241–250 of 295 posts
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That's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.
But there is no known function that has these properties and is useful in real world.
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I get that the energy is being used for something useful and cool, but when the energy cost to secure a single transaction could power 5 households for a day, then something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Surely even fans can agree there's a level at which it just doesn't make sense any more.
That energy is not just confirming the transactions in the existing block, it is protecting all transactions in the blockchain history, adding security to each of them. That represents a history of more than $70 billion in value. Suddenly it doesn't seem so expensive anymore.
First people try to argue that all this gigantic energy expenditure "buys" security.
And then – in the fine print – you are learning that you don't actually "buy" security, you have been sold a subscription. This gigantic waste of energy doesn't do anything unless you follow up with even more energy.
So the calculations that x amount of energy "secures" y amount of economic value is flat out wrong. Because x should be x + x' + x'' ad infinitum.
Oh, and the longer you stay in, the more difficult is getting out, because "sunk cost" isn't a fallacy in this scheme, it's actually real.
The energy expended is a guarantee of security and immutability. The fact that real world energy is expended is the thermodynamic guarantee of the irreversibility of a transaction. If you have access to the VISA database, and change something, you cannot have the cryptographic proof that it has not been tampered with. At the very best, you trust a VISA root key. With Bitcoin you trust math and physics, telling that i…
In addition to math and physics, you also trust the durability of infrastructure, the correctness of the software, the moral compass and cohesion of the developers, that there will be no 51%+ mining coalitions, that if there are they'll be benevolent, and probably believe in relative global peace. You also trust totally mundane things like internet resilience against phishing attacks, web browsers and other basic too…
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...
Please note "The right people were online and available in IRC or could be contacted directly."
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That's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.
No, you are incorrect. The important aspect of proof of work is that it is very expensive to create an alternate history (maybe one where you didn't send $15,000,000 to the exchange, for example). If you are doing useful work, someone can pay for it, and you can use that payment to make an alternate history for free, defeating the security assumption of blockchains. Blockchains only work by probably wasting in order…
If you attack the network you can steal billions - so if you have that much computing power available for your useful work, you can temporarially use it against the block chain.
As long as that mining power is available anywhere the chain isn't secure.
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Bitcoin can't move away from wasting energy - the entire design is based on that aspect.
Ad discussed above, the solution may be moving from proof-of-work to a proof-of-ownership scheme which doesn't require as much power to run
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If a single bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5 households for a day, that certainly makes me not want to do any bitcoin transactions anymore. I knew it was wasteful, but this article is really putting it into perspective. And because of the proof-of-work system, the wastefulness is intentional; you have to prove you've wasted enough time and energy to be allowed to mine a bitcoin.
" If a single bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5 households for a day, that certainly makes me not want to do any bitcoin transactions anymore. " This is another point where BECI is misleading... the author managed to screw up so many things on his site :-( Feel free to transact more. This will NOT consume more energy, as explained by many other commenters. The energy per transaction decreases as more…
I'm still demanding you take down the mistruths.
That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.
Miners consume an amount of energy comparable to Christmas decorative lights in the US (alone) I never see anyone refer to these lights as "absurd" or "infeasible" :) http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ Also note that BECI overestimates the consumption: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
We also spent some time discussing the estimate, but you were unable to make a good case for alternate variables (you actually explicitly agreed with a majority of the method) and ended up quote mining our emails to make a bunch of false statements. Hence I had to post: https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci
That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.
It's worth noting that this Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (BECI) is not without controversy. A more detailed analysis is this one: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ and the author of that has specific criticisms of the BECI calculation: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
I recommend having a glance at: https://digiconomist.net/re-serious-faults-in-beci
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Well it's pretty easy to spend an asset that's consistently increasing in value... the real test of it's utility as money is how many businesses and people have started accepting Bitcoin recently.
160k merchants, 3-6 million users. https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/cen...
Is it 10%,50%,or 0.001%?
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And yet some people, like me, use Bitcoin to buy products and services. Your articles merely explain that Bitcoin legally is not money. But in practice it is used as money, it is seen as money, so it is money. Practice trumps theory. Also these articles fail to mention that volatility is quickly decreasing, thanks to increasing market depths: https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519...
Well it's pretty easy to spend an asset that's consistently increasing in value... the real test of it's utility as money is how many businesses and people have started accepting Bitcoin recently.