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Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

bitcoinity.org

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Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#241

Post by sanswork »

moe wrote: post #233
sanswork wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Um, and with VISA they will just happily ignore you taking back what they consider their money and wish you a good day? VISA doesn't consider it their money. So ya they will do that. You not knowing that suggests a huge gap in your knowledge of how credit cards work/how charge backs work. >Why would you send money to those? Since you know there is no Chargeback mechanism wouldn't it be wise to demand product/service…

I'm not confusing it at all. I was giving an example that closely maps to the security concern with a credit card. So if you agree that Bitcoin is not a credit card then what relevance does an example have that maps to the security concerns of a credit card ?

I appreciate you skipping the whole rest of my comment to focus on the completely not relevant point of questioning why I included a specific example.

If you want to ignore that is fine with me. But there is still a lot of my comment left up there.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#242

Post by MildlySerious »

TheDong wrote: post #139
brazzy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

You're assuming that we have arrived at the final solution, which is not the case. The proof of work could change as required, even if it's gradually over 10 years to not weaken the network by making current, specialized hardware useless overnight, there is nothing that would stop such a move. If the power consumption became a serious problem, miners would probably consent to modifications to the proof of work algorithm, which is all it takes.

And changing over a course of 10 years (there's an incentive to constantly upgrade hardware anyway) is probably still way faster than the banking system would change on a global scale if it was running into a problem.

While this is a different story because hardware and the PoW algorithm is involved, Bitcoin has a story of "breaking" changes. There will be more with the increase of the block size, etc. So I doubt this would be aniticipated way before it made it's way into the protocol, so the affected parties could prepare as well.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#243

Post by TeMPOraL »

brazzy wrote: post #194
TheDong wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

Computational costs of traditional banking goes down in theory (in practice, they seem to easily overcompensate for that with increased complexity), but other costs (payroll, physical infrastructure, security thereof, etc.) do not. Unless you're proposing that the future of money is 100% digital, with minimal physical infrastructure. Admittedly, that is not entirely unrealistic, though I doubt things will go quite th…

Talking about the cost of energy detracts from the issue at hand. First of all, the market value of energy doesn't reflect the global issues we're facing. Secondly, it invites very bad comparison like "how much power bitcoin uses costs in dollars vs. bank bailout".

Dollar price of electricity doesn't matter. You can't magically print out more coal by signing a document, nor you can clear your "kWh used" counter by going to war with someone else. We have something like 50 years to cut down on our energy use and switch to better sources if we want to have a technological civilization alive on this planet; setting up our economy to run on an exponentially-growing resource waster might not be the smartest idea now.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#244

Post by JoachimS »

throwawayaway wrote: post #133
brazzy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate the hash rate doesn't grow on trees. why the hell would you doubt it would be worse? it does 7 transactions per second. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinati... here's on estimate: Bitcoin Mining Uses $15 Million's Worth Of Electricity Every Day

That chart of hash rate has very interesting increasing fluctuations as time goes by. Also the average trend seems to level off.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#245

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Normati wrote: post #199
ballpoint wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, most UK wire transfers are essentially immediate (at most a couple of minutes), even between different banks.

That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries. You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.

The UK has some of the worst banking in the developed world - not the best.

The quick-transfer system is only available for certain transactions. Most payments still take a while, and anything that involves a paper cheque still takes at least a week.

As for money laundering and terrorism - it's been proven over and over that it's easier to get a bank account for both than it is to get a bank account as an average Joe.

Not a few banks are knowingly involved in illegal transactions of one kind or another. So giving Bitcoin a hard time for the same thing is hypocritical.

Banks are certainly going to be killed by a global digital currency sooner or later, but it's going to need some kind of independent OpenMoney initiative.

BC is not that initiative, because the creators seemed to believe that starting a digital goldrush was more important than creating a rock-solid and secure peer to peer infrastructure for all transactions.

I doubt banks will still be around fifty years from now. In an all-digital economy they're not just parasitic, they're irrelevant.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#246

Post by tlrobinson »

TheDong wrote: post #139
brazzy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

but suddenly the hash-rate is 1000 times more and the energy consumption is 100 times more.

Not really. Eventually electricity will dominate mining costs, not hardware, and people will only invest in more efficient hardware, not cheaper hardware. The total cost of the electricity used in mining will never exceed the total value of the block rewards plus transaction fees, since miners would rather stop mining than mine unprofitably.

Whether the total electricity used increases or decreases over time depends on whether the increase in price of bitcoins outpaces the block reward halving every 4 years, or transaction fees become a significant source of miner income (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Funding_network_security). A single bitcoin would need to be worth $1 million in 50 years to keep pace, for example.

But I think it's more likely we'll transition to better (cheaper, more secure) mining system before then anyway, which is entirely possible to do without having to redistribute bitcoins (it would essentially be a fork that the "economic majority" agrees with: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority)

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#247

Post by [deleted] »

TheDong wrote: post #139
brazzy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#248

Post by jasonisalive »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #229
jasonisalive wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrepreneurs smell an opportunity[1] to roll out one of the many, many new energy technologies that have developed in the meantime in your area (which somehow was overlooked until this point.) [1] An opportunity made possible by the ability (created by Bitcoin) to profitably and efficiently collect micropayments in poor regions of the world

Ah, the libertarian dream. Maybe the "entrepreneurs" will in fact "smell the opportunity" and move in and save the day, but for what? What's the gain? Why design critical infrastructure so that its survival is based on a hypothetical market scenario, when it can be done right in the first place?

Ah, the smugness of the know-it-all anti-capitalist.

Anyway, start here, read diligently. It's not too hard, mostly just straightforward application of basic logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#249

Post by moe »

XorNot wrote: post #232
moe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally and most importantly [...] the difficulty goes up, so more and more power is required to preserve the status quo. Except... The difficulty also goes down . But don't let facts get in the way of your flaming argument...

Irrelevant. A decline in difficulty occurs due to a decline in hashing power. Not a decline in real energy consumption . A decline in hashing power can only happen from people looking at real energy consumption and saying "to hell with this". At which point the network compensates to keep hashing difficulty the same, but does not reduce energy consumption for any of the remaining participants. But correspondingly, th…

the net trend is less coins per unit hash, which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity.

Miners optimise for USD$/kWh, not for coins/hash. The latter is entirely virtual and largely unrelated to the network power consumption.

which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity

You seem to ignore that Miners, too, have to pay for their energy.

So, in your model, either the market price of the coins must also approach infinity, or the miners will just stop mining.

Re: Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

#250

Post by brudgers »

celticninja wrote: post #234
TheDong wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, bitcoin mining would be worse. Provably worse. As computers get better, traditional applications, like databases, perform better and you can either serve more customers, use cheaper (and often more efficient hardware), or do nothing and use your outdated hardware. With bitcoin, your enemy is not the performance of the raw work you are doing (you can hash better), but the fact that everyone else also has these in…

>power usage of cpus, then gpus, and then asics, you'll see that in general power consumption for bitcoin constantly increases. That does not tell the whole story though, power usage per gigahash is a more accurate measure, because the higher the GH the more secure the network. From CPU, to GPU to ASIC the power use per gighash has fallen significantly. If you really want to compare it to the banking sector then you…

The bailout was done with fiat currency.

There is no fiat energy.

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