Bitcoin minting is thermodynamically perverse

[Red]

Currently the rules are why they are because the entire network is designed with "trust no one" but instead "trust everyone collectively".

You mean it is designed  to "trust no one", not of "trust everyone collectively"?

Trust no one node, but if enough nodes are saying the same thing, then trust that. 

This exchange is fascinating! At some sense it's just a matter of semantics, but it is very insightful semantics.

Logically I can support knightmb's statement "trust everyone collectively".
However kiba's statement "trust no one" is disprovable,
as is knightmb's statement "Trust no one node, but if enough nodes are saying the same thing, then trust that."

The way the system works is every node attempts to receive every transaction, they each try to put every received transaction into a block at the same time. And while they are doing that, they each play the hashing game individually looking for fate to bless them with a match before it does anyone else.

So at any given point in time the system is really *trust (but validate) someone arbitrarily*. This happens when someone declares a block & hash "solved". All the other nodes check the block for self consistency, but they DON'T check the block's transactions for consistency with the transactions they themselves were working on. Nor do they check against the transactions other nodes received. So I see no support for the "if enough nodes are saying the same thing, then trust that."

All nodes simply declare, "I will trust this node's work as the next increment of bitcoin truth, because fate has blessed it." So it doesn't qualify as a "trust no one" system. Node's never say, "Hey you fuck head! I have 5 known transactions you didn't bother to put in your block! You are a lying bastard." Everyone just presumes the missing transactions will be resubmitted and they'll end up in a subsequent block. This is heuristically plausible, but not absolutely deterministic. Everyone has to keep checking to make sure their transactions actually cleared the process.

So if knight's "trust everyone collectively" meant, "trust in the process" I find that insightful and a good motto. I'd probably add "...but keep doing your own validation!"

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[gridecon]

As an overall point, I also do not agree with the idea that the very high computational burden of coin generation is in fact a necessity of the current system. As I understand it, currency creation is fundamentally metered by TIME - and if that is the fundamental controlling variable, what is the need for everyone to "roll as many dice as posible" within that given time period? The "chain of proof" for coin ownership and transactions doesn't depend on the method for spawning coins.

You seem to have things backwards.
The "dice rolling" is to maintain the "chain of proof".
Actually giving out the coins is a side effect.

I have 2 questions for you:

Without high computational burden how do you propose we:

a) Maintain the integrity of the system?
b) Distribute/Seed the system with coins?

I understand that the incredibly thermodynamic inefficiency I was complaining about is in fact very deliberate, and bitcoin might be said to waste as much energy as possible, as a security feature! Now I really don't know what to think - because exactly what I was complaining about gives the system its diabolical effectiveness. I think my earlier analogy with deliberately burning wheat and trading photographs of the ruined crops is very apt. We are all ceremonially burning computer cycles as an investment of resources in a "trust pool". The irreversibility of the process - the fact that we are burning our computational wheat crop just to crank out unusually numerically small hashes - is definitely perverse, and deliberately so. The entirely stupid amount of resources wasted minting bitcoins makes it nigh-impossible that anyone would choose to be EVEN STUPIDER as to waste the amount of resources necessary to outcompute you.

The problem is, if you look at the competition in the world of digital currencies - online casino currencies, mmorpg currencies, and the like - they often have much larger economies than bitcoin, with much less security, verifiability, and certainly much lower thermodynamic burden! The market, in the form of consumers, does not seem to demand a massive investment of random numbers to be willing to trade in a currency. I understand of course that the competition is generally centralized and that the thermodynamics of bitcoin are designed as a substitute for central authority - but I personally would regard a "large enough" network of nodes signing a transaction history using standard public key cryptography to be secure enough to use without demanding to see photographs of 500 billion bushels of burnt wheat as proof of the network's seriousness.

I see three additional replies written while I was typing this, so I'll try to refocus:

I understand the system, and appreciate its strengths. I am actually happy to participate in the bitcoin economy, sending coins around as tips for forum posts and the like is enjoyable as a "game" and the cost of entry is currently pretty low. My personal concern is not over botnets taking over with forged currency, but with botnets taking over the issuance of genuine coins. That is why I think the "security through wasting energy" concept is flawed - not because it isn't secure, but because it has the potential to create incentives for harmful behaviors, which in turn diminishes the likelihood of building social trust in the currency.

[knightmb]

I see three additional replies written while I was typing this, so I'll try to refocus:

I understand the system, and appreciate its strengths. I am actually happy to participate in the bitcoin economy, sending coins around as tips for forum posts and the like is enjoyable as a "game" and the cost of entry is currently pretty low. My personal concern is not over botnets taking over with forged currency, but with botnets taking over the issuance of genuine coins. That is why I think the "security through wasting energy" concept is flawed - not because it isn't secure, but because it has the potential to create incentives for harmful behaviors, which in turn diminishes the likelihood of building social trust in the currency.

Ah I understand then, the answer is botnets can't forge currency because the swarm would not accept it. The only thing they can do is produce "real" currency at the expense of the stolen CPU time. Just like forcing slaves to mine gold will still net you real gold, just at no cost.

The only known *practical* attack to bitcoin from a botnet would be to have more CPU than the swarm at your command and to use that CPU power to double-speed currency. So while that could possible fall in into the "forged currency" category, it's not so much to make fake currency as it is spending valid currency twice before anyone notices.

[NewLibertyStandard]

I had all four of my cores dedicated previously toward the goal of generating bitcoins, but it's no longer worth the cost to me. I am now only generating using one core but the goal is no longer to generate bitcoins. My current goal is to help maintain the strength of the network and to help the network recover (get to the next block adjustment) when and if a large botnet drops out. Bitcoin was about generating bitcoins, but now it's not. Now it's about competing botnets providing a secure and reliable foundation for an open currency. Yeah, they're stealing the electricity and yeah, they're profiting, but at least they're putting their stolen CPU cycles to a useful and accepted purpose instead of more harmful activities that they probably would be engaged in if they had not discovered bitcoin.

[gridecon]

I had all four of my cores dedicated previously toward the goal of generating bitcoins, but it's no longer worth the cost to me. I am now only generating using one core but the goal is no longer to generate bitcoins. My current goal is to help maintain the strength of the network and to help the network recover (get to the next block adjustment) when and if a large botnet drops out. Bitcoin was about generating bitcoins, but now it's not. Now it's about competing botnets providing a secure and reliable foundation for an open currency. Yeah, they're stealing the electricity and yeah, they're profiting, but at least they're putting their stolen CPU cycles to a useful and accepted purpose instead of more harmful activities that they probably would be engaged in if they had not discovered bitcoin.

Ok, bravo for an amazingly honest and straightforward answer. That is probably the most overall convincing argument I have seen made in the thread. You are arguing that the overall social utility of Bitcoin is "worth it" - worth both the raw energy cost of the computational work, and worth the regrettable fact that it provides a profit opportunity for botnet operators. I don't have a proposal for how exactly you measure the costs and benefits, but I entirely agree with your analysis of the bottom line of the situation. You could even make the argument that minting bitcoins as an activity is less harmful than other botnet activities like sending out spam.

[MoonShadow]

You could even make the argument that minting bitcoins as an activity is less harmful than other botnet activities like sending out spam.

I think that he already did.

[jgarzik]

I had all four of my cores dedicated previously toward the goal of generating bitcoins, but it's no longer worth the cost to me. I am now only generating using one core but the goal is no longer to generate bitcoins. My current goal is to help maintain the strength of the network and to help the network recover (get to the next block adjustment) when and if a large botnet drops out. Bitcoin was about generating bitcoins, but now it's not. Now it's about competing botnets providing a secure and reliable foundation for an open currency.

Well said.

Participation in the network as an honest node helps everyone.

[BitLex]

You are arguing that the overall social utility of Bitcoin is "worth it" - worth both the raw energy cost of the computational work, and worth the regrettable fact that it provides a profit opportunity for botnet operators.

I'd rather like to support a system like bitcoin, that i can use myself for value-transaction, than searching for E.T. to make some scientist save cash. That's a waste of energy and still people do it voluntarily without any benefits.

And i really dont care if some botnet-ops make a profit or not, as long as they don't bother ME (or anyone else).

[satoshi]

It's the same situation as gold and gold mining.  The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold.  Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.

I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin.  The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.  Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.

As an overall point, I also do not agree with the idea that the very high computational burden of coin generation is in fact a necessity of the current system. As I understand it, currency creation is fundamentally metered by TIME - and if that is the fundamental controlling variable, what is the need for everyone to "roll as many dice as posible" within that given time period? The "chain of proof" for coin ownership and transactions doesn't depend on the method for spawning coins.

Each node's influence on the network is proportional to its CPU power.  The only way to show the network how much CPU power you have is to actually use it.

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

I suppose it might be possible to measure CPU power at certain times.  For instance, if the CPU power challenge was only run for an average of 1 minute every 10 minutes.  You could still prove your total power at given times without running it all the time.  I'm not sure how that could be implemented though.  There's no way for a node that wasn't present at the time to know that a past chain was actually generated in a duty cycle with 9 minute breaks, not back to back.

Proof-of-work has the nice property that it can be relayed through untrusted middlemen.  We don't have to worry about a chain of custody of communication.  It doesn't matter who tells you a longest chain, the proof-of-work speaks for itself.

[Red]

I say this half flippantly and half seriously. :-)

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

If I were you, I would have considered a mapping that included, "For each entry into the bitcoin transaction recording/gold mining lottery, please send $10 to Satoshi."

That would discourage botnet operators from thousands of nodes. And if it didn't you would have tens of thousands of dollars! ;-)

[NewLibertyStandard]

I say this half flippantly and half seriously. :-)

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

If I were you, I would have considered a mapping that included, "For each entry into the bitcoin transaction recording/gold mining lottery, please send $10 to Satoshi."

That would discourage botnet operators from thousands of nodes. And if it didn't you would have tens of thousands of dollars! ;-)

I can't imagine a more splintered network.

[Red]

I can't imagine a more splintered network.

You laugh and I did too. But consider that the launch of bitcoin could have gone this way.

--------

Hi I'm Satoshi, you a are the 20 largest ISP's in the world. I'm launching a new network cash service. It will add significant value to your existing customer base and make you some additional revenue.

So here is the deal, In exchange for each of you running a bitcoin transaction verification peer and signing this contract, you will receive 1,000,000 BTC. You agree (in the contract) to distribute >= 500,000 BTC to your existing customer base in the first year. You may sell them, give them away to new subscribers or as a value add to promotions. Compete among yourselves, dispose of them anyway you want. Dispose of or keep the rest to dispose of in the future.

You also agree to run the transaction verification servers honestly for X years. Here is a free client you can pass out to your customers, you can give it away or charge them a service fee. Compete among yourselves.

Each of you pay me $100 for the privilege, you'll make that back the first day.

Thank you for your $2,000 good luck to you all!

Poof, now there is a functioning bitcoin network will all 21,000,000 coins in circulation. Satoshi gets to keep the last 1,000,000 BTC + he gets the $2,000.

Bitcoin builds on the reputation of the 20 largest ISP's and is adopted immediately. 20 trusted nodes can reach consensus quickly so there is no reason for the hashing game or new minting rewards.

----

I don't think that is too pie in the sky for some of the clever salesmen I know to pull off.

[knightmb]

I can't imagine a more splintered network.

You laugh and I did too. But consider that the launch of bitcoin could have gone this way.

--------

Hi I'm Satoshi, you a are the 20 largest ISP's in the world. I'm launching a new network cash service. It will add significant value to your existing customer base and make you some additional revenue.

So here is the deal, In exchange for each of you running a bitcoin transaction verification peer and signing this contract, you will receive 1,000,000 BTC. You agree (in the contract) to distribute >= 500,000 BTC to your existing customer base in the first year. You may sell them, give them away to new subscribers or as a value add to promotions. Compete among yourselves, dispose of them anyway you want. Dispose of or keep the rest to dispose of in the future.

You also agree to run the transaction verification servers honestly for X years. Here is a free client you can pass out to your customers, you can give it away or charge them a service fee. Compete among yourselves.

Each of you pay me $100 for the privilege, you'll make that back the first day.

Thank you for your $2,000 good luck to you all!

Poof, now there is a functioning bitcoin network will all 21,000,000 coins in circulation. Satoshi gets to keep the last 1,000,000 BTC + he gets the $2,000.

Bitcoin builds on the reputation of the 20 largest ISP's and is adopted immediately. 20 trusted nodes can reach consensus quickly so there is no reason for the hashing game or new minting rewards.

----

I don't think that is too pie in the sky for some of the clever salesmen I know to pull off.

You would then have to rely on "for profit" companies to be the central authority for the new currency and how long would it take to generate the full chain even at a difficulty of 1.00?

[Red]

I'm not opposed to for profit companies. Nor am I opposed to your for profit venture. Eventhough you have a huge advantage by learning about bitcoin before most people.

My point was, if you have only twenty-one nodes validating transactions you don't need the block list at all. There are easier ways of reaching consensus with a smaller pool of peers.

[gridecon]

It's the same situation as gold and gold mining.  The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold.  Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin.  The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.  Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.
[...]
Proof-of-work has the nice property that it can be relayed through untrusted middlemen.  We don't have to worry about a chain of custody of communication.  It doesn't matter who tells you a longest chain, the proof-of-work speaks for itself.

Thanks very much for your reply. I agree with your analysis, and this thread has actually changed my mind as to my initial criticism. After more careful study of the design of the Bitcoin network and trying to understand the exact manner in which Bitcoin attempts to create value from the computational work invested, I am now inclined to think that bitcoin is in fact high EFFICIENT rather than inefficient. My thinking now is that bitcoin does not, in fact "waste" computational work at all - instead it works hard to deliver the most value possible from that computational work. Something like a governnment issued fiat currency may not have any obvious energy burden beyond its printing - but in fact, maintaining the value of a fiat currency requires a substantial investment in maintaining police enforcement, a legal system, and national defense. In comparison to the energy cost of hiring police officers to enforce economic honesty, the energy costs of investing cpu cycles in guaranteeing that honesty mathematically seem very small!

[joechip]

It's the same situation as gold and gold mining.  The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold.  Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.

I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin.  The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used.  Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.

I agree with nearly everything you said, but I disagree, fundamentally, with the bolded.  Gold mining is not a waste of energy.  It is the opposite of waste, it is the measure of value people place in the 'utility of having gold as a medium of exchange' or a store of wealth, jewelry around their body parts or connectors on their home theater system.  If there was no demand for gold, the price would be zero.  Hence it is not a 'waste,' by definition.

I object strenuously to this idea, promulgated by the Monetarists, that the production of money is wasted capital which could be spent on other wealth-building projects.  It's a short-sighted argument which does not fully encompass the value we place in our money.

It's semantics, yes, but the negative connotations associated with the word "waste" is a tool of the money masters designed to confuse us and elevate their bankrupt system.

Ta,

[Red]

I really I understood the point of this thread but I guess I didn't.

I assumed that if you could design to do the exact same thing in the same commodity quantities and at the same protection level, BUT consuming less energy and producing less BTUs of heat, then that would be less wasteful.

You can mine gold in lots of ways, some require less resources than others. If two processes produce the same amount of gold then no point in optimizing anything else?

[MoonShadow]

The power used is not wasteful.  It is simply what the owner is willing to commit to the project.  Even so, it may be used even as "waste heat".  I am an electritian by trade, and years ago I had the following idea form, while installing a 'heat trace' network on insulated sprinkler lines inside an open air parking garage.

The 'heat trace' is a fairly expensive cable that has a continuous resistive core to produce low intensity electric heat along the length of the pipe that it's taped onto.  Insulation is then wrapped around this assembly.  The best, and most efficient, systems have a temp reactive core; so that the closer to the freezing point that the cable itself becomes at any given length, the lower the resistance across the core becomes, resulting in an increase in heat output along the colder and less well insulated sections. 

At the time, I was playing with an early form of distributed computing called "Condor", which allowed single processes to be exported to other computers upon a network and their disk I/O shipped back across the network to a master server without the process being able to tell the difference.  I thought then that a small "computer on a chip" wired upon a flat network cable would be able to effectively perform the same functions of keeping the pipes above freezing with local temp sensitivity while also crunching numbers in exactly the same way that bitcoin requires.  Such an idea would require a network that permited quite a bit of power in order to not need an unacceptable number of power points along the pipe, but imagine the usefulness of such a system for companies that have such needs in very high (or very low) latitudes.

What if such a system were retrofitted onto the Alaskan Oil Pipeline, for example, one mile at a time?

[satoshi]

The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.  If you're using electric heat where you live, then your computer's heat isn't a waste.  It's equal cost if you generate the heat with your computer.

If you have other cheaper heating than electric, then the waste is only the difference in cost.

If it's summer and you're using A/C, then it's twice.

Bitcoin generation should end up where it's cheapest.  Maybe that will be in cold climates where there's electric heat, where it would be essentially free.

[pyrrhos]

I agree with nearly everything you said, but I disagree, fundamentally, with the bolded.  Gold mining is not a waste of energy.  It is the opposite of waste, it is the measure of value people place in the 'utility of having gold as a medium of exchange' or a store of wealth, jewelry around their body parts or connectors on their home theater system.  If there was no demand for gold, the price would be zero.  Hence it is not a 'waste,' by definition.

Not necessarily, digging out a little bit more gold just makes the existing gold a bit less valuable since the supply is increased. That is because its value is mainly derived from its scarcity. Its utility IS its scarcity. However, it is not a waste for the miner if the cost of mining can stay below the price of gold.

I really I understood the point of this thread but I guess I didn't.

I assumed that if you could design to do the exact same thing in the same commodity quantities and at the same protection level, BUT consuming less energy and producing less BTUs of heat, then that would be less wasteful.

You can mine gold in lots of ways, some require less resources than others. If two processes produce the same amount of gold then no point in optimizing anything else?

I suppose that if anybody (as opposed to a single trusted entity) can produce bitcoins then the production costs will converge close to value of the produced bitcoin itself. If that were not true then it would make sense for someone to invest resources to produce as many bitcoin as possible. Since we dont want to let the value of bitcoin to go down then the production costs need to rise to the value of bitcoin.