Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 157 posts

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

#71

Post by cletus »

Yeah this has increasingly become my view [1].

It seems to me that Bitcoin has only really solved one problem: to allow transactions that governments don't allow and there's really two classes of that:

1. Illegal stuff

2. Capital controls and other government impediments on the movement of money.

What I didn't realize until Bitcoin was nearing $1000 was just how much (2) contributed to driving its value, specifically all the affluent Chinese (who are subject to capital controls) who used Bitcoin mining to move wealth beyond the reach of the Chinese government. I really wish I'd figured that out earlier but hindsight is 20/20.

At this point it's hard to view anything other than speculation as driving Bitcoin prices.

We're still figuring out what cryptocurrencies are. I don't think it's likely to be as a currency anytime soon. Traditional currencies just have better properties (stability in value, reversible transactions and the banking system are more of a feature than a bug). If it's an asset, it's hard yet to say what drives the price so this is little more than gambling.

That really just leaves it as a temporary medium for exchange and for Bitcoin at least, we're spending an awful lot of energy to maintain that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213693

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

#72

Post by tehbeard »

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.

Missing its wide applications in modern electronics, but ok.

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

#73

Post by civilized »

eloff wrote: post #16
juanbyrge wrote: post #7

It is quite pathetic that a purported 'future of payments' is so inefficient in so many ways. This is why I will never participate in systems like bitcoin that consume hundreds of TwH (and growing) each year.

Its not a payment system (unless the transaction is sufficiently large). It's more like digital gold. But gold has a track record of holding value over millennia. Bitcoin is only a decade old. Will it hold up over time? Nobody actually knows.

Who needs digital gold? Why not just trade ownership rights to actual gold? We used to have gold-backed paper money and you can easily trade gold electronically today.

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

#74

Post by slashdev »

zepto wrote: post #62
eloff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Nazis famously confiscated gold. At least if they shutdown the internet you still own your bitcoin.

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

#76

Post by deepnotderp »

dogma1138 wrote: post #66
birktj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even for reversible computation the Margolus-Levitin theorem has been hypothesized

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

#77

Post by eloff »

adventured wrote: post #61
starkd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, peop…

Most gold isn't used in jewelry either, so it didn't derive much value from a fringe use.

Ironically we go to huge effort to dig gold out of the ground, purify it, and form it into blocks and coins. Then we dig a new home in the ground, bury the gold in there and put guards outside the door. Someone here pointed out how aliens would be scratching their heads over our behavior if they could see it.

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

#78

Post by eloff »

tehbeard wrote: post #72
bitwize wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Missing its wide applications in modern electronics, but ok.

Fringe applications you mean.

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

#80

Post by noxer »

juanbyrge wrote: post #7

It is quite pathetic that a purported 'future of payments' is so inefficient in so many ways. This is why I will never participate in systems like bitcoin that consume hundreds of TwH (and growing) each year.

Its a long solved problem. Just years after bitcoin went live bitcoin devs figured out that PoW just cant be the solution. FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) DLT ("blockchains") where the result or making "a better bitcoin". There is no need to burn energy to solve the double spending problem. All you need is a distributed way to agree on Tx order. Whoever tries a double spend just f**ed up themself and simply wont know which one will be ordered first and which one therefore will be invalid. Thats not a problem for any honest participant.

See xrpl.org if you wanna read more in dept about this. There are plenty other protects using BFA instead of PoW/PoS by now.

Post reply on HN