Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Bitcoi…
A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
711–720 of 839 posts
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think here's your answer: It isn't just about the tech. This is what most "blockchain" enthusiasts get wrong. They think it is just about technology, and thus, they can come up with "a better bitcoin." They're missing that the predetermined monetary policy is the key innovation of Bitcoin, and that by creating a new "blockchain" which prints new money, they are shooting themselves in the foot, because they can't ev…
A predetermined monetary policy is fine but the fact that it is predetermined to be deflationary is a fatal flaw. I would have much more faith in a cryptocoin's potential as a currency if the predetermined monetary policy was something like Friedman's k-percent rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman%27s_k-percent_rule Of course this would vastly reduce the Ponzi aspect for early owners which might remove most o…
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#713Earlier 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…
And by the way with payment channels all your numbers are irrelevant anyway because your assumption of 4 tx/sec goes out the window. Try again with 4 trillion tx/sec. And keep in mind that there is no upper limit.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s natural way of life. If a system is subject to being controlled by political process, which PoS is unlike PoW, it will eventually be overrun by politicians. Just common sense.
And which political processes exactly is PoS subject to that PoW is not?
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#715I'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…
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#716Earlier 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.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your understanding of why bitcoin uses energy is completely skewed. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy to process transactions or ensure a functioning p2p network, bitcoin is the first time in history of money, that money can be expressed as energy units . Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy, or more specifically bitcoin is as much energy as people value the function and security of money. Trying to reduce it is ab…
I don't think you understand what you think GP doesn't understand. Bitcoin uses energy to establish distributed consensus. What's technologically missing from the protocol is an energy-efficient way to establish distributed consensus, not a faster PoW algorithm.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's also an issue of debt differences. One of the big 'benefits' of inflation is that it makes old debts worth less. This is a major incentive for pursuing investments on debt. Not only can you see investments on money beyond what you presently have, but the debt that you took on becomes worth less - meaning it takes a smaller share of your profits each year assuming the principle is not growing. For instance during the government auto bailouts Ford took on a loan for billions of dollars of debt from the government. The interest rate on that loan is sub-inflation. Unsurprisingly, they aren't paying it back since each year it becomes worth less, and given enough time, it will become worthless.
By contrast when a lower income individual takes on debt, it's often 'consumed' such as in the case of education. And the debt becoming worth less over time is not true if an individual's income is not keeping pace with inflation. And another big issue is that lower income individuals are also often going to be seeing rather high interest rates on their loans further diminishing any theoretic benefit of inflation.
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This is not to say inflation is bad. You can create a comparably negative argument against deflation. I don't really have much of an opinion one way or the other. We've seen how depressive systems can end. And while our current inflation and debt driven system has not yet collapsed, it's not looking as stable as it once did to put it very mildly. I think in 20 or so years (and especially once the petro dollar is 100% dead) we'll have a much better idea of the pros and cons of each system.
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#719I'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…
Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
#720Earlier 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.
Well that's nonsense for a start.
Bitcoin simply shifts trust from a middleman to a vendor I am interacting with.
A middleman that is highly regulated, with all sorts of protections and restrictions in place to protect me.
A vendor who has a financial incentive to rip me off, and thousands of years of history to show us just how much they do when given the chance.
The trustlessness of cryptocurrencies is a lie. They move trust from a small number parties you can actually trust most of the time, to a huge number of unknown entities with perverse incentives.