Because this is a website full of engineers who write computer software for a living? And finding and solving for those edge cases is literally a core function of what most of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time doing?
To me the big gripe is not the concern for edge cases but the immediate dismissal of a very productive first step in addressing an issue by resolving the entire conversation before it even happens.
It is very possible to bring up edge cases in a productive manner. Expand the conversation to include them. there's no need to assume the first solution idea posted is meant to be the final form
But is it even a productive first step? There are arguments to be made that proof-of-work mining incentivizes renewable R&D.
By banning that because it uses "too much" energy now - what are we potentially losing? What developments in renewables, energy storage, or grid development simply won't be there, which we won't know we don't have, because we banned the largest for-profit, skin-in-the-game competitive contest for low-cost energy that the world had ever seen 25 years prior?
Banning it outright is short-sighted. Thinking about it from a higher level is a way of addressing the real issue of carbon emissions while allowing a phenomenon that has the potential to massively help, not hurt, to thrive.
The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
The issue is clearly a tragedy of the commons - the cost (higher air pollution/higher energy costs) is socialized, while the profits are centralized. So the maximization function is cheap >>> anything else. Why wouldn't we expect more and larger coal plants versus research into fusion reactors?
That's only true so long as the price continually rises. As soon as the price settles, everyone is operating on the margin and can only become more profitable by reducing costs.
Unsubsidized renewables are already the cheapest new source of energy generation. [0] Even if miners wouldn't be doing direct renewable research themselves, their capital investments into renewables in the name of competition and cost-savings would incentivize more efficient technologies.
In this case the immediate marginal profits from mining are centralized, and the larger benefits of more advanced renewable energy are socialized.
Plus - do you believe that the price of Bitcoin will rise forever? If it did, wouldn't that mean to you that it might be doing something important, to constantly have growth and demand for 100 years? Cuz if I thought so then I'd want to preserve it, not throw it away. Sounds important.
Bitcoin isn't the only option. We've already seen that when the price of Bitcoin dips miners flip over to whatever cryptocoin seems next to bubble, seems next most interesting. Certainly what is called Bitcoin itself (today) has "hard" "deflationary" "caps", but as soon as miners get bored with that, there's always more room for more forks and other coins.
Even if Bitcoin isn't intended to be "growing forever", the ecosystem can and will.
> The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
Shameless hijacking here: at what point will the heat consumption/release rate be so great that the Earth becomes unable to support life? I've seen some back of the napkin calculations that estimate a couple hundred years, at our current acceleration.
IIRC (it has been a few years), we only need a few degrees to reach a tipping point. The decay of methane hydrates could push out 1000 GT CO2 equivalent suddenly, accelerating warming by roughly ~40-50 years.
Lighting all the oil and gas in the world on fire will also incentivize renewables. But that's not a good practice for a lot of reasons including increasing the pollution and CO2 levels.
Making renewables isn't actually useful if they're used for something we don't even need to do. We could switch to a low-energy crypto currency and do all the things we were going to do with Bitcoin.
Making this change would introduce an enormously impactful precedent. Politicians might take it and run with it to places we don't even want to imagine. I'd agree with you in a world without the current style of politics and decision making, but that's not where we live - and sadly alternative to that is unknown to me too.
I'm a software engineer, and I'm probably at least in the 90th percentile for ability to manage (or design not to have) edge cases. I try not to be that pedantic when criticizing coworker's designs, other than perhaps pointing out that lots of edge cases in a design is a common symptom of over-complexity.
On this particular topic, I particularly hate the amount of fossil fuels getting burned on cryptocurrency. I'm less concerned about the amount of energy getting "wasted" on data centers in general. At least in most cases, there's alignment of interests when it comes to efficiency optimization. Facebook has an incentive to make their servers more power efficient over time, and scale their capacity to the size of their customer base. With proof-of-work, there's also incentive to increase power efficiency, but also incentive to scale up to capacity limits.
I think it is possible that proof-of-work cryptocurrency algorithms could be tuned to the point of striking a sustainable balance long term, but that would require the world economy to converge on one or two of them. The issue with that I think is the speculative nature of the currency's distribution of ownership. With large portions of the currency being held by a small number of anonymous people, and no clear path for the majority of normal folk to exchange their wealth, it's just not going to happen without some sort of societal collapse. I also struggle to have faith in a system meant to disrupt the global economy when its existence depends on global scale internet infrastructure.
