571–580 of 839 posts
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No, it increases the trust of the system. Is it the best solution? Perhaps not, but it is not without utility.
"Increasing trust" doesn't add value if the system is already sufficiently trustworthy for the task of processing transactions. Based on that reasoning the cost should ('should' meaning: it is beneficial) increase forever because an infinite amount of energy burned is infinitely trustworthy.
Trustworthiness always depends on your use case.
If you are transacting small amounts of money (less than is spent on mining a block) then waiting for 3 confirmations is probably sufficient to consider the transaction settled. But what if you send a transaction with a 100 times higher value than goes into mining a block then you will need to wait for over 100 confirmations till you can be sure it doesn't make economical sense for anyone to try to double spend your transaction by orphaning the first block your transaction was in (with a very simplified incentive model not taking into account other transactions in these blocks).
Thus the money spent on mining blocks determines how much value can be transferred in one block. Allowing for higher value transactions is good thing imo, is necessary for its success as digital gold and therefore justifies the higher energy consumption (especially since there don't seem to be any alternatives with similarly good or better robustness against attacks yet, proof of stake can't work under the same assumptions bitcoin does [1]).
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…
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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…
> You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine . That's pretty damn cool. > I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currenc…
No, you can have 30K BTC in your brain, but unfortunately the USD value fluctuates so wildly that as a store of value, it's useless.
> It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be.
Probably, yes. Bitcoin is a failed project. It spawned many others, some of which may be successful. I am interested to see how they do.
> To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing.
That's assuming that banking is JUST storing and sending value. Banking does a whole lot more. I understand the drive behind taking that power away from banks, but it's just not going to happen until one can fluidly exchange USD for some for of highly-stable distributed currency. And once that happens, banks are still going to exist and handle most of the transactions! Please, take a stroll in r/cryptocurrency or r/bitcoin and see how many people are whining about how their private key got lost or stolen or etc etc. Banks exist because they not only store value, but protect it in numerous ways. They will continue to exist past whatever cryptocurrency-revolution people envision.
> You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go.
Great? So a fraction of the energy would have been wasted anyway. Fine, use that for bitcoin mining. For everything else, it's pouring carbons into the atmosphere so idiots who don't know how investing works can leverage 100x on margin while the exchange they're betting on is manipulating the price to call their bets and wipe them out.
> It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants.
Really? "Let's buy a bunch of toxic waste and dump it into the river because the government will be incentivized to not output toxic waste" isn't the best argument for why bitcoin is useful.
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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.
Or powering an MRI machine to detect cancer in a patient. Is it the same ethically?
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The original use case for cryptocurrency (eg digital sound money, not world computers and the like) is as a long-term (and hopefully independent and uncorrrelated enough) hedge against mis-management and failure of national currency regimes. That remains a legit use case but will take years or decades to materialize. Given that the tech is still in the early stages of its maturity curve and needs more time to robusti…
That wasn't the original use case for crypto. In the bitcoin white paper he mostly talks about micropayments, which bitcoin has ironically failed at.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
"The coinbase parameter (seen above in hex) contains, along with the normal data, the following text:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"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.
Energy is created to meet demand. It is not consumed to meet supply. The exception to the latter is where excess energy is created because a method of energy production is created to meet peak demand , but generates more energy than is needed off-peak. While some of it could be stored, storage is inefficient and it is better to sell the excess energy cheap, so that you can continue to expand your energy production ca…
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>[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…
I think it's absurd to think that it should be possible to package 150 years of median US household labor into an easily transportable, easily securable form. That simply will never be possible. It's not a technology problem. Even if you could somehow do this, you would be incredibly vulnerable to extortion, and I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability. There are people that ha…
You already can: bitcoin.
>I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability
If I'm a Jew in 1930s Germany or a grocery store owner in Venezuela and I see the writing on the wall that my government is constantly deriding me, saying I'm the scourge of and leach on society, I'm going to immigrate out of the country. They've banned all institutions from services me, I benefit from having access to a means to store wealth that's independent from a government. To disagree is to be excessively myopic and optimistic.
A "faster, more efficient cryptocurrency" is already in productive operation since 2015. Called "Nano" https://nano.org/en
What I know of it is Nano uses a DAG rather than Blockchain, similar to IOTA's tangle
In NANO every account is a virtual blockchain. This means when you want to send funds, you have to "mine" a low-difficulty block on your own account and simply publish the results of that block to the network. No one does any real mining in NANO, you can think of "mining" your own blocks the same as signing or encrypting messages. Check out https://nanospeed.live for a speed test.
I'm not related to their team or that website and I don't own NANO, but I do follow their news and liked that site.
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…