the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that youโve wasted enormous amounts of energy.
Cโmon, thatโs being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, โyour C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it.โ
It was a poor design decision, but it wasnโt a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.
Itโs absolutely not the case that nobody was thinking about computer power use. The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point and even had an EU-US agreement, and that was sitting alongside the EUโs own energy program. Getting an 80Plus-certified power supply was already common advice to anyone custom-building a PC which was by far the primary group of users doing Bitcoin mining before it had any kind of mainstream attention. And the original Bitcoin PDF includes the phrase โIn our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.โ, despite not going in-depth (it doesnโt go in-depth on anything).
The late 00s werenโt the late 90s where the most common OS in use did not support CPU idle without third party tooling hacking it in.
The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point
And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPAโs objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 โ 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intelโs 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isnโt included in any of the TCO metrics.
All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers โ you turned them off to save power. DVFS didnโt become widely available โ or effective โ until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that โonly 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.โ
So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasnโt a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power โ always the same amount of power โ or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or werenโt. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.
If I were looking to assign blame, Iโd start with the coal and gas operators who are digging up fossil fuels that would otherwise remain in the ground just to fuel their bitcoin mining rigs, those who peddle specious arguments claiming that it somehow isnโt a problem, those who turned the whole thing into a machine for separating the gullible from their money, and those whoโve built the shaky, buggy, mostly proprietary, convoluted, half-finished, untrustworthy, horrible mess that is the software ecosystem surrounding the whole cryptocurrency sphere. Perhaps none of that could have been foreseen by whoever designed bitcoin. On them we can instead put the blame for the failure to make it anywhere near sufficiently scalable, and the ridiculous choice of mechanism for the bitcoin monetary policy which serves to make it function only as a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme and not a durable currency. Regardless of whoโs to blame, itโs got to go.
Perhaps thereโs already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype, but if so itโs currently hidden under such an enormous pile of shitcoins that itโs impossible to identify. At least the internal combustion engine was good at doing the thing it was supposed to do.
Perhaps thereโs already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype
The USDโฆ /jk ๐คฃ๐คฃ
No currency or money system can avoid those, they are intrinsic features of capitalism, which is an intrinsic consequence of โwhoever hoards more X, gets more of most things in lifeโ.
And can you blame people for wanting to hide their cards when hoarding X? Have you tried consulting real-time stock values, with market depth, and a list of market orders? Have you checked the pricing plans for a Bloomberg terminal?
Crypto is a world of transparency and freedom, compared to non-crypro markets.
Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use.
It didnโt take long before people saw that energy was a major factor in cost of operations of the network.
It was a poor design decision
One that is fiercely defended by people who invested into the implementation. So it may not have started with it being anticipated, but not it is and people are actively choosing to perpetuate this use of energy.
