Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet • Hacker News Board

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#231

Post by BTCOG » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

nelsontodd wrote: post #72

jetpackjoe wrote: post #9

There are so many better crypto-currencies. Better for the environment because they use proof-of-stake, and not proof-of-work. Better for users because transactions are confirmed in seconds, not hours, and without the ridiculous fees that Bitcoin has. I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.

With bitcoin, you are paying for security. I know if I send you a bitcoin transaction there is a high probability it won't be reverted in our lifetime, possibly ever. I'm not a maxi but these new projects don't have that guarantee yet; likely they never will.

Ethereum and Litecoin for example are far, far less secure than Bitcoin. The centralization of ETH will continue to increase, and mining hardware for Scrypt for Litecoin is nearly non existent in comparison.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#232

Post by Shorel » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #71

kitcar wrote: post #11

Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.

Polluting and overheating the planet to make numbers in a computer go up.

We have been polluting and overheating the planet to make virtual characters eat pills and rescue princesses for over 30 years.

What's the utility of that?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#233

Post by gnrlst » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #195

gnrlst wrote: post #15

Bitcoin is a beautiful concept that has been bastardized by economies of scale. The mining concentration is decreasing its security over time. The centralized block structure and exorbitant fees will afflict it more and more as it grows. Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead. I truly be…

I see some ideas maybe having real usefulness. Large scale inventory/tracking/monitoring (part production, transport, etc) could lubricate a big portion of the world. A big secure unified store of tracking in a way. Am I the only one thinking this ?

There's definitely a lot of use-cases for decentralized blockchains, I agree. If implemented correctly they could fight corruption, improve accountability and traceability and whole lot of other good things. The thing is, blockchain =/= cryptocurrency and therefore blockchain =/= bitcoin. Btc is a cryptocurrency that happens to use blockchain as a decentralized way of signing and keeping track of transactions.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#234

Post by whoisninja » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

tester756 wrote: post #183

whoisninja wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're asking or deciding? if you know for sure, even then it doesn't matter if Bill Gates agrees or disagrees with you?

I meant that "Linux is cancer" seems just to be purely an opinion meanwhile behind claim that "BTC is bad for planet" stands some convincing things like energy usage and stuff.

not sure actually, are you?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#235

Post by tarsinge » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

Ceezy wrote: post #85

mumblemumble wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're moving toward PoS, which should help with that: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

They are talking about POS in ethereum since years.

The v2 POS is live, but the complete migration of the v1 chain will take one or two years: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#236

Post by tromp » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

bikamonki wrote: post #153

If I understand correctly, by design PoW gets harder with time, so it becomes ever more expensive to mine BTC. At some point, it should be economically unfeasible. Now, BTC is rewarded for transaction validation. Does this mean, that at some point in the future, it will be impossibly expensive to validate a new block, hence making it imposible to conduct a BTC transaction between two addresses?

> If I understand correctly, by design PoW gets harder with time, so it becomes ever more expensive to mine BTC.

You misunderstood (or possibly were confused with the ethash "ice age"). PoW difficulty follows daily dollar emission, which is proportional to the product of price and block reward. In Bitcoin there is a large lag (up to 2 weeks) though between changes in the latter, and changes in difficulty. Miners who can't turn a profit will stop mining Bitcoin, causing difficulty to drop. It will always be profitable for the most efficient miners.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#237

Post by shuntress » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #133

nelsontodd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With bitcoin, you are paying for security. I know if I send you a bitcoin transaction there is a high probability it won't be reverted in our lifetime, possibly ever. I'm not a maxi but these new projects don't have that guarantee yet; likely they never will.

How many times has this been used in practice? Like really - did your friend owe you $200 and you wanted to make sure he couldn't pay you something over square and then call his credit company and say his card was lost? Like are you a shop online and you wanted to make sure ALL of your customers are paying in Bitcoin so they can't claim someone stole their card? Are you a party to a lawsuit and the judge decided to o…

The fundamental purpose stated in the bitcoin whitepaper is to provide an electronic equivalent to physical cash.

The first line of the whitepaper[0] is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another"

In practice some "third" party (bank, paypal, square, venmo, etc) will still be involved in most transactions because of the scenarios you have described. But this would be because they are helpful and add value not because they are necessary.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#238

Post by ricardobayes » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

I said this and everyone hated me - he said it and it's suddenly a big awe moment, lol.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#239

Post by paulintrognon » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #210

kitcar wrote: post #11

Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.

> the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans As opposed to elephants or sea urchins? How can humans not be the cause humanity's biggest problems? The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha [usually translated as “suffering”]. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of imperm…

As opposed to external non-human controlled factors, such as meteorites, I suppose.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#240

Post by pornel » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

matthewbauer wrote: post #42

Bitcoin doesn't have to use so much energy. The difficulty level is what causes the high levels of energy consumption. If we could get all the major mining groups to dismantle some % of their machines, we could reduce energy consumption with a very small cost to the group. This could reduce energy consumption, while also preserving the value of Bitcoin. Maybe Bill Gates can start signing checks to the miners? You get…

That requires trusting that none of the miners will deflect (e.g. have a hidden stash of hardware waiting offline until it can perform 51% attack). If you need to trust that miners are not cheating, it kinda defeats the whole point of a trust-no-one cryptocurrency.

So sadly, in a proof-of-work scheme the secure steady state is only when miners are fiercely competing, and that means maxing out their hardware and electricity usage.