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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#771

Post by resters »

AgentME wrote: post #736
resters wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the environmental concern temporary? Once all the bitcoin has been mined, the computational requirements for maintenance of the network will certainly decrease significantly. One could argue that Bitcoin should reach the limit sooner, so that mining difficulty would not increase so much, but the mining incentive is mainly a bootstrapping strategy for a currency. Now that everyone is familiar with how the ecosys…

The energy cost isn't exactly in creating bitcoins. The energy cost is in securing the network against people doing 51%-attacks, and bitcoins are set to be minted out of thin air and transaction fees are paid out in order to incentivize people to protect the network. Mining will still be necessary after all bitcoins are minted, or else anyone could 51%-attack the network and double-spend bitcoins.

What percentage of CPU power do you think will be mining bitcoin 5 days before vs 5 days after all of the coins have been mined?

If you think the amount will be roughly equal, then you are predicting that transactions that end up in blocks will need to voluntarily contribute an amount equivalent to the block reward in order for the system to continue functioning. This seems unlikely to me.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#772

Post by keymone »

IanCal wrote: post #760
keymone wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You made a very specific claim which you seem reluctant to back up so we can leave that there. If you want to discuss in good faith, please try not to shift the goalposts so much. For example, your reply suggests that with crypto there would have been no military or political actions that were environmentally damaging.

i don't see a lot of good faith in your arguments if you keep sticking to 4tx/sec and measuring bitcoin costs in per-transaction terms.

i'll repeat and lets see how much good faith you have: payment channels encapsulate potentially unlimited amount of transactions which completely refutes all your calculations.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#773

Post by keymone »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #768
keymone wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs way less than current financial system costs even normalized for market cap or transaction volume because it involves politics and military.

The internet depends on politics and the military too. Don't be fooled.

oh yeah, they have so much control, they've totally fixed the problem of torrenting, child porn and illegal markets.

don't be naive, you can't block bitcoin any more than you can block porn.

besides, internet is no longer the only information transfer medium bitcoin can work over.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#774

Post by Nursie »

naasking wrote: post #761
Nursie wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This canard is tiresome. The exiting infrastructure does far, far more than cryptocurrencies do, including credit, investment, protection of funds and all sorts of stuff.

And you think the existing infrastructure for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies cannot support such services? The smart contract languages were designed for such things as far as I understand.

Currently? No I don't believe that this infrastructure comes close to providing the functions of the financial industry, and as such the energy comparison are completely spurious.

The smart contracts languages can have whatever intent they like, the fact is that comparing the power use of a full financial system to something which is effectively operating as a bad payment processor is so wrong it's funny.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#775

Post by SkyMarshal »

tim333 wrote: post #762
SkyMarshal wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original use case for cryptocurrency (eg digital sound money, not world computers and the like) is as a long-term (and hopefully independent and uncorrrelated enough) hedge against mis-management and failure of national currency regimes. That remains a legit use case but will take years or decades to materialize. Given that the tech is still in the early stages of its maturity curve and needs more time to robusti…

>hedge against mis-management and failure of national currency regimes At the moment cryptocurrencies seem a good be worse than fiat. Imagine your salary or mortgage was a set number of bitcoins. There were probably a number of initial uses imagined but if you look as Szabo's twitter pretty much the first link is The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto about circumventing government and libertarian freedom which I think was a…

They’re a hedge in that they have different failure modes than govt fiat, which means they’re a potential safe haven in the event of govt currency collapse/hyperinflation/etc. Which is part of what the cryptoanarchists wanted.

Yes they’re volatile, but they’re new, immature tech, with shallow market depth. None of those things will last forever.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#776

Post by Nursie »

keymone wrote: post #745
Nursie wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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.

Don't care.

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

Yup, turns out this trust is pretty good, it's backed up by all sorts of regulations and insurance, all sorts of protections and security, and in the last resort by the state.

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

Who cares? When I have $100 in my wallet, I actually have $100.

You completely fail to address the point - when making a transaction, removing the bank from the picture actually hurts purchasers and demands far more trust.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#777

Post by keymone »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #764
keymone wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Missed the 'vendor' part. Most folks dealing in bitcoin, don't trade a whole coin at a time (which is what, $20K?) They use an exchange. Which is the same as now, except without any federal safeguards. In fact bitcoin exchanges have infamously been hijacked and abscond with everybody's coins. So where's the safety there? Its imaginary.

oh boy..

not your keys - not your bitcoin. that's the mantra in crypto world. you're just repeating nonsense you've heard somewhere.

whether exchange gets hacked is irrelevant to bitcoin i own if i'm the only owner of the keys.

not true for any money you're currently holding (if we judge from the position you're arguing for), those are completely imaginary indeed.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#778

Post by dnautics »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #565
Sir_Substance wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone could issue their own currency, and try to convince people to use it for actually buying and selling stuff. But that convincing part is really the key Absolutely true, see EcoCash. It's a fascinating case study. >and crypto very explicitly doesn't solve the problem that businesses will need to trust the issuing entity before they switch to using a new currency. Trust is a relative thing. EcoCash is issued by…

> > People and companies want to have a central, stable issuing authority they can trust. > I'd love to see a citation on that. Didn't you just provide two examples yourself (Zimbabwe and Venezuela) that alternative currencies are being adopted precisely due to the lack of a stable central issuing authority?

It's not just the stability but also the direction of the change.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#779

Post by naasking »

Nursie wrote: post #774
naasking wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think the existing infrastructure for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies cannot support such services? The smart contract languages were designed for such things as far as I understand.

Currently? No I don't believe that this infrastructure comes close to providing the functions of the financial industry, and as such the energy comparison are completely spurious. The smart contracts languages can have whatever intent they like, the fact is that comparing the power use of a full financial system to something which is effectively operating as a bad payment processor is so wrong it's funny.

You seem to be missing the fact that the infrastructure in place is sufficient to not only specify but also enforce the properties needed for all the functions you describe. So while you call the comparison spurious, the fact is that no additional energy would be required to achieve the functions you think are missing. So the comparison is not as spurious as you imply.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#780

Post by keymone »

Nursie wrote: post #776
keymone wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. Don't care. > all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it. Yup, turns out this trust is pretty good, it's backed up by all sorts of regulations and insurance, all sorts of protections and…

> When I have $100 in my wallet, I actually have $100

yeah, tell that to Venezuelans.

> You completely fail to address the point - when making a transaction, removing the bank from the picture actually hurts purchasers and demands far more trust.

that wasn't actually the point, or at least was completely off target, but sure, i can address it - banks are providing some useful services, banks won't stop providing those services on top of cryptocurrencies, they will just have to face the reality that nobody is going to inflate them out of their financial screw ups.

and finally, if you're fine trusting politicians to run your financial system and regularly screw you up with inflation, financial meltdowns, bankruptcies, etc - i'm ok with your choice. just get off your high horse and don't claim nothing should be attempted to fix that by and for people who are fed up.

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