this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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if they don't explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right
then there's no reason to believe they got it wrong.
also they're vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.
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.
what's the problem of estimating based on mined blocks and difficulty?
not everyone is merge-mining and even those who do may only be merge-mining specific chains.
it's a bit like clocking your gas mileage to and from work, and then saying thats how much gas it took you to get out of your driveway.
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
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, .
asic miners are the problem with crypto's energy consumption. nothing is wrong the the bitcoin protocol, which is functioning as expected.
it's just that PoW is trash when applied at scale for encouraging energy use to create consensus - and that's by design - so indeed, "there's something wrong with the protocol".
you seem to understand that the protocol can function without the massive power use but you seem to want to blame the protocol for the power use.
at this point, we have to agree to disagree.
have a nice day
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>At scale
what does that mean?
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.
PoW isn't a problem at all.