> 1. Has anyone considered that it might be technically not possible to > completely 'power down' mining rigs during this 'cool-down' period of time? > While modern CPUs have power-saving modes, I am not sure about ASICs used for > mining.
Sounds like a point to consider, note the economic pressure of course so most people will find a way to power down. > 2. I am not a huge data-center specialist, but it was my understanding that > they charge per unit of installed (maximum) electricity consumption. It would > mean that if the miner needs X kilowatts-hour within that 1 minute when they > are allowed to mine, he/she will have to pay for the same X for the remaining > 9 minutes - and as such would have no economic incentive not to draw that > power when idling. That sounds kind of exotic, could you take charge of checking to see how true it is? > (a) Environmental concerns cause Bitcoin to be less popular and thus push the > price lower, which in turn lowers miner's power consumption (lower Bitcoin > price => less they can afford to spend on electricity). So it is a > self-stabilizing system to begin with. I like the idea but history shows that money outcompetes cute animals. > (b) Crazy power consumption may be a temporary problem, after the number of > halving events economic attractiveness of mining will decrease and power > consumption with it. If hashrate flattens, the chain security situation changes too. > 4. My counter-proposal to the community to address energy consumption > problems would be to encourage users to allow only 'green miners' process > their transaction. In particular: This cool idea of providing a way for users to support different miners with their transactions is not in conflict with reducing mining time. Both of these ideas are great ones; they are very different. On 5/16/21, Zac Greenwood <zach...@gmail.com> wrote: >> if energy is only expended for 10% of the same duration, this money must > now be spent on hardware. > > More equipment obviously increases the total energy usage. Are there people who can freely produce new mining equipment to an arbitrary degree? As I mentioned already and you didn't address, I thought the supply was limited. > For your proposal again this means that energy usage would not be likely to > decrease appreciably, because large miners having access to near-free energy > use the block-reward sized budget fully on equipment and other operational > expenses. Purchasing equipment with the same funds is unrelated to whether or not the machines are running full blast during a theoretical 90% downtime when a hash cannot succeed. If their electricity is free, they have no new funds to buy equipment with. Additionally, you claim that all these people use renewable energy so I don't know why they are being discussed at all. > On the other hand, roughly every four years the coinbase reward halves, which > does significantly lower the miner budget, at least in terms of BTC. Adjusting that could be another good approach to influencing properties of the chain. I think there's another thread around it, rather than this one. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
