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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

> 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

>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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

>At scale

what does that mean?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

PoW isn't a problem at all.