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BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

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Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#61

Post by jaawn »

durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

within roughly 5 years or so (very rough guess on my part), all of the available Bitcoin will have been mined. At that point, the mining part of the equation will be moot, leaving only the blockchain infrastructure to consider. Note that this may not hold true for various "forks" of the bitcoin blockchain, or for other cryptocurrencies.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#62

Post by txcwpalpha »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #55
notahacker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean a 2 trillion dollar market cap? That's not the same as GDP. I mean, Apple is close to a 1 trillion dollar market cap. I'd argue a 1% increase in world power output simply for Apple to store its money and make transactions would be a remarkably poor use of power.

Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation. If anything, my "GDP" comparison was off the mark because GDP typically represents a country's total wealth, and bitcoin can't have a GDP. But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close. Those bitcoin paper millionaires are investing in startups like Pinkapp, and Pinkapp is hiring programmers. All of this is happening outside the le…

> Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation.

No, that's not how economies work. "Bitcoin benefits all who hold it" is like saying "the USD benefits everyone who has a USD". It's a completely meaningless statement.

> But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close.

No, it doesn't come close at all. Bitcoin's market cap has absolutely nothing to do with the value that Bitcoin adds to society, and thus it is a completely meaningless metric to look at if you are trying to decide if it "merits" use of our resources.

>Those bitcoin paper millionaires are investing in startups like Pinkapp, and Pinkapp is hiring programmers. All of this is happening outside the legal system. What does that say to you about bitcoin's ability to affect the world?

Nothing? I don't know what you're trying to say with this. Just because people made money off of bitcoin and now can use that money to hire other people does not mean it is affecting the world any more than anything else that people make money off of.

I also have no idea what you mean when you say "All of this is happening outside the legal system." That is another completely meaningless statement. I assure you that investments in startups and hiring of programmers all happens firmly within the bounds of all applicable legal systems. But even if it wasn't, it still says nothing about bitcoin's "ability to affect the world".

You need to stop drinking the bitcoin koolaid, bro. You're spouting nonsense in an attempt to defend it.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#63

Post by tantalor »

dgacmu wrote: post #59
notahacker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean a 2 trillion dollar market cap? That's not the same as GDP. I mean, Apple is close to a 1 trillion dollar market cap. I'd argue a 1% increase in world power output simply for Apple to store its money and make transactions would be a remarkably poor use of power.

This is a helpful way to view it. Apple's 2016 revenue of 215B was about 0.2% of gross world product (GWP)... Which means the power draw if extended globally would be 5x our current global use. Of course, it wouldn't actually happen that way, because Bitcoin itself would then cause the price of power to increase. Edited: fixed mis-use of "world GDP" to GWP as per tantalor's comment below. Thanks!

It's "gross world product", not "world GDP".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#64

Post by AgentME »

deevolution wrote: post #58
1053r wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your linked argument is poorly formed. It's true that any system which periodically emits value will cause people to work towards achieving that value. However, it's not true that the work in question will necessarily be wasted in an arms race. Specifically, a (well constructed) Proof of Stake system will cause people to work to get a piece of the value by having them purchase the coin used for staking. This will cau…

How does proof of stake prevent double spending if there are no miners to validate blocks? I must be missing something here...

Stakers take act like miners, but instead of staking computation time through proof-of-work, they stake an amount of cryptocurrency which gets burned if they ever double-vote (and maybe if they vote for the losing chain, etc, depending on the scheme).

It's not very obvious how exactly a proof-of-stake scheme should work though. Many past attempts have been pretty flawed. I'm excited to watch Ethereum's progress in this area.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#65

Post by sillysaurus3 »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #62
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation. If anything, my "GDP" comparison was off the mark because GDP typically represents a country's total wealth, and bitcoin can't have a GDP. But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close. Those bitcoin paper millionaires are investing in startups like Pinkapp, and Pinkapp is hiring programmers. All of this is happening outside the le…

> Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation. No, that's not how economies work. "Bitcoin benefits all who hold it" is like saying "the USD benefits everyone who has a USD". It's a completely meaningless statement. > But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close. No, it doesn't come close at all . Bitcoin's market cap has absolutely nothing to do with the value that Bitcoin…

Just because people made money off of bitcoin and now can use that money to hire other people does not mean it is affecting the world

This doesn't follow.

I also have no idea what you mean when you say "All of this is happening outside the legal system." That is another completely meaningless statement. I assure you that investments in startups and hiring of programmers all happens firmly within the bounds of all applicable legal systems.

You haven't done even the most cursory search for Pinkapp. It's outside of the legal system, i.e. criminal.

You need to stop drinking the bitcoin koolaid, bro. You're spouting nonsense in an attempt to defend it.

Please re-read the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's important on HN to comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#66

Post by sillysaurus3 »

notahacker wrote: post #60
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfair comparison. Bitcoin benefits all who hold it, not a single corporation. If anything, my "GDP" comparison was off the mark because GDP typically represents a country's total wealth, and bitcoin can't have a GDP. But it's a useful abstraction that comes pretty close. Those bitcoin paper millionaires are investing in startups like Pinkapp, and Pinkapp is hiring programmers. All of this is happening outside the le…

OK, let's do it the other way. Let's pretend (in BTC's favour) that market cap and GDP are the same thing. World GDP is around 100 trillion. So by your own figures, if it were denominated in BTC or equivalent cryptocurrency, we'd require more than 100% of the world's current power output just to store and send people's money. That's more power output than is currently required for all the world's homes, factories, ho…

This is a strawman argument. I'm trying to think of a charitable interpretation, but it's difficult.

The world's currency isn't ever going to be 100% bitcoin. It's an invalid basis to start from.

I kind of see what you're trying to hint at, but it would be helpful for discussion if you could think of a more persuasive example.

(It may be difficult though, because it seems true to say that if Bitcoin starts becoming a significant fraction of the world's GDP then it's fine if it uses a little power. Where "little" is relative to the ratio of BTC's wealth vs the world's wealth, vs BTC's power usage to the world's power usage.)

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#68

Post by paulgb »

jaawn wrote: post #61
durkie wrote: post #45

so this has been an issue that keeps coming up for a while, but i don't really understand the issue. * As others have asked, how much is bitcoin supposed to use? What's the right amount and why? How is that number better/worse than the amount of resources spent on existing financial infrastructure? * We are rapidly progressing towards an era of free (extremely cheap) clean power. Just today ( https://electrek.co/2017…

within roughly 5 years or so (very rough guess on my part), all of the available Bitcoin will have been mined. At that point, the mining part of the equation will be moot, leaving only the blockchain infrastructure to consider. Note that this may not hold true for various "forks" of the bitcoin blockchain, or for other cryptocurrencies.

No need to guess, the reward schedule is written into Bitcoin:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/162

Re: BitTorrent inventor announces eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor Chia

#70

Post by freeloop3 »

goodroot wrote: post #50

I understand the argument regarding power consumption. However, if we're going to green wash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing ) a cryptocurrency, we need to focus on more than power consumption. Given that power is getting cheaper and cleaner through solar[1, 2], this is asking people to further accumulate more waste and precious metals in the form of fixed drives. This is not eco-friendly and it's dubiou…

Bitcoin adjusts difficulty based on how many people mine it. So cheap power doesn't reduce the cost, since it will just mean even more mining.
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