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Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

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Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#21

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

> This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its energy consumption.

That's not how Bitcoin or any PoW works. The amount of energy used is not a direct function of number of wallets. It is not either a direct function of number of transactions.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#22

Post by RurouniK »

aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

"This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its energy consumption."

This comment is beyond dumb and just showcases that you have no clue whatsoever about how bitcoin works. Bitcoin's power consumption doesn't go up when more people use it. It goes up when more people COMPETE for the production of the next block, meaning when there are more miners.

Also more than 50% of bitcoin's power consumption already comes from renewable sources.

Also youtube and online gaming need many times more power and I'd argue that a global, open, permissionless financial network is far more important.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#23

Post by [deleted] »

bawolff wrote: post #14
aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

Well i agree that the energy cost is immense, it doesn't scale with number of users but mining power.

[deleted]

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#24

Post by Ekaros »

bawolff wrote: post #14
aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

Well i agree that the energy cost is immense, it doesn't scale with number of users but mining power.

Energy cost scales with value of coins produced. As the price of bitcoin goes up so does the cost of energy and equipment used for mining. Market searching optimum.

This will be fixed at some point, but the point when rewards get low is very far away... So if Bitcoin were really come the one true currency with global market cap, the costs would be enormous...

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#25

Post by qayxc »

andreaorru wrote: post #18
aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

The energy argument has been debunked over and over again. I recommend you read this thread by Yassine Elmanjdra (analyst at ARK Invest): https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=...

This "debunk" is bunk in at of itself - have you actually looked at the presented arguments? They are ridiculous and make no sense whatsoever (e.g. comparing PoW with literal gold mining - as if gold were a currency...).

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#26

Post by lima »

Here's how things are looking in 2021:

(1) Scalability Issues

Solved - there's a plethora of high-throughput chains in development, either based on sharding or pipelining/MVCC/optimistic concurrency. Some projects like Solana use GPUs and JIT compilation to achieve well beyond 50k tps in a distributed network.

(2) Lack Of Intuitive Private Key Management

Little progress. Ledger and other hardware wallets make things easier, but it's still far from intuitive. Non-technical holders typically use centralized custody providers.

(3) Contract Security

Some progress. Smart contract exploits still happen almost every week, but there's a robust set of best practices, safe-by-default standard libraries, and specialized auditing companies which make it much easier to write bug-free contracts, if you're willing to invest the time and effort.

(4) Consensus Algorithms Are Wack

Solved very thoroughly. There has been significant progress in byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, like Tendermint consensus[1] used in the Cosmos ecosystem, providing strong consistency and instant finality.

(5) Privacy

Many developments around zero-knowledge proofs and similar methods, but I don't know how viable those are.

(6) Price Volatility

There's a number of trustworthy stablecoins like USDC pegged to fiat currencies. Other than that, tokens are still highly volatile and only useful as a high-risk investment.

[1]: https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/handle/10214/9769

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#27

Post by tromp »

lima wrote: post #15
aylmao wrote: post #5

To the scalability issues section I'd add the environmental aspect. It has already been reported that by some estimates Bitcoin today consumes more energy than Argentina, and that's with an estimated 1 million active wallets per day. Argentina is home to about 50 million people. This means that in order to have Bitcoin serve as the daily currency for all of Argentina's 50 million people would at least 50-tuple its en…

Everyone (except Bitcoin) agree that Proof of Stake is the way to move forward. Even Ethereum is migrating to pure PoS consensus. This solves the environmental aspect, thankfully.

Hundreds of PoW altcoins disagree. PoS is not a coin distribution method either.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#28

Post by bondarchuk »

Is this what Gell-Mann amnesia feels like? I happen to be a bit into cryptocurrency, and day after day I see these super basic surface-level takes on blockchain get posted here and even upvoted to the top spot. Are the other popular submissions here, on programming languages, the internet, entrepeneurship and what have you of similar low quality, but I just don't have the experience in those fields to realize it? This is a serious question.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#29

Post by RurouniK »

Bitcoin has been running non-stop for the past 12 years, used by tens of millions of people,has a market cap of 1 Trillion and all that while protecting the human rights around the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ldyy7s/bitcoin_is_...

But even if you are clueless enough to think that Bitcoin and blockchain isn't working at least you should appreciate all the breakthroughs in cryptography like Zero Knowledge proofs, networking like libp2p, distributed storage like ipfs etc. that emerged from the evolution of cryptocurrency tech.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#30

Post by andreaorru »

qayxc wrote: post #25
andreaorru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy argument has been debunked over and over again. I recommend you read this thread by Yassine Elmanjdra (analyst at ARK Invest): https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=...

This "debunk" is bunk in at of itself - have you actually looked at the presented arguments? They are ridiculous and make no sense whatsoever (e.g. comparing PoW with literal gold mining - as if gold were a currency...).

Of course, I've read everything, including the article by Nic Carter [1] (which I highly recommend) and all his related articles on the subject.

The comparison with gold mining is quite apt actually - one of the use cases for Bitcoin is to act as a store of value and hedge against inflation, precisely like gold.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

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