Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

digiconomist.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 463 posts

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#391

Post by noxer »

maxerickson wrote: post #368
noxer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners more or less entirely pay the cost with the blockreward which means the users pay way way less fees for their Tx than it would actually cost in energy. If we assume max 7Tx/s 1 block can hold 4200 Tx One block gets the miner 12.5 BTCs that's a 0.003 BTC "subvention" per Tx that would otherwise have to be pais as fee. In other words the cost is paid by inflation which hurts most who holds and not who uses it. P…

There's some question of what a crash looks like. If the block reward goes away but there are enough fees to cover a reasonable difficulty, the crash will just be the end of the enormous investment in chasing the block reward, the network might still be secure enough to be usable. I haven't checked the math, but this article says the block reward is ~$45 per transaction, vs ~$0.70 in fees: https://cryptoslate.com/eac…

BTC can survive if the price at lest doubles before or after the halving. This is what happened in the past. It can happen again maybe even multiple times but certainly not forever.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#392

Post by DonHopkins »

paulmd wrote: post #227
Iv wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.

vlad whatever was full of shit 4 years ago when he said that he thought proof of work would be eliminated within 6 months. I bought hardware on the basis that he was wrong and it paid out. I dunno why anyone still has faith in eth as a concept, it's a garbage programming model, it's a garbage developer, who has failed for an inordinate period of time as measured by the crypto community. he's just trying to pump up hi…

You mean the guy who the machine elves made him do it?

https://coinjazeera.news/vlad-zamfir-looking-for-new-drugs-t...

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#393

Post by DonHopkins »

rux wrote: post #331
keymone wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin’s energy use is its most valuable feature. If you think it’s an issue - you don’t understand what’s valuable in Bitcoin.

You've made this comment twice yet haven't enlightened me. I have no ideological bias - what is the value of the energy use?

It's all about making a political statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#394

Post by keymone »

noxer wrote: post #386
keymone wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each participant in the network chooses a set of validators, servers specifically configured to participate actively in consensus, run by different parties who are expected to behave honestly most of the time. maybe you're fine with that, i'm not and everybody who values bitcoin aren't either. it's the kind of thing that PoW solves and PoS doesn't. every PoS system i've seen just obfuscates this glaring hole instea…

Why exactly aren't you fine with that? You run a node and you decide which nodes you want to connect your node to. If such a node gets a Tx it will be relayed to your node and the other way around. It's not like your node would copy their validation and just agree with what they agree. Every node always enforces all the rules. So your node checks if a Tx is valid anyway and if you get invalid Tx from a node you trust…

> Why exactly aren't you fine with that?

because i don't want to trust anyone. XRP is not trustless or decentralized enough.

> Every node always enforces all the rules. So your node checks if a Tx is valid anyway and if you get invalid Tx from a node you trust it wont make your node accept that Tx.

as i said - validity is trivial. i asked you to not bring it up but you did anyway.

> majority of the validators say Tx X was first

"majority of validators" is not something you can reliably even define for yourself because you don't know which parties have colluded with each other. this consensus model fails on every layer.

> Only if everyone would select over 20% "bad" nodes it could halt the consensus.

i don't care how small you think this problem is. i want to never rely on having to select "correct" validators to ensure my financial future isn't at risk.

i want universally objective measure by which i can compare competing chains. if your protocol doesn't provide it without having to trust third parties - it's a failure.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#395

Post by DonHopkins »

xtracto wrote: post #384
mrb wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible that people on HN, a technical readership, still don't understand why the energetic or computational "waste" of proof-of-work is needed. There is simply no other known way of implementing a decentralized, censorship-resistant, robust digital currency. Without PoW you lose one of these properties. Proof-of-stake doesn't work. It isn't robust. Eg. PoS cryptocurrencies can't resolved which chain is corre…

I am not that old and still I remember Ring networks (before ethernet), they were highly impractical and rudimentary, but they filled a purpose at their time. Then Ethernet came. Anyone remembers the dumb hubs? when a computer wanted to send a message, the hub actually broadcasted it to all computers in the network... so inefficient, and yet, it served its purpose. Later, came the network protocols. There was this pr…

SMTP came a long time before NNTP.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#396

Post by xtracto »

DonHopkins wrote: post #395
xtracto wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not that old and still I remember Ring networks (before ethernet), they were highly impractical and rudimentary, but they filled a purpose at their time. Then Ethernet came. Anyone remembers the dumb hubs? when a computer wanted to send a message, the hub actually broadcasted it to all computers in the network... so inefficient, and yet, it served its purpose. Later, came the network protocols. There was this pr…

SMTP came a long time before NNTP.

I invoke Cunningham's Law.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#397

Post by dragontamer »

aeternum wrote: post #130
dragontamer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> watchtower reward can be built in to the revocation txn. 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 reward can still be low because you can choose many watchtowers. If you have a high value channel, you could choose for example hundreds of watchtowers. Only the first one to broadcast the revocation would get the reward. The reward only has to be high enough for it to be worthwhile for other nodes to spend a small amount of memory storing your txn.

What's the point of being a watchtower if only one watchtower gets the reward?

In the case of 100x watchtowers watching one transaction, each watchtower only has a 1% chance of actually getting the reward.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#398

Post by maxerickson »

noxer wrote: post #391
maxerickson wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some question of what a crash looks like. If the block reward goes away but there are enough fees to cover a reasonable difficulty, the crash will just be the end of the enormous investment in chasing the block reward, the network might still be secure enough to be usable. I haven't checked the math, but this article says the block reward is ~$45 per transaction, vs ~$0.70 in fees: https://cryptoslate.com/eac…

BTC can survive if the price at lest doubles before or after the halving. This is what happened in the past. It can happen again maybe even multiple times but certainly not forever.

A doubling leads to the rewards staying about the same. Whether that needs to happen for bitcoin to survive is not at all obvious. It would likely be sufficient for bitcoin to survive, it just isn't clear that it is necessary, maybe ⅓ of the reward would keep folks interested.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#399

Post by DonHopkins »

xtracto wrote: post #396
DonHopkins wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMTP came a long time before NNTP.

I invoke Cunningham's Law.

I invoke Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, and predict that Bitcoin will be replaced by artificially intelligent spam filtering software that can read mail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Principles

Zawinski's law of software envelopment (also known as Zawinski's law) comments on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#400

Post by trickstra »

ben_w wrote: post #388
trickstra wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trustless currency means exactly the opposite of what you think. It means you don't need to trust anyone, because everything can be proven and verified mathematically without any authoritative figure that you'd have to trust. That's why you can trust the system itself. And I'm sorry, I won't address your other points.

I think you have fundamentally misunderstood my point. Let’s say I buy a widget. How can I trust that the widget will arrive? That it will do what widgets do? That it will not break? None of these are payment issues, but they might call for a refund. How can I get a refund? How can the refund system be resistant to abuse? The answers we currently have are “the law”. If the law functions, I don’t need a trustless curr…

If I have a choice between math or "the law" as for which functions more reliably, my bet is on the math.
Post reply on HN