Re: Proposal for a new W3C CG: "Web We Can Afford"

> On 27 Jan 2016, at 08:06, alexandre.monnin@web-and-philosophy.org wrote:
> 
> Le Tue, 26 Jan 2016 10:06:19 +0100, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> a écrit:
> 
>> 
>>> On 26 Jan 2016, at 01:00, Jack Jamieson <jack.jamieson@mail.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> At any rate, I'm very pleased to see the creation of this group. One of my interests is material impacts of the web – a set of technologies that is so often presented as immaterial (e.g. in popular conceptions of "the cloud”) – and ecological impacts are a big part of this.
>> 
>> I'd be interested to know how much the electricity consumption would be if the BlockChain grew as much as the current
>> proponents indicate and if they did not change their proof of work algorithm.
>> 
>> Clearly there are other algorithms in the pipeline as pointed out by this article
>>    https://tonyarcieri.com/the-death-of-bitcoin <https://tonyarcieri.com/the-death-of-bitcoin>
>> 
>> But an argument from energy, can indeed be an argument against a certain type of algorithm.
> 
> Or some languages or bad practices for instance.
> 
> Another team at Inria has been looking at CSS and more specifically at the differences induced on energy consumption by badly written code. It seems that these are quite sizable...

Those look like things that can be improved, by better compilers, better languages, compression of sites, etc...

The really interesting case here is bitcoin, because there is so much money in it, that you can see people squeezing
every little bit of optimization they can out of the algorithms. But the algorithm themselves for bitcoin are fixed,
or at least very slow to change.

Here is a very good article on that:
"Bitcoin Is Unsustainable" with a good video on a chinese bitcoin mine.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-unsustainable

The article probably does not settle the issue, but it's an interesting starting point.

> 
> A.
> 
>> Henry
>

Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2016 09:07:40 UTC