'Minting' electronic cash (1999)

> Bitcoin isn't a country. It's ridiculous to compare bitcoin's energy usage to countries because it's international. Video gaming uses more energy than bitcoin mining, so stop parroting this BS false narrative that bitcoin is so wasteful.

Your point about video games is pretty asinine because a meaningful portion of the 8 billion people on earth playing video games. We have virtually nobody using Bitcoin because its so incredibly hamstrung. [2]

Based on this data [3] playing video games for 4.4 hours a day for an entire year consumes 823kWh. A single bitcoin transaction requires 1127.77kWh. [1]. So you can either play 6 hours of video games on your 3090 in ultra 1440p144Hz - or move 250 bytes of data.

Bitcoin's 3TPS currently yields as much CO2 as burning 1 ton of coal per second and generates 10kT of non-recyclable e-waste, which also includes a bunch of gold that has to be mined to make the systems in the first place. [1]

All for 3TPS lol.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-gaming-c...

[3] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-gaming-c...

> Your point about video games is pretty asinine

Well, I would have good points I could write. However, if you're just going to insult me, I'm not going to waste my time.

> No. The market does that. I'm not sure why you think this is different than how the value of, say, a dollar represents.

Well most markets aren’t made up of 95% fictional trades, according to an ETF that attempted to list two years ago.

> You misunderstand. Its not that direct. Central banks print money used to fund things like government loans (ie bonds), among other things.

You misunderstand. Central banks don’t print money, they set reserve rates, interest rates and they occasionally purchase and sell bonds. Nothing more.

> You're misinformed. Show me one way that bitcoin has lead to new kinds of corruption. I would be very surprised if you could name a single thing and have some credible information about it.

Ransomware and tether (unless you count the liberty reserve and even that was nowhere close).

I don't think this comparison with "the standard used in cryptography" is really accurate or useful.

Cryptography tries to avoid speculating on the attacker's motivation, but establishing trust from nothing is a different problem than sending private messages on a public channel. It's not clear the former can be done any other way than by creating incentive structures to make the cost of cheating greater than some known amount.

> Honest parties have no advantage over the attacker

Honest parties have the advantage that it's easier for them to agree (and they are rewarded for agreeing). An honest party who wants to play honestly is implicitly supported by every other honest party whether they are explicitly allied or not. Whereas a dishonest party doesn't just need to be dishonest to benefit, they need to get >50% of all miners to agree to benefit them specifically, or otherwise amass all that capacity just for themselves while outcompeting every other honest party put together (not just their specific enemy, but every honest party).

> and thus are left devoting ever growing amounts of energy to mining, continuously raising the bar for the attacker

Why would the energy usage be "ever growing"? Bitcoin might become more popular and therefore might have bigger security demands expected of it in the future, but that should eventually reach a cap. From that point only cheapening electricity generation would increase the expected usage.

> No competent military commander would pursue a strategy that depends purely on numerical superiority;

That is certainly what they'd do if there was literally no other way to achieve an advantage (which is the case in this kind of landscape). Everything else is just a way to make their forces work more efficiently.

Modern cryptography is about a lot more than sending private messages over public channels. The entire field of secure multiparty computation is about mutually distrustful parties participating in a distributed computation of some kind. Bootstrapping trust from "nothing" is part of that, and the theoretical work in that field establishes the limits and feasibility of accomplishing that goal. There are settings where "trust from nothing" (more precisely, when only one party is honest) is possible to achieve with cryptographic security -- for example, if aborting the protocol (stopping the computation) is an acceptable outcome (this is unavoidable if there are only two parties).

"Honest parties have the advantage that it's easier for them to agree (and they are rewarded for agreeing)."

I should clarify that when I used the term "advantage" I was referring to something analogous to mechanical advantage. A basic tenet of cryptographic security definitions is that the honest parties should have an advantage over the attackers in the sense that a small increase the work done by the honest parties results in a large increase in the work that must be done to attack the system. Note also that cryptographic security definitions assume the opposite of what you said: that the honest parties are not coordinated and are operated independently, but that the attackers do coordinate with each other (in fact we just refer to "the adversary" which has full control over all the attacking parties, with full access to their internal state, inputs, outputs, randomness, and whatever else).

You mention incentive structures, but incentive structures are not very reliable. You need to make a lot of assumptions about motivation before an incentive structure makes sense, and those assumptions can easily fail because of something external to the system. What if a group of miners who collectively control 51% of the mining capacity of Bitcoin realized that they could open short positions in Bitcoin futures and make a fortune if they triggered a panic by e.g. executing very obvious double-spending attacks? Historically incentive structures have failed to prevent wars, crime, and other unwanted behaviors.

"Bitcoin might become more popular and therefore might have bigger security demands"

One does not follow from the other. Security requirements have nothing to do with popularity and everything to do with the ability of some attacker to succeed in attacking a system. Even if nothing about Bitcoin changes, a change elsewhere in the world may create an opportunity to profit from attacking Bitcoin (and there is no reason to think anyone other than the attacker would be aware of that opportunity). The attacker may not be rational at all; maybe the attacker just wants to create chaos, even at great expense. Like I said, incentive structures are unreliable and make for a poor approach to security on the Internet.