151–160 of 266 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last year it transacted more than a trillion dollars in transactions. It's in the top 20 or so of world currencies, and it's still in its infancy (thus volatility etc).
Sardines were also involved in transactions amounting trillions of dollars, but that doesn't mean sardines are a currency.
Not to the same extent. A big contributing factor is the very high price of bitcoin that results from the FOMO on its finite supply, nearly 90% of which is mined already.
If Bitcoin had no halvings, then its inflation rate would come down much slower and its price would be much more reasonable.
Sadly, very few PoW coins follow that wide distribution model.
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…
If BTC were somehow linked to and used to solve some of the world's most pressing problems such as modelling protein folding or some equally significant problem, then that would make it partly energy efficient. I don't know of any such crypto, and I think I've heard of only one such crypto that's somewhat like that. And as recent evidence goes, no crypto gives you respite from the law - on the contrary, it will bind you in constant avoidance of the law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a very bad comparison, for several reasons. 1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this,…
1. Bitcoin mining is a race to cheap power, it's of course going to lead to more efficient power delivery technologies. Excess energy being created by hydrodams is being sold to fund infrastructure and to subsidize energy costs during dry seasons. Oil companies are capturing energy once wasted: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-helps-oil-companies-reduce-... Bitcoin is an energy currency.
If anything, bitcoin mining is a disincentive in making a more energy efficient green economy: instead of reducing waste and reducing power production as needed, we now have a way to turn excess power production into money directly. While a carbon tax could have shut down a coal plant, now the coal plant could instead get a bitcoin mining rig and power that, as long as the carbon tax is lower than the (extremely volatile) value of bitcoin.
To avoid the most apocalyptic effects of global warming, we have to close down most fossil-fuel based energy generation today, literally. Bitcoin is actively working against that by driving up the price of electricity to fuel a speculative bubble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bitcoin is an energy currency. Not a currency, but a digital asset that wastes enormous amounts of energy.
Wastes enormous amounts of energy... The energy is literally being stored in the value of bitcoin. It's an energy credit. People are transforming excess electricity into bitcoin. Period. What do I do with my profits from mining bitcoin? Send my kids to college, buy groceries, remodel my bathroom, etc. It's an entire ecosystem, speculatively mining bitcoin by consuming electricity is just as evil as driving 1.5hrs to…
Sure, the monetary value of that energy may be getting stored, but we can't buy lower temperatures with money, unfortunately.
When you store energy by pumping water for example, you can later let that water flow to get back the energy itself (with some inevitable waste, of course). When you're converting energy to bitcoin and later require energy again, you have to use the bitcoin to buy more energy (either from the market or by building a new power plant or something), you can't just physically convert the bitcoin back to energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a very bad comparison, for several reasons. 1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this,…
> There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 natur…
The cloud computing companies and EV companies and every other company that spends large amounts of its budget on buying electricity is doing the same thing. The difference is that (at least some of) cloud computing or driving is doing useful work with the energy being consumed, whereas 100% of energy going into bitcoin mining is simply getting converted to bitcoin, a speculative asset, and heat.
And the greenhouse gases are the largest problem the civilized world has ever faced, they are not some small aside. We need to figure out ways to produce less energy while still powering the important parts of our economy (transport, production of goods, research etc). Bitcoin is doing the opposite - it is creating a need for more energy production to create and exchange money, when we already have much more efficient ways of creating and exchanging money (the whole banking infrastructure of the world consumes less electrical energy than bitcoin, while doing orders of magnitude more transactions per second than bitcoin can hande in a year).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
2 things are about to happen in the bitcoin space. The size of transistor in the bitcoin miners is hitting a wall. The bitcoin market will either drive alternative energy efficiency in the chase of profits, or it will drive new technologies to lower the node size. Both will be a benefit to mankind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
Proof-of-stake is not an iteration on proof-of-work, it is a lateral idea. There is no reason why the first popular crypto-coin wouldn't have been proof-of-stake, except that it didn't occur to Satoshi (or it did and they didn't like it for other reasons).
Furthermore it's possible that a purely proof-of-stake currency would have never gained the widespread trust that proof-of-work did at a time when cryptocurrencies were a new idea. Or maybe not... but people did have ideas about proof-of-stake quite early on and it took much longer for those ideas to gain the same level of acceptance that proof-of-work did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why are people willing to exchange something of value for it? Because they can trust in it serving as a secure way to transfer tokens of ownership. And that is only possible thanks to the PoW computations, which have to be expensive enough that attacking the system would be more costly than the value you could extract through an attack. So, in a sense its value indeed derives directly from the work put into the s…
Doesn't sound like it's worth torching the only inhabitable planet for.
Ethereum has done it this way: First you build a stable blockchain, secured through tremendous amounts of power. Then, once your system has been widely adopted and people have "skin in the game", you switch to Proof of Stake to minimize power consumption while still maintaining security.
PoS is the better solution, environmentally speaking, but it necessarily depends on there already being value in the system that people can be held accountable with and thus kept honest. But to reach that state, people have to trust your system first, and if you're not an already trusted entity, PoW is one way of achieving that initial phase of trust building.