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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

#171

Post by vbezhenar »

wcoenen wrote: post #46
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.

The dream of using bitcoin as p2p digital cash does seem to be dead for now, the fees are too high for that[1]. Lightning hasn't really taken off for that use case either, the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing.[2] But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood…

USD equivalent in lightning is growing. I think that it matters more. People usually use USD prices and then derive bitcoin price for goods and other stuff.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#172

Post by imtringued »

atweiden wrote: post #131
meheleventyone wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable. Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.

> Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems. Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and animal products are two far larger, far more pressing issues than Bitcoin's carbon footprint. I would additionally rank “bullshit jobs” far above Bitcoin's carbon footprint in a ranking of things causing widespread social ills. If Bitcoin became global reserve currency, a…

Bullshit jobs are a product of low interest rates and low yield government bonds driving capital allocation elsewhere.

If CPI inflation is high that means there are not enough workers to do the most valuable work. Workers reallocate to more productive jobs and earn more money.

Interest rates usually follow CPI inflation. If interest rates are near 0% then you get lots of people starting stupid businesses. That's fine if everyone is unemployed and thus would prefer a bullshit job over a productive job but once the pandemic is over it won't be true anymore.

High interest rates force a company to be profitable enough to at least cover the interest payments. In theory the Fed should raise rates to at least 1% just to match current inflation but the economy is now full of bullshit and that bullshit is going to fail once the cheap money dries up. We can't afford to do that during a pandemic but once it is over it is necessary to cull the useless zombies.

I may or may not have conveyed this in a dramatic way but don't take this as a call to action. If you are invested in the stock market you should always make sure that you don't put too much money into dead companies regardless of how well the economy is doing. Timing crashes or whatever is futile. Your personal goals (risk tolerance aka financial security and when you want to withdraw money) are more important and should be planned well in advance.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#173

Post by imtringued »

illustriousbear wrote: post #95
tappio wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single ent…

Traditional banks are not accountable for all the electricity their services consume. One example alone is considering all the clients, pos and other systems that operate. Banks are also a very different model with different overheads compared to Bitcoin. I'd argue that banking infrastructure is quite wasteful with their physical skyscrapers and vaults. Executives at banks would argue otherwise. Bitcoin aims to disru…

The amount of value that the financial industry provides is multiple orders of magnitude greater. The market cap of bitcoin is a joke compared to gold and gold is an insignificant percentage of all financial services.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#174

Post by imtringued »

runeks wrote: post #81
XorNot wrote: 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.

Although you are correct I feel like you skipped over an important detail that is crucial to your argument.

The power consumption does not depend on the block size.

Securing blocks has a cost that is independent of the block size. Bitcoin Cash is a good example.

I also find it interesting that Bitcoin Cash is not as prone to deflation which means that in theory you could actually use it as money. It never caught on so it is effectively dead though. It's best to forget about it.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#175

Post by joshxyz »

diegocg wrote: post #152
joshxyz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, because humans can print USD, which inherently decreases the buying power of all existing USD. Can't do that with BTC.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#176

Post by joshxyz »

libertine wrote: post #154
joshxyz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By 1 BTC = 1 BTC I mean humans can print USD, which inherently decreases the buying power of all existing USD. Can't do that with BTC.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#177

Post by imtringued »

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…

>But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.

2% inflation is necessary to keep economies fair and productive. Without inflation you basically get hoarders that do nothing productive with their wealth. Deflation increases wealth inequality and is far worse for the average person.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#178

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

jart wrote: post #161
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…

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.

The block limit has nothing to do with the transaction rate. You'll just wind up waiting longer for a block.

Bitcoin core has had since the Big Forks a larger number of transactions than Bitcoin Cash, which was forked to allegedly fix the transaction rate.

If the rest of you had actually tried /running a node/ instead of just copying and pasting the fifty cent army's argument of the day maybe you'd realize that.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#179

Post by imtringued »

emteycz wrote: post #149
preya2k wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sources to undermine your statement that miners predominantly use waste electricity?

Simply look at prices and rewards. You literally can't have any profit without using waste electricity. The price of ordinary industrial electricity anywhere in the world is at least double of what you can mine with the latest Bitcoin mining hardware (which is expensive to begin with). BTW, what if the demand for Bitcoin mining hardware accelerated our technological or economical development of semiconductors? I thin…

In theory Bitcoin has some psychological benefits. It is literally Keynesian gold digging. You are putting people to work (workers employed at power stations and workers at semiconductor companies) and thus stimulate the economy. A lot of the bitcoin money originally came from central banks or at least was pushed to Bitcoin by the central banks. The only problem is that Bitcoin mining is not a domestic industry. Not every country benefits equally.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#180

Post by imtringued »

vbezhenar wrote: post #171
wcoenen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream of using bitcoin as p2p digital cash does seem to be dead for now, the fees are too high for that[1]. Lightning hasn't really taken off for that use case either, the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing.[2] But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood…

USD equivalent in lightning is growing. I think that it matters more. People usually use USD prices and then derive bitcoin price for goods and other stuff.

Isn't this just caused by the recent price spike? Bitcoin started off at $10k. It's at $30k now.

You have to, ahem, adjust for deflation.

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