191–200 of 332 posts
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And if you're going to rig up a volcano for power production, maybe use that power for something useful in your own country.
Geothermal power in El Salvador represents 25% of the country's total electricity production.
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Without debating any of your points: bitcoin is a terrible choice for this. It is horribly volatile, it is incredibly expensive to transact in, it is an awful waste of energy. Using a stablecoin on a proof of stake blockchain with high transaction rates would make a lot of sense. But that wouldn't help the officials who pushed this get rich from their stash of bitcoin...
> But that wouldn't help the officials who pushed this get rich from their stash of bitcoin... The price didn't move much after the announcement. The whole point is to attract those who have already gotten rich from their stash of bitcoin to come to the country.
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Without debating any of your points: bitcoin is a terrible choice for this. It is horribly volatile, it is incredibly expensive to transact in, it is an awful waste of energy. Using a stablecoin on a proof of stake blockchain with high transaction rates would make a lot of sense. But that wouldn't help the officials who pushed this get rich from their stash of bitcoin...
Once again, El Salvador is using lightning network which enable almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments. PoS isn't perfect either and has it's own sets of problems.
But yeah, if you sell this to me as a test of lightning at scale, then I'm definitely more interested in it, while still thinking a super volatile asset is a bad currency.
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But it s like there's ONLY the reward. You imagine if there was a way to make gold with electricity? We d live in the dark just to get more of it...
Well, not exactly. There is the utility of enabling the chain. And there is nothing stopping us from extracting gold using electricity. It's in basically all soil and sea water. Sure there are some required materials, but I'd water a guess that those materials are no harder to obtain than GPUs. The only thing that stops this reckless mining are the forces of the market, and the same is true with crypto. Crypto miners…
Can’t quite find a one for one measurement for Bitcoin, but due note this is the energy needs of all of Visa’s operations and they process in excess 100 billion transactions a year and Bitcoin (in 2020) averaged around 300,000 transactions a day[1].
If interested there is this[2] digiconomist article with more numbers (no clue as to the veracity of them).
[0]: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil.... [1]: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions [2]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
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Once again, El Salvador is using lightning network which enable almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments. PoS isn't perfect either and has it's own sets of problems.
It remains to be seen whether lightning network will actually work for this. If it does, then I'll allow that only the volatility and energy waste are the reasons this is a bad idea. But yeah, if you sell this to me as a test of lightning at scale, then I'm definitely more interested in it, while still thinking a super volatile asset is a bad currency.
The volatility will come down as the market caps get larger, but it'll never go away (I mean even fiat currencies and gold's price fluctuate on a daily basis).
The energy usage (not waste if you consider it to be a useful thing) will only go up as the price goes up, but it'll use increasingly renewable % and stranded energy and even bankroll new renewable power plants that wouldn't have been profitable to start.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...
Seems to me El Salvador will say anything they can to make the price rise.
From what I've heard about Salvador, investors who plan to mine cryptocurrencies in El Salvador should include an armed to the teeth private army in their projected expenses, or else their mining equipment would soon change owners.
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I’m sorry you don’t see that it has value. It has value to me. In fact, I need a secure, permissionless, censorship resistant, non-state backed value storage system more than I need hydroponic food or desalinated water. The problem is the disconnect between your wants/needs and the needs of others in the world. Waste is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Are the benefits of proof of work worth the additional cost over other consensus algorithms, to you?
PoW on the other hand will lead to consolidation around inexpensive energy: volcanoes in El Salvador, hydro in some northern countries, solar somewhere else, etc. However, those places will have some abstract voting power in the Bitcoin world, but exchanges, people, node operators, and businesses also have abstract voting power to balance against the cheap energy locations.
I should mention that the upside of all of this is that we can now choose the option to have accessible digital banking around the world, and people who print money will have less of an impact on world affairs.
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It remains to be seen whether lightning network will actually work for this. If it does, then I'll allow that only the volatility and energy waste are the reasons this is a bad idea. But yeah, if you sell this to me as a test of lightning at scale, then I'm definitely more interested in it, while still thinking a super volatile asset is a bad currency.
It does work, they have been using it in El Zonte town for quite some time now [1]. The volatility will come down as the market caps get larger, but it'll never go away (I mean even fiat currencies and gold's price fluctuate on a daily basis). The energy usage ( not waste if you consider it to be a useful thing) will only go up as the price goes up, but it'll use increasingly renewable % and stranded energy and even…