A Prime Number Could Be the Answer to Bitcoins Power Problem (Bloomberg) {misleading title}

[eppur_se_muova]

Last edited Mon Jan 22, 2018, 11:41 AM - Edit history (1)

By Jonathan Tirone
January 10, 2018, 11:00 PM CST Updated on January 11, 2018, 8:24 AM CST

--Real-world problems can also be solved through crypto mining
--Cryptocurrencies challenged to put electricity to better use

Methods used by computers programmed to run a 350-year-old equation may also offer answers to bitcoin’s out-sized demand for electricity.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search found and confirmed the biggest known prime number, a 23-million-digit-long figure discovered with the math of 16th century French monk Marin Mersenne, according to a statement earlier this month. That effort, along with other collaborative computing methods, are advancing the science of cryptography, which is essential to creating and tracking bitcoins.

“These ideas could be seen as intellectually connected,” said Seth Schoen, a senior technologist at San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is offering a $150,000 bounty to the first person or group to discover a 100-million digit prime number. “Cryptocurrency mining could be seen as an indirect descendant of distributed computing projects.”
***
Bounty hunters for prime numbers and cryptography hacker groups have helped to improve cryptocurrencies by showing people how to collectively compute problems in a distributed way, Schoen said. Bitcoin is an “odd fit” in this tradition because the math problems it solves aren’t particularly “useful or interesting for anything” outside its system.

“This energy is put to a productive use in one sense -- confirming the authenticity of bitcoin transactions,” Schoen wrote in an email. “Yet it seems disproportionate in many ways, particularly if another technical alternative could be found for confirming transactions while using much less energy.”
***
more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/bitcoin-seen-addressing-power-hog-problem-with-prime-number-find

[Jim__]

1. I can't read that article at Bloomberg.

The link goes to their technology page which doesn't seem to have a link to that story. I can find a link on google - it works, but sometimes it throws me out after reading for about 1 minute. The New York Review of Books had an article in January on bitcoin and it talked about the consumption of electricity - but I don't think they had any immediate solutions.

An excerpt from the article in NYRB:

...

When the bitcoin network began operating in 2009, people could run the validation program on their personal computers and earn bitcoins if their computer solved the puzzle first. As demand for bitcoin increased, and more people were vying to find the random, algorithmic proof of work validation number, speed became essential. Mining began to require sophisticated graphics cards and, when those proved too slow, special, superfast computers built specifically to validate transactions and mine bitcoins. Individual miners have dropped out for the most part, and industrial operators have moved in. These days, mining is so computer-intensive that it takes place in huge processing centers in countries with low energy costs, like China and Iceland. One of these, in the town of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, has a staff of fifty who oversee 25,000 computers in eight buildings that run day and night. A company called BitFury, which operates mining facilities in Iceland and the Republic of Georgia and also manufactures and sells specialized, industrial processing rigs, is estimated to have mined at least half a million bitcoins so far. At today’s price, that’s worth around $7.5 billion.

Still, it’s not exactly free money. Marco Streng, the cofounder of Genesis Mining, estimates that it costs his company around $400 in electricity alone to mine each bitcoin. That’s because bitcoin mining is not only computationally intensive, it is energy-intensive. By one estimate, the power consumption of bitcoin mining now exceeds that of Ireland and is growing so exponentially that it will surpass that of the entire United States by July 2019. A year ago, the CEO of BitFury, Valery Vavilov, reckoned that energy accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of his company’s bitcoin-mining costs. According to David Gerard—whose new book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain, is a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency like the Tapscotts’—“By the end of 2016,” a single mining facility in China was using “over half the estimated power used by all of Google’s data centres worldwide at the time.”

One way bitcoin miners offset these costs is by collecting the very thing digital money, traded peer-to-peer, was supposed to make obsolete: transaction fees. By one estimate, these fees have risen 1,289 percent since March 2015. On any given day, the fees will be in the millions of dollars and now cost upward of twenty dollars per transaction. While transaction fees are not mandatory, they are a way for users to attempt to jump the queue in a system rife with bottlenecks, since those who offer miners a fee to have their transactions included in a block have a better chance of that happening. With so many transactions lined up, waiting to be processed, miners have discretion over which will make it to the head of the line; the higher the fee, the more likely it is to be chosen. As the explanatory website Unlock Blockchain puts it: “when miners mine a block, they become temporary dictators of that block. If you want your transactions to go through, you will have to pay a toll to the miner in charge…. The higher the transaction fees, the faster the miners will put [the transactions] up in their block.” As a consequence, transactions can be held up for hours or days or dropped altogether.

...

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Oops, wrong link ! Fixed it now. nt