The economy does not account for the environment, that is what is wrong with the current economic system. Bitcoin did not fix that, but it fixes that there is no central bank other than miners.
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#782Bitcoin is so fundamentally deficient that I am absolutely shocked by its continuing popularity. I’ve tried and tried to think of a legitimate purpose for it, but I’m confident that it doesn’t have one.
It is just too slow and inefficient to be used as a currency, and I can’t understand why anybody would use something so volatile as a value storage mechanism similar to gold.
Transactions provide extremely dubious privacy as well, and governments still control it to a large extent via the exchanges, since at the end of the day, you still need to convert it to cash for anything useful.
Its only true use is for wild speculation and greed. It just makes me sick to think of the energy wasted by this when we are on the brink of climate catastrophe.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s also proof of stake which requires a lot less energy. I think a lot of nuance is missed when discussing Bitcoin and its consensus mechanism as the only way of running a blockchain
When is that rolling out for Ethereum
I like Ethereum not just because of the more responsible PoS but also because mining is currently asic resistant. A lot of the waste going into bitcoin right now is building specialized miners that will go into a landfill after a generation or two. Eth can still be mined with hardware you already own.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#784And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
Mining for gold is even more inefficient. You've got dig earth several kilometers down, build massive infrastructure, use harmful chemicals to purify it, lose lives etc etc
At least gold is useful for something though
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad. The institutional intere…
What percentage of transactions are 1 billion dollars? I'm pretty sure VISA has never had anything over $10M. This is excessively hypothetical. The more obvious benefit is that a Tesla can't drive 3000 miles in 15 minutes. But a VISA transaction is faster and uses 1/100,000th the electricity. And neither are "anonymous".
[deleted]
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say you want to transfer a billion dollars 3000 miles. A billion dollars is 10 million Benjamins, which weighs 10 tons. You're not fitting that in a Tesla. More likely, you'll put it in an armored car and hire a few armed guards to go along with it. If you need to transport it overseas, you need a freighter (and a week) too. Now the energy cost of that Bitcoin transaction doesn't seem so bad. The institutional intere…
> The institutional interest in Bitcoin I've seen lately seems to assume a thesis of dollar depreciation and Bitcoin usurping its role as the global reserve currency. Aren't we losing the assumed federation in this system? A country whose banking system is under strain (Nigeria) or has collapsed (Zimbabwe) will have a bad-faith government acting to constrain the free-flow of money (because they want a transaction-fee…
It'd have a similar role as gold. In cases state failure, you absolutely do have people trying to buy groceries with gold coins. But it's inconvenient, and people tend to run out of gold coins. So the incentives - when times are good - run toward normal credit systems like Visa & Mastercard, and hard currencies gain adoption only when times are bad.
Similarly, we've had folks transacting personally with Bitcoin in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It tends to work out fairly well for them - at least their money holds value. But transaction costs in Bitcoin during the 2017 bubble were about $20/transaction, which makes it a pretty high-friction experience for groceries. There's a lot of market pressure to create other solutions (Lightning Network? Stellar? Local fintech companies?) for payments when Bitcoin costs $20 for everything.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#787And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
It's really hard to see how BTC does not get outlawed by most governments. Since financial transactions are zero sum and provide no economic value, it's the equivalent of a giant methane leak.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#788That sounds very impressive, until you realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year).
So comparing Bitcoin to Argentina really is more a testament how little electricity Argentina uses. In people's mind, a "single dam" sounds much, much less impressive than a "whole country".
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#789And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption. Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death e…
Is that you, Gary Johnson?
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#790Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…
Would the need for oil and military go away were we to switch to using bitcoin for everything? Why are those coupled to the dollar's energy usage?
Seems to depend on how well your tinfoil hat fits.