role as a "store of value" at a much lower yearly cost, I don't see how it would not eventually become more attractive as a store of value.

For a great detailed explanation on why PoS is better see Vitalk's blog. Vitalik views attacks on chains in terms of costs, which IMHO is the proper paradigm to quantify attack costs.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

(BTW, the TLS cert looks like it has an issue at the moment).

In 2011 I assumed Bitcoin would transition because PoW's weaknesses were obvious. Unfortunately, the majority of the leftovers in Bitcoin no longer share my sentiment. Electricity consumption is a reason that PoW is the most likely downfall of Bitcoin if they don't transition to another technology. To keep PoW Bitcoin will need to morph into something else, like a semi-centralized "reserve" asset which is not a technology that excites me. …

> it seems that environmental groups in Iceland are fighting the expansion of bitcoin because it is directly driving extra demand for electricity, not simply using the existing production

As someone who lives and works here I can assure you there is absolutely no environmental group fighting the expasion of btc mining here in Iceland, we are however viciously fighting the increasingly destruction tourism influx that has been happening since 2012. It does far more damage that the dams that were built here well before btc mining even existed.

>while currently not paying much of anything to the local government[2] and hiring next to no people, like most tech industries.

This is also untrue, construction and remote hands as well as grid infrastructures resulted from them, the companies that run the facilities also incorporate here and pay corp and employee tax here.

>And it is not my place to have productive ideas for how a country could use its natural resources. My claim was that bitcoin mining should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is driving an overall increase in power needs for the entire world, at a time we should be looking for every possible means to reduce our energy consumption.

If you followed your own citations you'd see one of them linked to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption which shows est electric consumption going back as far as 2018. Notice the graph has not really changed since 2018 (since the last halving).

>You came and brought…

> It seems I have hit a nerve! :D

Hit what exactly? You have failed to refute any of my points.

> AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s.

I don't think you would trust a black-box 'AI' in any high risk activity such as medical, financial, legal advice and especially transportation which there is a lack of a human driver or pilot, end-to-end to hold accountable once something goes wrong. Hence it will be totally regulated and licensed.

Not only techies like you wish to accelerate everyone further into a dystopia no-one asked for, but to even recklessly risk deploying untrustworthy AI models unchecked which can easily hallucinate and confuse themselves over a single pixel or any adversarial input. Making them unsuitable for anything serious, unless they are strictly regulated for that purpose.

Regardless, my environmental argument still stands unchallenged. Crypto has alternative greener methods to proof-of-work right now, and former PoW blockchains like Ethereum have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce its emissions by 99% by moving to a greener consensus method. [0][1] AI (Deep Learning, LLMs, CNNs, etc) however still does NOT have any viable greener alternative methods of training, inference and fine-tuning available and continues to waste tons of electricity and water. [2]

> Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid…

That's a fair explanation. A crypto token with a supply of 1. But here's the problem.

And?

This takes the idea that anything has value only due to scarcity to such an extreme, it's laughable. So much so, people thus had to try redefining the idea of ownership to justify its existence. These NFTs aren't "free" in existence. While this is true of anything is digital and on the internet, the cost of an Etherum NFT is far more expensive and more worthless in its own existance (which is an amazing feat). If you post 1 piece of artwork on imgur, artstation or even deviantart, the amount of electricity used to upload and view is going to be difficult to sustainably measure since it's so low. A single Etherum transaction to create an artwork NFT takes 60kWh (https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption). 2 days of an average household's energy usage.

It's solutionism that's trying to create a false narrative of problems that it can "solve". But even a regular solutionist would be disgusted and demand a new word to be formed so they're not lumped into the same category. I don't have a grief with those trying to simply profit off a craze. I don't hate the player, I respect the hustle. I hate the game and the zealots. The zealots who drop on their knees and pray to the almighty crypto whitepapers are sucking in victims just like a cult. And just like cults, "Put all your money into us. We're far safer from those evil outsiders. Stay and never listen to the outside world.…

My understanding of the situation is:

1. Wind/solar energy are being trumpeted around the world as the cheapest source of electricity available.
2. Bitcoin miners' profits are directly `sale price of BTC - buy price of electricity`. Other costs are marginal in comparison.
3. BTC mining is a extremely competitive, trivially mobile, trivially liquid, global market.
4. Given 1, 2 & 3 there is a lot of fretting that BTC is creating a coal-powered financial system.

With the recent spike, the currently reasonable cost for a fast, median-sized transaction is $10.46 [1] [2] According to the fretting articles I read, that is enough to power an average home for a 23 days and motivates sending over 300kg (700lb) of C02 into the air [3] That's 35 gallons of gasoline at 20lb CO2/gallon.

:/

For what it's worth, I get the concern. But, I also see equal shares of BTC hate|BTC fanboyism everywhere I go. Latching on to the environmental concerns of BTC is trendy right now. It's hard to argue against without sounding like an asshole and it's not entirely false. But, it's not entirely honest either. Everything I read and calculate shows that BTC makes total sense as a defacto green energy subsidy. But, that does not spark outrage. So, instead there is a lot of fretting about the second rise of a coal-powered economy.

IMHO, the way Ethereum is going is great: Bootstrap with POW then switch to POS after enough investment is built-up that staking actually means something. It's…