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Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

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Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#151

Post by 127 »

mtrycz2 wrote: post #91
esimov wrote: post #37

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 . Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

That thread is assuming that BTC runs on fossil, non-renewable energy, which was mostly correct ten to five years ago, but will be mostly wrong onwards. BTC runs mostly on surplus hydroelectric power. This may change based on what's locally available and the local cost of oil gas and coal, but when renewables will become cheaper than fossil (which will never be soon enough) it will not make any sense to mine on fossi…

Since nobody has made any better citation, here's one article giving a bit more depth to the issue: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

Seems at least half of Bitcoin is currently mined directly using coal.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#152

Post by diegocg »

joshxyz wrote: post #150
tempsy wrote: post #2

bitcoin appears to have just become another asset that rich people on wall street are hoarding with no real attention or interest in the actual payment mechanism at all. it might as well just be some trading cards being shuffled around.

At this state its not really intended for micro txs. Its large txs and the energy spent (yes, spent, not wasted) on the math is what secures it. Your keys, your bitcoin. 1 USD = 0.99 USD tomorrow. 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC.

No, 1 USD = 1 USD tomorrow

The actual value of 1 USD may change. But so does the value of 1 BTC

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#153

Post by joshxyz »

esimov wrote: post #20

I was wondering if these developers have any ethical concerns about the environmental impact they are responsible for by developing a technology which I can categorize with a single world: ABSURDITY!

Reposting the 300 IQ comment i replied to someone else on this thread:

Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol.

I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value.

Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.

Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#154

Post by libertine »

joshxyz wrote: post #148
esimov wrote: post #37

I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064 . Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.

Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol. I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value. Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol. Simple m…

I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD?

I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#155

Post by jart »

robjan wrote: post #133
CryptoPunk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could have authorized the hard fork.

The miners are ultimately the ones who decide whether to fork or not.

Miners can't change Bitcoin without the consent of full nodes, who run the core client. That's why SegWit2x didn't happen three years ago. All the miners supported it, because bigger blocks means bigger transaction fees. Full nodes and core devs didn't support it, because big blocks means you won't be able to run Bitcoin on PCs much longer and therefore centralized online service providers will control it.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#156

Post by emteycz »

dandanua wrote: post #129
tappio wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.

Sure, increased mining difficulty means you have to do more computations to find a block. Here is the graph https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

It also means there is a huge motivation to decrease energy consumption per computation.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#157

Post by CryptoPunk »

127 wrote: post #142
CryptoPunk wrote: post #110

People like this shouldn't be leading a project that threatens to upend multi-trillion dollar institutions. If it weren't for his timidity, Bitcoin would have hard forked in 2015 to raise the block size limit to allow for mass-adoption.

Raising the block size is complete nonsense. It will simply kill of nodes and at best create increased transactions per block proportional to the block size increase. A very poor trade-off.

Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff.

There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth.

The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.

It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.

Responding to the comment below:

1. You can prune spent transactions. Only the UTXO set needs to be stored, so you don't need to store 5 TB more each year. But even that wouldn't be prohibitively costly for thousands of hobbyists worldwide. So even if pruning wasn't an option - and it is - Bitcoin's censorship resistance would remain totally secure.

2. You can use checkpointing in initial sync up, instead of downloading the entire transaction history. The hash of the true chain is widely disseminated and Bitcoin nodes already use a form of checkpointing, where they skip validation for transactions before the checkpoint flag, to expedite Initial Blockchain Download.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#158

Post by saalweachter »

tappio wrote: post #119
dandanua wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the design. Higher price -> more miners -> increased mining difficulty (due to design goal – 1 block per 10 min) -> more energy waste. Bitcoin was a fun prototype idea, but humans made it just evil. As usual, though.

Does this lead to the energy consumption increasing over time? I'm not too familiar with the technology.

The security of the network is proportional to the amount of work put into it.

If the network wasn't consuming absurd amounts of hardware and energy, anyone could waltz in and use a perfectly reasonable amount of hardware and energy to break it. So yes, it does need to constantly increase as fast as possible. If it ever increased less fast, someone could eventually exploit that delta.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#159

Post by 127 »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #157
127 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the block size is complete nonsense. It will simply kill of nodes and at best create increased transactions per block proportional to the block size increase. A very poor trade-off.

Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising o…

If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#160

Post by CryptoPunk »

127 wrote: post #159
CryptoPunk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising o…

If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.

A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time.

The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.

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