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Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

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Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#121
Bitcoin itself is not bad for the Planet. The current implementation differs somewhat from the Satoshi vision and has not scaled well in terms of fossil-fuel based electricity consumption. Solar or wind powered Bitcoin would have little impact, and in the right areas be cheaper for the miners. This is a trend I expect to see take off.

Also, I suspect Bitcoin at some point will migrate to Proof of Stake once aspects of that set of algorithms are addressed:

* Problems with bonding and checkpoints

* Problems with being fuzzily forgiving about slashing

* More rigor needed by doing rigorous proofs somewhere, in some way

* Some systems introduce a central party that rubberstamps the latest block (e.g. Peercoin)

* Existence of such a coordinating party costs the system its censorship resistance

* Since stakers have to hold funds in the system to author blocks, it's difficulty to have a fair launch of a PoS system. Many PoS systems get either started as airdrops, ICOs, or a proof of burn auction

* Staking requires some representation of the private key to be online at all times, which may mean that it is easier to redirect some of the staking power (in early PoS systems it had to be the actual private key, so not only staking power but actual funds could get stolen)

* Some systems require coins to have a certain amount of confirmations before being allowed to be used for staking, so spending funds interrupts your staking revenue

* Some people expect that staking revenue will be taxed differently than mining revenue

* Some PoS systems can be gamed for profit by trying a vast number of block candidates to cause the staker to get blocks more often than their stake should qualify them for. Such an incentive may turn such PoS systems just into PoW schemes under the hood

* Some researchers argue that "by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value".

These are not problems I came up with, they are from various sources, such as Bram Cohen.

For full disclosure: I have Bitcoin, Cardano, and Ethereum, in that order of holdings.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#122
post #11

Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.

Polluting and overheating the planet to make numbers in a computer go up.

[dead]

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#123
post #11

Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.

Polluting and overheating the planet to make numbers in a computer go up.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#124
post #97
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin eventually in usage. In some ways it already has. Ethereum's transaction fees are set to drop like a rock over the next few years, and so many useful things are built on it already.

What usage? Isn't bitcoin used only for speculation, and a bit of crime on the side? I'm not aware of any usage for bitcoin that isn't purely commodity trading (with zero actual underlying value) or scams.

Ethereum has had a few other interesting, non-black-market uses over the years. DeFi, game assets, NFTs, etc. And the technology has actually evolved. Bitcoin is just...still bitcoin.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#125

What is up with the comments in this thread? Feels like tons of them are bot written. Weird attacks on Bill Gates and Microsoft all over the place.

You haven't noticed that bill has become something of a movie villain over the last year in some circles?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#126

Bitcoin doesn't have to use so much energy. The difficulty level is what causes the high levels of energy consumption. If we could get all the major mining groups to dismantle some % of their machines, we could reduce energy consumption with a very small cost to the group. This could reduce energy consumption, while also preserving the value of Bitcoin. Maybe Bill Gates can start signing checks to the miners? You get…

I'm pretty sure destroying perfectly fine hardware is not the way to go.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#127
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're moving toward PoS, which should help with that: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

They are talking about POS in ethereum since years.

And now the PoS chain has already launched and been working great. Next step is just to move the PoW chain to it. But they are definitely going slowly and safely. And it is definitely a slow process. :(

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#128
post #65

Billionaire says XYZ bad for environment. I cannot help thinking: what a hypocrite. Poor people are much better for the environment than rich. Not even considering private-jet flying super rich. I think BG has no business telling others what's good/bad for the planet.

I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has a way way bigger net positive impact on the environment than you, or almost any of us here. Just because he is rich doesn't mean he has a net negative impact. Rich people like him have the money and power to make a significant change and do more good than a 1000 of us combined possibly could.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#129

Still no valid usecase found for Bitcoin, aside from being a number-is-green-and-goes-up currency. Lightning is unused. TX fees are stupidly high. We're dedicating ASICs powered by entire coal plants to mining bitcoin. And before you, commenter to this post, say anything, no, your Eth/Doge/Xrp/Monero/Tether/scam-ipo-of-the-day is not more valuable. NFTs are worthless. No, being distributed does not make your favorite…

It enables people cut off (in one way or another) from traditional banking to actually have an account. You want to kill bitcoin provide a real alternative else it is most definitely not "worthless" as you say?

No it does not. Especially not with bitcoin. Nobody is paying anything with bitcoin. Are you going to pay for your groceries in your store that doesn't take bitcoin, by adding 30 dollars of fees and having it clear in three days ?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#130

Steve Balmer and Bill also used to call Linux a cancer but look now: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-07/hackers-b... their OS filled with malicious stuff and who knows what kind of backdoors is when exploited by hackers, they blame it on China rather than taking responsibility of putting users at risk with vulnerable OS

Are you refusing to consider the negative externalities of Bitcoin because Microsoft executives bad-mouthed Linux twenty years ago?
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