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

[ZmnSCPxj]

Good morning Anton,

> >> 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.
> and
>
> (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.


The point of avoiding centralization is to avoid authorities --- who can end up being bribeable or hackable single points-of-failure, and which would potentially be able to kill Bitcoin as a whole from a single attack point.

Adding an authority which filters miners works directly against this goal, regardless of however you define "centralization" --- centralization is not the root issue here, the authority *is*.

One can observe that "more renewable" energy sources will, economically, be cheaper (in the long run) anyway, and you do not have to add anything to go towards "more green" energy resources.

After all, a "non-renewable" resource is simply a resource that has a lower supply (it cannot be renewed) than a "more renewable" energy source.
There is only so much energy that is stored in coal and oil on Earth, but the sun has a much larger total mass than Earth itself, thus it is a "more renewable" energy resource than coal and oil.
Economically, this implies that "greener" energy resources will be cheaper in the long run, simply by price being a function of supply.

In short: trust the invisible hand.

We already know that lots of miners already operate in places where energy prices have bottomed due to oversupply due to technological improvements in capturing energy that used to be dissipated as waste heat.
What is needed is to spread this knowledge to others, not mess with the design of Bitcoin at a fundamental level and risk introducing unexpected side effects (bugs).


Regards,
ZmnSCPxj