skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm finding Eth2 attractive because of its move to Proof Of Stake which addresses the concern raised in this tweet.

I believe that energy usage was one of the motivations for them making that change.
It is so shameful for people to characterize resource use as “waste” like this. Not surprised to see more sanctimonious nonsense from Stephen Diehl, the same guy who thinks all us programmers not using functional languages are neanderthals still in “the bloodletting and leeches” era of software engineering.

This really is beyond the pale. Stephen sounds like a total crackpot here.

How much “waste” does Pixar’s renderfarm generate when creating artistic cinema that people want?

How much “waste” does Sony’s Playstation Network generate distributing games people want?

How much “waste” does the sum total of plastic surgery create?
Consent basically doesn't work as a basis in employment situations, because it's almost impossible to argue that an employee is guaranteed to not be disadvantaged if they do not consent.
Still, there are plenty of coins that don’t rely on this “waste”, and even big ones that are moving away from it, such as Etherium. If Bitcoin was a PoS system, the underutilized electricity could be going towards something else, like protein folding.
Yes, the output is just a large vector with each dimension mapping to a move. But we'd probably do it as different "head" so have a small set of layers that are trained just to predict resignations. Both options would break the lc0 chess engine we use for stuff like the Lichess bots though.
I believe that depends on the configuration.

The error dialog in the gif when Cancel is pressed does say "You cannot use Windows unless your login name is validated by the network."
Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C (2018)
78TWh is also about the annual electricity consumption of a couple large aluminum smelters.
At least Gold has industrial usage, beyond the "store of value" and jewelry part ?

The premise of the OP is that bitcoin is not worth the cost. I tend to agree, though I can understand the appeal of decentralized currency.
Erm, yes: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=peer+reviewed+papers+on...
Do not get me wrong, k8s is a revolutionary piece of software, but it is not the best example of a clean Go project.

There are a few disturbing things:

1) Usage of `utils` package. Points against it were made in:

https://dave.cheney.net/2019/01/08/avoid-package-names-like-...

https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments#package...

2) Check out the number of dependencies. This looks almost like NPM hell.

3) Lack of standardization and consistency. This project is so big, and there are so many contributors with their coding styles that the project looks untidy.

4) A lot of import renaming is a symptom of package name clashing or simply poor package naming. You usually do not need to rename import, and this is simply not required if your package structure was carefully thought about.

Again, k8s is great. K8s solves a lot of problems. I love it, but it is not a great example of Go code.
I’m sure words can have separate meanings from their initial one.
Is there a spec bump here?
> The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day.

I can think of a few that can’t be disrupted soon enough.
If Bitcoin becomes global reserve currency, governments won't be able to conjure money out of thin air to finance wars of aggression. And — sans inflation — prices of all things will decrease over time in absolute (BTC) terms. This could put a major dent in consumerism, as owning BTC will be seen as preferable to owning any other asset, particularly depreciating assets e.g. consumer goods, housing and cars.

The above dynamics could more than offset Bitcoin's carbon footprint. But even if it doesn't, humans are driven by self-interest and every single individual on this planet has the financial incentive not to be left behind. You basically just have no option but to invest in bitcoin. And the longer it takes you to figure this out, the more costly it will be for you.
Mining for gold produces something that can be used in for example electronics.

Mining for Bitcoin produces something that can be sold to speculators or be used to pay for drugs and assassinations.

And most of that mining (~65%) is in China where 65% of the electricity production is with coal.
I’d be interested to see a citation on that. But even still, couldn’t those renewables be used for other applications if Bitcoin isn’t using them?

> will turn off when rates are high

But doesn’t Bitcoin directly contribute to rates rising? Supply and demand, and all that.
Explain how any solution prevents the user from opting out of yubikey and typing self-XSS into Dev console to get owned.

Unless you have a 100% vendor controlled system, (more than Apple + ChromeOS combine) you have to rely on the user not breaking their own security.
Weirdly they keep saying 802.11 but apparently it's 802.11a/g.
I didn’t realise miners were that sensitive to electricity pricing. Does this make a 51% attack easier if you can spike power prices in key mining regions?

Also is there a good graph somewhere showing BTC online mining capacity over time?
I recall being able to just cancel that dialog back in the day. There was a group policy to require network authentication added at some point, but I don't know when.
Just because it’s a website problem, it doesn’t stop being a problem.

Usability is important if you want adoption outside of the HN crowd.
Agreed, I am eager to see the widespread adoption of proof-of-stake technologies to improve the efficiency of cryptocurrencies. The inefficiencies of proof-of-work aren't something to be happy about obviously, except insofar as they enabled cryptocurrency technology that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

And to be clear, I was referring to OP the author of the twitter thread.
Any such password manager you like? Didn't know they could do domain matching
What type of transaction? Are you taking $16 in fees? Or do you mean energy cost for mining that transaction into a block? Fees are definitely not that high. On Gemini for example I can buy $100 of bitcoin for $0.15 (as a one off example for a USD->BTC transaction).
The tweet links to a paper published in Nature. What's missing for you?
Bisqwit's channel is full of awesome stuff like this. Well worth a look at his other videos too.
“If alternative stores can't give sufficient security guarantees, then users will prefer the official one.”

Nope. Users will use the stores where the apps they want are.

Players starting new stores will just pay for exclusives of popular apps, so that users are forced to install other stores, which will of course claim to support privacy and security in marketing terms that have no substance.

Android is why it is clearly wrong to intervene in Apple’s secure store.

If people want a choice of stores, Android is available and just as good as iPhone.
Held back might be the tradeoff we have to pay for letting them exist in the first place. Developing new technologies is not cheap or trivial- especially hardware innovations. I'd rather have a delayed 20 year start to fast e ink innovation than have e ink never get the r&d funding needed to get past the valley of death and make it to market in the first place.
$0 commission fee. $5 shares. Robinhood for real estate investing
No. Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are really just a waste of electricity. Even if you put your miners next to a hydro plant it is wasteful. You could just use proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies and do something productive with the electricity, like smelt steel or produce hydrogen.

Bitcoin is the equivalent of heating your house with the body heat of cows. Yes, its possible, yes, it works, yes, it used to be done this way. But it isn't really efficient and while a few cow-merchants and fleas might object, the world is better now.
Yes. They would lose the option to use one trusted store, and be forced to use set of different stores of varying different trust levels.
Veeery impressive! Side note: By pure coincidence I spent 5-6 hours this weekend playing around with an sdr dongle and a raspberry pi (specifically sending images over fm). And I have to say, the ecosystem around sdr's is annoyingly poor on linux(unsure about other os-es but it does seem windows has it better).
I agree. How much waste do fiat currencies generate protecting their themselves with standing armies (or the alliances with a country that has one)? Far more than the amount of energy used to secure bitcoin currency against other nation states using proof of work.
Advertising was around for thousands of years before tracking. The fear is that they won't make as much money and will have to go back to how they did it before all the privacy invasion. Very sad indeed.

It's easy really, you just put ads on sites visited by your target market. That's how advertising was always done before Gattica style snooping was involved.

Individually targeted advertising needs to be illegal. It's bad for society.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.

The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.

Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.

Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.

This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.
> Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization?

For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population, but also markets - or figure out interstellar travel rather quickly.
Bizqwit has done some phenomenal work. I loved his videos on how DOOM style 3D engines work where he goes through raycasting and BSP trees. He also has videos around how passwords work in old 8-bit console games. His article about dithering I read a while back was also super interesting and I can see that he used that in this raytracer. Highly recommended.
20 years is not a reasonable amount of time for technological products in current times.
> TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do.

Nope, lost me there. I'm all for having deep discussions about Bitcoin and the environment and the undeniable fact that Bitcoin mining wastes energy, but not with a person that refuses to understand how value works.

Things have value if and only if there are people that believe it has value. There is no other principle. No "inherent" value, no guarantees, nothing.
Everything is exactly as valuable as the majority of people perceive it to be. Dollars, gold, food, Justin Bieber, freedom, Bitcoin.

You may not agree, but then it's still happening, only without you.

If you don't sell Bitcoin, you're not the supply and you don't have a say.
If you don't buy Bitcoin, you're not the demand and you don't have a say.
The largest mines in china don't use coal, because coal is more expensive than hydro.
For skeptical downvoters: http://darwinian-medicine.com/the-perfect-eyesight-of-hunter...
Live HN on Internet Explorer 4
Nothing in life is free. While I concur BTC mining is expensive (and I'm a huge fan of movements to Proof-of-Stake (Vitalik is a genius)), I'd love to see a comparison to the movement of gold. Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores.

All energy expenditure == global warming, but that doesn't mean no energy should be spent. As one of my favorite humorist/economist/lecturers, Jeffrey A. Tucker, somewhat trolling-ly put it: "Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way."
There are some papers about Bitcoin.

So what?

Almost no claims about Bitcoin made on social media are ever supported by them.

Is there a paper that refutes the global warming claim, or shows it to be flawed?
Is digital gold not enough as an application?
Flash did, not sure about Java, because I never had the runtime installed. Maybe you used NoScript?

edit: If I remember correctly, at first Flash wasn't blocked by browsers, but it was abused just like JavaScript is today and because of that NoScript came along. Then I think browsers started blocking Flash by default once JavaScript took over.
If the easy part is the implementation and the hard part is convincing people of its value then I can say one or more of the following are true:

- Your solution is not sufficiently great as to be self-evidently great.

- People (i.e. the victim) must be faulted (i.e. blamed) for their inability to be convinced of its inherent majesty.

- Given convincing's similarity and overlap both with educating and with training, you are having a failure of imagination. (Source: Your comment.)
The same? Red ochre + water? Why would it be different?
I think we're saying the same thing.

I'm coming at it from the perspective of the irrationally frugal (a common problem I see on HN and how engineers typically behave even when they've found traction).

You're coming it from the angle of the irrational big spenders (VC-funded stuff you hear about in the media ie. WeWork, etc.).

We're both saying: be ruthlessly rational with your time and money.

However, I think a bias towards spending (vs. irrational frugality) is actually much more rare than you think. Everybody knows about WeWork, but they don't hear about all the engineers who spent 6 months optimizing their AWS bill to save $500 when they hadn't even found product-market fit yet.
Well it's not technically incapable, it's just that the makers can't profit from it.
Preposterous logic. Any energy used has to be made up with other sources. The idea that all bitcoin miners are public-spirited eco-warriors is pure imagination.
Turns out, about 10x less than Bitcoin, (this article seems to imply 25 million GJ per a year of energy mining/processing gold, and the Twitter thread implies 280 million GJ per a year in Bitcoin.

https://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-producti...

Except Bitcoin also creates electronic waste, including gold, and, I would argue, is not at the scale that gold is at, as an influencing factor on the economy.
I don't think this would really make a difference: Even if miners work only with renewable energy, they waste energy that could be used for other things.

I think the unique thing with bitcoin (and what offsets them from other large-scale energy consumers) is that the technology is intentionally spending as much energy as possible - at it's core, bitcoin mining is quite literally a race about who can access the most energy.

As such I see the environmental danger in bitcoin in a potential to undo efficiency wins everywhere else: If we make the rest of the economy more energy efficient, then the surplus energy could be used to grow the economy without impacting the climate or might not even need to be produced at all. Now there are incentives to dump this energy into crypto-mining instead.
You can redirect stuff to a register with the following dance:

:redir "a
:messages
:redir END

Then, you can just paste from that register using "ap.
It's even easier than that. Since the majority of mining happens in China, the CCP can control the chain by fiat.
Northern European male:
Maybe, sort of depends on what kind of contract you have.
If you get equity or have social plan / profit sharing good and fair healthcare and other secondary benefits like education and leave and there is the ability to carve a career path and the other side is supportive i would be more receptive to not bail for greener pastures at the first downturn or setback. Its reasonably hard to fire people here tough.

Bailing on any of the above and not holding their end i have moved to another job before.

Without any security like you would have in at will states in usa i would not be loyal at all, if they can fire you they can stuff it too when i dont think its going at its best.
The only reason bitcoin mining happens in Iran is because the price of electricity is artificially low because of government subsidies. It seems to me that country with power shortages shouldn't be subsidising power consumption and then getting mad when people take advantage of it.
Banks are high-risk, and video surveillance is longstanding practice and generally fine.

BUT I believe it is required to face the customer area (and, therefore, film employees mostly from the back). There's also usually a "pit"-like work area that's employee-only and I would imagine that's out of bounds, as well.
Pixar and PSN provide actual value to some people, while mining bitcoin is completely superfluous (not saying that bitcoin itself is necessarily useless but that the same result can be reached without wasting as much energy needlessly)
An HDMI cable is an accessory.

CompactFlash card doesn't fit in an SD port.
How are freebsd ports less up to date?
As far as i am aware, ports are usually as up to date as can be, because you are compiling from source.
This one makes sense to me, if someone has access to the console during boot, there's not much sense in preventing them from logging in. At that point they could just pull the drive and mount it in a different computer and replace passwd and shadow.

If you want to prevent this you need full disk encryption
Just out of curiosity. What would happen if, for any reason, you lose the capacity to work for a couple of years? Let's say that you have a bad accident that affects your hands, or you get a depression.
> This really is beyond the pale.

Beyond the pale? Beyond the pale to discuss Bitcoin energy usage. Some bitcoin people never cease to amaze me.

On top of that, the answer for all of the above is effectively zero compared to Bitcoin.

https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

And I think that's part of the issue - a number of people aren't appreciating exactly how incredibly wasteful Bitcoin mining is.
> put carbon taxes on BTC/fiat exchanges

Almost the best solution that preserves bitcoin, which is: put a tax on BTC mining.

The Bitcoin consensus rules rely on miners proving their faith in Bitcoin up to the amount of resources they are prepared to (provably) burn. Since this is about 'wasting' resources, having it taxed 99% globally would let the faith proof stay intact while the environmental cost would go down by 100x. You do can 'burn' resources by giving it to your local government. And it would actually benefit the local population.

Caveat: it has to be global, and at about the same rate everywhere. Can it happen without a world government? I don't know. But governments could start to trace transaction compositions up to a distribution over block rewards; and back-collect a tax on them accordingly. That is if they can control transactions; but governments do have a fair amount of leverage over the average joe's daily activity.

But all this presupposes that Bitcoin has gone mainstream and is used in the daily life, and we're definitely not quite there yet.

----

On another note, it is a bit sad the article does not mention halvings, which are quite relevant to that topic.
Virgin Orbit confirms that LauncherOne has reached orbit
Probably at least 1 Hz to even be slightly usable as a screen you are composing or editing on, but current refresh times are multiple seconds so there's still likely a long way to go...
I don’t really think those are fair comparisons. For one, the PlayStation network provides entertainment. I know from a hard economic perspective that might not be “valuable”, but it is. People need entertainment. And I’m sure the PS network is more energy efficient than everyone driving half an hour to a movie theatre, or something.

By comparison Bitcoin provides nothing other than itself. It’s price is almost entirely powered by speculation at this point. To put it another way: if the PS network disappears tomorrow it will have still entertained millions. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, it leaves nothing.
Failure in and of itself is not so bad, it's really how it's operationalized. How quickly can they identify, correct and move on to the next test? That's the question.
I believe space would be the least of our worries in that case...
Irrelevant equivalencies. What has gold to do with anything?

Hard to imagine anything more colossally wasteful than burning precious energy sources for ... imaginary points.
You could say the exact same thing about pyramid schemes.
Strong opinions follow

Flatly, this is my observation and I hadn’t as of the time of this post really seen it mentioned:

JS is over used not just because of tracking and ads, though this is a big part with all popular websites I’ve visited in the last 30 days (side note: thanks uBlock origin!)

It’s also in large part because I strongly believe frontend developers are re-enforced to think this way. I see a lot of blogs, community meetups and conferences organized around leveraging JS and specifically the large frameworks, which is okay! However it only re-enforces that JavaScript first solutions are implicitly better, rather than an emphasis on leveraging the whole tech stack correctly. I have friends that I respect very much who have largely gotten by with just a passing knowledge of CSS, HTML and hasn’t yet gained a deep understanding when it’s more appropriate to leverage those technologies over JS, let alone the trend of pushing so much work to the client (such as, not even bothering to scope APIs correctly. How many times have you had to sort the results of an API request because it is not sent over the wire sorted for it’s use case, even though your team controls the API?) The industry does not enforce wholistic thinking when it comes to this. That is the real problem to me.

Web components are somewhat an exception to this, as API considerations go they do attempt to strike a balance between server side rendered content and dynamic client side content, our industry just isn’t heading in a direction where that balance was struck
So 72 TWh per year in electricity is between 3 and 5 billions of dollars. Which is a lot, but the question is — should it be compared with electricity bills and environmental footprint of Visa Inc. or with a budget of U.S. military?
that's ridiculous.

You are forgetting (among many) about the impacts of a decentralised currency for the billions of people without access to bank accounts or a stable currency.
It’s also a massive source of spam. We’ve had to do a lot of work last year to prevent spam qq signups while also allowing legit users. Those spammers are freakin relentless.
Having grown up in an area with an abundance of crime I prefer to live with the surveillance of public spaces. I'd wager that opinions on surveillance highly correlate with exposure to crime.
In the way it's described in the article? yes, that very likely wouldn't fly in a bank as well. Banks do have video surveillance, but with more restricted terms, e.g. clear information which areas are monitored, risk assessments which areas justify being monitored, restricted recording (i.e. only very short-term storage that needs human intervention to be preserved), processes around when and through whom recordings can be accessed at all, ...
Facebook is only 16 years old. Think about that. 20 years ago everyone was using 56k modems and JS barely existed.

20 years is an absurdly long time in tech