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Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

301–310 of 319 posts

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#301
post #156
post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

'Pure waste' is very much a point of view. If you dislike porn, the entire energy to create and distribute that, is 'pure waste' in your view (last time I looked, streaming porn consumes about the same amount of energy as Bitcoin. This probably changed by now). If, like me, you dislike billboards, all those giant flaring screens, burning neon, or LCD pixels, screaming to make you buy Pepsi, is 'pure waste'. If you di…

yes 'pure waste'

Now 1. a bad billboard doesn't make bad btc better. Neither does everything else you mentioned.

2. there is a margin of difference on how much enjoyment and entertainment something like porn makes vs. btc does.

If we would need to cut down on a lot of things to reduce co2, i would argue that btc would be much much further up the list then porn.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would you quality VISA and Tesla accepting bitcoin ? does it qualify as asset tranfer or currency ? (open question)

Governments want you to think of crypto primarily as an asset and not a currency, because they don't want to give up control over currency creation. The fact that you have to file capital gains for every crypto will be the giant silent hurdle that stimies wide spread use. The only way to overcome this is if so many people ignore the law that it becomes unenforceable. Only time will tell.

bitcoin will not just replace other mechanism/means of paying without a state interfering.

And why?

Because our current finance market is regulated and we don't need bitcoin to free it.

Its not technology which is putting all those restrictions and systems onto the finance market therefore a technology like btc doesn't solve anything.

Companies for example are not allowed to do trade with North Korea by law. So if everyone starts to use btc to do exactly that, guess who will step in and regulate it?

I'm always lost on why people think btc will fix any issues we currently have. There is a reason why people invest in Euros and Dollars ('hard' currencies) and gold.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin. That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold. Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline…

It just depends on which parts of the system you're focused on. We'll continue to bridge the gap between monetary -> electrical energy. A bitcoin is a store of monetary energy, and the bitcoin network is readily available. We're building solutions on top of the network to more quickly and easily convert that monetary energy to electrical energy. It's somewhat analogous as converting readily available wind (kinetic en…

Its still wrong what you are saying.

A battery stores PRODUCED ENERGY and gives out the SAME PRODUCED ENERGY with loss.

You might not care but the problem is ENERGY which would not be needed to be PRODUCED to save co2 and our planet.

And you can play around with the idea how Bitcoin can be useful on supporting this stuff but honestly? No one needs btc for sustainable energy investment. No one.

And about this excess energy garbage: Either its so much excess energy that the system ooptimizes itself and reduces the co2 output by shutting down or prices are so different than someone is building a REAL Battery to make money out of this. Bitcoin would just put that energy segment onto the global market by some arbitrary decoupled btc value.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#304
post #29

This is a joke, right? You can’t convert Bitcoin back into energy no matter how you look at it.

You can. It's not even hard to work out: if we take "charging" to mean "buying energy for ₿", then "discharging" ought to mean "buying ₿ for energy".

If you think about it, both of those describe the same economic transaction — just from opposing vantage points (what is "charging" to one party in a transaction, is "discharging" to the other).

Relatedly, consider Switzerland's pumped hydro at Linthal. It'd be hard to dispute calling that plant a "battery" (works on gravity+water); but also consider the economic role it plays: it's an energy price arbitrage facility.

During the night, when grid prices get low, the plant "buys" the energy "for" water volume in the high lake. During the local day, the plant "sells" the water volume back, "for" literal electricity fed back into the grid at a higher price.

... Why have the water?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost everything else (fiat, gold, silver, real estate, etc...) that exists is debased/debasable, deteriorates, or loses value. Look, yes, Bitcoin is deflationary, but it's still subject to market pressures. It's not technologically guaranteed to be worth anything 200 years from now. Besides that... > securely store human labor/time for future use? It's not secure storage if you can't retrieve it [0]. What do you…

>What do you mean by "lossless"? Owning 1000 satoshis/21M BTC is guaranteed to be worth 1000 satoshis/21M BTC 100 years from now, it can not be debased. Every fiat currency (USD, GBP, CAD, AUD, etc..) has a denominator (aka max supply) that increases. Almost every fiat currency dies a horrible death in less than a century due to this inflation. 1 British pound sterling used to buy 12 ounces of silver but is now worth…

> Owning 1000 satoshis/21M BTC is guaranteed to be worth 1000 satoshis/21M BTC 100 years from now, it can not be debased.

That's your definition of lossless storage? Literally any limited-run asset fits into that category. It doesn't mean that your 21M BTC 100 years from now is going to be worth anything, because limited-run assets are not inherently valuable.

It certainly doesn't mean that Bitcoin is a store of electricity because, again, you can not get that electricity back once it is lost. You are hoping that other people who didn't put their electricity into Bitcoin will trade you some for an asset. That is not the same thing as retrieval.

> Almost every fiat currency dies a horrible death in less than a century due to this inflation

No? That's just very blatantly not true, to the point where I don't understand how you made that error. The US dollar is multiple centuries old. The EURO is multiple centuries old. The most common currencies today across the world are multiple centuries old.

It would be a massive stretch to try and argue that all of them have horribly died, given that I can 99.99% guarantee that right now your job is paying you in one of those currencies.

> This is P2P money first, just because it has now scaled to 10M+ users doesn't mean it can't run like it originally did, with 1 miner and 1 node.

I don't mean to be confrontational about this, but do you understand the technology behind how blockchains work? The whole point of the blockchain is to prevent double-spending. If you're waiting months to reach consensus in a P2P network, that's months before you can be sure that a transaction went through securely.

If you have 1 miner and 1 node, and if lots of people across an environment are building this setup, you have effectively mass-forked the blockchain already. You've lost the ability to prevent double-spending. The only reason Bitcoin is secure is because everyone uses the same chain and is connected to the same network. Fracturing that chain is forking. That's what forking is.

This is also why Bitcoin is having difficulty scaling, because the whole point of a blockchain is that you need network consensus and network consensus takes a lot of time/energy. The reason you can't double-spend is because your hardware is slower and less powerful than the overall Bitcoin network. A single-pool network destroys that principle.

This is also why people are worried about the environmental costs. You seem to be looking at mining as something separate from the transaction process. It's not, mining is how transactions on Bitcoin get written onto the chain. That energy cost doesn't go away, it's an intrinsic part of how transactions get confirmed and secured. The principle is that the more people you have mining, the harder it is to commit fraud. A 1-person pool is not secure.

> This would be true if we ignored one of the primary laws of money, "hardest money wins". There can literally only be one hardest money, and capital will flow into it precisely because it is the hardest and acts as the best store of value.

So in other words, it's exactly like I said and the value of Bitcoin is based on social consensus that Bitcoin has value, not on an inherent immutable property of Bitcoin itself.

You don't know that 200 years from now a better store of value won't come around, and if that happens, your own principle of "hardest money wins" will guarantee that your Bitcoin is worthless, because the newer, better store of value will be the "harder money".

> I took another run at this because the longer you take to understand these concepts the poorer you will be.

No offense, but I think this is part of the reason why people compare Bitcoin to a pyramid scheme. I do understand the tech of Bitcoin and the economic theory about it. I've been hanging around this circle and listing to the talks and proponents since early 2013-2014. I've dug into the algorithms that make this work and listened to the economic theories that early proponents were using to justify their experiment. What that experience has given me is an understanding that this process isn't magic.

So you use words like "space money solution" which means nothing for a network that requires real-time consensus to confirm transactions. You're saying that the network literally can't go down, which displays a wild misunderstanding of how mining actually works and why it's important to the technology. You seem to be under the impression that Bitcoin is magical just because it's complicated. But as someone who has genuinely been in this space for a long time and genuinely spent a bunch of time learning how the technology works, most of the magical properties you think exist... don't.

You're buying into a technology that you don't understand, based on wildly flawed economic ideas like "deflationary assets can't go down in value", an idea that can easily be proven false just by looking at the history of literally any other deflationary asset. Never mind the fact that silver and gold are also deflationary assets in the long term; apparently they don't count because they physically degrade, a process that hard drives are magically immune from. Never mind the fact that you yourself seem to understand that silver dropped in value when gold took over; apparently that can't possibly happen with Bitcoin because it would be impossible for anyone to iterate on the technology. We should all just buy into this idea because you said the words "space money".

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#306
post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

You need to have a triadic understanding of bitcoin, this is what allows it to be a flat currency, a store of value, and a battery at both one and the same time, through the act of transubstantiation of the coin a quantum state is triggered that allows the individual coin to choose which form it will manifest itself as.

It's interesting how your comment hasn't been flagged into the ground and garnered a response from dang. I guess sarcastic flamebait is OK when it agrees with the HN hivemind.

(meanwhile, my comment will be flagged in 3... 2... 1...)

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#307
post #251
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment, but this part is way off: > [...] despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition [...] FIAT currencies are by design inflationary to enhance spending. Bitcoin is deflationary _by design_. Since there's no bank or state backing Bitcoin, the only way that bitcoin makes sense was/is deflation. This quality makes BTC an asset and that's what it is, a digital asset. As a currency B…

A fiat currency is any currency that isn't backed by a commodity, i.e. it's not redeemable for a certain quantity of the commodity by the issuer, and bitcoin falls squarely into this category.

The definition of fiat means by decree. In other words fiat currency has value because a central government authority (formerly king) decrees that the paper has value. Bitcoin has no central authority that decrees it has value - only demand by the people drives the value of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin may be a lot of thing, but it isn't a fiat currency.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will not. Bitcoin is literally designed specifically to make sure this never happens. Again, as soon as you manage to develop a way to mine bitcoin more efficiently, the difficulty of mining will automatically go up to make sure you are still wasting just as much energy.

the diff goes up for everyone, not just you. you still have a relative advantage over all the other miners who have not yet reproduced your efficiency gains.

'relative difficulty' was never germane to the discussion. The point is that the system self-corrects for more efficient energy use by increasing its energy use. And its a lot of energy.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What do you mean by "lossless"? Owning 1000 satoshis/21M BTC is guaranteed to be worth 1000 satoshis/21M BTC 100 years from now, it can not be debased. Every fiat currency (USD, GBP, CAD, AUD, etc..) has a denominator (aka max supply) that increases. Almost every fiat currency dies a horrible death in less than a century due to this inflation. 1 British pound sterling used to buy 12 ounces of silver but is now worth…

> Owning 1000 satoshis/21M BTC is guaranteed to be worth 1000 satoshis/21M BTC 100 years from now, it can not be debased. That's your definition of lossless storage? Literally any limited-run asset fits into that category. It doesn't mean that your 21M BTC 100 years from now is going to be worth anything, because limited-run assets are not inherently valuable. It certainly doesn't mean that Bitcoin is a store of elec…

>The US dollar is multiple centuries old

Fiat currencies aren't backed by commodities... the modern fiat dollars we have used since 1970 are very different from what existed before that point in history. It can be and should be considered a separate currency.

---

You seem to not know the history of money/fiat currencies and make a lot of assumptions about things that are not based in reality.

Being in this space since 2013-2014 doesn't mean you have a good grasp of the tech or the economics. Many people that arrived at the btc maximalist position in the last 6-12 months have more of a basic understanding of these topics, I can tell from your responses.

Unfortunately this is growing too long for me to respond to and I gave it a good go, so I will let the market teach you the rest of this lesson (warning - the market is a harsh teacher). I would have to give you a course in monetary/economic history to adequately do this topic justice and this is not the format that is best suited to do it in.

Good luck holding on to fiat as a store of value.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#310
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that's BS, It absolutely requires the energy. If it would be running on a privet computer still then anyone with such a computer could double spend which would make it useless regardless of success.

That’s not the point, I didn’t say that it would be a good idea. The point is that it would work with just 100 or a 1000 miners if no one has 51% of computing power, hence the computing power is a consequence of Bitcoin’s success.

But you are wrong, it would absolutely not work. The only way to make sure no one has 51% and no one can simply get 51% (buy cloud computing for example) is if the 51% is more than what feasibly can be bought or it would at least need to cost more than what you could gain from a double spend.

Also its about hash power not number of miners, that's completely irrelevant. 100 or 1000 miners that means nothing.

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