[Arm-netbook] Urgent statement on Cryptocurrency ethics

[Sam Huntress]

Excessive power consumption by bitcoin miners is an indication that either power is undervalued, bitcoin is overvalued, or both.

> On Mar 21, 2018, at 3:48 PM, KRT Listmaster <listmaster at beauxbead.com> wrote:
> 
> Now the discussion is starting to get interesting....
> 
> On 03/21/2018 07:11 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> 
>> *if* people agree - world-wide - to slow down on the mining *then*
>> the hashrate - world-wide - will slow down.  however the only way
>> that's actually realistically likely to happen is when the "reward"
>> drops sufficiently (halves every 18 months) for the financial
>> incentive to lower.
>> 
>> *then* when the financial incentive lowers, the number of people
>> mining will also lower (non-financially-viable equipment switched off)
>> and the hashrate will correspondingly drop.
>> 
>> the problem with that assumption is that the people mining will only
>> be motivated by profit.  if they're genuinely interested in going over
>> the 50% share in order to corrupt / control the blocks then that
>> doesn't happen, and bitcoin goes to hell in a handbasket.
>> 
> 
> 
> Exactly, this is something most people fail to understand about mining.
> There's nothing inherent to the algorithm or the protocol that makes
> Bitcoin so power-hungry.  If the entire network agreed to all shut off
> the ASICs and run everything on low-powered SBCs running on photovoltaic
> cells only (for example), the network *itself* would continue to
> function just fine.  The difficulty would adjust itself (eventually, up
> to two weeks for BTC) to match the processing power available to it.
> That's the design.
> 
> When I first came across Bitcoin, the idea was to let your wallet
> solo-mine all the time in the background.  Pools didn't even exist yet
> when I first tried mining (on an ASUS netbook in rural Peru, no less),
> or at least I wasn't aware of them. At the time, I compared it to
> something like SETI at home, which looks for signals from space-brothers as
> a screen-saver, basically.  Everyone mines a little bit, and everyone
> gets a little bit of the reward.  One CPU, one vote.  That was the
> original intent.
> 
> The problem is greed.  Some clever bastard decided "Why limit myself to
> just a single background process?"  That's when dedicated mining rigs
> started, and the arms race began, even before GPUs came into the picture.
> 
>> 
>> i've been thinking about this, beyond what monero does (which plans
>> to hard-fork to increase the random-access memory usage).  monero is
>> not possible to do on a custom ASIC because it deliberately requires
>> large amounts of memory (6gb, 8gb).  if you were to make a custom ASIC
>> it would *be* a GPU... therefore you might as well buy...
>> off-the-shelf GPU Cards.
>> 
>> beyond that i think you need to specify and agree hard limits about
>> mining capabilities that, if exceeded, result in PENALTIES not
>> REWARDS.  such mining contracts would need to be stored *in the
>> blockchain* rather than being hard-coded.  miners would be required to
>> sign up to the mining contract (in the blockchain) in order to
>> participate, along-side a declaration of running some CPU benchmark
>> tests which indicate the computing capacity that they are declaring
>> that they intend to use.
>> 
>> if they go OUTSIDE of those parameters, by responding too fast on a
>> block (which can be verified by other miners re-running the same
>> algorithms that they did), they get PENALISED *not* REWARDED.
>> 
> 
> Yep, the Monero devs are very much dedicated to "egalitarian mining",
> which I think gets closer to Satoshi's original intent,[1][2] and makes
> something like javascript browser-based mining possible, which then
> opens up an entire new set of ethical concerns, even if it's a tiny step
> towards fair hashrate distribution. [3][4]
> 
> 
> What are the other options?  POS coins take very little energy, but "the
> rich get richer", and the more coin you have, the more you stake, etc.
> Not very egalitarian either.  Or some insta-premine like Ripple, where I
> just make a bajillion tokens out of thin air and then start selling them
> for a tenth of a cent each?  Neither of those seem like better
> distribution schemes to me.  So, how do we get newly mined coins into as
> many hands as possible?
> 
> Definitely an interesting conundrum.
> 
> - krt
> 
> ---
> 
> [1] https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html
> [2]
> https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitmain-announces-new-monero-mining-antminer-x3-cryptos-devs-say-will-not-work
> [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.02887.pdf
> [4] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/27/ethical_coinhive/
> 
> 
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