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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#421

Post by malvosenior »

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…

" it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second."

I think it's more accurate to talk about the amount of value the Bitcoin network is storing than the transactions per second.

Bitcoin currently has a market cap of $68B. I'm not aware of any other distributed system that's worth that much money. It's definitely interesting that a fully distributed system has been able to achieve that valuation without any centralization or governing authority (debates over developer and miner power aside).

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#422

Post by 4bpp »

aidanlister wrote: post #392
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…

Oh come on. Bitcoin uses the same amount of energy that the country of Iraq [1] uses, home to 38 million people. Bitcoin has about 500k active bitcoin addresses [2], most of which contain less than $100 [3]. So what are we actually getting for all this energy usage, and couldn't we get that same result for a fraction of the energy usage? [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://bitinfochart…

In what way does this address the parent post's argument that to the extent Bitcoin produces more negative externalities than positive effects, it is because the price of electricity is not set correctly by governments?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#423

Post by dralley »

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's being used to help people send money to each other very very very inefficiently.

As someone else in this thread pointed out, there's only 500,000 active Bitcoin addresses, and yet the Bitcoin network consumes the same amount of electricity as the entire country of Denmark

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#424

Post by 4bpp »

malloreon wrote: post #16

I have long wondered how cryptocurrency fans would answer the question: ‘Would you be happy if the crypto-utopia you bring up happens in the next 10 years, and all value is stored/transacted through a cryptocurrency, but it was a coin that you do not possess now, nor could you transfer any of you current currencies into it?’ Say tomorrow someone releases the one true coin, but no one notices. All other cryptocurrenci…

Yes, as far as I am concerned. There has been a nontrivial number of instances of the payment processor oligopoly wielding its power against things that I care about (by preventing certain companies/institutions/organisations from using it) in the past decade, and I want that sort of thing to become impossible.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#425

Post by ericol »

tim333 wrote: post #397
ericol wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm into cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, actually) because it solves a very specific problem that might apply only to my country. So, anecdote: I live in Argentina, work for an UK based company. been doing that for the last 10 years. Before I could trade bitcoin in an almost frictionless way (I.e., before I discovered Localbitcoin.com) my routine was to go to the ATM after the payment got into my european bank account, do…

Transferwise does £ to pesos. Fees for £1000, £11.88. Rate 50.06 vs google saying the market rate is 50.07. By the way if you are buying BTC, Kraken is much cheaper than 2% (more like 0.2%) and I think they take GBP. It does sound like the banks are iffy.

Transferwise does £ to pesos, to where. As stated, bank accounts in the country do not have a SWIFT code assigned. You have to triangulate the money (Please check my other comments below). Re: Kraken, the 2% I'm talking about is in the local broker I'm using to convert BTC to pesos. I doubt Kraken can help me there. Not to mention that that Kraken is an exchange. A completelly different bussiness model to Localbitcoins.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#426

Post by Foivos »

sametmax wrote: post #82
malloreon wrote: post #16

I have long wondered how cryptocurrency fans would answer the question: ‘Would you be happy if the crypto-utopia you bring up happens in the next 10 years, and all value is stored/transacted through a cryptocurrency, but it was a coin that you do not possess now, nor could you transfer any of you current currencies into it?’ Say tomorrow someone releases the one true coin, but no one notices. All other cryptocurrenci…

How do you think bitcoin started ? You'd had to be crazy to believe in it 9 years ago, and spend time and energy in the community, nlt to lention monney, to foster the project. My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks,…

It does not really matter how it started but how it is now. I would bet that all these selfless visionary nerds who believed in bitcoin from day 1, now are less than 0.1% of the people who deal with bitcoin today. The rest 99.9% are there for the easy money. At least, this is what I see from my surroundings and the feeling I get from the internet. It might have started great, but it got alienated along the way.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#427

Post by throwawaymath »

SilasX wrote: post #381
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…

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…

> When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean?

We mean that mining Bitcoin is extremely energy-intensive by design. This is to say that the energy consumed by Bitcoin's economic activity is deliberately and gratuitously significant, not incidentally so. Moreover, the energy consumed by Bitcoin mining scales commensurate with how many Bitcoins have been mined thus far.

So yes, that makes it categorically different from other energy-expensive activities like farming or hospital maintenance. We are actually economically incentivized to consume less energy over time in most energy-expensive activities. With most cryptocurrencies, energy consumption is a design imperative.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#428

Post by root_axis »

c22 wrote: post #403
aidanlister wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. Bitcoin uses the same amount of energy that the country of Iraq [1] uses, home to 38 million people. Bitcoin has about 500k active bitcoin addresses [2], most of which contain less than $100 [3]. So what are we actually getting for all this energy usage, and couldn't we get that same result for a fraction of the energy usage? [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://bitinfochart…

You think bitcoin is bad? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1s8219SGDIjMnkzdFI2QjhwNm8... My gut instinct is that the vast majority of all computing cycles used by humanity are completely wasted on irrelevant tasks and inefficiencies.

Bitcoin is wasteful because of its energy profile not because of an arbitrary value judgement regarding how energy should be used.

Rendering images is useful work. Processing transactions is useful work.

With gaming computers, increasing energy costs means increasing detail and complexity in the images that can be processed.

Bitcoin is wasteful because the increasing energy costs does not increase the total number of transactions that can be processed.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#429

Post by kadendogthing »

SilasX wrote: post #381
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…

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…

>No, we don't.

I stopped reading.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#430

Post by kragen »

This sounds pretty similar to the benefits of MimbleWimble, the design behind Grin (and another earlier system whose name I forget). Grin recently "went live" in the sense that now there's a network that isn't the testnet.
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