191–200 of 266 posts
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Does this mean no more mining and waste of electricity ?
It means orders of magnitude less. The part of the blockchain that proves your transaction was valid is now (oversimplifying here) just a boolean check instead of running a hash algo over and over
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If it took little to no effort to get gold, then it wouldn't be valuable. The only reason something like gold is valuable is because it's scarce, and it's scarce because it requires a lot of work to extract. Am I missing something here?
> The only reason something like gold is valuable is because it's scarce, and it's scarce because it requires a lot of work to extract. These things are true but not necessarily so. Things can be scarce without being difficult to refine from raw materials (a stamp). Things can be difficult to extract without being particularly scarce (aluminium). Things can be valuable without being scarce (TVs), things can be scarce…
– boring grey in colour
– not a good conductor of electricity
– not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable either
– not useful for any practical or ornamental purpose
and one special, magical property:
– can be transported over a communications channel
If it somehow acquired any value at all for whatever reason, then anyone wanting to transfer wealth over a long distance could buy some, transmit it, and have the recipient sell it.
-Satoshi Nakamoto, August 2010
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Does this mean no more mining and waste of electricity ?
Not to mention GPUs! Can you believe how many GPUs have been cooked by this scheme? I got a water-cooled GTX 1080 almost 5 years ago on Craigslist for $500. Usually old things like that get cheaper as time goes by, but not GPUs. Nowadays those things are going for like $800. I was hoping to upgrade to an RTX2080 or something (also a few years old now) but they're like $1000! I can't help but think that cryptocurrency…
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> security is not the primary thing they're buying sounds like speculation. it's a major desirability factor in bitcoin. > constantly increasing level of energy use is indeed a waste the more money you store in a vault - the more security it needs for you to sleep well. you wouldn't lock a $5000 bike with $5 lock. so difficulty increase correlates very much with amount of wealth poured into bitcoin. edit: typo
> sounds like speculation. it's a major desirability factor in bitcoin. No, that's a plain fact. Nobody ever buys security as an end unto itself. You buy security to protect the thing you really want. Which in the case of Bitcoin is by a vast majority "getting rich". > you wouldn't lock a $5000 bike with $5 lock. so difficulty increase correlates very much with amount of wealth poured into bitcoin. It correlates, but…
a thing that can't be taken away from you due to security characteristics of the medium - that's very much a factor in purchasing decision. among many other factors. different people value different factors, so just be reasonable and admit that you can't know how are those factors valued by all the purchasers.
> Which in the case of Bitcoin is by a vast majority "getting rich".
you may be out of touch a little. there are phases in every investment vehicle and while bitcoin is still in price discovery, there definitely are people who are in it to get rich quick, but as volatility goes down and actually valuable characteristics are becoming more widely known, the proportion of those people goes down.
> With any other kind of security, you don't need to spend 10 times as much to protect a 10 times higher value
why not? maybe the coefficients are off, but the more value you want to secure - the more you have to pay. that's how it works literally everywhere in the world.
> there is a possibility of security getting cheaper due to advances in technology.
maybe there are and maybe we will discover them in future, but the thing at hand that we're discussing is whether or not to call "wasteful" the process via which wealth ownership is secured by energy consumption.
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The whole "this costs too much power!" movement is disingenuous, it generally relies upon comparisons to Visa or similar networks. These networks are built upon the suffering of millions (which you can I suppose equate to rampant CO2 production, if you really wanted to) and should not be used at all. Any alternative is better than that. Then of course there is the whole notion that using a lot of power is in and of i…
Serious question: Who suffers at the hands of Mastercard?
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It means orders of magnitude less. The part of the blockchain that proves your transaction was valid is now (oversimplifying here) just a boolean check instead of running a hash algo over and over
I think a better way to say it is that it moves from a trustless system to a system that trusts based on some criteria. That criteria is usually how many coins one has. Since the original bitcoin concept was solving the byzantine generals problem, the entire point of all the cryptographic work was to be trustless. If you are cool with trust, you can have reversibility, lost password retrieval, anti-money laundering c…
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I've been involved with ethereum long before the presale and never once has there been any expectation of a soft cap. Nobody removed a cap. If you don't like an uncapped coin, use Bitcoin and help them figure out how their coin is going to maintain security after the mining rewards start to dwindle.
EIP 669. Google it
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What has even higher potential to be cheap is nuclear energy - when you don't care as much about (operation, storage) safety, a lot of costs fall out ... Nuclear energy has high fixed costs but then scales pretty well. As crypto currencies with PoW become a major industry, it's not difficult to imagine it might be cost-effective to build huge nuclear plants in some corrupt African country. (Africa has also huge untap…
Cost of capital is higher in less stable countries though - the backers need insurance against unexpected outcomes either way, corrupt African countries (or some future equivalent) would require less community buy-in but what makes that true would cause other worries to the owners of capital. Nuclear works in stable, rules-following countries like France where its high energy paybacks subsidise good salaries for an a…
We are literally stuck with 50 year old technology in nuclear energy, as unfortunately progress has been slow.
With the fuel cost being basically free (thorium), the and the operational cost low because the system runs with little human intervention energy should actually end up incredibly cheap once we engineer these system in a better way.
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If there were refrigerators that could work without electricity with no the same set of capabilities, then any refrigerator still using electricity would be considered wasteful.
I'm not saying that proof-of-stake is bad, but it does change the way the network functions, because it locks capital and therefore affects the velocity of money in the network. It also changes the distribution of mined coin. Whereas currently it takes an equal mining cost to reap an equal reward, proof-of-stake rewards those who already have enough to stake. This is essentially a recreation of the inflation system w…
That is very questionable.
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Does this mean no more mining and waste of electricity ?
Funny nobody complains about the energy consumed by actual banks and other services Bitcoin would replace, which is much higher. In those circumstances they can understand it's not a waste at all, but a cost of providing a valuable service. I don't think POS is an adequate replacement. POW was an intentional design choice because of the highly competitive environment that it creates.