Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the winter I ride my bike down streets lined with cars idling because their owners don't want to ride in the cold for a few minutes. In a way I appreciate bitcoin for its absurd and unambiguous wastefulness. It's sort of the perfect expression of consumerism, destroying the precious and irreplaceable earth for something immediately disposed of.
I think people generally want to enjoy their lives. I have a friend that keeps his house at 60F in the winter. I think you can argue that I'm not going to die at those temperatures or experience hypothermia. It's quite unpleasant nonetheless. During the summer if it's hot indoors I feel miserable and tired. A lot of us could live a more simple life (i.e. no cars, fewer children). But humans are attracted to comfort a…
Bitcoin Is Time
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#123Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
To be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, pickin…
https://solana.com/solana-whitepaper.pdf
The core insight, I think, is this:
> Proof of History is a sequence of computation that can provide a way to cryptographically verify passage of time between two events. It uses a cryp- tographically secure function written so that output cannot be predicted from the input, and must be completely executed to generate the output. The function is run in a sequence on a single core, its previous output as the current input, periodically recording the current output, and how many times its been called. The output can then be re-computed and verified by external computers in parallel by checking each sequence segment on a separate core. Data can be timestamped into this sequence by appending the data (or a hash of some data) into the state of the function. The recording of the state, index and data as it was appended into the sequences provides a timestamp that can guarantee that the data was created sometime before the next hash was generated in the sequence. This design also supports horizontal scaling as multiple generators can synchronize amongst each other by mixing their state into each others sequences. Horizontal scaling is discussed in depth in Section 4.4
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#124Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should be provided commensurately to society for the damage incurred. And yet:
2. It is a terrible currency. Promoters claimed we could pay for things with Bitcoin, that it'd replace fiat currency. But the design of Bitcoin in particular makes it an awful currency. To prevent deflation, a currency should be able to increase its supply to maintain reasonably constant velocity as demand increases for it as a medium of exchange. With its limited number of coins, Bitcoin cannot increase supply to maintain velocity: its only solution is to fractionalize, a form of deflation. And deflation is what we get. Massively: everything you own, and all your income, constantly becomes worth less expressed in Bitcoin, day after day.
3. It's a terrible currency, part two: currencies should have very low transaction costs. Bitcoin transaction costs exceed $20. The response to this is to recentralize it in the form of services that cheaply transact Bitcoin rights management through traditional databases. Eliminating the very value proposition of Bitcoin.
4. After having given up on defending it as a currency, the next claim is that it's a "store of value." But stores of value should have some degree of consistency of value: volatility is not a virtue. Bitcoin supporters are right that fiat currency, to the degree it is exposed to inflation, is at risk of not being the best store of value, which is why we don't normally keep huge amounts of resources piled up as cash. But Bitcoin is an awful store of value because it has no fundamental utility that moderates its price swings. Normal assets - real estate, bonds, gold - have some sort of fundamental utility or cash flow that helps to moderate price action over time. The asset must have some sort of use first, then it can become a good store of value. Because of the above flaws, Bitcoin has no good use, which thusly makes it a poor store of value.
None of this is a fundamental problem of crypto, just Bitcoin. Crypto could be very useful! But with many millionaires minted from a lucky speculation and their entire ego reliant on deceiving themselves that their speculation was clairvoyance, critiques of Bitcoin are invariably met with a flea market of intellectually mangy defenses that ultimately boil down to saying "well, look at its price!"
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
> using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#127This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.
Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored.
Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up just to explain us his grand new theory about money. It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented.
That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.
also the military/police/law/government defend you from being killed for your bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#129Bitcoin is only popular because tech workers get paid a lot and have the ability to speculate, we live in a world of massive asset bubbles created by government fiscal policies and Bitcoin is excellent for buying drugs on-line. Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one. All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do…
Actually it's pretty important for many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
Re: Bitcoin Is Time
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.