71–80 of 151 posts
It is useful if you consider having a non-governmental/internet native currency a useful thing. If you don't see any value in that, it's gonna be hard to justify that computation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inefficient compared with what? Gold requires a ton more energy. As does the existing banking system. Bitcoin uses less electricity than Christmas lights and provides a completely electric, transparent, uncensorable currency.
What other currency are people fanatic about HODL'ing? It's not a currency.
If gold was invented today, what would it look like, and how would it function?
If it's useful, it's less costly. If it's less costly, it is less secure.
Costly doesn't mean that it has to waste actual resources. The chance of winning a block could be made to be proportional to the amount of bitcoin deposited into some smart contract, instead of proportional to the amount of electricity wasted. The outcome would be exactly the same, and nothing would be wasted.
I worked 10 years for a Bank. A lot of the mainframe batch processing were unnecessary. A lot of the mainframes running Cobol could be replaced by some smaller hardware and code written in java and C. There are a lot of people working around bad written system or bad written laws/rules, to make the things work. My point is: Wouldn't be fair to compare the amount energy to run bitcoin vs the amount of energy to run th…
FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts: - The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-bala…
> Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
Could be, but are the price signals really in place to make this out work in practice in many places? How many electric utilities have so far succeeded in charging people more at all during peak demand times? (maybe other than electric customers they've identified as industrial)
Edit: To be clear, I agree that there is such a thing as surplus power generation and usefully smoothing out demand, I just don't agree that we're in a scenario where cryptocurrency mining is predominantly used or predominantly incentivized to be used that way.
If it's useful, it's less costly. If it's less costly, it is less secure.
Costly doesn't mean that it has to waste actual resources. The chance of winning a block could be made to be proportional to the amount of bitcoin deposited into some smart contract, instead of proportional to the amount of electricity wasted. The outcome would be exactly the same, and nothing would be wasted.
Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient computing platform. There's no silver lining to BTC, it's simply a moderately big, potentially huge mistake in the history of modern technology.
Decentralized projects will always be less efficient than centralized ones why are we suddenly so surprised? The value of decentralized system far outweighs the cost of maintaining it especially when it comes to money. Could bitcoin be more efficient? Absolutely, but to call it big mistake of modern technology is just silly.
It is useful if you consider having a non-governmental/internet native currency a useful thing. If you don't see any value in that, it's gonna be hard to justify that computation.
There are far less costly ways for the environment to achieve the same results. This is simply unjustifiable, when thousands of people are actively running the planet to the ground to make a quick buck in an online casino.
Are you talking about the stock market? Or the companies that have already more or less destroyed the planet to extract every last bit of profit?
I worked 10 years for a Bank. A lot of the mainframe batch processing were unnecessary. A lot of the mainframes running Cobol could be replaced by some smaller hardware and code written in java and C. There are a lot of people working around bad written system or bad written laws/rules, to make the things work. My point is: Wouldn't be fair to compare the amount energy to run bitcoin vs the amount of energy to run th…
> Wouldn't be fair to compare the amount energy to run bitcoin vs the amount of energy to run the banking system? Hasn't this comparison been made over and over, and every time it comes out in favor of traditional banking by a mile ?