The notion of an Internet-enabled toaster or coffee machine was for the longest time, and hopefully still is, a harmless joke.
Not everyone seems to get jokes however, and some of the unfunniest people on the Internet seem to get their kicks from taking other people's money with "crypto", so it's maybe unsurprising that coiners have taken seriously the idea of creating Internet-enabled toasters.
Let's be honest, mining is the biggest bit bucket in computer science history. A bit bucket is where wasted data goes. Most calculations in mining are wasted as lost bets in the bit-mask lottery: PoW is not useful security, it's a scam. So what does mining actually do, other than take people for fools? In all seriousness it toasts the planet, and the toaster I want to introduce you to today is the Bitmain Antminer S9.
This device converts electrical energy into radiative1 and convective energy, using TSMC nano-scale Silicon processes. If operated at scale this beast will cook an atmosphere and with that, your bread. Although it will probably boil the oceans and melt polar ice first, due to some nuisances owing to the ideal gas law.
Unfortunately there is one small problem with this toaster. To cook (using Maillard reactions) a slice of bread properly you need a temperature (t) of 400>t>200C or an energy sum of 72 kilo-Joules (kJ) transferred under some time curve, but each unit is limited by the fact chips melt if they get that hot, so they are operated within engineering limits, usually <72C as measured on die.
So, we can cook all the bread on the planet with an air-air interface, just like a toaster does, but the time-scale is many years not minutes. The fun part is we can compute from this a relativistic mining and bread-toasting equivalence: apples for apples, Joules for Joules.
Another issue with this design is when cooking bread via the atmosphere, it's easy to forget all known humanoid life in the universe exists in this narrow strip above our lithosphere and hydrosphere. Proteins will mis-fold and cancer rates will sky rocket, due to the Brownian motion noise long before the toast can be enjoyed. But, there is surely some Genius to the Bitcoin energy issue us mortals have not understood. The silly no-coiners like me, who enjoy fitting curves to data more than white collar crime are just being haters?
I promise I'm not a hater, 8.8 trillion pieces of toast per year for a Pyramid scam is just a bit out of proportion. The working is simple. Trust but verify, right?
J_btc=175.87e12*3600 J_toast=72e3 J_btc/J_toast/1e12=8.7935
That much toast would probably solve world hunger, that's 24 billion pieces of toast per day, while on the other hand Bitcoin only consolidates wealth, upwards. Bitcoiners themselves brag how it is a deflationary system for consolidation of wealth, and therefore can not simultaneously be for the redistribution-of.
It's one or the other; you can't pick both. And if Bitcoin is a deflationary currency does that not mean fiat currency becomes it's inflationary co-domain? The yield comes from somewhere and Bitcoin's mere existence would surely be forcing central banks to take corrective measures to reduce inflation?
A lot of big questions and no answers, sorry, but at least we can ask them. The moral of this short story is I am just grateful for the bread I receive, but also grateful for the delicate environment I enjoy it in.
Footnotes:
- Nyquist noises into the mega-hertz (not radioactive)