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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#671

Post by sparkie »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #577
sparkie wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nothing is created to meet demand. Goods are consumed based on supply, demand, and other factors.

I work in the FMCG industry, and we treat supply is effectively unlimited. You will constantly have suppliers begging you to buy more, and to buy new products as they expand their range.

However, as a trader, you will only ever buy what you expect to be able to sell. It would be pointless stocking up on goods which you aren't going to sell, especially in FMCG where you need to sell them before they go out of date, else you lose all of the money on your purchase. Sales are almost always the constraint under normal operation.

Suppliers are attempting to create new demand by creating new markets. They usually offer freebies or discounts for new products in order to gain penetration, but it is then up to the market to decide whether that demand warrants them to continue producing the good. Without demand, they cannot continue to produce, because it would be a loss making endeavour.

Electricity can be seen under the same lens. Like FMCG, it loses value with time rapidly, because it gets lost as heat through storage, and it also costs to store. An electricity producer is never going to create more than they expect that they can sell. They might produce a bit more than actual demand as the means to try and capture new markets for greater long-term profits. Mining is part of this - if they can capture a new market for bitcoin mining, they will generate profit in the long term by continuing to supply that demand.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#672

Post by Semaphor »

jayd16 wrote: post #162
Semaphor wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loans, money transfer, storing your money are all things that can be replaced. Seems like a decent chunk.

Loans no, not at all. Money transfer for coin is extremely inefficient. Volatility makes crypto a terrible place to keep money. Besides, you're paying for the legal and institutional protection anyway. If crypto made money transfer more efficient, they'd use it and still have the value add of a large institution backing transactions.

I thought we were talking about the hypothetical situation where crypto becomes amazing and not at the current state? Of course, crypto can't replace banks as it is now…

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#673

Post by ggggtez »

c22 wrote: post #449
root_axis wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Is bitcoin sufficiently trustworthy without proof of work? I'm not a bitcoin expert, but my understanding was that this is an integral part of the trust model. If so then we're just back to talking about inefficiencies. I can't imagine the processing being done by my computer right now is all strictly necessary to read and post these comments, and I'd wager this site is more efficient than most these days. Still I ac…

>the processing being done by my computer right now

Well it depends what you are considering. Arguably, yes, your computer finished the HTTPS connection long before you got around to reading the words on the page itself. But the scale of an idle CPU compared to a 100% CPU is not even close. Mine is sitting at 2% use while I type this.

You could put that money into mining actual gold, and literally make 4x as much as mining bitcoin [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-co...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#674

Post by iameli »

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…

> But that doesn't mean there's zero net benefit. The benefit is a permissionless network that no one can control unless they produce more computation than the rest of the network. So, the benefit of each miner coming on is raising the attack threshold and increasing your confidence that it won't be attacked.

Hypothetical scenario: a hardfork of Bitcoin is developed that maintains all of these wonderful properties — impossible for any one party to control, bypasses financial choke points, impossible to censor — but requires orders of magnitude less energy. It utilizes a variety of clever mechanisms to achieve the same goals without using Proof of Work calculations to secure the network. This sort of thing is what the exactly what the MIT team in the article is attempting to accomplish, it's not an intractable problem.

Would you support switching over to the new fork? I would. It does all the things I like about Bitcoin without this big carbon footprint. No downside.

But do you know who will never support the fork? Bitcoin miners. They've invested millions in custom hardware to let them process proofs of work as quickly as possible. They have a massive economic incentive to continue to use PoW. Forever. Even if there exists a better way.

Maybe in this world the price of BTC would go down as people moved to alternatives. I'd like to think people would be ashamed to use an unnecessarily inefficient currency. But when I hear Bitcoin advocates dismiss environmental concerns as irrelevant or shift the blame onto government tax policy, it doesn't make me terribly optimistic.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#675

Post by BookmarkSaver »

orthecreedence wrote: post #557
baddox wrote: post #499

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. Objectively? No, I'm pretty sure that isn't "a complete fucking waste" to the people who are benefitting from it. Which is literally the definition of "subjective." Removing externalities of electricity pricing solves this. That's the…

> If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact The day that markets actually price externalities into the costs of goods and services, whether by benevolent owners or force of regulation, I'll gladly declare Bitcoin useful.

This seems like a completely arbitrary and absolutely biased place to draw a line. Why Bitcoin and not luxury cars or Hello Kitty backpacks? How about we shut down Six Flags and Disneyland?

This sounds very much like you've decided that you don't like Bitcoin (and that's fine, with good reasons) but you have rationalized it with an argument that is almost certainly inconsistent with the rest of your worldview. Bitcoin isn't any more bullshit than countless other systems/goods, the argument based on environmental externalities is a very weird reason to draw such an absolutist line given all the other (arguably) bullshit systems that incur the same costs.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#676

Post by eropple »

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…

I thought "taxes are theft" was bad enough. Is the new galaxy-brain "inflation is theft"?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#677

Post by mr_spothawk »

yarrel wrote: post #296
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…

It's weird how many people only want to talk about the environment when it's Bitcoin. Anyway - https://medium.com/coinshares/beware-of-lazy-research-c828c9...

it'd be great if more people would read this link... but, since that's not where we're at on this forum here's the synopsis:

"""

The Takeaways

* Contrary to what you’ve heard in the media, bitcoin mining is not an environmental disaster. In fact, it is one of the cleanest billion-dollar industries on the planet.

* The combined total bitcoin mining network draws less power than global gaming consoles running 4 hours per day.

* Bitcoin mining is mainly powered on renewable energy, at levels more than four times higher than the global average (>77.6% vs ~18.2%).

* Every year, enough hydro power is wasted in Yunnan and Sichuan alone to power the Bitcoin mining network many times over.

* Bitcoin miners are highly mobile and can therefore serve as cornerstone demand for low-cost stranded renewables.

* By increasing profitability and lowering reliance on subsidies, bitcoin mining can positively contribute to the development and scaling of renewable energy projects wherever conditions are the most favourable.

"""

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#678

Post by chemmail »

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…

You want to help the environment? Then stop consuming totally. Do you eat things? It is wasteful, just drink ocean water. Do you use any form of entertainment at all? Movies, games, songs? TOTALLY WASTEFUL for the environment. DOES NOT HELP HUMANITY AT ALL. Time to go live in a hole and die, because living is about consuming and waste.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#679

Post by b1daly »

baddox wrote: post #635
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…

I don’t think anyone disagrees that reducing the energy requirements of cryptocurrency without any capability loss would be great. The trouble is when people who don’t like cryptocurrency for other reasons, or just don’t care about it, focus specifically on complaining about its energy usage. Say you don’t care much about professional sports. Of course you would think that any innovation that reduces the energy requi…

Damn bro, you are missing the point. As has been described, pure market mechanisms do not and cannot price externalities correctly.

That’s why we have environmental regulation, as imperfect as it is.

This implicitly means a society does make choices about how energy is used. Therefore, a discussion about societal priorities amongst individuals is essential.

Likewise with regulation related to finance and money.

Energy and money. Among the most highly regulated things in all societies.

I agree with the poster that POW cryptocoin systems are a shocking waste of electricity.

In addition, the only use cases that have proved viable are illegal or highly destructive to the social fabric.

When you look at the sheer amount of money transferred from losers to winners, it’s clear that this is not a benefit to anyone. The scams, the hacks, the thefts. Bitcoin and it’s ilk are parasitic systems that weaken the host.

To compare to Ferraris, well Ferraris are a niche product, are already regulated, and have a historical component that accounts for their hedonic properties.

To compare bitcoin to hello kitty backpacks is just a category error, which belies that the argument is disengenuous.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#680

Post by heimatau »

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…

Why does everyone, especially within crypto, seem to believe a One Coin theory?

Plurality is the name of the game. History has endless examples. Yes nothing would last but...the better monies would move to a better monies. It's called competition. There is very little competition when it comes to monetary policies. Crypto will foster more of it. It can get messy but hopefully it won't get deadly.

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