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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#351

Post by Franciscouzo »

Sparkyte wrote: post #260
gnrlst wrote: post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

There is also no meaningful contribution for the work. Imagine if there was a blockchain crypto attached to folding@home it would work that has value.

That's by design, if you use a proof of work that's validated outside of the blockchain, the work could be valid for multiple forks, thus being a really bad proof of work system.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#352

Post by PragmaticPulp »

WanderPanda wrote: post #282
gnrlst wrote: post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Its not that I'm saying it is not possible but its your usage of "likely" that I would argue against

> But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right?

The real problem is that if it happens once, it's proven to be both possible and practical. And once it's proven to be possible and practical, how do you know it won't happen again and again?

> What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security?

Most mining hardware is specific to hashing, not Bitcoin specifically.

The obvious attack is something like this: Imagine someone invents a Bitcoin competitor that is somehow more resistant to these types of attacks, yet can use the same mining hardware. To convince everyone to switch to their new alternative (which they have accumulated significant amounts of, similar to Satoshi), they spend the money to crash Bitcoin, while advertising themselves as the more secure alternative to Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#353

Post by matheusmoreira »

gnrlst wrote: post #210

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy us…

Bitcoin is technologically obsolete but that doesn't matter. As the very first coin, its history is the main reason it's still relevant today. It's very well known and that makes its position as the number one cryptocurrency extremely hard to shake even though we have much better coins now such as Monero.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#354

Post by shawnz »

betterunix2 wrote: post #311
ballofrubber wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to share your Econo101 knowledge? I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money.

The collective energy spent by Bitcoin miners equals the energy consumption of Argentina, yet the Bitcoin network only processes a small fraction of the number of transactions per day that Visa processes. For reference, Visa itself consumes only a small fraction as much energy as Argentina. In other words, you must cover the cost of vastly more energy per Bitcoin transaction compared to the mainstream financial syste…

Western Union has a lower transaction rate than Visa, so does that make it necessarily less useful or valuable (either absolutely or per-kilowatt)?

Also, as you noted the energy usage is correlated with the value, not the transaction rate. Transaction rate limits could be changed arbitrarily without affecting the energy usage of the coin.

However you have the causal relationship backwards: The value of the coin determines what level of electricity spending is profitable for miners. The electricity spending of miners doesn't determine the value.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#355

Post by anthropodie »

zepto wrote: post #340
anthropodie wrote: post #298

That was an excellent read! Every time I read about Bitcoin here, I see the "Energy" arguments. Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific problem and it solves that. Even Satoshi himself would not have foreseen the energy requirements for PoW. If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. Technological advancements will always need energy. We should be discus…

> If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. This is not even close to true. The energy requirements for the Saturn program and for the LHC were calculated and understood in precise detail, and did not depend on any assumption that there would be new energy sources in the future.

The study that raised concerns regarding Bitcoin's energy usage also suggests the amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the US alone could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year[1].

I am not trying to undermine Bitcoin's energy problem. We need more discussion and awareness on this than just labeling "Bitcoin bad" because it consumes more energy.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#356

Post by hfsp »

toto444 wrote: post #127
olah_1 wrote: post #69

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up jus…

>Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong

The market decides. Not an economics "expert", nor fitting btc to an arbitrary theoretical definition of money.

>It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented.

Are you aware of the Austrian school of economics?

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#357

Post by zepto »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #209
noxer wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is onto something What if it "was"? The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with…

>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

> The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.

But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.

Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#358

Post by DennisP »

015a wrote: post #199
DennisP wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything Bitcoin can do, we can do now with proof-of-stake currencies at a tiny fraction of the energy consumption.

That's true. So, where are those currencies in the market capitalization charts and news articles? Remember; the last time Bitcoin tried to change its mining algorithm, the democracy voted for a split. Ethereum has said they're moving from Proof of Work to Stake; I'm not surprised, given the Ethereum developers seem to abhor Work in all of its forms, including making progress on Ethereum itself, so we'll see if that…

Ethereum's PoS has been running in production for three months, and has about $5 billion staked. So far it's running perfectly.

They still have to migrate the rest of the network to it, but that's a relatively easy task. Once you have consensus, adding more data to reach consensus on is basically just adding a hash value to each block.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#359

Post by ttul »

doomroot wrote: post #116
ttul wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Half of the value of gold, or thereabouts, relates to its utility as a metal. Bitcoin is purely valued because people believe others will buy it from them in future at a good price - hopefully a higher price.

So half the people that use gold are involved in a ponzi scheme?

It may also not be correct that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is, strictly speaking, one wherein the latest investors are used to pay out interest and withdrawals to earlier investors.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#360

Post by reader_mode »

boredpandas777 wrote: post #348

Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our colle…

Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.
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