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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#431

Post by captainmuon »

rojeee wrote: post #430
captainmuon wrote: post #302

I like to think of bitcoin as solving the sybil problem via proof of work. Because if you just gave every "account" coins, then somebody could just make multiple "accounts" and get more than they are entitled to. (I know bitcoin doesn't have "accounts" but bear with me.) By it's very nature it is wasteful. Question: Has anybody tried to replace proof of work with social proof? Let every participant create their own f…

Not a crazy idea! I think this is the only decentralised system that can work long term. I’ve spent a long time thinking about it. Figuring out how to manage reputation is key, which you allude to with your comment about needing a page rank type algorithm.

For reputation + value, I was hoping to piggyback on external exchanges. Your coin is just worth what people are willing to trade for it. If you mint more coins, you have to sell them for something real, or they are not worth anything.

The hard part is the reputation transfer (or voting, or embuing). If you have 30 A coins and B puts 10% "juice" in them, does this mean you can use them like 3 B coins? Or can you convert them somehow? What happens when C puts "juice" in B? Or A puts "juice" in C? The potentially recusive nature reminded me a lot of Pagerank, but basically you will end up with coins that are a mixture of different coins, and you have to find an algorithm that converges.

I also think the economics are going to be really funny because suddenly price does not depend just on supply and demand, but your coins are going to be better or worse for certain purposes depending on how the emitters vote. (They are basically giving out vouchers to a bit of their surplus depending on what you buy.)

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#432

Post by moistrobot »

davewritescode wrote: post #221
xiphias2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you are serious, the Bitcoin Standard book is a worthy read. But what’s important is that Bitcoin solves the inflation problem, and proof of work is the only system that we have for getting rid of the Cantillon effect of modern banking: the closer people get to the top of the central banks, the richer they get and destroy life for those who don’t have access to the inner layers of central banking. With Bitco…

On a philosophical level, I think the flawed premise you’re presenting here is that inflation is a problem that needs to be solved. Inflation is unpopular because it’s effectively a tax on unproductive wealth. Inflation incentivizes investment because idle wealth will lose it’s value at the rate of inflation. On a technical level, Bitcoin is worse than a currency because it’s value can fluctuate wildly constantly and…

> On a philosophical level, I think the flawed premise you’re presenting here is that inflation is a problem that needs to be solved. Inflation is unpopular because it’s effectively a tax on unproductive wealth. Inflation incentivizes investment because idle wealth will lose it’s value at the rate of inflation.

Inflation is a tax on those without assets or the available capital to invest in assets. It's a form of wealth transfer to those with assets. Increasing economic inequality is not good for anyone, and some would say the US is already close to a breaking point.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/219643/gini-coefficient-... https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/11/when-inequality-is-high-pan...

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#433

Post by sgjohnson »

tata71 wrote: post #400
sgjohnson wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>like coal or nuclear Nuclear is dirty? How?

Fukushima

An unfortunate accident, and basically the worst case scenario for that reactor design. Not to mention there was an earthquake and a tsunami.

And the fact that the current death toll stands at 1 (likely to increase though) and Fukushima is perfectly habitable now (and has been for a while now). Almost 20000 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Only 1 due to the nuclear disaster.

Fukushima disaster should be a footnote in history. It’s not a valid representation of safety of nuclear power.

As a European, I’m far more concerned about the dependence on Russian natural gas (Germany completely abandoning nuclear; Nordstream 2) than I am about a reactor blowing up.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#434

Post by admax88qqq »

svara wrote: post #414
admax88qqq wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of ways to turn electricity into money. Bitcoin is one of the easiest but you're not going to stop climate change or make a reasonably impact on the growing energy demands of civilization by banning it. Better to focus on replacing all energy production with green sources and taxing polluters rather than trying to ban specific energy uses you don't like.

Unfortunately, that won't work. Bitcoin is designed so that material/energy approximately equal in value to mining revenue is wasted. What you waste it on is ultimately irrelevant.

Bitcoin can be designed however it wants, that doesn't magically grant it value.

It's value is only based upon how much value people ascribe to it. And for that, I don't really care how what people ascribe to it, so long as they pay for the pollution they produce in the process.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#435

Post by admax88qqq »

joshgrib wrote: post #326
admax88qqq wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of ways to turn electricity into money. Bitcoin is one of the easiest but you're not going to stop climate change or make a reasonably impact on the growing energy demands of civilization by banning it. Better to focus on replacing all energy production with green sources and taxing polluters rather than trying to ban specific energy uses you don't like.

This seems like a fair solution that could have the same impact - if the pollution tax is high enough and the mining profits are low enough then mining would no longer be profitable. At a minimum it at least makes sure people are "cleaning up after themselves" by paying to mitigate the damage they cause

Exactly, and then its not limited to just bitcoin, but any process that creates pollution (coal power, dirty manufacturing, forest removal, etc).

If pollution stops being free, the market will finally be incentivized to reduce it.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#439

Post by louloulou »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #401
louloulou wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everything good that humans have produced are proof of work. Proof of stake is the rent seeking that comes afterwards.

I have no notion of what metaphor you are referring to. In real life, POW is a waste of electricity that produces nothing external to proving that CPU cycles were wasted, with an ever-increasing difficulty in the case of Bitcoin (getting worse with time, on purpose)

Not a metaphor. The general theory of relativity is proof of work, so is a bridge. Being too big to fail is an example of proof of stake in a system and how it can be gamed.

> an ever-increasing difficulty in the case of Bitcoin (getting worse with time, on purpose)

This is not how Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment works. It increases/decreases with the value of the block reward. This is proportional to the value of bitcoin, transaction fees paid, and decreasing new bitcoin issuance. Bitcoin users pay miners for their PoW because they find the value of using such a system to be worth the cost.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#440

Post by spopejoy »

cipheredStones wrote: post #262
boramalper wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: (1) No one is tearing anything down as far I am concerned, rather people are working on a new system that is intended to complement, surpass, and eventually perhaps even replace the current one in a distant future. For instance, I do not put my savings in neobanks nor would be able to get a mortgage from them anyway, but they are absolutely fantastic for day-to-day use. Is it really impossible to imagine…

Part of my point is that cryptocurrency as it stands really doesn't complement the normal financial system. Your landlord isn't going to accept crypto for your deposit because it would require them to invest a great deal of time and effort to learn about how to use crypto, force them to accept additional risk (of e.g. having their coins stolen, of losing access to them), and give them marginal-if-any benefit. And tha…

> Your landlord isn't going to accept crypto for your deposit because it would require them to invest a great deal of time and effort to learn about how to use crypto, force them to accept additional risk (of e.g. having their coins stolen, of losing access to them), and give them marginal-if-any benefit.

That's not an effective argument against crypto itself but more it's UX which is granted, awful, but is improving over time. An argument for "better tech for crypto" is actually pro-crypto -- I fully agree that innovation has been really slow in the last near-decade on actually progressing the user experience of owning crypto. The answer lies in effortless multisig and better APIprotocol interaction, and while it doesn't look great now folks are working on this.

Solve this problem and crypto becomes easier to hold than even a credit card, let alone a full-on bank account.

Tech failures actually imprison crypto a lot more than people realize. If Bitcoin could (a) scale and (b) not be terrifying to hold large quantities of, there'd be no debate here; what's more, volatility would _improve_ with the drastically increased usage. FX market has just as many negative actors (and indeed far more powerful than crypto whales and corrupt projects), but the reason currencies are less volatile is because they are _used_.

The average HN crypto-hater now says "yeah well bitcoin can never scale". Bitcoin doesn't have to, _crypto_ does, and it's been a lot slower going than I think folks realize. Proof-of-Stake slowed things down significantly by encouraging huge centralization of ownership across almost every project (Cosmos being one of the few exceptions). But POS doesn't actually scale very well -- it has fast finality but once you hit the TPS limit it starts looking like subnets etc.

The point being, there ARE worlds to conquer in blockchain tech still.

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