211–220 of 319 posts
It is a sink.
I saw no method of storing and re-releasing the energy
Only a method of immediately consuming the energy into something potentially useful and transportable. IT is not like transporting your BTC will allow you to extract new energy at its destination, the way that transporting charged batteries or gasoline would.
So it has utility, but not nearly as much as he's advertising in the headline.
Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE.
In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an obvious bubble.
In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to actually be put to use in productive sectors.
IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.
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This is false. Bitcoin’s value is “backed” by the expectation that it will be valuable tomorrow — nothing more. It’s the same with gold. Gold’s value has nothing to do with the cost of mining it out of the ground. Rather the cost of mining it is justified on the basis of its expected value.
Its price certainly can appreciate for many reasons but that’s not my point. The price of BTC price is backstopped by the sunk cost of mining. Every time the price has fallen below the cost of production miners deactivate and the price stabilizes. If a miner’s opex goes to zero (due to cheap or free renewable energy) in the future there will be no incentive to stop mining during a crash and prices will go to $0.
Also, it is not clear that having more or fewer miners on the network drives prices - it seems more likely that more miners reduce transaction/confirmation times, improving service levels and increasing value (to the extent that actual transactions drive value or price).
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> 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.
We can't act like a 12 year old invention should arrive with drop in decentralized replacements for every component of the legacy financial system...this is all being built from scratch as we criticize its shortcomings.
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> 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 agree that many cryptocurrencies are not suited for this... but some are, and of those, Cardano is proof-of-stake from launch, has ~50 billion USD market cap, 20s to 1 minute confirmations (up to 10 for complete irreversibility, but one confirmation is really reliable already), an amazing community, relatively low fees (about $0.20 USD right now but hopefully decreasing in the future), ability to support 1 million transactions/s without fee increasing, and extremely high decentralization.
I agree that many cryptocurrencies aren't suited to real use at scale as a transaction layer, but I think the hype about the power of this when done right is very fair.
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This is an excellent take on why the Grossman's idea is plainly idiotic [0]. You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity, you just get more security. The system itself can reach a state when you need 51% of whole planet electricity and computation devices locked into it to be perfectly secure. Thats frankly scary. [0] https://elad-verbin.medium.com/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-it-i...
Yes, to me this response seems intuitive if you know anything about bitcoin and PoW blockchains. The original article seems based on misconceptions. I find it strange that even people at a prominent firm like Union Square Ventures are perpetuating such misconceptions.
Remember, their goal is to make money. As we’ve seen over and over again, there’s a strong financial interest in doing whatever is needed to make their holdings profitable and most will say anything short of legally actionable misrepresentations.
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I think of the government part as largely an accident; my definition of fiat money is “money that has value solely because the transacting parties say it has, and not intrinsic uses” - historically the way to get people to agree something intrinsically value-less has value was by government decree, but there are lots of exceptions. I think of the Yapannese rei stones as fiat money, for example (though there is some q…
I think your definition is faulty: are you aware of shell money? This served as money enabling international trade for thousands of years[1], and can you say these shells have intrinsic uses?[2] These shells had value because of their properties: compact, scarce, unforgeable. In contrast, fiat value is held because an authoritative party says value is held, e.g. Chucky Cheese tokens, or the USD. Fiat requires this au…
If Chucky cheese tokens are money at all, they are “representative money” because they can be readily exchanged for various commodities by the issuer (the prizes and games).
A central authorities decree is not required for money to be fiat, it just simply can’t have intrinsic uses like commodity money or be directly redeemable for commodities like representative money. It has value purely because we have confidence it will have value in the future - and historically the most reliable way to do that is by government decree, but it could also be by a mass consensus that a particular crypto coin will still be used in the future.
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> 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…
I like bitcoin (the idea, not the burning of the planet, even though it's only a temporary hack to bootstrap the whole thing). And hey, maybe it will encourage building nuclear mining farms, that will give their owners free bitcoin, and then we can use the nuclear plants.
The only defense I can stomach for Bitcoin's unfathomable energy consumption is that it might be only temporary. Is it worth it? So far, not that much, but I think developed-countries under-estimate the value of bitcoin, since they have more stable economies, and thus currencies, and enjoy freedom of moving their money, and data privacy...