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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#411

Post by justicz »

thesausageking wrote: post #391
justicz wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the Chinese government can kill the liveness of the network (preventing it from producing new blocks), but not the safety of the network (they can't fork the chain). Your question has changed into: "doesn't the system break when a malicious party controls 35% of the stake?" To which the answer is yes. If a malicious party can control 35% of the stake, that is very bad. I should add, though, that if you k…

"If a malicious party can control 35% of the stake, that is very bad." That didn't happen in this case. The Chinese government never took anyone's keys or controlled any stake, which is the point of the example. The malicious parties don't need control. They don't need to take anyone's keys or access their servers. They just need to be able to bring it offline, which is much easier to do. Which raises the question I…

You are right to call out the difference between "control" in the sense of keys and "control" in the sense of a network adversary. I should have been more careful with my wording there.

It is true that if 35% of the participating stake is suddenly prevented from contacting the network, no new blocks will be created. The word "participating" is important -- you can have stake that is not participating in the agreement protocol, but that is still spendable.

The only way I can think of to mitigate the scenario you've described would be this: before going offline, you can broadcast a transaction which essentially removes your stake from the pool of participating coins until you're able to come online again. This would ensure the network can proceed without you.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#412

Post by root_axis »

stale2002 wrote: post #395
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant. Renewable energy could be used to replace other sources, instead of peed away on this. A larger demand for energy likely means more polluting forms of energy will come back into service/stay in service to meet the demand.

It is not irrelevant. Crypto mining provides a very nice energy sink for inconsistent renewables to put their energy into, when that energy would have gone completely to waste. It is a subside to renewables, where they can make money on energy that would have been thrown away. It allows better managements of the peaks and troughs that commonly plague reneweable energy sources.

This perfectly encapsulates exactly how wasteful and backwards PoW cryptocurrencies are. In a system that wasn't wasteful, adding in huge amounts of otherwise unused renewable energy would be a great thing because it'd mean more energy for doing useful work (i.e. processing transactions), instead, adding in all that extra energy actually decreases efficiency because everyone else must now work harder to process the same amount of transactions because of the increased difficulty rate caused by more people competing for block rewards. These new competitors don't actually add value to the network, they just make useful work more expensive from an energy perspective.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#413

Post by stale2002 »

skohan wrote: post #387
pepesza wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting how something which was built on the idea of decentralization by design has given way to a clear power structure, where those who have the sway to control the fate of the technology have largely used it to pursue their own personal enrichment over the health and success of the system as a whole. Care to elaborate? Some examples?

Well, as one other commenter mentioned, with regard to Bitcoin miners have essentially become a centralized authority, and their decisions on block-size have made Bitcoin less liquid, and less useful as a currency while making transactions more profitable to them. Another example would be exchanges: a vast majority of people do not use cryptocurrency in a peer-to-peer fashion, but instead go through a small number of…

> , with regard to Bitcoin miners have essentially become a centralized authority, and their decisions on block-size have made Bitcoin less liquid, and less useful as a currency while making transactions more profitable to them.

>Another example would be exchanges

Interestingly enough, with regards to bitcoin, there was a huge powerplay that happened a couple years ago. And this debate proved who had the real power.

A couple years about, almost every major exchange, bitcoin company, merchant payment processor, and bitcoin miner, wanted increase the bitcoin blocksize, in order to reduce transactions fees to users and help adoption.

(Even though this directly hurt the miners, the miners still wanted it, because they supported adoption. Crazy, I know)

But, this change didn't pass, because the 4 or 5 people who controlled the bitcoin core github repository, and reference client disagreed with the changes, it prevented it from happening.

And this was in spite of the fact that almost every single major player in the space wanted this change.

So crazily enough, the central authorities of the bitcoin protocol, are the couple people who hold the keys to a github repository.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#414

Post by kmkemp »

ForHackernews wrote: post #394
SilasX wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don't. Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways. When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided , the use of (harmful) energy to run…

Bitcoin is a terrible way to use energy. It's deliberately inefficient, and it's a constant arms race to become even more inefficient . You're literally killing the planet to enable...what? Tax evasion? Selling drugs and child porn? It's a moral and ecological atrocity. I agree that capping and/or taxing carbon emissions is the right policy approach, but I would seriously question the values of any humans who then de…

A correction - bitcoin is not anonymous enough to enable any of the use cases you mentioned. But that misses the points - tools can't be blamed for secondary use cases - do you blame physical dollars for enabling child porn?

As far as our carbon budget, how we choose to create energy and how much energy something uses are unrelated concepts. If people pay a proper price for energy that reflects its scarcity and externalities, then there is no problem. In a world where we use 100% renewable energy sources, would you complain about bitcoin mining? In any case, one could argue that the amount of energy required to secure the bitcoin network is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of energy that (for example) the USA uses to secure the value of the dollar. If we then factor in the pretty obvious benefits of a decentralized currency, it seems like a great idea if the downsides can be properly addressed.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#415

Post by sjeohp »

orthecreedence wrote: post #399
SilasX wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don't. Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways. When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided , the use of (harmful) energy to run…

An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support som…

> “However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.”

Great! I look forward to seeing your solution in action.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#416

Post by darkpuma »

seanyesmunt wrote: post #293
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant. Renewable energy could be used to replace other sources, instead of peed away on this. A larger demand for energy likely means more polluting forms of energy will come back into service/stay in service to meet the demand.

It's not being "peed away". It is being used to help people send money to each other. That's like saying the energy used to run the security system in a bank is being peed away.

> It is being used to help people send money to each other.

Probably 95% of it is being used for speculation/gambling and scamming the uninformed. 4% on drugs, and 1% on anything else. I'm being generous here. Bitcoin advocates are pool sharks, they want the rest of the world to be their marks.

Who the hell pays rent with bitcoin? Who buys groceries with bitcoin? Bitcoin could drop off the face of the earth this instant and I wouldn't shed a tear.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#417

Post by stale2002 »

Scarblac wrote: post #365
sbenitoj wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do governments have to simultaneously be in the business of (1) securing people’s property and (2) creating money and regulating the monetary supply?

Because regulating it is an important part of securing it. They're not separate things. If I am a victim of fraud and lose my money, I have the concept of the rule of law to help me get my money back. In a decentralized world there is no way to get my money back. Besides, it is the government's job to help society function well, in part by making the economy successful. Money is just a tool to do that.

> If I am a victim of fraud and lose my money, I have the concept of the rule of law to help me get my money back.

The governments ability to print money has absolutely nothing to do with its police force.

If someone steals money from others, then the police should go in and arrest them. The police don't need a printing press to do their job.

It is perfectly possible for the rule of law to exist, and for decentralized currencies, to also exist at the same time.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#418

Post by audunw »

0xdxdt wrote: post #170
DenisM wrote: post #87

This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a t…

(Edited) Let me ask you why do you use cash? For anything? Is it for?: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players The 3rd point is the same for any fiat currency on forex and many governments are the same as the ICO shills. I'm not justifyin…

> Let me ask you why do you use cash? For anything? Is it for?

In areas that are ahead in digital payments technologies, cash is dying out very fast.

In the US, you may want to use cash (as a seller) to avoid transaction fees. But in countries like Norway that has implemented a cheap national debit payment system (BankAxept), that's not been a big issue. Now the banks in Norway has implemented a common payment app as well (Vipps), which is free for transactions between individuals.. this has started to kill off cash in all the areas it held out before (sales of used items, buying cookies from scouts, etc)

> What with what? PayPal? There have been no alternatives, or equivalent to cash in the electronic age to date.

If you ask me, that's because making payment systems is actually extremely hard. It's just that cryptocurrencies pretend it's not, by simply ignoring a whole lot of real-world issues that you would address if you were making a payment system that wasn't trying to make blockchains fit the problem.

Most of the challenges with payment systems are social. Challenges related to what happens if there's an error, a scam, a theft, etc. Cryptocurrencies just avoid it all by saying there is never any errors, even when any reasonable person would say there is.

If you think there's no alternatives, I'd say you're very US-centric. Outside the US there are lots of places that are already most of the way there.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#419

Post by creato »

ur-whale wrote: post #331
sbenitoj wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature — if it were easy to extract (like aluminum), it would have been much more inflationary and thus not a “good” choice for money.

I didn't claim it was a bug. I was trying to make the point that all the tree huggers that scream bloody murder because of Bitcoin mining costs never look at the actual environmental cost of existing systems.

Gold is a fringe commodity valued by a similar small subset of the population that values bitcion. And yeah, I'd say that those people are also causing similar problems to bitcoin because they incentivize significant environmental destruction. Even worse than bitcoin, they also increase the costs of real commercial use cases for gold.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#420

Post by keymone »

good-idea wrote: post #242

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…

Your understanding of why bitcoin uses energy is completely skewed. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy to process transactions or ensure a functioning p2p network, bitcoin is the first time in history of money, that money can be expressed as energy units.

Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy, or more specifically bitcoin is as much energy as people value the function and security of money.

Trying to reduce it is absolutely misguided - if you figure out a thousand times more efficient way to generate sha hashes (mine bitcoin), it won’t matter in the slightest - bitcoin mining difficulty will rise thousandfold and exactly the same amount of energy will be spent going forward.

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