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Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

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Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#61

Post by adventured »

starkd wrote: post #39
rootusrootus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody actually knows. We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.

Aside from some industrial uses, gold really has no intrinsic value aside from cosmetic. And cosmetic use is really just shared appreciation. There's really no reason btc couldn't offer shared value as medium of exchange in the same way fiat currency serves. Just depends on enough people who agree to use it.

Your aside is an extraordinarily large aside and yet you casually toss it in there.

Humans have a nearly unlimited desire for luxury goods and always will, quite predictably. They lust after jewelry accordingly and have for many thousands of years. Nothing about that will change. The aesthetic demand for gold will remain so long as people continue to desire luxury goods.

If you drop the price of gold low enough, people will start rampantly decorating their walls and consumer goods with it. It has potent intrinsic support under the price, as much as anything can. It will remain scarce and desirable.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#62

Post by zepto »

eloff wrote: post #36
rootusrootus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody actually knows. We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.

It does, but that only establishes a low floor on the price of gold. If it had no value as a store of wealth, it would plummet in value to a tiny fraction of what it is actually worth. Bitcoin has a floor of 0 in theory. I would also guess that makes gold better as a store of wealth. But given that the price rarely ever approaches that floor means it might not matter. And bitcoin is harder to steal (at least you don'…

> easier to divide and transact and verify ownership

Yes, in the presence of high tech infrastructure, but otherwise impossible.

Gold coins carry on working no matter what the nazis do to the internet and the chip foundries.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#63

Post by reilly3000 »

ketamine__ wrote: post #47
iagovar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've very skeptical for cryptos, specially about their regulatory survival, but I've been studying it a bit, and aside some obscure cryptos that are propably genius, I found nano worth mentioning as currency, and Cardano seems on track for a blank sheet replacement of Ethereum.

Cardano doesn't have smart contracts yet. How many years has it been? How can they still be top ranked?

It’s like gen 3 crypto, incepted in 2017. I’m a believer in their platform and governance models, and enjoy their fast, cheap transactions today. IOHK is delivering something with vast consequence, generally on schedule. They will lag until dev adoption takes off, but then I have high hopes for the network and protocol to deliver on early crypto promises.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#64

Post by anm89 »

And then this one time, bitcoin went all the way up to $30 and then crashed all the way down to $13.

And another time bitcoin went all the way up to $1100 and then crashed all the way down to $200.

So the moral of this story is don't buy bitcoin. You know it's going to crash.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#65

Post by zadler »

throwawayQuwcy wrote: post #13
JulianMorrison wrote: post #5

Bitcoin needs to get mapped across 1:1 to something that doesn't require vast number crunching energy use, and the old blockchain abandoned

It's already happening! There's approx 150,000 BTC locked in the Ethereum network as ERC20 tokens like WBTC and RENBTC https://wbtc.network/dashboard/order-book Ethereum is moving to proof of stake shortly. I imagine a lot more BTC will transfer over to take advantage of this & other benefits like defi interest

For the migration to be complete, there would need to be a coordination between the btc network and an eth contract to move the issuing of the remainder of the supply over to the contract. And an agreement of how the new units would be allocated; it seems doubtful that this could ever take place.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#66

Post by dogma1138 »

birktj wrote: post #55
eurasiantiger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That equivalence exists in the domain of classical physics. Bitcoin only exists in semiconductor systems: its ineffectiveness stems from the extra logical layer (gates on silicon) which, while based on quantum effects, does not utilize quantum effects directly for calculation.

Isn't there also a fundamental equivalence between information and energy in physics? And so is there not a lower limit to the amount of energy required to compute a SHA256 hash of a certain number of bytes, and by extension mine a bitcoin block?

Yes but only for irreversible computation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#67

Post by sp332 »

auntienomen wrote: post #31
agravier wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its not a payment system (unless the transaction is sufficiently large). > It's more like digital gold. As explained by the famous paper: "Bitcoin: Definitely Not A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"

And rebutted in the equally well known "Bitcoin: A Comically Badly Designed and Completely Dysfunctional Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

It was an impressive proof of concept. There are technically better cryptocurrencies (along pretty much any dimension), but they just didn't get as much attention. Maybe these articles about how bad bitcoin is should call out some alternatives.

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#68

Post by woah »

iagovar wrote: post #22
JulianMorrison wrote: post #5

Bitcoin needs to get mapped across 1:1 to something that doesn't require vast number crunching energy use, and the old blockchain abandoned

I've very skeptical for cryptos, specially about their regulatory survival, but I've been studying it a bit, and aside some obscure cryptos that are propably genius, I found nano worth mentioning as currency, and Cardano seems on track for a blank sheet replacement of Ethereum.

Genuinely curious, why Cardano? There are dozens of reputable, high profile “eth killers”, such as Cosmos, NEAR, Polkadot, Solana, Avalanche, Tezos and many more. All of these have a proof of stake consensus, and smart contracts which are supposed to have some special sauce that makes them better than Solidity, be it functional programming, formal proofs, rust, or what have you.

Cardano seems to have accomplished the least of the bunch, (not even fully operational yet) but somehow it has spiked in the last few months to have the highest market cap. Not trying to offend you if you have invested in it or anything, but do you have any idea why?

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#69

Post by Aachen »

blfr wrote: post #58

Reminds me of this tweet. https://twitter.com/HedgingChaos/status/1364675046191546377

To save everyone a click:

> What’s the yearly energy usage of this single USD full node? [picture of aircraft carrier]

Edit: anything wrong with this comment that I can do better in the future?

Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

#70

Post by adventured »

bitwize wrote: post #56
rootusrootus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody actually knows. We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.

There's no such thing as intrinsic value. Gold has value because humans value it. Humans value it basically because it's shiny and somewhat rare, but the value is something we project onto it.

Yes there is. It's pretty obvious that intrinsic value here means something that is very reliably valued by humans.

Nobody thinks intrinsic value for gold means that the universe likes wearing shiny gold jewelry and that places a floor under its value.

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