• HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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    10 months ago

    the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I’m using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

    and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

      Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain’s system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.

      • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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        10 months ago

        the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          That’s because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.

          The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  Right. Which is not what I was talking about. This was about how a PoW chain would become useless if there was no cost involved in making blocks, ie, if the “W” part was missing. It would allow anyone to add blocks. There’d be no way to distinguish forks from each other and decide on a canonical one. Being able to agree on a particular fork as being the “valid” one in a decentralized manner is the fundamental secret sauce of what makes cryptocurrency work. All the various protocols boil down to ways of solving that one particular problem.

        • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          then there’s no reason to believe they got it wrong.

          also they’re vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.

          • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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            10 months ago

            there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i’m dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i’m not going to believe them, and no one should.

              • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                10 months ago

                the work that goes into mining those blocks should be discounted by the amount of energy that goes into mining every other merge-mined chain

                • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  ok, so either ~1% figure already discounts this energy due to merge-mining, or it doesn’t discount and the effective energy consumption of Doge is lower. The original point remains: Bitcoin is pretty much the energetic problem of crypto, .

                  • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                    10 months ago

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