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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#611

Post by lvs »

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…

I don't think you understand what you think GP doesn't understand. Bitcoin uses energy to establish distributed consensus. What's technologically missing from the protocol is an energy-efficient way to establish distributed consensus, not a faster PoW algorithm.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#612

Post by geofft »

SilasX wrote: post #597
geofft wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 miners doesn't justify its environmental cost. For myself, that is not what I mean wh…

Thank you, this is a very productive reply, and you are highlighting specific things that are unique to Bitcoin. You're right that a core part of its design is making sure real computational resources are spent on it. That means the (total, social) cost network as such will scale with the size of the economy, not the number of transactions. So, in a sense, there's (something that looks) like an arms race going on, wh…

There's a few big differences between gold and energy. First, energy is consumable and gold is generally not. If I mine a bitcoin, the coin itself is reusable, but the energy is turned into heat and lost. If I mine an ounce of gold, I can turn it into jewelry and melt it back into gold, so the mining of gold serves to make the resource more accessible, not less. Second, gold has limited uses beyond being a store of value - while it's useful for jewelry, electronics, etc., most manufacturing processes have little use for it. Increased demand for gold does not compete with much. But energy (either as electricity, or as fossil fuels) is useful for approximately everything. Increased demand for energy drives up the cost of production of everything because everything uses energy. A shortage of gold does not hurt a working-class family earning minimum wage; a shortage of energy does. And, finally, that's assuming that the process of mining isn't inherently harmful. Mining gold has none of the environmental externalities that mining bitcoin via burning fossil fuels does.

So I don't think there's a comparison in how the economy correlates. As long as gold is mineable in the earth, a growing economy mines more gold. But a growing economy demands more energy, which can go either to the economy or to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has no way of saying "I want this portion of the energy in the world, and no more," the way that mines are naturally filled with resources other than gold; all it can say is "I want all the energy possibly available."

(If you could store energy and use it as the basis of a Bitcoin-style network, such that your limited resource was energy itself and not loss-of-energy-per-unit-time, it would kill basically all of these arguments. There would be other arguments about the fairness of OilFuturesCoin, but it wouldn't be these, and it would basically be the arguments about any natural-resource standard.)

And yes, the benefit of Bitcoin is a permissionless network, but the entire question is whether this energy-monster property of Bitcoin is required to have a permissionless network. You could donate to Wikileaks just fine with, say, Stellar's consensus protocol, could you not?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#613

Post by camgunz »

tomglynch wrote: post #608
orthecreedence wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 man…

> 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. From an outside perspective, I don't think it's worth continuing the discussion as is. Perhaps you should both come back in a few hours when everyone is a bit calmer.

For what it's worth, I disagree. I also think Bitcoin's energy usage is an existential issue and agree it's ridiculous we think things like "I can memorize my wallet passphrase" are at all at the same level of importance.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#614

Post by kmkemp »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #601
kmkemp wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exter…

> tools can't be blamed for secondary use cases Hold on. Technology (and knowledge in general) is ethically neutral. The action of researching and developing it in a specific way, time and place in never ethically [and politically] neutral.

Making anonymous trades is a legitimate use case, even if we understand that it would be an attractive option for black markets.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#615

Post by bobwaycott »

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,…

You’re quite noticeably not answering the parent’s question, while simultaneously proving their point.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#616

Post by orthecreedence »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #606
orthecreedence wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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're just describing capitalism there ;)

To be fair, I feel the same way about the stock market as I do about bitcoin, so yeah some of the sentiment is shared. At least with capitalism, for better or worse, just about everyone participates.

That said, I don't think a complex economy can really operate very well without some form of market (at least not until we're at 80%+ automation). And with markets come waste.

I guess I'm not saying anything should be done about bitcoin, but rather that I personally believe it's a complete waste of energy when there are already many better alternatives.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#617

Post by chc4 »

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…

Digiconomist's figures are entirely fake. They've been debunked but the author (and hapless news outlets) continue to promote them.

https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#618

Post by nostrademons »

orthecreedence wrote: post #598
baddox wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. It doesn’t make sense to make the environmental argument for things that you consider wasteful, but not for other things that other people may consider wasteful.

> The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. Yes, I agree that my argument would be completely irrelevant if only something that will never happen happens. Until then, I'd rather see some form of distributed currency that doesn't rely on pissing finite resources away to function. I get where you're coming from, but our planet is…

"Yes, I agree that my argument would be completely irrelevant if only something that will never happen happens."

The same could be said for people changing their behavior because you complain about it on a message board that the people in question don't even read. Nobody's going to stop using Bitcoin because you don't like it, so why bother?

That said, I think the cryptocurrency world is moving in that direction anyway. Most of the more exciting new cryptocurrencies use non-PoW consensus mechanisms, eg. IOTA = tangle, Ethereum Casper = PoS, EOS = DPoS, Stellar = SCP. And there's a strong economic incentive for that: when you reduce the cost of computation, you can use those computations for more applications, which drives adoption, which increases the value of peoples' cryptocurrencies. The challenge is that the fundamental benefit cryptocurrencies offer is computational trust, so until people are confident that these other consensus mechanisms are at least as immune to attack as PoW is, they're unlikely to switch away from Bitcoin.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#619

Post by IanCal »

handzbagz wrote: post #446
rspeer wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not very much.

That's literally all Facebook and Google do.

It absolutely and obviously is not.

They do significantly more than this, even if you wanted to (incorrectly) classify all of their products like this, they actually do more than that to entice people in.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#620

Post by camgunz »

DINKDINK wrote: post #582
darkpuma wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

>You're supposing It's a single example of the value of decentralized property rights. Say I'm an alcohol maker in Sharia-law country, I want to be able to make wine but prevent the state from expropriating my wealth because they ban alcohol. Say I live in a country which mandates that all business ventures with returns less than 2% a year will have their profits stolen (read: inflation) I can use bitcoin to escape t…

> Say I live in a country which mandates that all business ventures with returns less than 2% a year will have their profits stolen (read: inflation) I can use bitcoin to escape that oppression.

The moment Bitcoin becomes a viable way to subvert the state, they'll just change the laws. And if people actually start using it to smuggle money internationally the feds will get involved. The entire idea that Bitcoin can subvert the state is absurd.

And if you don't believe me, look at the evidence. ICOs got regulated. Silk roads got shut down.

And furthermore, while it's convenient to use oppressive regimes as examples for this Bitcoin "feature", it's way, way more likely the 1% (you know, the people who actually have money) will use it to hide their wealth from wealth redistribution policies demanded by liberal democracies.

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