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Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

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Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#191

Post by capableweb »

danShumway wrote: post #183
capableweb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane. I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit. > There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do d…

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distribut…

> I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.

To be fair, a large part of the ecosystem doesn't actually deal with Bitcoin at all. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies seems to reach up to 1.5T USD at this point. Bitcoin is 1T USD of that, with the rest of the ecosystem quickly catching up[1]

It's really hard to generalize that everyone in any given ecosystem are the same way or act with the same interest. Yes, most people in the oil industry probably don't care about the environment either, but I'm sure there are many in the oil industry who actually care about the environment as well. Same goes for cryptocurrencies.

- [1] "Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance)" graph - https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#192

Post by albntomat0 »

smashem wrote: post #190
audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

> ...Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it... A sound monetary system has more value than anything else on this planet. There's a lot of information out there, but here's one article to illustrate my point: https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2... > The energy is burned forever. Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societ…

> Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.

That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold.

Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline or food.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#193

Post by smashem »

danShumway wrote: post #183
capableweb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane. I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit. > There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do d…

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distribut…

> Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.

Who's claiming this? The Lightning Network is gaining popularity as a decentralized Layer 2 solution, for example.

You mean like Cash App and PayPal?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#194

Post by capableweb »

smashem wrote: post #193
danShumway wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distribut…

> Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. Who's claiming this? The Lightning Network is gaining popularity as a decentralized Layer 2 solution, for example. You mean like Cash App and PayPal?

I think things like centralized exchanges doing trading with centralized technology also "claims" this. Some people seem to be fine with using those as well, even though it supposedly goes against their interest of a payment network without trusted 3rd parties.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#195

Post by dehrmann »

PeterBarrett wrote: post #17

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.

> If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart

This is actually a weird game theory problem because there are a lot a miners with expensive hardware that would be worthless if such a change happened. You could fork it, but you'd have to attract miners after burning them (possible if commodity GPUs were viable, again), and you'd have to convince people that the new tokens are also valuable, and this isn't just Bitcoin Cash II.

Bitcoin has odd, long-term systemic risks based around miners.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#196

Post by smashem »

albntomat0 wrote: post #192
smashem wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it... A sound monetary system has more value than anything else on this planet. There's a lot of information out there, but here's one article to illustrate my point: https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2... > The energy is burned forever. Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societ…

> Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin. That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold. Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline…

It just depends on which parts of the system you're focused on.

We'll continue to bridge the gap between monetary -> electrical energy. A bitcoin is a store of monetary energy, and the bitcoin network is readily available. We're building solutions on top of the network to more quickly and easily convert that monetary energy to electrical energy.

It's somewhat analogous as converting readily available wind (kinetic energy) to electrical energy. There is a large gap between the two forms of energy, but we're continuing to close it.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#197

Post by dehrmann »

fsh wrote: post #18

I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…

> The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak

Viewing aluminum as a battery isn't even valid, unless people start oxidizing it for energy. It's more like economic value added. Bitcoin is only a "battery" in the sense that it could be turned off on-demand to free up power generation capacity.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#198

Post by klyrs »

capableweb wrote: post #189
klyrs wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers and cloud providers are optimizing flops per watt, not flops per second. Energy providers are finding that wind and solar have become incredibly cheap, and transitioning as fast as they can. It took us a while to overcome political hurdles erected by the carbon-burning industry, but it turns out this stuff just makes sense on an economic level.

Not sure it's happening as fast as you seem to indicate here. And if it is, what's the problem with Bitcoin and energy consumption, exactly the same thing will happen, but faster since Bitcoin is all about money?

Where did I indicate a timescale (outside of "it took us a while" -- wherein I said that progress is slow)? As many others have pointed out, energy efficiency is seen as a bug and bitcoin has repeatedly increased hashing difficulty in order to offset increasing efficiency. Likewise, if a locale is known to have cheap power, miners move in until the power isn't cheap anymore. Eventually we'll be on 90+% renewables, and it won't be as bad, but ultimately, bitcoin is a space heater, and never a battery unless you devise a system to capture, store, and generate electricity from that heat.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#200

Post by danShumway »

capableweb wrote: post #191
danShumway wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions. They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distribut…

> I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and…

That's fair, but how much of that 33% of the overall cryptocurrency ecosystem is going onto forums and arguing specifically about Bitcoin?

I don't necessarily want to generalize about all cryptocurrencies or all crypto-enthusiasts -- there is genuinely interesting technology here. But I find it increasingly hard not to generalize about the subset that shows up in these discussions arguing that Bitcoin is the future.

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