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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

#161
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…

Raising the limit 100x means the blockchain would grow 5tb a year. So personal computers would not be able to use Bitcoin anymore. Only companies like Google would have the resources to participate in the Bitcoin network.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#162
post #133

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 were solidly behind a hard fork. Every major stakeholder group, minus the Core development team, was solidly for it.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation please.

I can't offer a citation, but I can observe that electricity prices in wholesale markets regularly go negative during times when renewables are operating at peak output. Since people overprovision solar to have enough power at non-peak times, during peak generation times, there's too much energy. This doesn't happen with fossil fuels, since the plant operator will of course reduce output as far as possible by reducin…

As long as the profit from operating the mining during high prices is higher than the cost of electricity at high demand times, it is economically rational to continue mining and grow demand to use the "excess" capacity that is provided in the grid.

In China it in particular it is seen as an easy way to convert coal to money, as one of the other commenters already linked [1] (which is also economically responsible, given the looming deadlines due to international agreements, but also disastrous to the climate at large).

Also, not to put too fine a point at it, neither Chinese nor US bitcoin miner server farms (mines?) have been found to be using particularly clean energy sources [0].

[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881601

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#164
post #81
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reply to that thread addresses the better comparison of power usage I've seen ( https://twitter.com/ipvkyte/status/1350922562935681024 ): (in response to a single BTC transaction consuming 621 kwh) A Tesla gets 4.1 miles per KWh. So one transaction costs 2,546 miles. Seattle to Boston is 3k miles. Paying for a burger with bitcoin has the same environmental cost as driving that burger to you from the other coast.

Bitcoin mining on a block secures not just this block's transactions, but the transactions in all previous blocks as well. For each block that is added to the blockchain more transactions are secured by the following blocks. Consequently, these "power usage per transaction"-figures are misleading.

Not really. You could interpret it as older transactions are massively more expensive than newer ones and every transaction we make will have perpetual upkeep costs for as long as we keep running Bitcoin, but the overall result isn't changed by that, the average cost per transaction is the same

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#165
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…

Get out of here with this bullshit. Do you know it is bitcoins resistance to change that makes it appealing?

Layer 2 is where the scaling happens. END OF STORY.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#166
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.

The power consumption is a reflection of man's greed - not what is needed to operate bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#167
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.

This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are. If your concern is about avoid…

> This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.

You didn'tconsider that the things you have listed cost money. There is an incentive to reduce them to the absolute minimum because you would go broke if you leased commercial property and put 200 clothes dryers running 24/7.

Mining bitcoin is a profitable activity. You can afford to do that. The price of bitcoin dictates how profitable mining is. The higher the bitcoin price and transaction fees the higher the margins and that means you can buy more miners and thus waste more energy. There is no limit to how much energy can be wasted. Every time you think this is an insane amount of energy it can always get worse. Right now it is only at approximately 80 TWh. In 10 years it could be at 300 TWh. In 20 years it could be 1000TWh. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen.

Bitcoin doubled multiple times in the last decade. The value of a bitcoin could easily outpace the reduction in block reward.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you decrease energy consumption per computation you can afford to buy more miners which then leads to an increase in difficulty and you end up wasting the exact same amount of energy.

If a bitcoin costs $30k then the amount of electricity you can afford to waste is exactly... $30k worth of electricity. Higher energy efficiency is just a competition among miners. Less efficient ones have to stop mining.

If anything that is contributing more to energy waste because you have to periodically replace old miners and not every miner managed to break even on their less efficient hardware by the time the latest hardware became available. It's probably less significant over the long term though because eventually there is a limit to how efficient bitcoin miners can be.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you decrease energy consumption per computation you can afford to buy more miners which then leads to an increase in difficulty and you end up wasting the exact same amount of energy. If a bitcoin costs $30k then the amount of electricity you can afford to waste is exactly... $30k worth of electricity. Higher energy efficiency is just a competition among miners. Less efficient ones have to stop mining. If anything…

This is why reward is decreasing periodically, isn't it?

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years. From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy co…

The climate catatrosphe that looms upon us all has been caused by individuals and organisations using resources as they wish. What we've ended up with is a planetwide tragedy of the commons - and free markets aren't going to solve this. They can only continue to exacerbate it.

Carbon taxes are a market based solution and pretty much everyone agrees.

Unregulated pollution is basically like having unregulated crimes. Criminals obviously want to keep committing crimes because they benefit personally.

Imagine if you could just go and mug a random CEO and get $10k out of that and the police won't stop you. The CEO and even those who hate the CEO would agree that muggings are bad. The only one who disagrees is the criminal. Therefore regulation is actually necessary to have a well functioning free market in the first place. Heck, punishing net negative behavior is compatible with the free market. The only question is how that punishment is implemented.

Without CO2 taxes you basically have people legally dump waste into the atmosphere which is shared by everyone equally. It's pretty obvious that there is nothing free about this. You can consider the act of pollution to be a forced transaction between the polluter and every other living being on earth. It's like you are mugging a tiny fraction of a cent off of millions of people.

The obvious idea is to just do the same thing we did with garbage disposal. Just charge a fee that covers the damage. That way the polluter has to weigh the damage he does. In some cases the damage outweighs the benefits, in other cases the benefits outweigh the damage. As a society we only want the latter.

The only real problem with CO2 taxes is that every nation has to agree on them. That's what the paris agreement is for. Dismissing CO2 taxes entirely because of global competition doesn't make sense. Global competition merely puts an upper bound on how high domestic CO2 taxes can be without introducing special tariffs or other means of global enforcement.

I prefer a token amount over complete denial because at that point you can just point out that the price is too low instead of pointlessly arguing about which policy to implement or whether to implement a policy at all.

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