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

[Anton Ragin <anton@etc-group.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5422 bytes --]

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.

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.

3. Not really a criticism of the idea to reduce Bitcoin energy consumption,
but rather a couple of observations:

(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.
(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.

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:

(a) According to this source (
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transaction-fees-usd), fees represent
approximately 12.5% of total miner reward. Not a lot, but not insignificant
either.

(b) Based on the method used in this source (
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/) to offset CO2
emissions of bitcoin mining the miner would need to spend approx ~3.6% -
7.2% (depending how 'dirty' is his power source) x 87.5% (mined portion of
its rewards) of its fees (assuming 50k Bitcoin price and 15$ / tonne of CO2
price of carbon offset).

(b) Should there be some non-profit organization(s) certifying green miners
and giving them cryptographic certificates of conformity (either usage of
green energy or purchase of offsets), users could encrypt their
transactions and submit to mempool in such a format that *only green miners
would be able to decrypt and process them*.

Users routing transactions specifically to 'green miners' (and posting
potentially higher fees) would create economic incentives for miners to use
green energy and/or buy CO2 offsets, as described above with ~3.1% - 6.8%
of total revenue cost to offset CO2 vs.12.5% of fees component in mining,
if majority of users would use the routing to green miners method - there
is a chance that Bitcoin network will become significantly greener.

Anton.

On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 8:02 PM Karl via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> [sorry if I haven't replied to the other thread on this, I get swamped
> by email and don't catch them all]
>
> This solution is workable but it seems somewhat difficult to me at this
> time.
>
> The clock might be implementable on a peer network level by requiring
> inclusion of a transaction that was broadcast after a 9 minute delay.
>
> Usually a 50% hashrate attack is needed to reverse a transaction in
> bitcoin.  With this change, this naively appears to become a 5%
> hashrate attack, unless a second source of truth around time and order
> is added, to verify proposed histories with.
>
> A 5% hashrate attack is much harder here, because the users of mining
> pools would be mining only 10% of the time, so compromising mining
> pools would not be as useful.
>
> Historically, hashrate has increased exponentially.  This means that
> the difficulty of performing an attack, whether it is 5% or 50%, is
> still culturally infeasible because it is a multiplicative, rather
> than an exponential, change.
>
> If this approach were to be implemented, it could be important to
> consider how many block confirmations people wait for to trust their
> transaction is on the chain.  A lone powerful miner could
> intentionally fork the chain more easily by a factor of 10.  They
> would need to have hashrate that competes with a major pool to do so.
>
> > How would you prevent miners to already compute the simpler difficulty
> problem directly after the block was found and publish their solution
> directly after minute 9? We would always have many people with a finished /
> competing solution.
>
> Such a chain would have to wait a longer time to add further blocks
> and would permanently be shorter.
>
> > Your proposal won’t save any energy because it does nothing to decrease
> the budget available to mine a block (being the block reward).
>
> You are assuming this budget is directly related to energy
> expenditure, but if energy is only expended for 10% of the same
> duration, this money must now be spent on hardware.  The supply of
> bitcoin hardware is limited.
>
> In the long term, it won't be, so a 10% decrease is a stop-gap
> measure.  Additionally, in the long term, we will have quantum
> computers and AI-designed cryptography algorithms, so things will be
> different in a lot of other ways too.
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6382 bytes --]