>> 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?
I am pretty sure that is how it works in data centers absent 'special deal', as we use some DCs in our business. However, after reading some discussion on this thread it is pretty clear that some (maybe even majority?) of miners have some sort of special deal on electricity - some use 'spill over' electricity which would otherwise be wasted etc. This kind of disproves my point, but not entirely - even 'special deal' electricity is very unlikely to be available like water in the tap - you open it when you need it, and pay for what you use only.
Variations in power consumption in the grid are very difficult to compensate for:
(a) there is no efficient way to store electricity;
(b) some (majority?) power-generating assets are notoriously difficult to throttle up and down - it takes almost a day in some cases to throttle down power production on the nuclear power plant for example.
(did you know that sometimes the spot price for electricity goes below zero, and consumers are being paid to consume - exactly because it is cheaper to pay somebody to consume electricity than to switch off the reactor?)
Because of this, an enormous spike in energy consumption every 1 minute in 10 is the worst possible load profile to any power grid, and would most likely result in either miners or power grid infrastructure itself just burning off peak energy during the 9 minutes 'cool-down' period.
>> 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:
>>...
>> (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*.
>Hello centralisation. Might as well just have someone sign miner keys, and get
>rid of PoW entirely...
>No, it is not centralization -
No, it is not centralization, as:
(a) different miners could use different standards / certifications for 'green' status, there are many already;
(b) it does not affect stability of the network in a material way, rather creates small (12.5% of revenue max) incentive to move to green sources of energy (or buy carbon credits) and get certified - miners who would choose to run dirty energy will still be able to do so.
(c) nothing is being proposed beyond what is already possible - Antpool can go green today, and solicit users to send them signed transactions directly instead of adding them to a public mempool, under the pretext that it would make the transfer 'greener'. What is being proposed is some community effort to standardize & promote this approach, because if we manage to make Bitcoin green(er) - we will remove what many commentators see as the last barrier / biggest risk to even wider Bitcoin adoption.
Not to mention the fact that some aspects of the Bitcoin community are pretty centralized already - '
www.bitcoin.org', GitHub repo, certain global internet cables / protocols / providers. Centralization is evil only when it enables (or makes significantly easier) a threatening attack on the network, which does not appear to be the case. It is my personal opinion only, though, I would respect it if someone disagrees.
On a separate note, I just want to draw everyone's attention to the fact that - assuming if my calculations are correct - carbon credits to offset dirty energy burned by miners would cost only approx 5% of block rewards in USD terms max. On the other hand, BTC price has just collapsed 20% because Tesla dropped their adoption citing environmental concerns. If every miner on the planet agrees to go green or buy carbon credits, it will actually be commercially beneficial to everybody, as the price will likely skyrocket - the problem is that such situation absent community coordination is not a Pareto-equilibrium state, which means that every single miner is incentivised to break away from the commitment to the green energy.
Maybe there is another solution to the problem, and huge mining pools need to establish a 'green cartel' like OPEC and all start buying carbon credits in order to make Bitcoin greener and more widely adopted for their own benefit.