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Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

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Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#121

Post by kevingadd »

Nursie wrote: post #72
Glench wrote: post #6

Worth mentioning the cryptocurrency that Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent) is creating that is explicitly designed to be low-energy usage and more distributed: https://www.chia.net/ It uses "Proof of Space" (proof that you're allocating a certain amount of storage space) instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. Pretty interesting and they're coming out of beta into their mainnet in the next few weeks. Their on-c…

If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste

Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + populating the drives along with having to replace them periodically and you know the cost of that storage. In comparison, PoW's future cost can skyrocket as the network expands and the difficulty goes up.

Storing the whole chain takes a bunch of space anyway, so you have a similar storage problem there too.

If you want to see how cheap persistent storage can get, look up the cost of Amazon Glacier. It's shockingly cheap - $0.005 per GB or even less.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#122

Post by JumpCrisscross »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #83
Nursie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When cryptocurrency provides 1% of the services that the traditional banking system does, let me know and we can do this comparison.

You can already do many things with crypto that you cannot do with the traditional banking system. Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now? I can make 10k wallets. There are so many new things we can do with crypto that it's going to take decades for people to discover them.

> Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now?

If you need to do this, you can do it through the group at your bank called treasury services (or something like that). They have APIs for financial services customers and CFOs who need to do this sort of thing.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#123

Post by AlexandrB »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #95

Cryptocurrency is still something that legacy financial systems could easily out-compete given an appropriate regulatory environment. There are things Bitcoin is better at than e.g. credit cards. If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often. You can get…

> If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often.

If you're a scammer merchant, ripping off good-faith customers you also don't have to worry about chargebacks. Bitcoin moves power from the consumer to the merchant. I don't see that as a net positive.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#124

Post by viklove »

Nursie wrote: post #118
viklove wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Escrow accounts and merchant layers are in development. Sorry, this does not make BTC a bank. As they continue to add more features, we will see what BTC will become and how it may be useful. But comparing it to a bank is silly.

Ergh, sorry, that's a mis-paste from another thread I was talking on, not an assertion of mine. I agree, Bitcoin is not a bank, that makes comparing its energy footprint to the banking system totally pointless.

For the record, I'm not trying to defend BTC's energy footprint. It's a black-eye on the tech and a problem that needs to be solved. Proof-of-stake over proof-of-work is an interesting solution, and part of the reason I hold a lot more ETH than BTC. That's why I'm so interested by cryptos though -- BTC just opened the door and the derivatives are where the real innovation will happen in my opinion.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#125

Post by solosoyokaze »

ashtonkem wrote: post #119
solosoyokaze wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asserting that you can't have a currency independent of a country without crypto. It's a prerequisite to defunding warmongering countries.

One of the more confusing things about crypto is how many magical wishes get attached to it. It’s never actually explained why crypto will magically solve the problems listed, merely asserted that it would be so. There’s no reason that Bitcoin would magically eliminate the need for armies and oil consumption, at best it might change who has the armies, but not their presence. The funny thing is that we know that neit…

> The idea that replacing something that’s been around for ~50 years will solve a Millenia long problem of humanity’s is just funny.

Is it? Communicating over distance was a problem we've had for millenia (or much longer) and it's now solved. Technology is amazing and we hit an inflection point last century. We're essentially already living in a post-humanity world, and crypto is the currency to match.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#126

Post by ivanche »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #115
torben-friis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to the process. But more importantly, as far as I know bitcoin is not designed to guarantee anonymity in money transfers, and the fact that every transaction is set in stone publicly in the blockchain makes it relatively easily traceable. Am I wrong in that area?

> Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to it. Adding friction to non-illegal actions is harm, not benefit. Adding friction to illegal actions is the opposite of what happens, because it's enabling something that wasn't previously possible. Also, criminals can survive higher friction than dissidents and vulnerable populations because the illegality creates a moat that raises marg…

> You go to some cryptocurrency hangout, pay some stranger a hundred bucks in cash and they transfer a hundred bucks in Bitcoin to your wallet. You go pay for a VPN with it. Then everybody can see that A transferred money to B and B transferred money to C, but nobody knows that you're B

Nobody? Some stranger from above knows that you're B!

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#127

Post by Geee »

rebuilder wrote: post #57
djbebs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they are not incentivised to expend more and more energy. The amount of energy expended is a direct correlation to how important bitcoin is. You wouldn't criticize a government for spending millions keeping ita gold reserves safe, even though it can store them just as easily in a warehouse as it can in fort knox

How secure does the Bitcoin network need to be? What mechanism exists to determine that? Rhetorical question, BTW. There is no market mechanism that determines what is sufficient security. This should become clear if one looks at what the network is choosing to pay the miners who secure transactions. The block reward is now 12.6% of what it originally was, and tx fees have certainly not gone up correspondingly. So is…

Answers to those questions are not yet known. The price competition between different cryptocurrencies should be the necessary market mechanism. Someone has to pay the price of mining, and if mining is not necessary, then it's not going to be paid. If it can be proven that the same security can be achieved with less mining, then either the Bitcoin protocol is updated, or a Bitcoin fork will become more valuable (and that fork will be named Bitcoin).

There are lots of cryptocurrencies which have infinite supply, which means that the mining rewards will keep the network running. For example Ethereum, Monero, Dogecoin and Grin. Bitcoin will rely on transaction costs, but it doesn't provide fully deterministic security as far as I know.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#128

Post by rspeele »

rebuilder wrote: post #57
djbebs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they are not incentivised to expend more and more energy. The amount of energy expended is a direct correlation to how important bitcoin is. You wouldn't criticize a government for spending millions keeping ita gold reserves safe, even though it can store them just as easily in a warehouse as it can in fort knox

How secure does the Bitcoin network need to be? What mechanism exists to determine that? Rhetorical question, BTW. There is no market mechanism that determines what is sufficient security. This should become clear if one looks at what the network is choosing to pay the miners who secure transactions. The block reward is now 12.6% of what it originally was, and tx fees have certainly not gone up correspondingly. So is…

Very interesting food for thought. Thanks.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#129

Post by solosoyokaze »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #122
solosoyokaze wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already do many things with crypto that you cannot do with the traditional banking system. Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now? I can make 10k wallets. There are so many new things we can do with crypto that it's going to take decades for people to discover them.

> Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now? If you need to do this, you can do it through the group at your bank called treasury services (or something like that). They have APIs for financial services customers and CFOs who need to do this sort of thing.

I imagine I'd have to give the bank much more money or information than I already have to get this business service. At the very least, it would take time.

Anyone can do this now with HD wallets.

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