301–310 of 381 posts
Also, this doesn't take off-chain transactions into account. There's way more actual financial transactions on Bitcoin when every L2 transaction is counted. Lightning network scales to billions of transactions per second, without adding PoW energy consumption.
People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take. Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food. PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digi…
Producing fiat currency through manual labor uses a mix of renewable resources, and value is provided. You can't just dig in the ground and get paid for it. You have to do something that improves someone's business or life.
Producing crypto is just turning coal (or whatever) into numbers. There is no intrinsic value created in that chain.
If the crypto loses value, you may have even destroyed resources in the world for no reason. It's a net-negative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is one of the important points point made by jtoomin in the first post of this thread: the energy consumption of a PoW blockchain if not proportional to the number of transactions. This means we could have everyone, everywhere, using a PoW blockchain with the same percentage of energy consumption as today (although it would probably rise as price would arguably also rise as demand increases, but it would eventua…
Didn't bitcoin have the chance to double their transactions-per-second for a constant amount of power consumption, in the form of Segwit2x, and decide not to do so? The fact Bitcoin could be more efficient and chooses not to isn't really an improvement over being unable to be more efficient IMHO - in fact arguably it's worse.
At the technical level BCH has showed that the network is stable in production with 20 MiB blocks, but the goal and ongoing work is to support gigabyte and eventually terabyte blocks so it would scale to worldwide usage while keeping transaction fees low. The counterargument by Bitcoin BTC is that large blocks centralize the network, as not everyone can afford to run a full node. That's a different debate that I would be happy to discuss, but I want to start by pointing out that keeping the block size low also centralizes the network, as many users will not be able to afford the increasing transaction fees (which rose to $50 at recent times). Does it make sense to restrict the network so anyone can run a $50 node but not be able to transact on it? I think decentralization is a means to an end (electronic P2P cash), not a goal in itself. In other words, blockchains should be decentralized enough that no single entity can take control of the network, but too much decentralization is inefficient, so an equilibrium must be found.
People that complain that PoW cryptos spend too much energy don't understand that it's just another form of conversion of energy, just like every other action human take. Average Joe has a manual labor, his physical energy is converted into labor, which converts to fiat currency. The food that Joe ate also require some amount of energy to grow and become Joe's food. PoW mining converts raw electric energy into a digi…
Txs / MWh is not a valid metric for most cryptocurrencies since power consumption is proportional to price, not transactions. Also, BSV and BCH are totally insecure so it's not really fair to compare them to secure cryptocurrencies.
Why are BSV and BCH insecure?
On top of that, larger blocks also means that home users, or small businesses can no longer run their own fully verifying nodes, meaning that we have to move to relying on larger businesses to take care of attacks on the network, and not to collude to change the ruleset.
In reality, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV have not taken off in popularity, due to these issues as well as serious character flaws in their most vocal proponents, meaning that for now their blocks remain small, and the possibility of these attacks isn't actually realized. But if they were to become more popular it would not last long.
It doesn't mention any PoS solution (which are, compared to PoW) extremely energy efficient. They do mention in the FAQ that they're not included since they still depend on some sort of centralization, but as far as I know this is not true for, for example, avalanche ( https://avax.network ) It's not really clear who is behind this site and if there's some hidden agenda. Let's assume not (but with crypto you can neve…
I think Ethereum 2.0 is currently demonstrating at scale that proof of stake works fine and can be secure against hordes of very incentivized hackers trying to cheat. That should hopefully bury the whole proof of stake is centralized argument. The notion of centralization has its roots in a different concept: permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Ethereum (1 and 2) and Bitcoin are both permissionless in the se…
This is really shakey ground to prop up an argument in favor of cryptocurrency: AFAICT no cryptocurrency ever dies until people stop trading it, which virtually never happens.
I’m reminded of the saga of “stable coins” — stable coins of the non-IOU sort. Every major example of one has imploded at least once during times of high market volatility, no exceptions. Including as recently as 2020. You’d think after enough of these implosions the concept would be disproven on a fundamental level, but no.
(Many have considered these unstable stablecoins theoretically unsound ever since the concept’s inception — bitUSD IIRC — with clear parallels to PoS.)
Developers and VCs have been deeply invested in PoS consensus for many years now, mostly because they were attractive financial bets to make. There’s no use in my even opining on the theoretical flaws of PoS, because implosions of cryptocurrencies seem to not even matter to investors.
Anyway, at some point, the people funding and developing these PoS systems evidently shifted into abject promotion mode for obvious financially motivated reasons based on really nothing aside from investor expectations. Nothing has ever been proven about PoS aside from the fact traders are willing to hold speculative positions in these coins — no different from the reasons they’ve held any other cryptocurrency. And even if PoS were a fundamentally discredited concept disproven as many times over as “unstable stablecoins” have been, it would change absolutely nothing about investor behaviour.
Interesting but I’m not sure of the point. PoW by design is not energy efficient. The incentive is just not in the correct place. Interesting but if the goal is to show more energy efficient coins we need to be looking at different tech such as PoS. Although this might have just been a fun project someone put together in which case nice job.
Exactly, hn is stuck on fossil fuel cryptocurrencies and doesn’t seem to understand that all new tech in the last 5 years hasn’t used proof of work.
There are new PoW cryptocurrencies such as Grin (https://grin.mw)
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>>> meanwhile traditional fiat currencies are secured by massive banking industries, governments, and militaries. Crypto-currencies are also secured by those things in their present state. So long as crypto remains a small portion of the overall economy, it depends on the mainstream economy for its existence. For instance, it can't exist without an economic infrastructure that can develop and produce computer chips,…
But computer chips, telecommunications, the electric grid, etc., don't require for governments to exist for them to exist and work. I would even argue that they would work better and more efficiently under a free market economy, so governments, in general, are holding back progress.
That sort of argument would need some extraordinary evidence, given the sort of chaotic, crime-ridden, violent state places without governments tend to devolve into.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But almost any other activity only benefits from getting more efficient. Compare today's efficient LED lighting technology with what was available a few decades ago. With proof-of-work on the other hand, efficiency is actively counteracted . If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up. You are also assuming that only renewable energy will be used for mining in the first place. I…
> If a proof-of-work cryptocurrency holds its price, its energy usage can only go up. The cost of proof-of-work is paid by the network participants. When you transact on Bitcoin or Ethereum, you pay massive fees to proof of work miners that significantly limits the number of things you can do productively. Dozens of interesting use cases on Ethereum are made completely non-viable by fees that sometimes break $100 per…
This seems to be purely theoretical.
In the real world, most people stick with the recognised names regardless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately the money comes from people buying in to Bitcoin and many of them are not aware of the power consumption or the fact that it's possible to achieve number go up with virtually no energy.
The people buying Bitcoin don't need to be aware that it costs 6 GW of power, any more than they need to be aware of the electricity costs associated with the manufacture of plastic, electronics, or other goods and services. If we as a society feel like there is too much energy being consumed, we should regulate the production, and let the market come to equilibrium on a fair price for the cost of electricity. If you…
But people do need to be aware of the environmental costs of such things, because society does not account for negative externalities.
> regulate the coal plants, not Bitcoin. Regulation of electricity will increase the cost of electricity
What if society actually thinks it's reasonable to discriminate on energy use? What if we want to provide cheap-ish energy for end-consumers, for essential services like the medical sector, but not for cryptocurrencies?
Seems like a fine choice for a society to make.