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Lol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet. This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".
- I think 80 tons of CO2 for BTC is wrong. It should be around 15-20 tons (75% of BTC is mined with renewables, I think approx 20-25% is coal) - for US, CO2 per $ GDP should be around 0.3 kg - so if BTC is 50000$ value, it is almost same CO2 then something else US produce, (it would be 50000* 0.3 = 15 tons) - if we assume those numbers correct, lets assume they are both 15 tons, it means 50% of the things US produce…
That last point is key. Bitcoins once created exist forever.
The difficulty of mining bitcoin is variable, whereas for gold it is (comparatively) constant. The energy cost of creating $40,000 worth of bitcoin right now is very different from the energy cost of $40,000 worth of bitcoin having been created. It is estimated that 190,000 Tons of gold have been produced in history, which is 53.8 years worth at current production rates. That current production rate requires 132 TWh…
A good share of the gold mined is not in circulation. Besides other uses, the bond wires of every chip are made out of gold. Bitcoin is "the gift which keeps on giving". Every transaction, not only the original "mining", incurs a substantial ecological cost. The share of gold otoh used as financial tool is often not moved at all in transactions. E.g. a good share of it is stored in some vaults and virtually never mov…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But won't each continent adjust its difficulty to account for its local hashrate? And would a high difficulty fork accept that a low difficulty longer fork is valid? Or would it reject it for having invalid blocks?
The algorithm is tuned so that a block is mined about every 10min no matter what the hashing power available is. In the case of a serious and persistent network partition, both “sides” would continue to mine blocks at roughly the same rate as before, minus the first blocks that would take a while as the algorithm tried to catch up to the drastically reduced local hashing power. The real issue is what happens once the…
One caveat here is that "longest chain" is measured not in blocks but rather in cumulative difficulty. So the fork with more hashing power, having a higher difficulty per block, will mine a "longer" chain over the same time period.
> The real issue is a social one: how do you deal with finding out that the last N months worth of transactions are just gone?
If the transactions are still valid (i.e. the inputs haven't been spent in diverging transactions on both chains) then they can be reintegrated into new blocks on the winning fork after the partition heals.
The real problems come from double-spends, whether deliberate or accidental; if funds were moved from TxA to InB in one chain and from TxA to InC in the other then only one of these can be retained, and all transactions downstream from the losing version will be nullified.
In general, to create such a situation a client would need to be aware of both forks and sign conflicting transactions for the same unspent output. There is one major exception, however, which is that the coinbase transactions introducing new block rewards on the losing fork can never be valid inputs for transactions on the winning fork. Ergo, any transaction which depends on recently mined coins is ineligible for reintegration.
Are there any good papers on the BTC network robustness in the event of war. It is well known that major military powers have the ability to cut essentially every ocean-floor optical fiber bundle handling the backbone of the internet at a moment’s notice. If this happens, how would the bitcoin network respond without active connections to other mining nodes? E.g. would the Chinese miners automatically (algorithmicall…
Lol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet. This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".
Lol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet. This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".
Still, how much energy would it take to print an equal amount of money in the form of banknotes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philosophical question: At what point do divergent chains become irreconcilably and separately valid? Is this a property we would ever want in a should-be decentralized currency? One way this can happen today is with intentional forks.
That is actually a good and very practical question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any evidence that Bitcoin is actually displacing traditional banking? Using BTC for your savings or checking account would be an absolutely terrible idea given its volatility. No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. So really, this is just whataboutism to deflect from the fact that, environmentally speaking, Bitcoin is one of the worst inventions of the century.
>> No rational person would ditch traditional banking in favor of Bitcoin. There are people who have made arrangements to receive their payroll disbursements in BTC. While there are not many of these people and they probably all still maintain some form of traditional bank account, I am curious if you would define these folks as irrational (by your definition)?
Would you define someone who put 100% of their net worth into an aggressive, high-risk investment as irrational?