Re: [bitcoin-dev] Proposal: Force to do nothing for first 9 minutes to save 90% of mining energy

[Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com>]

> 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 <zachgrw@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.