• dhork@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    This post triggered my /r/Bitcoin PTSD…

    Nobody in this community cares about opening a tab on Lightning and needing to continually police it to make sure you don’t lose your coins, but let me explain the Power thing a bit more.

    Bitcoin’s block confirmation algorithm is based on SHA-256, which is an algorithm that just uses computing capacity to work. Custom ASIC chips have been developed to solve that problem at a very high rate, and current Bitcoin mining farms just use a bunch of these in parallel to go faster and make more hashes. More chips = more power consumed.

    But computing power is not the only resource that you can use for Proof-of-work. Other algorithms are designed to use a large amount of memory also, and memory is harder to scale than computing power. Other algorithms enforce that multiple nodes need to work in concert, and the network delays between them also enforce an additional cost. These make it harder to make things go faster simply by spamming more units. These are just as secure as the SHA256 algorithm that BTC uses. But fewer units = less power.

    BTC Maxis think the enormous amount of power consumed on the network is a selling point, when in reality it is the only feasable excuse for governments to ban it. Governments can never ban the protocol itself – it’s just math, after all – but can severely restrict where mining can happen if they think it is burning too much power and endangering other parts of the economy.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      Nobody in this community cares about opening a tab on Lightning and needing to continually police it to make sure you don’t lose your coins

      You don’t have to do this. This is all automated and abstracted away in UX. I’ve never manually looked at any channels. There is also zero incentive for an attacker to do an attack as your describing because prevention of such attacks is automated and they have to put coins at risk to do it. In lightning’s early days what you’re talking about was real and true, but it’s been years since that’s been the case. I dismissed lightning out of hand as well and came back round to it recently and it’s really matured a lot.

      Other algorithms are designed to use a large amount of memory also, and memory is harder to scale than computing power.

      Ultimately you are replacing one type of scale with another. At the end of the day, it’s hardware, and people will buy the appropriate hardware to mine, and if you can achieve economies of scale you can mine more efficiently all other variables the same. What route they use to turn that energy into BTC is almost immaterial.

      Other algorithms enforce that multiple nodes need to work in concert, and the network delays between them also enforce an additional cost.

      Until a device is created that can do it without concert, then you’ve ended up at square one except worse because one actor can now gain a significant advantage much more than say the party who gets the new ASICs first. You can “prove work”, you can’t “prove network latency”. Basing anything on network delays will cause clustering and centralization and is a less equitable distribution of mining power than energy can provide.

      but can severely restrict where mining can happen if they think it is burning too much power and endangering other parts of the economy.

      I’m not sure they want to though. Bitcoin miners are ‘buyers of last resort’, they’re not buying power at peak demand times. They’re not competing with existing electricity buyers. They’re helping grids over-provision renewables and ensuring they’ll have a buyer for any extra power produced during non-peak time and driving down the electric rates for their normal ratepayers since your rate is essentially cost to produce electricity/units of electricity produced and as you scale and bring in more renewables cost per unit goes down. Regulators have taken both pro and anti-mining stances, we’ll see how it shakes out, but regardless, as you say, it’s math and mining will still happen regardless. My money is on the grids which have 100% of produced electricity bought 100% of the time at the most efficient scale possible.