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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#541

Post by comboy »

darkpuma wrote: post #495
malvosenior wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the valuation can rapidly fluctuate. Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists. There is a huge incentive to create transaction fraud with that much money on the line and Bitcoin is working and intended and acting as a distributed, transaction fraud free public ledger with a trade-able currency.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

Real estate is likely the best storage of value there is. It's only distributed across governments though. When you own a piece of land you actually trust your government to protect your right to it.

Gold is fantastic. Apart from its physical properties, we all agreed to assign value to it and it's been working for thousands of years.

But wouldn't it be great to have gold in a digital form? Something easily divisible and transferable, yet as gold is, not dependent for its value on some 3rd party? Something that is truly yours not just IOU. Which can keep value.

Forget about Bitcoin, how would you envision something like this?

Apart from technological problems, we have a problem of initial trust and distribution. Please stop here and think for a moment, this is a hard and interesting problem. I'm not saying you can solve it with a few minutes of thinking but just after a few moments some things clarify.

Now imagine we do have it. We did it. Because it would be a cool future where we do have this digital gold. Is it a safe storage of value? What if some better digital gold 2.0 comes along? If people would prefer to move their wealth to it then the 1.0 would become less desirable, so its value should drop. But if it does, then it's not a good storage of value after all.

You can devise a system in which 1.0 tokens can be exchanged to 2.0 but then you cannot change the initial distribution.

If all that thinking is not enough, it is interesting to ponder impact of an actual perfect storage of value system on society. Wealth can be leveraged to generate more of it.

Not that it's something completely new, we had a few close enough matches throughout the history. That's what most wars are about. Although it's easier to go get something if you know where it is.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#542

Post by keymone »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #534
keymone wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#543

Post by plankers »

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…

I can use bitcoin to buy things on the internet, or send money across borders, or bring money across borders, all without anybody's permission. So it's pretty successful in my book.

Oh wait, you're bringing sin into the argument. My bad, I thought we were being rational.

And just a side-note, it irks me when people say that bitcoin uses as much energy as the country of Iceland like that's some kind of horror. Iceland is pretty damn small, with a population smaller than the mid-sized city I live in.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#544

Post by DINKDINK »

darkpuma wrote: post #495
malvosenior wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the valuation can rapidly fluctuate. Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists. There is a huge incentive to create transaction fraud with that much money on the line and Bitcoin is working and intended and acting as a distributed, transaction fraud free public ledger with a trade-able currency.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

>[Bitcoin] is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as [S.A.] old fashioned pieces of gold

Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. Also can you let me how how I can costlessly assay gold when I accept it as payment? or make the supply of gold only dependent only on time and not how it currently is (price and time)? Whenever the price of gold goes up, they mine more of it :C this makes its Store of Value property worse than bitcoin. Looking forward to your reply and our future endeavor together. /s

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#545

Post by JoeAltmaier »

keymone wrote: post #542
adrianratnapala wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.

...which is a trivial result, and could be reproduced by simple trust (which is essentially free)

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#546

Post by plankers »

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.

You could generalize that to "the vast majority of all waking time used by humanity is completely wasted on irrelevant tasks and inefficiencies."

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#547

Post by darkpuma »

DINKDINK wrote: post #544
darkpuma wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

>[Bitcoin] is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as [S.A.] old fashioned pieces of gold Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. Also can you let me how how I can costlessly assay gold when I accept it as payment? or make the supply of gold only dependent only on tim…

> Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA.

You're supposing that the vast majority of people using bitcoin are using it to exfiltrate money out of countries. That niche application is very far from the reality of what most bitcoin advocates are doing.

But yes, digital exfiltration may be easier than physical smuggling. That's supposing a lot about what forms of control are implemented in that country at at it's borders.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#548

Post by keymone »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #545
keymone wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.

...which is a trivial result, and could be reproduced by simple trust (which is essentially free)

that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Trust is dangerous, we’ve been dealing with trust based financial system failures for hundreds of not thousands of years.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#549

Post by DINKDINK »

root_axis wrote: post #428
c22 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Are you saying the number of transactions the market will demand of a system is independent of the trust of the system? If I need to move $250,000[1] in one hour with ~100% certainty are you saying an IOU from a bank janitor is equivalent in value to a bitcoin transaction? An increase in attack costs increases the types of transactions that can occur safely on L1. The number of L2 updates are unbounded by L1 transaction capacity, increase attack costs gives the market confidence L2 updates cannot be erased.

A high cost to signal which money you're willing to use filters out fraud attempts. Which should I trust more, Malory Money who double-pinky swears to run her Malory Money servers 5 years from now but is signaling with no costs or Bobby Bitcoiner who signals by billions of dollars in single-use capex (ASICS)

[1] 12.5 BTC/block * 3850 $/BTC * 6 Blocks/hour < tx.value()

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#550

Post by darkpuma »

comboy wrote: post #541
darkpuma wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

Real estate is likely the best storage of value there is. It's only distributed across governments though. When you own a piece of land you actually trust your government to protect your right to it. Gold is fantastic. Apart from its physical properties, we all agreed to assign value to it and it's been working for thousands of years. But wouldn't it be great to have gold in a digital form? Something easily divisible…

I sympathize with the dream, but the dream is very far from the reality bitcoin has realized.
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