Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 839 posts

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#621

Post by JoeAltmaier »

keymone wrote: post #548
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#622

Post by nostrademons »

geofft wrote: post #511
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…

> 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…

"(... except perhaps capitalism itself, and funny enough, people are claiming that capitalism too must be stopped to avert irrecoverable climate change)".

Also life. Evolution, birth, and metabolism also result in all available energy going into increasing the complexity of the system. The real reason we have an environmental crisis is because there are 7.5B of us, but few people recommend destroying all life on earth to save the environment.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#623

Post by nickpsecurity »

orthecreedence wrote: post #574
ecwilson wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

In response to stability criticism, chadski on Lobsters told me about so-called stablecoins with MakerDAO and Dai being in active use:

https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/

It's an Ethereum-based scheme that's tied in value to the U.S. dollar. That sounds good. The methods to achieve that look... complex... to say the least. If they work, then there's at least one of them that's stable so long as there's no serious problems in it and/or Ethereum. Well, that sounds promising. ;)

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#624

Post by MereInterest »

c22 wrote: post #566
MereInterest wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, I think I get it. So the power consumption of the network is based only on the power available to miners, which is probably reasonably constant since the mining pool doesn't change much? So putting aside market hype the main thing impacting the value of a bitcoin should be the cost of this power? I agree it doesn't sound like the most efficient system and these incentives are somewhat perverse, but there weren'…

It is a new application, but I'm not sold on it at all. I don't see anything that cryptocurrencies do that fiat currencies do not do better. Irreversible transactions, for example, is touted as a benefit, but I believe is a major disadvantage. As a result of them, consumer protections against theft and fraud are impossible to implement. Any reverse payment requires the cooperation of the fraudulent actor.

Furthermore, the decentralized nature of bitcoin cannot last indefinitely, and arguably has already ended. All mining nodes need to have a record of all balances, in order to verify that incoming transactions are valid. This places a limit on the ability to contribute to trust by mining, and will result in further centralization of miners. If a cryptocurrency were to replace fiat currency, it would not be a change from centralized currency to decentralized. Rather, it would be a from a centralized currency controlled by an elected government to a centralized currency controlled by conglomerations of miners.

I have done my best to understand their use, their applications, and their limits. With that in mind, I believe cryptocurrencies to be a obfuscated form of pyramid scheme, with additional externalities of heavy power use.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#625

Post by orthecreedence »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #623
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…

In response to stability criticism, chadski on Lobsters told me about so-called stablecoins with MakerDAO and Dai being in active use: https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/ It's an Ethereum-based scheme that's tied in value to the U.S. dollar. That sounds good. The methods to achieve that look... complex... to say the least. If they work, then there's at least one of them that's stable so long as there's no serious pro…

I'm aware of Maker.

It's a bunch of math that uses market mechanisms to try to solve the problem of stability when the only real answer for the question "how do I stabilize a cryptocurrency" is "for each unit you issue, you have a bank account with $1 matching USD in it."

Maker essentially banks on the fact that a bundle of cryptos (ETH and a few others) will not drop past a certain amount in relation to USD over a given amount of time. They've been correct, so far, but that doesn't mean there won't come a time when the markets drop past whatever magical threshold they've set.

I'm not putting down the project, I followed it closely for a while and a lot of work went into it. My point is you can't really have a stablecoin unless you have the USD to back it up.

An interesting plot twist will be if Maker derives from other stablecoins (ones backed by USD reserves, like GUSD) and not ETH.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#626

Post by cjbprime »

rspeer wrote: post #349
cjbprime wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether this is true, but I expect that electricity-from-coal for Bitcoins isn't a massive problem because doing so is simply unprofitable: the electricity costs more than the value of the Bitcoins, so it would be irrational to do. I would expect that mining has become an arbitrage market that narrows in on the cheapest possible electricity anywhere in the world, and as such is dominated by excess "free"…

Well, it's not true. Bitcoin has increased the demand for coal power in China. Bitcoin miners flocked to New York State for cheap natural gas power. Green energy is not necessarily the cheapest form of energy. If it were, it wouldn't even be _hard_ to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent climate change.

Here's a NYT article about Bitcoin miners moving to New York State last year, but not for natural gas -- instead to a depressed ex-industrial town that has overprovisioned hydroelectric, as you'd expect:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n...

When did miners go to NYS for natural gas power? Are they still there, or did they get undercut by hydro from somewhere else in the world?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#627

Post by IanCal »

keymone wrote: post #442
root_axis wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is simply no comparison. The banking system is many many, many orders of magnitude more efficient and to suggest otherwise is frustratingly disingenuous.

No it isn’t, banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy but also is open for corruption, is run by greedy bankers that governments have to bail out all the time for taxpayers money, etc, etc. current financial system is many orders of magnitude more expensive and dangerous. Suggesting otherwise is not just disingenuous - it is malicious.

Let's try and run some numbers then.

Estimated energy consumption - 46TWh [0]. Average transaction rate seems lower than 4/s at all times so let's use 4 [1]. That makes 126M/year.

Visa process 111B transactions per year [2] and mastercard 65B [3] for a total of 176B.

If those transactions alone were as energy expensive, then that would account for about 64,000 TWh.

Global energy consumption (all kinds) is about 110,000 TWh

For traditional banking to be more expensive in energy per transaction, it would seem to need to account for more than about 60% of all energy used if all banking were only these card payment services and nothing else.

Appreciate any checking of figures or calculations, though unless there's something very wrong the rough outcome should be the same given that I've only included a slice of transactions.

[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transactions-per-second...

[2] https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

[3] https://s2.q4cdn.com/242125233/files/doc_financials/2017/Q4/...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#628

Post by sonofaragorn »

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…

That highly depends on the amount (in USD) at stake:

$100: Absolutely.

$1000: Tough, but I'd do it if it meant the promised change to financial services

$10000: Unlikely, I'd rather keep my non-perfect coins

$100000: No way.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#629

Post by orthecreedence »

nostrademons wrote: post #618
orthecreedence wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 any…

> Nobody's going to stop using Bitcoin because you don't like it, so why bother?

Perhaps someone who did actually read what I wrote will realize that there are many, many things that do what Bitcoin does without the power usage of Bitcoin and perhaps seeks those as an alternative (like, PoS coins). And originally, the argument was "this is an environmental crisis," someone said "no it's not because of ferraris and backpacks," and I countered and said, yes, it's an issue. Why does anyone argue on an internet forum? I guess in the hopes of changing minds. I hope you would not find debate a waste of energy, at least not in a democratic form of governance.

> 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.

Yeah, that's the real meat of the argument, I suppose. We know PoW is at least difficult to attack. I am very happy that other consensus mechanisms are being explored though. I'm also not convinced existing non-PoW consensus mechanisms won't be as secure trust-wise as PoW.

I guess the overall point of this is that, yes, there's nothing I can do about people doing horribly wasteful things. But let's not pretend that bitcoin isn't horribly wasteful. Let's call a giraffe a giraffe. And maybe it's ok to be a giraffe if you're aware of the trade-offs, but it's certainly not a gazelle just because you're uncomfortable with the properties of giraffes.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#630

Post by foxrob92 »

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.

Sure, but estimates for marginal energy costs for bitcoin transactions sit at around 150-250 kWh.

A 310L fridge [1] (random one I found) for context uses about 280 kWh per year [2].

I think it's pretty ridiculous to say that the average bitcoin transaction provides approximately half the value (in the best case scenario) as having the ability to refrigerate food for a year. I'd say "pissing away" is a pretty fair comparison.

[1] https://www.lg.com/au/fridges/lg-GB-310RPL

[2] http://www.energyrating.gov.au/calculator

With [2] you will need to put the model number in the "Brand or Model" box

Post reply on HN