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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

#211

Post by UncleMeat »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #69
ComodoHacker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's more reasonable to compare the energy footprint of cryptocurrency with that of our traditional fiat currencies. Including all computing power used by banks to settle their transactions.

You really also need to include the entire military budget (and eco damage) as that's what props up the state, which backs the fiat.

If we all used BTC, there'd be no war and no standing armies?

Come on. Of all of the cryptocurrency-utopia claims that exist, this is surely the least believable.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#212

Post by rebuilder »

Geee wrote: post #127
rebuilder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't quite see how price competition between cryptos is a mechanism that optimizes security spending, unless you mean that cryptos that fail security will crash and burn.

As for mining, it is necessary for reasons that have nothing to do with security. If you want to send a tx, you will pay a fee or perhaps hope for a kind miner to include your spend in a block. In no way are you signaling how much you think the Bitcoin network should spend on security.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#213

Post by ashtonkem »

simiones wrote: post #149
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.

Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency. If anything, limited supplies of anything, including bitcoin, are a likely to spark wars, not end them. If you truly wish to help stop wars, join a peace-loving organization, attend marches, lobby politicians. You'll find all of the real work on this are in leftist organizations, which fight against the real foundations of war, such as inequality, ideas of excepti…

> Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency.

Arguably currency is a consequence of wars, as are markets[0]. Markets and currency (fiat & hard specie) are usually the consequence of states needing to raise armies, equip and pay for armies, and do something with the tribute collected from vanquished foes. Small scale agriculture can work on either physical barter or interpersonal debt systems, it's only when you need to equip and train men to fight full time that you need actual coinage and markets to produce arms for them and do something with whatever they seized abroad.

Assuming that one accepts this, this is actually a pretty big problem for the "bitcoin will stop wars" crowd, as arguably currencies are a consequence of wars and not vice-versa. If one wants to stop wars, one has to tackle the root causes, not the side-effects.

Furthermore, it's also clear that it's possible to organize and fund wars on the back of several different types of currency. We've seen wars funded with hard specie (early Roman Republic/empire), diluted hard specie (late Roman Empire), wheat backed coin (Sumaria), lead (Sparta), paper notes backed by land (French directory), gold backed paper (America pre-1971), fiat (everyone nowadays), and probably more still. There's really no clear reason why one couldn't use a cryptocurrency to organize and fund a war.

Heck, if they actually worked it would probably make modern wars a bit easier. Modern conflict often involves the funding of proxy groups with a variety of openness and plausible deniability. This usually requires the actual transit of physical money, which is dangerous and expensive. The ability to just digitally wire a bunch of currency to your proxies without the need to fly pallets of money and gold to your proxy fighters would simplify things significantly for current world powers. The ultra-private currencies would be a pretty good way to send money to terrorist and rebel groups you don't want to be seen visible funding too.

0 - For more on this see David Graeber's Debt, the First 5000 Years.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#214

Post by minitoar »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #99
minitoar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people would use Bitcoin in this scenario? I reckon so few as to render it worthless. Ergo, Bitcoin requires the same expensive infrastructure as our fiat banking.

"This scenario" being the complete disbanding of the US military? I imagine everyone would be using crypto at that point since there would be no USD.

No, “this scenario” being the one you described in the comment I was responding to: there is no power and people are mining Bitcoin by hand.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#215

Post by JumpCrisscross »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #192
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot do this right now There is a difference between not being able to and not knowing how to. You can. There are no-minimum balance API banking interfaces. There just isn’t a common enough use case for them to be heavily advertised. We can move the goalpost again to an open API, but that’s another thing once more.

Go back and reread my original comment. I stand by my statement. Can you open 10k accounts right now? I'm sure you can't.

> Can you open 10k accounts right now? I'm sure you can't.

Yes, easily.

It would take a phone call, since I haven’t set up the rails to do this. But “I need ten thousand sequentially numbered checking accounts with wire privileges” is a perfectly fine (if odd for an individual customer) request. (Almost any process requiring that many accounts is being done wrong.)

Granted, I have a private banker. But there are services who provide this to e.g. fintech companies setting up and destroying single-use accounts on the fly.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#216

Post by woeh »

pochamago wrote: post #208
woeh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterargument, proof of work takes all the energy it can get: because bitcoin automatically makes the work to proof more difficult. This means when there is more available energy it's lucrative for miners to put more energy in the system. However, no more bitcoins are outputted. The only extra output is heat from used hardware. In some other related topic on HN, someone compared it to a car, where more energy…

You're probably right that the incentives are misaligned. I suppose I'm just reacting against what I feel is an anti-progressive assumption, which is that reducing our carbon footprint to desirable levels will require a massive reduction in our energy footprint.

I understand your sentiment, and I agree that the future probably is one where we use and generate a lot more energy then we do now.

But I do hope that in that future we also use that energy a little bit smarter, and proof of work's incentives are indeed aligned poorly from this perspective.

Disclaimer: I am conflicted about the subject, because I think there is merit in crypto, and also hold some myself.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#217

Post by ForHackernews »

bouncycastle wrote: post #81
ForHackernews wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other systems I know of are deliberately designed to continuously become less efficient. That's why Bitcoin/PoW is in a different category to me: It's a Red Queen's Race where all the miners are incentivized to keep wasting more and more energy (for no greater benefit) or else risk that somebody else can execute a 51% attack. Imagine if your email host needed to keep burning more and more energy, not to send any m…

> or else risk that somebody else can execute a 51% attack No, they aren't motivated by that. They are motivated purely by profit. If more miners start mining, the difficulty goes up, and therefore profit goes down. So they need to keep adding more machines. The price is driving this cycle too. The current hashrate & difficulty are at their ATH levels. (Edited)

Potato/potato

The bitcoin advocates like to pretend this is somehow about "securing the network" instead of pure greed, but it doesn't matter either way. Even if we take them at their word, the miners have to keep pouring in more and more energy or risk a 51% attack.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#218

Post by [deleted] »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #157
simiones wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency. If anything, limited supplies of anything, including bitcoin, are a likely to spark wars, not end them. If you truly wish to help stop wars, join a peace-loving organization, attend marches, lobby politicians. You'll find all of the real work on this are in leftist organizations, which fight against the real foundations of war, such as inequality, ideas of excepti…

> Warmongering has next to nothing to do with currency. Quite the contrary. You'll find that many currencies were created specifically to support an army or war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#219

Post by novok »

Nursie wrote: post #146
londons_explore wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main cost of compute is electricity. The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside). It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.

I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.

overall it would be significantly less, that is the point

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#220

Post by novok »

sneak wrote: post #103
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…

I don't think we will get existing planet-scale financial regulatory authorities to give up their dream of ubiquitous financial surveillance and point-and-click, shoot first and ask questions later financial censorship/DoS abilities simply by there being an alternative. Already they have practically banned p2p bitcoin transactions in the US. They're closer to their goal than we are to ours. In 2011 I gave a halfway t…

I didn't think bitcoin wasn't going to be special in that regard either, because states have shown ability to tax and regulate the finance of citizens before anything electronic ever existed, with cash, gold, cows, farmland, personal goods and more, and they would just go back to those old methods with something like bitcoin or monero.

Also they're willing to add a lot of inefficiency to their economies to retain financial control of their countries.

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