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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#691

Post by baddox »

orthecreedence wrote: post #659
baddox wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, this makes sense. I guess the issue I have is such a tiny minority of people are using such an excess of energy to do something that adds very little value to society. Even if the value of bitcoin is subjective, there's still a tiny minority of people consuming vast amounts of energy to derive what value it does bring them. It just feel disproportionately harmful at a time when our top scientists are blue in th…

I’d rather not have environmental regulation that needs to decide the value to society of every activity. If the regulation just internalizes the costs of energy production, then I don’t care what you use your electricity for (up to some obvious and less-obvious limits, which can be and are handled by completely separate laws).

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#692

Post by scartracs »

puranjay wrote: post #669
dantillberg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

DASH and NANO had several initiatives this past year to achieve adoption in Venezuela due to their humanitarian crisis. It was small, but there were some good results especially by DASH if we believe the media they produced. There was a movement to donate DASH/NANO and get merchants to accept it in exchange for goods. All merchants need is a sticker that displays their QR code and a terminal that can confirm the transaction, which can be done by any smartphone/tablet/computer/IOT with minimal effort. Keep in mind, this happened while DASH and NANO are quite unknown and all crypto was in a bear market, meaning there were few people following the projects that could donate and promote the events.

The hard part is not adoption within poverty-stricken nations, rather adoption in developed nations with complicated tax codes and lack of incentives for merchants to invest in more payment processing tech is the true challenge ahead.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#693

Post by beefield »

koonsolo wrote: post #405
beefield wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how would you then like to arrange your mortgage if banks are not allowed as intermediaries managing the credit risk between depositors and yourself?

Banks could still lend out cryptocurrency, but in that case you know it is lended out (because you don't have it). In other words, banks multiply money right now, but you cannot multiply cryptocurrency. It's much more honest and clear.

But I would still as a depositor have the promise from the bank that the bank will give me back my cryptocurrency when I want?

If I do, there is practically zero difference how banks would work with crypto and fiat. And that promise can be used as money just like it can now with fiat. Thus banks would be able to monetarily multiply crypto at will as well.

If not, well, how exactly are you planning to stop me and my bank making such a contract? You know, the bank can pay me some interest on my savings is I let them lend the money forward, so both banks amd my incentive is to allow the lending of my deposit.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#694

Post by antidesitter »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #621
keymone wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#695

Post by rkagerer »

Setting aside the giant environmental debate, does anyone here actually have an opinion of this new cryptocurrency?

e.g. Do you think the advancements are novel, or just a mashup of ideas already tried in other blockchains?

Do any other cryptos do the "breadcrumb" shortcut?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#696

Post by antidesitter »

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…

Actually, cryptocurrency mining serves an environmentally-friendly function in energy markets because it absorbs excess capacity in the geographic regions where mining is done (i.e. where electricity is cheap) and allows it to be “exported” rather than go to waste. Interesting stuff.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#697

Post by antidesitter »

yqx wrote: post #297
SkyMarshal wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most* Bitcoin mining is done with renewables. Mostly hydro. Hydro power is often remote from cities and other main electricity consumers, and too weak to transfer over long distances. So they’re a natural place to set up Google data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations on-site, which is pretty much what’s happened with Bitcoin. *Don’t have a citation but there may be some research on this being published soon…

Independent of whether this is true (and I'm sceptical), Bitcoin mining requires computation (and lots of it). Computation requires power. Even if that power is renewable and would be difficult to use for things other than computation, there is still a huge demand for computation. Hence it's still a choice to spend that power on Bitcoin mining rather than other computation tasks such as simulations for scientific res…

Are you claiming that crypto-mining is pricing out useful scientific research? If so, can you provide evidence for that claim? Keep in mind the geographic nature of electricity generation and transmission.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#698

Post by dajohnson89 »

IanCal wrote: post #627
keymone wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 110,0…

https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-renewable-coinshares/

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#699

Post by topmonk »

darkpuma wrote: post #658
topmonk wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But yes, digital exfiltration may be easier than physical smuggling. That's supposing a lot about what forms of control are implemented in that country at at it's borders. Given that some forms of cryptocurrency can be stored using only a memorized passphrase and nothing else, (ie. a brain wallet), it's pretty much guaranteed that getting cryptocurrency put of the country would be easier.

You're supposing the government doesn't know you bought those bitcoins (or at the least doesn't know that you are somehow hiding a lot of money without knowing the details) and isn't willing to beat it out of you. Most cryptoanarchists are deluded nerds who would fold in less than 5 minutes of waterboarding. Do you think these thugs who are willing to look up your ass for a few pieces of gold aren't willing to violat…

Tell me how anything you just said shows how it could be easier to smuggle physical currency out of the country than digital currency, which was the point that I was refuting.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#700

Post by dorgo »

Aeolun wrote: post #666
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…

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.

> you try to argue that they’re a good expenditure of energy?

I think his argument is that it shouldn't matter whether it is a good expenditure of energy or not. Environmental costs should be priced in the energy costs. Then it wouldn't matter for the society and for the environment how much energy you use or waste.

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