• HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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    9 months ago

    asic miners are the problem with crypto’s energy consumption. nothing is wrong the the bitcoin protocol, which is functioning as expected.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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”.

      • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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        9 months ago

        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

        • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          the protocol can function without the massive power use

          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.

          • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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            9 months ago

            > 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.

            • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              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.

              • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                9 months ago

                >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.

                • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

                  • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                    9 months ago

                    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.

            • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              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.