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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

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Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#271

Post by [deleted] »

rootlocus wrote: post #74
tfha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't people rail like this against the aluminum industry? It's just as wasteful. Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society, the energy to secure bitcoin is a cost just the same as the energy to smelt aluminum.

> Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society Only for speculation and money laundering. Bitcoin's exaggerated volatility makes it unusable as a currency. If it would you wouldn't be making fun of the guy who spent N bitcoins on 2 pizzas instead of holding it. And conversely, if everyone would hold bitcoin, it wouldn't bring any utility to society.

[deleted]

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#272

Post by flatfilefan »

arcticbull wrote: post #251
flatfilefan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as per your linked article 95% of it is fake. Supply of fiat money is also „fake“ in a sense that it’s arbitrary controlled by one entity per country at most.

Do you not think there's a meaningful difference between privately-run exchanges fraudulently manipulating the price to enrich themselves (to clear short or long positions off their books, pump the value of their assets, etc) -- and central banks who operate on behalf of the people of their respective countries to ensure a stable and reliable money supply?

I think in the long run there’s none. Look at devaluations in various countries. Or cut of paper money circulation in India. Or the $8Trln “printed” by the US to balance out Chinese foreign reserves (also $8Trln at the time by coincidence)

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#273

Post by jcranmer »

keymone wrote: post #250
village-idiot wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you’re just dodging the question. Prove your assertion that a country on bitcoin would need a smaller army. I’ll wait. Edit: saying that the economy would be deflationary and thus couldn’t afford a large army would be a hilarious way to go.

fiat's value is, at least partially, backed by an army that can defend/assert it. not having fiat eliminates the need for as much army.

Explain the value of the Somali shilling, then.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#274

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

nybble41 wrote: post #244
Retric wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate That’s a reasonable approximation. Over time mining is paid for by transaction fees in a competitive market. If you get 2x the fees and the cost to mine stays the same, you get 2x as much mining. Granted that assumes transaction fees are ~1:1 with transaction count. However, protection from a 51% attack eventually requires 1:1 increase in mining as the value o…

Mining would scale with the transaction fees, but there is no reason to assume that transaction fees alone would match the current block reward. We don't need the amount of mining we have now just to defend against 51% attacks.

That depends entirely upon how motivated an attacker is and how many blocks organizations wait for.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#275

Post by jcranmer »

keymone wrote: post #207
jcranmer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts?" That's not "at least some chunk", that's the entire cost that you're trying to wedge in there.

ok, feel free to only include partial cost. how does that change my point?

In my opinion, the fraction of the cost of the army that goes to preserving fiat is somewhere in the region of 0%.

What maintains the value of fiat is not government coercive action (e.g., having an army that forces people to use currency). Instead, the value is dictated by how much the populace believes it is worth. So it's the general government actions to maintain the health of the economy, and none of that would disappear if the government were to decide not to use fiat.

Indeed, to the extent that you'd compare how much the government spends in a hypothetical world where it doesn't use fiat currency versus one that it does, it probably takes more resources in the first case (i.e., fiat currency is a net asset to the government, not a net cost).

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#276

Post by village-idiot »

keymone wrote: post #249
village-idiot wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how quoting you is a “manipulative tactic”.

I love how you didn't even notice that quote was doctored, which is my point entirely.

I'm not sure why you'd make such a trivially disprovable claim, they quoted you word for word, it's very easy to prove that with a quick browser text search...

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#277

Post by village-idiot »

keymone wrote: post #264
village-idiot wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s two issues here. First, the logic doesn’t work. Let “has fiat currency” be A, and “has a large army” be B. You’re asserting “If A then B; therefore if not A then not B”. This is a formal logic error called “denying the antecedent”, which means the argument is invalid. (You also don’t support A well, but that’s a side point because your logical assertion doesn’t work). Second, there are plenty of examples of r…

> Let “has fiat currency” be A, and “has a large army” be B. You’re asserting “If A then B; therefore if not A then not B”. those are incorrect presumptions and therefore incorrect conclusion. A is "has fiat currency", B is "needs an army or other means to maintain fiat value". of course army is not the only thing, but it's one of the things in many of the countries. whatever other things other countries have to asse…

You can change the definition of B all you want, it's still a formal fallacy, meaning the argument is literally worthless. You have to structure a very different argument from what you've shown to assert that bitcoin would reduce national military expenditures, not just tweak the details.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#278

Post by jcranmer »

keymone wrote: post #264
village-idiot wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s two issues here. First, the logic doesn’t work. Let “has fiat currency” be A, and “has a large army” be B. You’re asserting “If A then B; therefore if not A then not B”. This is a formal logic error called “denying the antecedent”, which means the argument is invalid. (You also don’t support A well, but that’s a side point because your logical assertion doesn’t work). Second, there are plenty of examples of r…

> Let “has fiat currency” be A, and “has a large army” be B. You’re asserting “If A then B; therefore if not A then not B”. those are incorrect presumptions and therefore incorrect conclusion. A is "has fiat currency", B is "needs an army or other means to maintain fiat value". of course army is not the only thing, but it's one of the things in many of the countries. whatever other things other countries have to asse…

> yet another reason why you can't make these energy consumption comparisons without being intellectually dishonest.

The intellectually dishonest part is trying to shove as many extra costs onto the fiat currency side of the equation without counting them for cryptocurrency.

Comparing the energy cost per transaction is a simple, pairwise comparison. Even if all the world used bitcoin for currency, there is no reason to expect that things like banks, armies, and the entire financial ecosystem wouldn't also exist. Trying to make fiat currency account for all the latter costs is just trying to mask the fact that bitcoin is by design inefficient.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#279

Post by davidgerard »

thisisit wrote: post #210
mrb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…

I am really curious about the points you make in your post. > This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. Who are these other researcher? Care to link to their research on this? > when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9 How do we know that? > It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today. Again…

> Who are these other researcher? Care to link to their research on this?

When a bitcoiner says something is "debunked", what they mean is that someone wrote a post on Medium. In this case, it's an investment banker who put some money into electricity companies before he put money into Bitcoin: https://hackernoon.com/the-reports-of-bitcoin-environmental-...

Digiconomist's response: "Verify, don't trust" - he shows his working. https://digiconomist.net/verify-dont-trust/

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#280

Post by davidgerard »

flatfilefan wrote: post #220
plutonorm wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have half a suspicion that it's the fact that it's burning through lots of fuel that is driving it's adoption. Processes in general seem to be driven by a kind of 'pressure' between low entropy and high entropy regions. This includes life itself. If life has a purpose it is to increase the flow across these low/high entropy regions. I don't think it's too outlandish to suppose some kind of hidden process that drive…

Replacing an oppressive apparatus that is relying on proof of military/police power to establish trust in banking with some form of an algorithm that is relying on proof of work/energy may be energy saving at the end. Just compare how much police/military has to be maintained and related resources spent to the naked energy for mining/transactions.

> Replacing an oppressive apparatus that is relying on proof of military/police power to establish trust in banking with some form of an algorithm that is relying on proof of work/energy may be energy saving at the end.

Bitcoin, 0.1% of all electricity: 7 tps

THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION, 99.9% of all electricity: a whole lot more than 6993 tps.

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