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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#701

Post by Gpetrium »

antidesitter wrote: post #696
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.

Did you know that some governments subsidize energy prices to make it easier for their populace to pay the bills and to encourage businesses to come to their country?

If cryptocurrency mining goes to countries with subsidized energy and they become part of maxing out that country's energy output, the country may be forced to create new energy sources to provide to the population (aka, higher environmental impact + cost). This push may be partially blamed by the cryptocurrency servers.

In other words, not all cryptocurrency mining servers as utilizing just the extra capacity casually created by a city/state.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#702

Post by blotter_paper »

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…

I have bad news for you, which may or may not be fake: in the future, we all live inside. Our houses aren't self-sufficient bio-domes at first, we pipe in fresh air and water from centralised facilities; then we use it, and pipe it back. At the centralised facilities where air and water is recycled and power is generated, waste just goes outside. Some modicum of theatrical effort is put into loading the particularly radioactive stuff in steel drums and telling the concrete trucks cover it over, but nobody really cares. As we approach the limit of a dead planet, the externalities of energy production cease to be negative -- there's no harm in beating a dead horse. This is when the cost of energy will accurately reflect all externalities, not before then. A society which slows down energy production will be outcompeted, and then they won't be in charge of the inside. The outside is already a lost cause.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#703

Post by root_axis »

sgeisler wrote: post #689
sgeisler wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sufficiently trustworthy Trustworthiness always depends on your use case. If you are transacting small amounts of money (less than is spent on mining a block) then waiting for 3 confirmations is probably sufficient to consider the transaction settled. But what if you send a transaction with a 100 times higher value than goes into mining a block then you will need to wait for over 100 confirmations till you can be s…

@root_axis (since I can't reply directly): > PoW systems are the only ones where "higher value transactions" need security proportional to their size. Every other currency is either backed by men with guns and transactions are reversible (fiat) or you have to spend a roughly proportional amount of resources securing it (e.g. gold). I didn't look at the data, but judging by US military spending I'd guess that the stro…

> Every other currency is either backed by men with guns?

So what? Men with guns are also the foundation of property rights, law and order, and national sovereignty; they are not an extra cost of fiat currency, they underpin the government's ability to maintain order and structure within society. I shouldn't have to explicitly point this out.

> transactions are reversible (fiat)

Cash payments are not reversible. Reversible payments are also a feature that nearly everyone wants.

> spend a roughly proportional amount of resources securing it (e.g. gold).

Gold is not a currency.

> that's only because it can operate with less assumptions (no identities), which I see as a feature

Untrue. A centralized anonymous payment system is technically possible, the limitations are strictly legal.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#704

Post by puranjay »

scartracs wrote: post #692
puranjay wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tran…

Venezuela is an interesting case in the sense that it is an otherwise well-off, decently well educated country going through a crisis.

My country - India - has the world's largest number of poor. Even if these people were to get smartphones, there are already deeply entrenched players (PayTM, Google Pay) who offer free and instant transactions.

This is true for a lot of African countries as well. No reason for anyone to use a new currency when there's already M-Pesa and UPI and PayTM that use the currency they already know and trust.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#705

Post by dorgo »

keymone wrote: post #438
darawk wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) You know that one of the major motivations for Proof of Stake is environmental, right? Proof of stake eliminates the energy waste…

Proof of stake may not involve energy costs directly but it has far worse consequences - costs are just shifted into political plane. Which is essentially what bitcoin was designed to avoid. You do know that idea of pos is older than PoW, yet nobody cared for it exactly because you end up with financial system run by politicians - exactly where you started.

> you end up with financial system run by politicians

At least, in case of pos, it is run by politicians with skin in the game...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#706

Post by bloomer »

darkpuma wrote: post #685
eropple wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not a new position. "Inflation is a regressive tax" has been around for a while.

I’m confused. How is it regressive? Inflation is essentially a tax on idle wealth.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#707

Post by teknologist »

orthecreedence wrote: post #625
nickpsecurity wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I would think that, regardless of the math, the token prices might remain stable just because people think the algorithms are doing their work. Kind of like an "invisible hand" situation.

Circulating supply fluctuations don't seem to have much of an influence on crypto prices (as seen with quarterly Binance Coin burns for instance)

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#708

Post by dorgo »

Gpetrium wrote: post #701
antidesitter wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you know that some governments subsidize energy prices to make it easier for their populace to pay the bills and to encourage businesses to come to their country? If cryptocurrency mining goes to countries with subsidized energy and they become part of maxing out that country's energy output, the country may be forced to create new energy sources to provide to the population (aka, higher environmental impact + co…

> and to encourage businesses to come to their country?

Bitcoin mining is a business and it comes to the country. Goal achieved.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#709

Post by adrianN »

robertAngst wrote: post #660
briatx wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, this is an important distinction. Bitcoin isn't liquid enough to count as actual money and proponents of the idea that sending bitcoin is the same as sending money are glossing over the cost to buy bitcoin, and the cost of transferring it back to actual money on the other side. Ha…

Give it a few years. Seeing how Americans Elected Trump, I can't imagine the USD being better than BTC over 10 years.

Have you already converted all your savings to bitcoin?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#710

Post by keymone »

root_axis wrote: post #560
keymone wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Politics and the military are the foundation of all society politics - maybe, military - not necessarily, just an artifact of infancy of our civilization. > Those things won't go away because of cryptocurrency those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin, which is good enough for me.

> just an artifact of infancy of our civilization. Just an artifact of all of human history . > those things will become irrelevant to financial system based on bitcoin I don't think there is any point in further discussion; we are simply living in two different realities. The military and the military industrial complex are not going anywhere, certainly not because of cryptocurrency, the notion is laughably absurd.

If you try reading my comments again you will realize I’m not claiming military and politics are “going” somewhere because of crypto.
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