Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

franck-leroy.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 266 posts

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#121

Post by [deleted] »

primitivesuave wrote: post #79
ForHackernews wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.

From the ASIC perspective, what I see personally is a massive waste of engineering talent. Why build ASICs for boring but important tasks (especially bioinformatics) when you can cash in on Bitcoin mining while the going is good. With regards to tax evasion, my opinion is that it will simply force taxation to occur in other ways like VAT. People are quite capable of evading taxes in the present system, so wide adopti…

[deleted]

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#122

Post by jonhendry18 »

shawnz wrote: post #112
jonhendry18 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, no it wouldn't? You don't need Bitcoin around to do that.

I didn't say you need it, but it incentivized the development of those more efficient cryptocurrency technologies by providing a decentralized store of value in which the market could build trust in the interim period where proof-of-stake technologies were still being developed. What I am saying is that perhaps proof-of-work coins actually bootstrapped proof-of-stake technologies, thus leading to more rapid developme…

Sure, but in that respect Bitcoin has been redundant for years.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#123

Post by jonhendry18 »

herewegoagain2 wrote: post #95
jonhendry18 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What the author suggests would be similar to saying," No, because driving has a legitimate purpose.

In many cases it doesn't.

More legitimate than mining coins that'll be put in a wallet that ends up in a landfill.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#124

Post by inter_netuser »

seaman1921 wrote: post #106
inter_netuser wrote: post #89

Proof of work exists maintain unforgeable costliness. It's a basic pre-requisite without which you cannot have digital scarcity, because it would be far too easy and too cheap to forge/create new coins. It's amazing how early we still are in Bitcoin after 12 years. Almost nobody on this forum understands why proof of work exists, and yet most people here are intelligent enough and have enough technical skill to figur…

Classic - assuming anyone who doesn't hold BTC is an idiot. Followed by a 'Have fun staying poor' to stir some social anxiety and FOMO. Unfortunately a lot of people keep falling for such statements and the price keeps going up - I have friends buying loads of dogecoin over the past week who told me they have literally no idea what crypto or doge is - but they know for sure that the prices are going to go up over the…

You are exactly correct, everyone who ignores does so at their own cost.

Close to one _trillion_ in foregone profits at the moment.

You think this is a fad?

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#125

Post by CryptoUnchained »

tsimionescu wrote: post #70
yuvadam wrote: post #17

As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…

> Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value. Why would that matter? The problem is the huge amount of greenhouse gases getting released because of this store of value. Whether it makes some economic sense or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be allowed…

You're so angry about the greenhouse gases that you're completely missing the logic behind an energy currency. You complain that the energy and dollars are spent speculating because you're flat out ignoring that miners are re-investing their profits to become more efficient and productive. Bitcoin mining is a rat race to develop efficiency in technology and energy deliverance.

Oil companies capturing the wasted natural gas, Hydro dams capturing the wasted water energy, etc. Bitcoin is a battery or energy credit where areas with abundant energy can benefit from their standing in the world and benefit the people of the region. Bitcoin has its ebbs and flows but eventually balances to where your typical american household cannot afford to mine bitcoin and profit.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#126

Post by blindgeek »

I have some green sensibilities, but I'm more of a Post-scarcity Socialist. Backing a currency with a scarce resource serves no purpose other than to keep us serfs "down on the manor" so to speak. Standards of living didn't start rising significantly until fiat money really took off. Societies and governments give currency value; it has little to no inherent value on its own.

But the primary philosophy behind bitcoin is right-libertarian / Ayn Rand / a return to the 19th century with futuristic technology.

Go look up the Cyphernomicon for instance, where you'll find Tim May cheerleading for cryptocurrency-powered darknet murder marts. Here's a choice sample quote:

    begin quote
16.10.4. Will I be sad if anonymous methods allow untraceable markets for assassinations? It depends. In many cases, people deserve death--those who have escaped justice, those who have broken solemn commitments, etc. Gun grabbing politicians, for example should be killed out of hand. Anonymous rodent removal services will be a tool of liberty. The BATF agents who murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son should be shot. If the courts won't do it, a market for hits will do it. - (Imagine for a moment an "anonymous fund" to collect the money for such a hit. Interesting possibilities.) - "Crypto Star Chambers," or what might be called "digilantes," may be formed on-line, and untraceably, to mete out justice to those let off on technicalities. Not altogether a bad thing.

    end quote
Attacking vulnerabilities in the bitcoin network seems like a great idea. At this point, so does anything that might take it down. It's a technology that deserves to be eliminated.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#127

Post by knuthsat »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #108
knuthsat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, although a bunch of work on Monero is still a result of work from people that worked on Bitcoin. There's some independent research there but AFAIK Bitcoin people did not stop working on confidential transactions or fungiblity. Just explaining that the core tenet was not lost, but that it was still not researched. Bitcoin jump started a research movement that reaped all kinds of cryptocurrency variants as time w…

"Here's a paper whose coauthors belong to the Bitcoin team discussing efficient confidential transactions that were eventually implemented in Monero (not by the Bitcoin team)." The knowledge held by the Bitcoin team wouldn't disappear if Bitcoin was shut down. They could still contribute to other crypto projects.

Yes, but saying that the core tenet was lost is a bit dramatic. The guys working on it were still interested in other aspects of cryptocurrencies that bitcoin does not implement. Bulletproofs coming out in 2017 meant that Monero had inefficient fungibility and confidential transactions before, bloating the blockchain before they implemented bulletproofs.

There's so much stuff that still had to be researched after Bitcoin came out.

One big example that comes to mind is SegWit.

The cryptography was still not there and I do not feel that something can be lost if it's not there.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#128

Post by effie »

comboy wrote: post #92
azernik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting down A/C usage is , in fact, an important climate change mitigation.

Climate change doesn't care if I use my 1kWh for gaming on a console, using dryer, A/C or computing digits of pi which have already been computed because I wanted to do it on my super inefficient old computer. There are many ways to mitigate climate change but I don't think that telling people what should they do with electricity is the way to go. Perhaps focus more on how the energy gets produced, not how it is cons…

> I don't think that telling people what should they do with electricity is the way to go.

If the advice is sound, maybe we should be telling people about it. For example, we could recommend to replace cheap ineffective ACs with effective but expensive heat pumps and some small percentage of people will do that. But this won't do much to mitigate CO2 production. AC energy consumption isn't a major driver of CO2 pollution, fossil-fueled transport and coal/gas power plants are.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#129

Post by shawnz »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #122
shawnz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say you need it, but it incentivized the development of those more efficient cryptocurrency technologies by providing a decentralized store of value in which the market could build trust in the interim period where proof-of-stake technologies were still being developed. What I am saying is that perhaps proof-of-work coins actually bootstrapped proof-of-stake technologies, thus leading to more rapid developme…

Sure, but in that respect Bitcoin has been redundant for years.

You may say that, but given that proof-of-stake coins should be able to easily outcompete proof-of-work coins on a purely technical basis, and yet they have not achieved that success yet in practice (although they are growing rapidly), it seems the overall market still disagrees.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#130

Post by chill1 »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #85

Controversial opinions below: Feeling might be hurt. - Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time. - The digital Gold-rush aspect, HODLing, and no regulation makes it more lucrative to play…

My understanding of the space contradicts each of your points. So without either of us providing citations, both of our opinions are pretty useless to the casual reader. But I will add some thoughts here.

> The [humongous] energy wastage of the network should be the biggest cause of concern, but most proponents shoo it away by buzzwords like lightning network etc.

Lightning Network is a second layer payment network that is working today. Its goal is to take the transaction pressure off of the base layer (blockchain). Its design has privacy built-in, so it's not possible to generate statistics [3] on its total transaction thru-put. That's also why articles like the one on which we are commenting are so disingenuous. The source they cite makes a direct comparison of the total transaction volume of the Visa network with the Bitcoin blockchain while completely ignoring layer 2 networks built on-top of Bitcoin.

> Bitcoin is popular in the west and the US specifically because it lacks the cutting edge financial networks rest of the world has. Citizens in China, India, Kenya etc can do transactions in a jiffy using their existing bank accounts, whereas ACH clearance takes longer time.

Bitcoin is not "popular" anywhere. The total number of Bitcoin ATMs [1] and physical shops/vendors [2] transacting with Bitcoin is still quite limited. The vast majority of commerce occurs online. But what I do see is that there is slow, steady growth globally. The infrastructure is still developing to support larger volumes of users - and with more diverse levels of computer skills.

[1] https://coinatmradar.com/

[2] https://coinmap.org/

[3] https://1ml.com/

Post reply on HN