If you stop mining bitcoins, Bitcoin would not disappear....
Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
121–130 of 157 posts
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#122It's worth noting that Tether has not minted any significant amount of new coins since the NYAG settlement was announced. If the terms of the settlement effectively prevent them from being able to print any more coins, we will soon find out whether or not the theory of Tether propping up the price of BTC was indeed accurate or not.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#123If you stop mining bitcoins, Bitcoin would not disappear....
If you stop mining bitcoins, anybody with a small rig can produce a double spend and destroy all trust in the network. It wouldn't disappear, but the coins wouldn't be worth much.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#124> The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels. Nice to see actual data on this. Bitcoin advocates keep claiming it's mostly renewable.
Even this doesn't matter much. Nuclear, wind, and solar are all frequently criticized because they do not have the ability to scale with demand. We can think of all of these energy sources as fixed, with all of the marginal energy use coming from CO2 emitting sources. If you use one fewer watt of power, virtually all of that savings is in coal and gas. This is why reducing power usage is so important.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#125If you stop mining bitcoins, Bitcoin would not disappear....
If no more bitcoins were mined, you couldn't move bitcoins around. You can only include new transactions by mining a new block.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#126> The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels. Nice to see actual data on this. Bitcoin advocates keep claiming it's mostly renewable.
If that were true, we'd be seeing fluctuations in how frequently blocks are being created depending on where the sun shines and where it's windy. Water power is more stable but not enough to explain the TWhs all disappearing into bitcoin every year. No need to do a lot of work surveying miners to disprove these trolls, also they'll just come up with a new argument like that it's the payment method of the future and t…
I find it funny that in every post that denounces the energy use of bitcoin, which is one of its apparent weakness and strength at the same time, there are what I'd call "apologists" who come in and give other reasonings to support bitcoin, ignoring facts that go against it.
Let's be honest with each other:
- The reason why bitcoin is revolutionary is because it opens up a way to do transactions on a ledger between millions of people without a central authority. Even if you say owning 51% of the network means you are the central authority, you have to keep pushing those resources forever, basically impossible to happen in a "struggle" situation.
- The reason that in itself is its weakness is because it relies on computational proof of work, and that means energy. The more people are involved in bitcoins the more energy will be consumed to vie for the possibility of mining out rewards, to the point where the costs doesn't make sense anymore and you have to rethink mining strategy. Any system that proposes a central authority to lessen this energy use burden is just making it weaker, not stronger, if you care about decentralised transaction systems.
That's why it's both a weakness and strength.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
ledgerx.com is tightly regulated (all trades reported to CFTC) and physically settled with (in my opinion) very good security practices, but it's only available to US residents. Their longest expiry dates are December 2022, so about 2 years out. I haven't seen anything longer, unfortunately. Since it's physical delivery, when you sell an option, the exchange "locks" the coins or USD that would be required if it were…
>Deribit ... it's been operating successfully for a while now. Deribit operates from Panama. Typically these markets work well until there is finally some big event in the markets. Just when when big wins and losses are actualized they have "technical difficulties" or they just disappear.
Yeah, so that's why I was more hesitant about Deribit than I was about LedgerX. I have full faith in LedgerX the company and the regulator that oversees is. With Deribit you only really have a track record to go on, because if past performance fails to predict the future then you're kinda SOL.
But if you're outside the US I'm not sure there are many other choices. I think okex and bit.com might both offer some flavor of option, but last I looked were relatively tiny markets.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#128Why is proof of work so much more popular than proof of stake?
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might be a little rusty, but don’t we know exactly how much calculating is being done (measured in M/G/T/P/E hashes/second)? And don’t we also have fairly accurate measurement of how much electricity it takes to calculate those hashes (assuming everyone is using this year’s tech)?
We do, which is why it's so attractive to look at Bitcoin's energy consumption. The result is a big number, but we don't know how bad this number actually is because we don't have fairly accurate measurements of any other industry to compare it to. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis. For example, is Bitcoin the most energy intense industry, or is it really just because computing…
I have to admit: I had never considered the fact that we can’t measure most other energy consumption as accurately.
Seems to me we really have to be having that conversation instead of just “it uses so much”.