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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#531

Post by craigc »

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…

I am not going to make the argument that Bitcoin is energy efficient cause I know that it isn’t, but it is designed to be inefficient on purpose in order to provide trust in a decentralized way.

Does that make it a good use of energy? That is debatable, but energy is used for all sorts of things. How much energy is spent producing weapons, bombs, tanks, etc.? How much is spent producing addictive drugs? Cigarettes? Non-recyclable plastics? How much is spent on illegal surveillance of individuals? Why is it that no one ever talks about these examples?

It is very likely that Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, etc. each use orders of magnitude more energy than Bitcoin does yet no one ever talks about that either.

Bitcoin gets trashed because people believe that the energy used to run the Bitcoin network is wasteful, but the energy used for other things is not. I am sure that opinion is shared by the majority of folks here as well, but that is what it is. It is an opinion. Does Facebook really improve our lives in a way that can totally justify the energy needed to run it?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#532

Post by VMG »

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…

> using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.

does this number include off-chain transactions?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#533

Post by keymone »

root_axis wrote: post #494
keymone wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No goalposts have moved. Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances. It is therefore many orders of magnitude more expensive than bitcoin even if you normalize by market cap of transaction volume or pick your own metric. Edit: typos

Politics and the military are the foundation of all society. Those things won't go away because of cryptocurrency, so repeatedly bringing them up doesn't help your point at all.

> Politics and the military are the foundation of all society

politics - maybe, military - not necessarily, just an artifact of infancy of our civilization.

> Those things won't go away because of cryptocurrency

those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin, which is good enough for me.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#534

Post by adrianratnapala »

keymone wrote: post #420
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 ab…

> Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy

Or a little more precisely a bitcoin is a provable record that a significant quantity of free energy was once turned into heat. So it does use energy, in the creation and once it is created, that energy is wasted unless the created also needed to heat something.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#535

Post by throwaway415415 »

legohead wrote: post #386

Until the 51% attack problem is "solved" I can't take any cryptocurrency for serious. You can't use the word "secure" with this attack vector being possible.

There is no 51% attack in PoS system. Rather there is a more than 1/3rd attacker problem.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#537

Post by DenisM »

pas wrote: post #522
DenisM wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a wire/ACH transfer not an immediate proof of payment?

You can't link to it. It's just a screenshot. Or do you have something else in mind?

Suppose: I sent you the money, you call the shipping guys and notify them that it's time to ship the goods. That's all.

I don't see why the shipping company needs to verify anything themselves - they just need a call from the owner of the goods directing the shipment.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#538

Post by packet_nerd »

brazzy wrote: post #295
packet_nerd wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto 101: never let anyone have your private key. No-one who religiously followed that rule has ever had their crypto stolen. Coins go missing from exchanges, which break the basic private key rule. People use exchanges for convenience because as clever as cryptocurrency is, it has no answer to the exchange problem.

> never let anyone have your private key. No-one who religiously followed that rule has ever had their crypto stolen. Bullshit. No "religious" following of rules can protect you against a zero day exploit somewhere in your system.

I didn't say it always will, just that it has so far.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#539

Post by MereInterest »

c22 wrote: post #497
MereInterest wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run that one by me again? If tomorrow, a manufacturer announced the new Super Duper Quantum ASIC for Bitcoin that can perform hashes at 10 times less energy cost, everybody would switch over to it, and the total hashrate would increase 10x. Neither the number of miners, the proportion of mining held by each person, the distribution of mining rewards accumulated, or the total power consumption would be affected at all…

I'm probably way out of my element here (I don't own bitcoin or play video games). Are you telling me that the power consumption of the bitcoin network is constant and based solely on the most popular bitcoin mining hardware?

I wouldn't say that it is constant, as the energy consumption has been increasing. However, it does not depend on the efficiency of the hardware being used.

Think of bitcoin mining as a raffle. You can buy as many raffle tickets as you want, and so can everybody else. Each raffle ticket costs $1, and so people buy tickets until the prizes start getting spread out too much. The next day, though, the raffle tickets are only 10 cents apiece. However, the prizes are still the same, so the break-even point is still the same when expressed in dollar value. As a result, the same amount of money is spent, just buying 10x as many raffle tickets.

In this analogy, each hash performed by the miners is buying a raffle ticket. The block reward is the prize at the end of the raffle. Going from CPU mining to GPU mining to ASIC mining each increase the efficiency of performing a hash, analogous to lowering the price of a raffle ticket. Just as lowering the price of each raffle ticket results in an increase in the number of ticket sales without changing the total value of ticket sales, so decreasing the cost of each hash results in an increased number of hashes performed, without changing the total amount of electricity spent to perform those hashes.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#540

Post by claudiawerner »

sjeohp wrote: post #408
ForHackernews wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You're literally killing the planet This kind of hyperbole suggests you didn’t read the person’s comment very closely. How is using X joules mining bitcoin worse than using it for anything else? Eg. mining gold? If the energy grid was 100% sustainable would bitcoin still be “literally killing the planet”? Surely not, so maybe the problem is actually the energy source, not this particular use case.

Indeed it might be still killing the planet, if all the renewable energy we can make at the moment were to be used for Bitcoin and so the other needs must use fossil fuels. At the very least, this argument leads to the conclusion that we ought to stop mining Bitcoin until all energy is renewable, but something tells me its advocates won't be happy with that.
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