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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#661

Post by trsfgbb »

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…

>pathetic ~10 transactions per second.

It's only an artificial limit of Core fork of Bitcoin.

Increasing it to 10 000 transactions per second doesn't use more energy for mining. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#662

Post by nosuchthing »

chc4 wrote: post #617
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…

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-...

The author of your paper appears to be attacking another author and yet has nothing to back up their claims other than "Trust me I'm an expert and I know a guy in Hong Kong who tells me what's happening in China!"

The argument summary of your article is hand waving, claims that the sum usage of software designed to be increasingly energy wasteful (Satoshi's random nonce lottery as a means of increasing CAPEX and decreasing production output)

https://digiconomist.net/verify-dont-trust/

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#663

Post by geofft »

nostrademons wrote: post #622
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…

"(... 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 eart…

Sure. The claims about needing to avert climate change before it "destroys the planet" are not about the literal annihilation of the world itself, but about its inhospitability to human life.

Humanity, to some extent, competes with capitalism for resources. But while resources are not at their limit, we can grow together, and capitalism seems to bring us benefits. Humanity also competes with Bitcoin, which is a much newer system that has become seriously competitive very quickly, and it's much less obvious that it's the best or even only way to solve the problems it sets out to solve.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#664

Post by sparkie »

tromp wrote: post #523
sparkie wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An early adopter will always have an advantage over somebody who gets on board later. The only way you could prevent this is by actively punishing early adopters. Good luck achieving adoption if you try this.

It suffices to not punish the late adopters (something that admittedly the vast majority of cryptocurrencies do).

Bitcoin doesn't punish late adopters, it just does not give them the same advantage as the earlier adopters. Somebody who adopts Bitcoin today will still have a major advantage over somebody who adopts it in 10 years from now, but it might not be of the same magnitude as the people who adopted it 10 years ago have over the people who adopt it today.

The decline in rate of inflation is what prevents punishment of the older adopters. Inflation is inherently punishing of people who are saving an asset, because it steals value from them, or at least would do if demand didn't outpace supply.

If bitcoin offered the same reward to newcomers as it did to the people who adopted it 10 years ago, then nobody would've adopted it 10 years ago, and the result would be that everybody is punished, because the world at large would've ignored a great innovation.

You can't have both! Either you punish the savers by taking value from them and giving it to newcomers, or you let savers keep their value which pushes up the price for newcomers as demand increases. Socialist ideology fails to understand economics as usual.

Now you might argue that the rate of bitcoin's reduction of inflation is just too high, and should've been more gradual, or over a longer period of time. There might be some merit to that idea, but nobody could've accurately guessed the rate at which adoption would occur for a brand new technology.

After everyone is aware of what Bitcoin is, it doesn't really matter how long you make the halving. There will still be risk-takers and there will still be laggards. Some of the laggards will leave it until they can no longer go around with their eyes closed and must acquire some Bitcoin in order to make some purchases. Others will acquire it now (and 10 years ago) even when it is an extremely risky investment. Most people are somewhere in between.

So you have the option right now that you can either: Acquire some Bitcoin while it is apparently still cheap (relative to where it may be in a few years)

Or you can: Chose not to acquire some bitcoin because you think it is overpriced, and in a few years, complain again that bitcoin is overpriced, when it is worth significantly more than it is today.

Late adopters punish themselves by ignoring economic reality, either intentionally (because they are driven by ideology), or accidentally (because they don't take the time out to learn). Once you grasp it, there is only one direction which bitcoin can go over the long term.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#666

Post by Aeolun »

SilasX wrote: post #381
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…

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…

These tiny blobs of data with utterly fake scarcity consume more energy than whole countries. And you try to argue that they’re a good expenditure of energy?

The only reason to single out bitcoin is that it’s a highly visible waste.

But just because there’s multiple ways we waste a ton of energy, does not mean we shouldn’t fix any of them.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#667

Post by ggggtez »

hndamien wrote: post #589
root_axis wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the American military wasteful because it provides too much security? How much should it be reduced to provide sufficient security? This is a legitimate question/ I don't have an opinion either way - but it seems to be a fair corollary.

Unlike bitcoin, every person in the US has an (more or less) equal vote to help decide that. Congress's job is literally to decide whether to spend more money on military, among other things.

And also unlike bitcoin, when you pay the salary of 450k+ soldiers, among other jobs and such created, that's likely a lot better for the economy than random people converting electricity into crypto tokens. What does bitcoin provide in terms of add-on benefits like jobs? The ability for power companies to maximize profits by having their supply used more fully?

Edit: Additionally, you can argue that the US army does not provide too much security, because it doesn't take someone more than a few seconds to look at the world and see the world is not 100% safe. There are numerous areas such that, if money was not a concern, could be made safer and more profitable by adding more security. Creating infinite trust in bitcoin would... do what exactly? Let nerds buy drugs on the internet?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#668

Post by puranjay »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #134
sametmax wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. ... All great things start like that. "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan https://www.brainyquote.com/qu…

It's a little ingenuous to use the word 'genius' for people who put gas money into a meme currency 9 years ago

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#669

Post by puranjay »

dantillberg wrote: post #90
DenisM wrote: post #87

This gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a t…

> Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) There are a lot of people in the world that live in places where the law is far more gone than "misguided." For these people, it's not a question of "whether" to side-step the law but "how." You may not care, but they do.

These people are already so far removed from the crypto infrastructure that it's a trivial case.

People who bring this up are almost always people who have never lived anywhere near real poverty or conflict. Barring individual cases, the vast majority of the world's less privileged have neither the means nor the knowledge to buy crypto in any shape

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#670

Post by really3452 »

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…

On the other hand I am shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing the cost of maintaining the US dollar as a currency. Specifically, it takes a huge amount of energy to maintain the military and police power that backs the US dollar.
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