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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#741

Post by IanCal »

keymone wrote: post #713
IanCal wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

per Transaction calculations are completely flawed. If transaction cost was the primary goal - bitcoin would have been a centralized mysql database. Decentralized and secure ownership of your assets that doesn’t involve trust, politics and military is what important in bitcoin. 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 agai…

> per Transaction calculations are completely flawed

They seem fairly important to me, but OK, what metric are you comparing on to claim that the current banking system is using far more raw energy?

Bitcoin has a market cap of $70B and daily volume of transactions of $10B.

NYSE covers about $20T alone for just 4000 companies. Scaled up, bitcoin would be over 10% of world energy use.

SWIFT seems to deal with about $5T per day https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/files/Appendix_D.pdf so that'd be bitcoin taking about 20% of total global energy use if scaled up.

By what measure do you want to back up the claim that the current system is far more energy intensive? I'm trying to find one and honestly struggling.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#742

Post by IanCal »

Scarblac wrote: post #365
sbenitoj wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do governments have to simultaneously be in the business of (1) securing people’s property and (2) creating money and regulating the monetary supply?

Because regulating it is an important part of securing it. They're not separate things. If I am a victim of fraud and lose my money, I have the concept of the rule of law to help me get my money back. In a decentralized world there is no way to get my money back. Besides, it is the government's job to help society function well, in part by making the economy successful. Money is just a tool to do that.

The government doesn't have to supply my shoes for me to be able to go to the police when someone steals them.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#743

Post by AgentME »

empath75 wrote: post #188
naveedi wrote: post #38

Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand. There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deli…

Without the marginal energy cost of mining blocks from proof of work, what do you think would drive the value of such a currency?

This question seems to assume that the cost of electricity and mining sets cryptocurrency prices, but I'm not sure why that would be the case. I think it's the other way around. Demand for Bitcoin doesn't increase when electricity gets cheaper / mining becomes more profitable. Mining becomes more profitable when demand goes up. If electricity became more expensive or mining otherwise became less profitable, demand for bitcoin does not go down; most traders and users of bitcoin probably don't even notice. The only direct effect is that some miners stop mining (and the network becomes a little more vulnerable to 51%-attacks).

Another way to think about it: if Bitcoin somehow worked without mining, that's no reason for demand or usage of Bitcoin to go down. The value of bitcoins comes from network effects and scarcity.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#744

Post by keymone »

IanCal wrote: post #741
keymone wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

per Transaction calculations are completely flawed. If transaction cost was the primary goal - bitcoin would have been a centralized mysql database. Decentralized and secure ownership of your assets that doesn’t involve trust, politics and military is what important in bitcoin. 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 agai…

> per Transaction calculations are completely flawed They seem fairly important to me, but OK, what metric are you comparing on to claim that the current banking system is using far more raw energy? Bitcoin has a market cap of $70B and daily volume of transactions of $10B. NYSE covers about $20T alone for just 4000 companies. Scaled up, bitcoin would be over 10% of world energy use. SWIFT seems to deal with about $5T…

> By what measure do you want to back up the claim that the current system is far more energy intensive? I'm trying to find one and honestly struggling.

how much damage financial and environmental have politicians and military have caused over the last 5 thousand years? yep, take that into account in your calculations.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#745

Post by keymone »

Nursie wrote: post #720
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.

> that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. 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 gi…

nope, you're the one talking nonsense. when your bank tells you you have $100 on your account - it's a lie, all you have is a record in a database and never actual $100 in a safe to back that up.

all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it.

when you have 100BTC, you actually have 100BTC.

how is that hard to understand?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#746

Post by johnisgood »

foxrob92 wrote: post #652
johnisgood wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying it will not be an issue in terms of environmental impact after fusion becomes a reality, as far as electricity goes.

I mean that's a bit of a tautology isn't it? Once we have clean energy production for everything, bitcoin will have minimal environmental impact? That's ignoring the fact that fusion is still a very long way from commercial availability.

Why is it a tautology, and why would it be ignoring the fact? I am not. I am only stating that it will be less of an issue, because well, it will be... that is, if everything turns out to be working as ITER "predicted". Isn't this correct? We are aiming for "cheaper" and "greener" electricity, some even call it "infinite electricity".

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#747

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

Speculation is not really a point. It's a temporary method of popularization, because people can't be reasoned with in other ways.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#748

Post by geofft »

iameli wrote: post #674
SilasX wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 —…

> when I hear Bitcoin advocates dismiss environmental concerns as irrelevant or shift the blame onto government tax policy

... You know, when you put it that way, there's another problem with this argument. "Bitcoin is good because governments shouldn't be interfering with my ability to give money to Julian Assange. They shouldn't even know that I'm paying him. And if it hurts the environment, well, that's the fault of governments not taxing energy usage appropriately. They should be paying close attention to what people spend money on and dissuading uses that have harmful effects for society, as determined in their sole opinion."

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#749

Post by RugnirViking »

seth__ wrote: post #166
gregknicholson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't accept this assessment of how Bitcoin's consensus fundamentally works. Yes, anyone can fork the code, but consensus comes only when the miners choose a fork. As far as I can see, there's no significant incentive to mine other than money, so miners want money, so you can persuade them with money. The "consensus" is fundamentally an auction.

Unless people really use bitcoin to pay for stuff. Then, whatever token can be exchanged for something of value is the one everyone wants, doesn't matter if the miners fork

Unfortunately bitcoin becomes steadily less useful for actually using and paying for stuff as time goes on. Back in the day, it could be used on amazon, buy a coffee etc. Now its just a bizzare experiment in markets without consumers.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#750

Post by saalweachter »

ithkuil wrote: post #184
mandeepj wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think she is the original author of this quote. Going to share another quote, which I think is relative here - “Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.” - Steve Jobs

Sadly those you think are too crazy to change the world, usually are

s/Sadly/Thankfully/
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