So bitcoin failed its guarantees two times at least, but it's fine and dandy by the ‘crypto’ people. Such cryptography, wow.
Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
171–180 of 268 posts
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption. > How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. > Time for the UN to get together and get this banned. How about we get the developed nations to stop trading with China instead? How about we get them to stop burning fossil fuels? They're the ones ruining this world. Cryptocurrency is merely a little raindrop compared to that ocean.
> Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption. 1% is huge , especially considering the trend: Bitcoin alone tripled their energy consumption during last year. Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ Why shouldn't I think that 5 years from it could become 25% or more?
That's the figure responsible for my "less than 1%" statement and I'm not even sure how accurate that estimate is. Honestly it makes no sense to me.
> The index is built on the premise that miner income and costs are related.
> Since electricity costs are a major component of the ongoing costs, it follows that the total electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network must be related to miner income as well.
> To put it simply, the higher mining revenues, the more energy-hungry machines can be supported.
So BTC price shoots up all the way up to nearly $70k. This means miner profits will also increase proportionally since they get paid in BTC.
The problem is they try to correlate energy consumption with miner income. Profits are up so energy consumption must have risen proportionally as well? I'm not sure I buy that. When BTC prices rise, profits must be higher and therefore the costs will represent a smaller percentage of miner income, not the constant 71.44% that's apparently assumed by this study.
The way they estimate the minimum energy consumption does make lot more sense.
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean decentralization in the "proving ownership" way. Right now, a bank can be the central authority on how much money you have in your account. With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. A bank doing it will always be cheaper, but then the bank has too much control. How much are people willing to pay to make sure one entity does not have too much control or power?
> With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. That's how it was supposed work. The current reality is small highly centralized group of miners maintain the blockchain.
Do you think more miners will join if Bitcoin gains more adoption? Their is a cost to even find out if decentralization (through blockchain) is even worth it.
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
All without any meaningful service costs No we can't, because there's no way you can dismiss the climate costs (and the impact on energy prices and chip supply) as not meaningful. It is this blue-sky pollyanna-ism among crypto advocates which generates much of the "hate" against it, btw.
Those are externalities, not service costs. Hal Finney didn’t have to pay a dollar to keep the network running, the users pay all the costs, and the users are miners or accounts. Nuclear bombs can be cheap and bad at the same time, the 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement because it had externalities, then that’s short sighted.
Those are externalities, not service costs.
In strict accounting terms, yes.
But in practical terms -- the cost offloading that is inherent to BTC is so blatant and direct that it barely qualifies as an "externality" (and only in an abstract, technical sense).
The gist of the GP comment was, in essence: "Isn't BTC nifty because it can do all these things, and it costs basically nothing to run." When in fact the exact opposite it true. And in fact there are still countless people running around trying to downplay its true cost.
If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement
I will accept that the bomb was "an engineering achievement". But I'm not going to get out my pom-poms try to lead the room in a cheer to the effect of: "The Bomb was an astounding engineering achievement that keeps the world safe for democracy, and at minimal service cost".
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would probably be collapsed in the short term and eventually be replaced by something, if not decentralized power generation. >Without the rule of law and threat of prosecution, a massive surge in usage due to theft would overwhelm systems. I used both internet and electricity in Northern Syria circa 2015, provided by private providers, and it seemed to work just fine then. Why you think rule of law is so import…
Sounds like the next startup mecca. Now, before bitcoin, where did smart people put their savings? Probably, any money that wasn't needed for immediate liquidity went into dollars or euro or securities denominated in those currencies. The present state of the art is that cryptocurrency is an arbitrage that converts subsidized electricity into value that can be transported out of the country.
Without bitcoin I would still advise putting savings in stocks, bonds, a little precious metals maybe. I don't see bitcoin as savings as much as a currency or insurance policy against all your material assets and bank accounts being seized and/or stolen.
>that can be transported out of the country.
There's a lot of value in this though, no? The 10k limit on undeclared financial instruments held in your personal custody through customs and KYC/AML laws in banking mean crypto fits a big void that was previously much harder to fill.
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive. I do think it has some small benefits like transferring money where there are no other options. But the vast majority of the network's use is in purely financial use and justified by HODLers and libertarian types. Its existence is largely a downside o…
>Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive. Y'all told me crypto was bad and now I'm bad for dumping crypto to buy precious metals? The litecoin transaction I do uses $0.02 of electricity. $0.02. Ever left a lightbulb on longer than you should have? Spent $0.02 in gas to go to the bank to get…
Well, it's pretty simple really - I'm not a big fan of financialisation. I think it's done some pretty serious harm to the world - even many libertarians, simple minded though they may be, have the good sense to point out that wall street is bad. Now I don't really blame you personally for day trading or buying gold as a store of value or whatever, but it isn't helping your argument that bitcoin is doing anything good if it is literally just "wall street but with massive energy costs, less regulation, and full of even more scammers and financially illiterate".
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#177For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…
The site is disingenuous. There have been far more than two service incidents. Around 2015 there were many periods where transactions simply weren't clearing at all due to overload, and there was no way to set a correct tx fee because the fee needed to get to the front of the queue was constantly changing and wallets couldn't inform users of what the current fee was anyway. From the user's perspective these were outages.
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. That's how it was supposed work. The current reality is small highly centralized group of miners maintain the blockchain.
Do you think more miners will join if Bitcoin gains more adoption? Their is a cost to even find out if decentralization (through blockchain) is even worth it.
How? They can't. My PC, laptop and phone can't mine bitcoin.
The way to achieve true decentralization is ASIC resistant mining algorithms and some form of diminishing returns to force miners to operate at small to medium scales. We need lots and lots of small miners running on commodity hardware that people already own, not a few large scale operations running on expensive custom silicon.
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a measure against the banking system? If you do, then I'd love to see how Bitcoin is worse.
Let's take an article [0] produced by a big Bitcoin miner at face value. They claim the banking system consumes 263.72 TWh globally, twice the power consumption of the Bitcoin network at that time, 113.89 TWh. Now, Bitcoin is processing 4.6 transactions/second [1]. VISA alone is processing 1700 transactions/second on average, with peak transaction rates claimed in the 24000/second [2]. Mastercard is similar, as are o…
Your transactions/second number ignores the lightning network
Re: Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's take an article [0] produced by a big Bitcoin miner at face value. They claim the banking system consumes 263.72 TWh globally, twice the power consumption of the Bitcoin network at that time, 113.89 TWh. Now, Bitcoin is processing 4.6 transactions/second [1]. VISA alone is processing 1700 transactions/second on average, with peak transaction rates claimed in the 24000/second [2]. Mastercard is similar, as are o…
Your transactions/second number ignores the lightning network
We were discussing Bitcoin. The Lightning network is a completely different thing, with completely different guarantees of payment security/trust than Bitcoin (it's possible to steal money on the Lightning network, or to do denial of service attacks against nodes, by design).