101–110 of 463 posts
Now they pass the time counting their money until their stars burn out.
Bitcoin is an ongoing environmental disaster, profiting off of subsidized coal power in China and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people die every year from air pollution. But on the other side, hey blockchains are so cool they can do the same work as banks but six orders of magnitude less efficiently.
By that measure, the problem is the pricing of energy, not Bitcoin.
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> Wasteful compared to what though? How much energy, human capital, and resources are consumed by the banking industry? The article actually answers this to some degree. See the following graphic: https://i.imgur.com/8TdKevG.png
How much energy to mine an ounce of gold?
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Why is this getting downvoted, I'm curious as well.
I don't think any modern currency is really using Gold these days. The cost of creating dollars is basically the cost of the Fed signing a few papers. A lot of modern currency is fully virtual. So I don't think "mining gold" is an appropriate analogy. EDIT: Case in point: how much did it cost for Visa + Bank to increase a credit-card from $500 credit limit to $2000 credit limit? $1500 of credit appeared out of thin a…
The first credit limit increase "from scratch" costs hundreds of billions of dollars in creating a system of legal compliance, accounting, communication, internal and external risk management, executive compensation, regulatory oversight, credit ratings, cybersecurity, salaries of millions of workers, building public trust in the credit system, writing and passing legislation, even Fed responsibility of building and maintaining a fiat currency.
The second credit limit increase once this system exists is essentially free.
To what extent do these costs need to be accounted for in creating an accurately comparable 'per transaction' metric? By replacing much of the logic with 'just math', Bitcoin has the potential for a much higher theoretical efficiency than the current banking system. Whether market penetration will ever reach the current banking systems levels - and function without replicating these same structures - is certainly highly debatable and for many of the above items implausible.
Bitcoin transactions in isolation are also essentially free - it's the maintenance of the system which keeps it secure and trustworthy that is expensive.
The Bitcoin network has a fixed transaction capacity that has no relation to the amount of power expended to mine bitcoin. The amount of power used is proportional to the value of the reward for successfully mining a new block, which happens about every 10 minutes (12.5 BTC or about $100k). If the value of BTC goes up miners will increase their spend and more power will be consumed per block mined, and if the value g…
Shut it down. Can a couple of these people agree that a well-coordinated merge & release to sabotage proof of work is ethical. https://github.com/orgs/bitcoin/people
Even if you got a maintainer to commit and release code to disable PoW, you'd still have to get enough node operators to update, which... I doubt would happen.
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I'm afraid that the moment you chose to use the word "wasteful" it became a philosophical discussion and they don't typically have final words at all. The stripped down reason you see it as wasteful is that you have some set of beliefs about what is "right" and "meaningful" (many of which, I'll take liberty to say, most likely likely NOT consciously thought out) and since the core technical principle behind Bitcoin i…
Or you could say Bitcoin is wasteful because PoS accomplishes the same thing with 99.99% less energy.
To be clear: if you ask my opinion on technical side of Bitcoin, I wouldn't be really praising it. But, as I said already, Bitcoin is not a technical thing. It is a very complicated sociocultural phenomena that definitely did achieve something. And you need to consider everything X is, to apply words such as "wasteful" to X.
Again, if this seems too abstract: if you are living in the USA, you are consuming twice more energy (per capita) than Japanese people, having lower life expectancy (both are far from the ends of the spectrum, BTW). So, the existence of USA citizens is wasteful.
Now, doesn't stripping down all the nuance of living different lives in different countries seem a bit outrageous to you? It surely does seem so to me.
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I like cost of electricity. While Chinese plants are subsidizing the BTC network right now, we can estimate the cost of "unsubsidized" BTC in the future based off of electricity costs today. -------- With regard to the Lightning Network, it seems that it requires a bit of supervision to be secure. https://themoneymongers.com/lightning-network-watchtowers/ That supervision probably will have a cost of some kind. > You…
It should be possible to build watchtowers into the protocol itself. A lightning node could elect some number of random nodes as watchtowers at bootup, similar to how many clients now elect random channels. Being a watchtower is extremely low cost, it only requires a small amount of memory. Every full lightning node is watching the blockchain anyway so it is easy to watch for some extra transaction ids with a certain…
How much will watchtower rewards cost?
The economics aren't fully studied. But I'd expect a good watchtower would be proportional to the amount of the transaction. That is, if you wanted to protect a 100 BTC transaction, you'd want to spend more on the watchtower reward than if you wanted to protect a 1 BTC transaction.
Hypothetically, if you spend too little, the watchtower + your opponent can collude to effectively steal some of your money. (Ex: the Watchtower could be paid by your opponent to NOT send the revocation message).
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I love when bitcoin promoters claim that bitcoins massive waste of energy is okay cause “it’s totally renewable”. Setting aside the non-trivial ecological damage caused by dams.... all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. Instead it is getting flushed down the toilet solving useless math problems so that a relative handful of people can milk a larger set o…
> all that renewable energy could have been used to power something that actually adds value to society. If the miners are using excess production, then by definition, that power could not have been used for anything else; otherwise, some consumer in the grid would have used it!
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I'm afraid that the moment you chose to use the word "wasteful" it became a philosophical discussion and they don't typically have final words at all. The stripped down reason you see it as wasteful is that you have some set of beliefs about what is "right" and "meaningful" (many of which, I'll take liberty to say, most likely likely NOT consciously thought out) and since the core technical principle behind Bitcoin i…
Bitcoin is absolutely wasteful to the vast majority of the population on earth. It provides no benefit to them, and makes their energy bill (and video card bill) go up.