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Replacing an oppressive apparatus that is relying on proof of military/police power to establish trust in banking with some form of an algorithm that is relying on proof of work/energy may be energy saving at the end. Just compare how much police/military has to be maintained and related resources spent to the naked energy for mining/transactions.
Both of those will remain. Even if we fully adopted Bitcoin there's no world in which we tell the army and the police to go home and thank them for their service. They do other things . It's not particularly effective to tell ISIS "you can't hurt me -- I've got Bitcoins!" You can't double-spend this energy budget.
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Existing financial systems process many orders of magnitude more transactions than Bitcon does. There's no acceptable excuse for its current consumption VS the throughput it provides.
It's software, it can be optimised much quicker than optimising the politics and dynamics of the existing banking system.
This manta keepa being repeated by the bitcoin crowd as if it were a fledgling technology, when its already 10 years old.
Is mass adoption just around the corner, do you reckon?
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No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
> by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate That’s a reasonable approximation. Over time mining is paid for by transaction fees in a competitive market. If you get 2x the fees and the cost to mine stays the same, you get 2x as much mining. Granted that assumes transaction fees are ~1:1 with transaction count. However, protection from a 51% attack eventually requires 1:1 increase in mining as the value o…
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The idea that bitcoin will magically make armies obsolete is one of the most laughably silly ideas I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s quite the bar to clear. Hint: wars predate fiat currency. You’d still need army without fiat.
Read on British debt and it’s relationship to the WWI and WWII.
It’s entirely possible to fund massive wars without fiat currencies. We know this because we’ve seen it time and again. Taxes and bonds can be used even with a hard metal currency, as does the handy expedient of promising a portion of the spoils of war. I see no reason why a bitcoin based country couldn’t just raise taxes and bonds just like the gold backed ones did for literally all of human history.
Beyond that, the world hasn’t seen any truly massive multi-lateral engagements since the proliferation of fiat currency. While the Middle East remains a hot spot, there has been nothing to match the scale and hardship of a world war or a napoleonic war. If the theory is that fiat currency enables war, you’re going to have a very hard time explaining the limited scope of conflict since the abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971.
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The premise of “no fiat, less war” is just asserted without any proof, and is actually quite ahistorical.
i never said nor implied "no fiat, less war".
Edit: saying that the economy would be deflationary and thus couldn’t afford a large army would be a hilarious way to go.
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> this is an elaboration for your assertion, that was missing from your previous message. Not really. Who else was it going to be, it's not like I'm the first to point this out. > miners don't control who can transact with whom Of course they do. It's up to them which transactions to include in a block. > transaction fees are still orders of magnitude lower than the actual flat block reward People who like bitcoin li…
> It's up to them which transactions to include in a block. and "them" is not a single entity or even small number of entities. miners compete for block rewards and every transaction with a fee contributes to the profit - whatever malicious miners choose to leave out will be included by non-malicious miners making them more profitable. calling miners middlemen when they would only have actual control over which trans…
Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
Why don't people rail like this against the aluminum industry? It's just as wasteful. Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society, the energy to secure bitcoin is a cost just the same as the energy to smelt aluminum.
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> It's up to them which transactions to include in a block. and "them" is not a single entity or even small number of entities. miners compete for block rewards and every transaction with a fee contributes to the profit - whatever malicious miners choose to leave out will be included by non-malicious miners making them more profitable. calling miners middlemen when they would only have actual control over which trans…
I love how quoting you is a “manipulative tactic”.
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i never said nor implied "no fiat, less war".
Now you’re just dodging the question. Prove your assertion that a country on bitcoin would need a smaller army. I’ll wait. Edit: saying that the economy would be deflationary and thus couldn’t afford a large army would be a hilarious way to go.