Live data from Hacker News

A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

news.mit.edu

781–790 of 839 posts

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#781
post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

edit - I haven't, and my last comment contained nothing to do with per-transaction figures.

I've asked what basis you made your initial claim on, and provided several options where I've looked - transaction rate as currently happens with bitcoin, market cap and daily volume of transactions. None look even vaguely reasonable - so again, what was your initial claim calculated on? What measure were you using and where did you get your numbers? Have you actually tried to work it out?

> 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.

We have current use, how does that actually compare to the current banking system you were saying uses more energy?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#782
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the calculation here.

This is by far the least productive HN thread I've ever been on. The article just isn't related to a raw energy calculation, as that is not impacted by where the energy comes from.

edit - noted. Avoid crypto threads on HN as they're like discussing things on reddit.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#783
post #554

Here is also a lesser known open source project that demonstrates the use of proof-of-stake for energy efficiency, combined with a fixed-width directed acyclic grah with transaction sharding for parallelization. Furthermore, "final" and "stale" blocks are dynamically forgotten to increase storage efficiency. It achieves 10,000 tx/s on chain and transaction times below 1 minute. https://blockclique.io/

There's also Credits which claims to be the fastest chain at 0.1 second transaction times and to be capable of over 1 million transactions a sec. Though it you run it that fast you use a lot of disk space. https://credits.com/

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#784
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a long way of asking: do you want cryptocurrency to succeed if you knew that you could not profit from it doing so? That is a brilliant question! Instead of all the endless bickering between crypto-fans and -haters reaching from technology to fiscal policy to society, it reduces the conflict to one simple test, as a sort of precondition. Anecdata, but just going through my set of acquaintances, personal pro…

I always have been excited about Bitcoin because allows me as a developer to do things with money in the internet. I could create a service like PayPal without the need of having deals with hundreds of banks all over the world. A homeless can have a btc wallet but probably not a bank account. I could automate transfers and payments. In countries like Argentina there are a few banks and they're really bad quality, bot…

> I always have been excited about Bitcoin because allows me as a developer to do things with money in the internet. I could create a service like PayPal without the need of having deals with hundreds of banks all over the world. A homeless can have a btc wallet but probably not a bank account. I could automate transfers and payments. In countries like Argentina there are a few banks and they're really bad quality, both in terms of services and tech, so there are not things like stripe, etc.

But the problem is not the technology (it is there and exists for decades), but the laws. Better concentrate on that problem.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#785

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…

I would be delighted because imho it would make the world a better place.

However if there is a slight chance I might profit from it, I'll gladly take those odds.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#786
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't claim it was a bug. I was trying to make the point that all the tree huggers that scream bloody murder because of Bitcoin mining costs never look at the actual environmental cost of existing systems.

Gold is a fringe commodity valued by a similar small subset of the population that values bitcion. And yeah, I'd say that those people are also causing similar problems to bitcoin because they incentivize significant environmental destruction. Even worse than bitcoin, they also increase the costs of real commercial use cases for gold.

> Gold is a fringe commodity valued by a similar small subset of the population that values bitcion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve#Officially_report...

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#787
post #752
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are one of the unbanked billions around the world. I think I can buy that. The unbanked could become centrally-banked like all of us as their countries develop, but there is a competition between that and the cryptocurrency which could wedge itself in at this point and outcompete the local government simply because the government is small and lacks in experience (maybe corrupt too). Another contender here is…

Crypto is a pain to use even if you have a bank account, passport to scan and so on. I doubt many of the unbanked will use it to join the financial system. There is more promise from payment systems like M-Pesa, or new semi banks like Revolute I think. In the long run I think banks will win amongst the unbanked.

You’re still thinking like a mainframe salesman scoffing at PC’s ;) Crypto doesn’t require a bank account, passport, etc... The establishment requires that. A hope is that like the third world skipped telephone lines straight to cellphones, they will skip being dicked around by The National Bank of Venezuela and JCMorgan Chase & Partners, Ltd. and go straight to self-sovereign value exchange.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#788
post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have to supply the money so that they can have something which can be collected with reliable value for taxes. If your government allows you to pay taxes with monopoly money, then Hasbro becomes King. If the government supplies the money, there is no external organization which can inflate the supply to gain control.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold . Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and d…

>[Bitcoin] is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as [S.A.] old fashioned pieces of gold Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth? If we can figure this out, man bitcoin is totally KIA. Also can you let me how how I can costlessly assay gold when I accept it as payment? or make the supply of gold only dependent only on tim…

> Hi can you let me how I can immigrate out of my country with $10e6 without thieves at the airport taking my wealth?

I guess you mean "how can I violate capital control laws"?

Post reply on HN