Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland' • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#121

Post by lone_haxx0r » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

aidanlister wrote: post #94

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer depending on the market instead of the state dictating how much my money is worth.

Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly monitoring and adjusting. It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla. Sure the Tesla makes mistakes and kills someone every now and then, but I’d take that over the brick.

> Why? The market is dumb (in a technical sense). The state is constantly monitoring and adjusting.

The market is relatively 'dumb', but its decisions are based on human expectation and applied peacefully through voluntary transactions. The state is relatively 'dumb' too, but it's also evil most of the time, and its decisions use violence to be committed.

Also, when the market is wrong, some people may lose money (specially those that were the most wrong), but the system corrects itself. When the state is wrong, the error accumulates because the system can't self-correct.

>It’s like saying you trust a car with a brick on the accelerator over a self drive Tesla.

The market is much like a machine learning algorithm. I say the market is the Tesla AI and the state is a drunk driver.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#122

Post by modeless » Thu, Jul 04, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #120

modeless wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that Bitcoin users will not pay transaction fees that are anything close to the current mining reward that is subsidized by inflation of the Bitcoin money supply. Therefore when the subsidy inevitably falls, so will the total income of all Bitcoin miners. And in the long term Bitcoin miners collectively cannot afford to buy more electricity than their total income, therefore their electricity consumption…

Thanks for clarifying! Fees are denominated in satoshis though, and even today the average USD amount of fees is around $8,000 per block[1] (around 6% of the total reward). A 10x increase of the BTC price will make that amount around the same as the current total reward. [1] https://fork.lol/reward/fees

Fees may be denominated in satoshis but unlike the block reward they are not fixed. Users choose their fees at every transaction, and they will not pay more than the value they derive from making transactions. The total value of all fees paid is determined by the actual usage of the network, not the Bitcoin price.

Of course today usage of the network is somewhat correlated with price, but it's not directly proportional and the correlation will weaken in the future.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#123

Post by viraptor » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #116

viraptor wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already online only banks without physical presence in most places and many countries don't tie their currency value to gold. The payment systems are not great on either side of the issue.

> many countries don't tie their currency value to gold Is there any national currency still on the gold standard?

It doesn't look like it. I wanted to stay on the safe side without research :-)

But it's interesting - not really a gold standard, (they're pegged to USD) but it looks like Lebanon has between 1/3 and 1/2 GDP worth of gold backing it's currency.

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#124

Post by stuffbyspencer » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

lumberjack wrote: post #67

stuffbyspencer wrote: post #37

Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!" Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!" Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most…

> The intense desire for personal wealth that one truly owns. Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger. Also philosophically speaking, "wealth that one truly owns" as in "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing. If your wealth is in Bitcoin, you are trusting in fellow Bitcoin users and your wealth is entirely dependent on their feelings about the cryptomarket. That is hard…

> Not at all. It's the desire to get rich quick without lifting a finger.

I disagree with that. Bitcoin did not start off with get-rich-quick schemes. It started off with a core bunch of people who wanted independent options to wealth. One of the major issues we're going through today [ in terms of tech-misinformation ] is how everyone assumes cryptocurrency & blockchain are just buzzwords that people only got interested in to make money & scam. Not true. Bitcoin started off with a completely different ideology among the early adopters before it got to where it is today. Don't look at the current trend of youtube """educators""" [ read: hype-beast / scammers ] and think that's what drives the development.

> "wealth that is not dependent on others" is not a thing

That's actually a very good point! I wouldn't necessarily agree to your ending statement of whether it is / isn't a safer store for one's wealth, but I do agree that wealth needs dependencies. I guess I should have made my statement to be more along the lines of: "Independent wealth OPTIONS where users can control their dependencies."

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#125

Post by stuffbyspencer » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

ubersync wrote: post #49

stuffbyspencer wrote: post #37

Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!" Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!" Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most…

The Bitcoin "bubble" has "burst" at least 6 times now. Which one were you refering to? Every time it recovers and reaches another all time high in a couple of years. Being the nascent but potentially world changing technology, it might take a few years to realize its true market cap. And along the way, we will see a few pumps and dumps. Its just normal.

I'm referring to the most recent one that I believe most are familiar with: when Bitcoin reached ATH of $20,000 and then plummeted to $4,000 [ I think that was the lowest... ]

I'm not against BTC, and I'm not saying it's dead, I'm just pointing out the obvious crash that recently happened :^)

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#126

Post by stuffbyspencer » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

arisAlexis wrote: post #82

stuffbyspencer wrote: post #37

Someone created Bitcoin. It was a neat idea and people played with it. When the first pizza was bought with Bitcoin, I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh cool, real world use!" Then Bitcoin bubbled. People panicked and jumped on board without researching, Bitcoin went up a bazillion %. I wonder how the creator felt? "Oh wow... Lots of people want this!" Then the bubble burst, price went down, people got mad, but, most…

wow what a hate comment really. you totally miss all of the pain points that Bitcoin addressses

lol, I think you need to re-read what I wrote and not have that "hate" implication going through your mind.

I'm not against BTC, I love blockchain & decentralization, I toy around with many cryptocurrencies myself. I'm not ragging on anything with my comment, just making an observation about events and attaching how I would feel if I were the creator / catalyst for said events :^)

Re: Bitcoin's energy consumption 'equals that of Switzerland'

#127

Post by schoen » Sat, Jul 06, 2019, 2:10 AM UTC

jdijdhud wrote: post #88

schoen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty hard to do. It appears that you need problems where (1) you can generate a practically unlimited number of arbitrary instances, (2) of arbitrary difficulty, (3) deterministically based on a random seed, (4) that are roughly constant difficulty to validate, and (5) where a randomly-chosen instance is likely to be useful to know a solution to.

If someone thought those cycles could be put to better use they would pay out bitcoins themselves to mining machines to convince them to run their computation instead, it's straight arbitrage.

You might be able to convince a lot of cryptocurrency adopters to switch to coins that were based on a useful proof-of-work (sometimes called "proof-of-useful-work") even if the kind of useful work that secures the coin isn't one that many people are currently paying for. After all, some present and prospective adopters care a lot about externalities, whether ethically or out of fear of future regulation or marketing.

A wonderful case would be where biomedical research somehow had an unlimited and ongoing need for solutions to arbitrary, random simulation tasks (where it was also relatively easy to confirm the correctness of an alleged solution). This doesn't really seem to be the case, but cryptocurrencies' impact and popularity would be improved quite a bit if it were!