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What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?
I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies
Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.
> BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output I’m not sure I follow this (admittedly I don’t know much about how BTC actually works). Doesn’t mining also serve the purpose of verifying transactions?
I am NOT a fan of Bitcoin, but... Watch a real-time visualization of the global Bitcoin transaction flow, as it is happening right now: https://dailyblockchain.github.io/ Each square is a bitcoin address (like a cryptographic public key) Each graph component is a transaction. The components appear as transactions are broadcast into the bitcoin P2P network (but before they are verified and committed to the blockchain)…
Formation of large aggregates?
[edit]: pretty blinkenlights?
I am NOT a fan of Bitcoin, but... Watch a real-time visualization of the global Bitcoin transaction flow, as it is happening right now: https://dailyblockchain.github.io/ Each square is a bitcoin address (like a cryptographic public key) Each graph component is a transaction. The components appear as transactions are broadcast into the bitcoin P2P network (but before they are verified and committed to the blockchain)…
What's the current thoughts on Tether, and how its speculated potential collapse will affect the rest of the ecosystem? Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.
Bitcoin is a pure computer-science phenomenon. Regardless of whether you personally feel this is a good or bad investment, I think the magnitude of this success over such a short time frame, the impact on the world, and the interest it and the wider crypto ecosystem receives from the non-tech world, is absolutely stunning. HN should accept that Bitcoin is an achievement of massive proportions.
But it's really not. Bitcoin isn't anything special. If there were any real-world use cases for it (which there don't seem to be), this would have been done long ago or would have been done organically. As it stands, interest in bitcoin was largely null, until people realized that it's a great investment opportunity where everybody can get rich (tulips, anyone?)... The rest is history. Now alt coins were popping up l…
So you have found a way to protect your wealth against inflation, I guess?
Would love to hear what that is.
What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?
BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.
How so? That is a non binding resolution where the world's greatest polluters are still allowed to increase their carbon footprint. Countries receive all sorts of praise for signing it and their so called commitment to "battle climate change", even though it's still business as usually, but at least they signed it I guess.
And since a lot of mining is done in countries where the majority of their energy comes from fossil energy sources it has a footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?
Yes, but not with Bitcoin. Etherium is currently moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
There are a few asic's for ETH, but the hash algo is fundamentally executed through memory. Even if you build an asic for ETH, you are always tied to the speed of memory.
Therefore, a GPU is going to be the most ROI efficient mechanism for a long time (asics cost more to build than a commodity GPU) and even more so, older GPUs work just as well from a ROI perspective because newer GPUs are more expensive.
This means ETH does not see the same hashrate growth (and energy usage) as BTC, while maintaining the same level of security.
The vast majority of energy usage for blockchains, is green energy hydropower using excess power from facilities that already exist. Why? Because this is the lowest cost and prior to this current bull run, was the only way to be profitable.
What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?
Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint somewhat I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies
They might bring down transaction fees, but most of the money in mining is from block rewards, which depends on the market price of Bitcoin rather than transaction volume.
What's the current thoughts on Tether, and how its speculated potential collapse will affect the rest of the ecosystem? Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.
As for lightning, it adds a layer of trust into a system whose reason for existence is trustlessness.
If you don't care about trustlessness, you can already have fast and scalable transactions through normal banking.