Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#401

Post by trickstra » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

noxer wrote: post #390

trickstra wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners are not paying their electricity bills with bitcoin (most of them). It's the other buyers, that buy the bitcoins from the miner in exchange for dollars, that in fact pay the bills. And those are willing to pay the current price of electricity required to create the block. And mining costs have gone down before. It's when bitcoin's price falls making mining unprofitable, so some miners stop, which lowers the di…

That's word juggling whether the miners pay with bitcoins or sell bitcoins and pay with fiat is totally irrelevant. Fact is, mining is paid with the block reward. Bitcoin pays itself by "printing" itself. The value that goes to whom sells the energy/hardware is extracted from every bitcoin in existence via inflation. Unlike with Fiat the inflation rate is hard-coded and declines so hyperinflation isn't a problem but…

If you are so sure, you are welcome to make some money on it by shorting bitcoin before the halving which is in May.

And no, it's not word juggling, the value of money comes from the people who exchange things for money. Here they exchange either electricity, or USD for it. Miners are paying their bills by selling virtual tokens, if those tokens didn't have any value for anybody, they wouldn't be able to sell them. Whether the token comes from block reward or transaction fees doesn't change anything on the fact that somebody gave up USD to get the token.

> Bitcoin pays itself by "printing itself"

Kinda ironic now after FED printed more money in one week than the whole Bitcoin economy is worth. I'd rather have the printing controlled by math, than any person.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#402

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

btcd wrote: post #238

xg15 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the purpose of Bitcoin is to give billionaires better tools to move their wealth around while externalising the energy consumption and CO2 omissions to all of us. Thanks a lot!

That is a side effect, not the purpose. Millionaires can use Bitcoins to move their wealth too. I'd say even for a transaction of $1,000, it is often cheaper to move in Bitcoins. On the contrary: the purpose of private banks is almost exclusively for billionaires to move their wealth around, while externalising costs to all of us. Many financial market interventions in the past are the society bailing out billionaire…

> That is a side effect, not the purpose. Millionaires can use Bitcoins to move their wealth too. I'd say even for a transaction of $1,000, it is often cheaper to move in Bitcoins.

Compared to a free domestic ACH or wire?

Internationally you have to pay exchanges on the receiving end >1% fees to convert it to something you can actually spend.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#403

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

RidingPegasus wrote: post #216

puranjay wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countries that don't have reliable currencies are countries like South Sudan and Somalia. Do you really expect illiterate people (3 in 4 women in Somalia are illiterate, 1 in 2 men) to use Blockstream? You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.

Given the choice would you suggest a person from somewhere such as Venezuela keep their personal savings in Bitcoin or Venezuelan bolívars?

Each BTC transaction fee costs 2 weeks average wages in Venezuela my dude.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#404

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

trickstra wrote: post #401

noxer wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's word juggling whether the miners pay with bitcoins or sell bitcoins and pay with fiat is totally irrelevant. Fact is, mining is paid with the block reward. Bitcoin pays itself by "printing" itself. The value that goes to whom sells the energy/hardware is extracted from every bitcoin in existence via inflation. Unlike with Fiat the inflation rate is hard-coded and declines so hyperinflation isn't a problem but…

If you are so sure, you are welcome to make some money on it by shorting bitcoin before the halving which is in May. And no, it's not word juggling, the value of money comes from the people who exchange things for money. Here they exchange either electricity, or USD for it. Miners are paying their bills by selling virtual tokens, if those tokens didn't have any value for anybody, they wouldn't be able to sell them. W…

> If you are so sure, you are welcome to make some money on it by shorting bitcoin before the halving which is in May.

Only suckers take positions in a rigged game, short or long.

> Kinda ironic now after FED printed more money in one week than the whole Bitcoin economy is worth. I'd rather have the printing controlled by math, than any person.

Obviously that math is defined by people, so you're just pointing at it and pretending otherwise. The Bitcoin Core team can just change the printing rate any time; their lack of action is defacto action. Rather than an elected group of economists you've got a bunch of un-accountable, un-elected people with zero experience in the economics space shooting from the hip.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#405

Post by heimatau » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #320

heimatau wrote: post #221

The idea that bitcoin is 'wasteful' is entirely missing the solution that bitcoin is. Byzantine Generals Problem. This network is unmatched in it's provability and security. There is a turing complete machine, operating that can be trusted. Seriously, the possibilities are limitless but guess what, they do have a cost. And there are too many con-artists around. But an industry that is changing the entire monetary pol…

If PoS is rent-seeking how come PoW isn't rent-seeking?

In a PoW network (read Bitcoin), those that have the currency (satoshis/'sats') don't gain any more sats by just possessing them. The only way to gain more is from either those that have some or to mine more (until 2140).

In a PoS network, those that have the currency can "stake" their possessions to gain more. They don't need to spend in hardware/electricity to mine more. There is a built in function to extract currency.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#406

Post by ben_w » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

trickstra wrote: post #400

ben_w wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does your maths enforce arbitrary quality control assurances? How does it guarantee refunds for breaches of contract?

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#407

Post by aeternum » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #397

aeternum wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's true, I believe the low probability of getting the reward is the greatest flaw with the watchtower reward scheme. Not just if you have many watchtowers, but the likelihood of a peer attempting a channel breach in the first place esp. when watchtowers are in place would be extremely low since that peer is almost certainly assured to lose money.

There are some services currently providing watchtower for a flat fee instead, and the going rate is low (1 satoshi / txn watched) =~ $ 0.00008

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#408

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

biolurker1 wrote: post #336

glenneroo wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I have seen ever more who do such as Overstock, Microsoft, Expedia, Wikipedia, Namecheap, NewEgg. I'm sure there are more.

you missed the news of the last couple of years with all these names dropping btc because if the high fees, a problem that could be solved but wasn't due to politics

Also transaction times + volatility. Because it takes so long to confirm, the underlying exchange rates were shifting out from under customers, so even though you'd paid the right amount, by the time the transaction cleared, they either needed to refund you or you needed to pay extra. The whole system was so asinine nobody wanted to use it, and it created tons of customer service headaches.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#409

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

_57jb wrote: post #356

lukev wrote: post #132

The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…

Hashing solved a problem of limiting supply and spreading the work in a dynamic way to prevent takeovers. Energy consumption would be dramatically less if ASICs weren't a thing. In hindsight it is obvious they would be built but give me a break. What they accomplished was a decentralized balancing of power based on economics, crypto, and distributed computing. It is beyond remarkable. So tell me, what is the carbon f…

> So tell me, what is the carbon footprint of FedNet and all of the banks clearing the 3,000 tx/s demands and their collective datacenters...

(a) whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

(b) If every Visa transaction took 625kWh, it would use 38X the entire world's power generation capacity and 3X the worlds entire rate of e-waste generation. Just Visa, not MC, UnionPay or Amex. Visa is literally 700,000X more efficient, and getting more efficient as technology does. Bitcoin becomes more wasteful as technology improves.

> I hate these fud charged articles with no balance, basis, or actual science.

A study from Cambridge University backs it up and is linked. Just because it doesn't agree with your preconceived notions doesn't make it "not science" all of a sudden. You could just be wrong.

Re: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

#410

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #349

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.

Should Christmas lights be illegal too because they are "wasting energy"? Shouldn't consumers be allowed to choose what they will do with the energy that they pay for? Or is this soviet Russia?

Should it be illegal to dump toxic chemicals into streams because they're "killing us all?" Shouldn't consumers be allowed to choose where they dump the cleaning products they paid for? Or is this soviet Russia?

Ok bad example because the soviets weren't known for their environmentalism, but you get my point. Once a problem becomes big enough scale that it affects us all regulation is justified.