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A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

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Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#591

Post by johnisgood »

good-idea wrote: post #242

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…

> My favorite summary of crypto is something along the lines of: leaving your car running while it solves sudoku puzzles in exchange for drugs. The drugs part isn't as relevant anymore, but the rest is.

Seriously?

By the way, the negative environmental impacts will be significantly reduced after ITER is ready.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#592

Post by hndamien »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #534
keymone wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your understanding of why bitcoin uses energy is completely skewed. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy to process transactions or ensure a functioning p2p network, bitcoin is the first time in history of money, that money can be expressed as energy units . Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy, or more specifically bitcoin is as much energy as people value the function and security of money. Trying to reduce it is ab…

> Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy Or a little more precisely a bitcoin is a provable record that a significant quantity of free energy was once turned into heat. So it does use energy, in the creation and once it is created, that energy is wasted unless the created also needed to heat something.

My miner dries my washing.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#593

Post by eeZah7Ux »

keymone wrote: post #483
root_axis wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not missing the point, you're moving the goalposts You: "the banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy" Me: "it uses much more raw energy because it services the financial needs of most of the planet".

No goalposts have moved. Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances. It is therefore many orders of magnitude more expensive than bitcoin even if you normalize by market cap of transaction volume or pick your own metric. Edit: typos

> Banking system involves politics and military in securing your finances

I'm not a fan of the current implementation of cryptocurrencies but you have a point here. Plenty of wars and armed takeovers have been driven by the prospect of accessing financial systems and therefore plenty of resources are spent to prevent that from happening.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#594

Post by resters »

good-idea wrote: post #242

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…

Isn't the environmental concern temporary? Once all the bitcoin has been mined, the computational requirements for maintenance of the network will certainly decrease significantly.

One could argue that Bitcoin should reach the limit sooner, so that mining difficulty would not increase so much, but the mining incentive is mainly a bootstrapping strategy for a currency. Now that everyone is familiar with how the ecosystem works, another coin could launch that was identical in every way except a shorter period of time before all coins were mined.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#595

Post by omarchowdhury »

Isomatik wrote: post #463
omarchowdhury wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Loans no, not at all. https://makerdao.com/dai/ $80M DAI issued so far...

That's only useful as a hedge for ETH. A mortgage where you have to put down 373% of the value of the house in liquid currency as collateral is not competitive in the slightest. https://mkr.tools/

Sure, but I'm responding to the disingenuity or possibly the ignorance of saying "no loans, at all."

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#596

Post by jessaustin »

sametmax wrote: post #194
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. ... All great things start like that. "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan https://www.brainyquote.com/qu…

We were talking about being genuine, and here you come implying I brag that I was smart. That's really rude.

You're rich now, so you have to get used to this.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#597

Post by SilasX »

geofft wrote: post #511
SilasX wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don't. Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways. When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided , the use of (harmful) energy to run…

> When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment". That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided, the use of (harmful) energy to run bitcoin miners doesn't justify its environmental cost. For myself, that is not what I mean wh…

Thank you, this is a very productive reply, and you are highlighting specific things that are unique to Bitcoin.

You're right that a core part of its design is making sure real computational resources are spent on it. That means the (total, social) cost network as such will scale with the size of the economy, not the number of transactions. So, in a sense, there's (something that looks) like an arms race going on, where more resources spent on it don't mean more transactions. Point taken.

But that doesn't mean there's zero net benefit. The benefit is a permissionless network that no one can control unless they produce more computation than the rest of the network. So, the benefit of each miner coming on is raising the attack threshold and increasing your confidence that it won't be attacked. At equilibrium, the cost will be some fraction of the economy, not all available growth or energy (like a gas). That amount of energy that this involves will decrease as energy is taxed.

That's pretty much the dynamic of gold mining under a gold standard: the larger the economy, the more money being spent mining (literal) money.

I agree that it's a high price to pay, but I don't think the benefits should count as zero. Being able to bypass financial choke points so you can donate to Wikileaks is definitely a positive.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#598

Post by orthecreedence »

baddox wrote: post #585
orthecreedence wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact The day that markets actually price externalities into the costs of goods and services, whether by benevolent owners or force of regulation, I'll gladly declare Bitcoin useful.

The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. It doesn’t make sense to make the environmental argument for things that you consider wasteful, but not for other things that other people may consider wasteful.

> The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be.

Yes, I agree that my argument would be completely irrelevant if only something that will never happen happens.

Until then, I'd rather see some form of distributed currency that doesn't rely on pissing finite resources away to function.

I get where you're coming from, but our planet is at a critical point right now objectively. Pouring pollutants into the atmosphere so people can play with FunBux is an incredibly stupid use of resources. Yes, markets should price in externalities. That would solve SO MUCH MORE than just bitcoin's energy usage. But unfortunately that concept is at odds with market capitalism, and as such, I believe my critique of bitcoin stands. Markets are not rational, prices are not accurate, bitcoin is a polluting waste of energy.

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#599

Post by creato »

DINKDINK wrote: post #578
creato wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's absurd to think that it should be possible to package 150 years of median US household labor into an easily transportable, easily securable form. That simply will never be possible. It's not a technology problem. Even if you could somehow do this, you would be incredibly vulnerable to extortion, and I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability. There are people that ha…

>Even if you could somehow do this...That simply will never be possible You already can: bitcoin. >I doubt you would actually really want to do this even if you had the capability If I'm a Jew in 1930s Germany or a grocery store owner in Venezuela and I see the writing on the wall that my government is constantly deriding me, saying I'm the scourge of and leach on society, I'm going to immigrate out of the country. T…

> If I'm a Jew in 1930s Germany or a grocery store owner in Venezuela and I see the writing on the wall that my government is constantly deriding me, saying I'm the scourge of and leach on society, I'm going to immigrate out of the country. They've banned all institutions from services me, I benefit from having access to a means to store wealth that's independent from a government. To disagree is to be excessively myopic and optimistic.

I didn't disagree with any of that. My position is that if you are actually in that situation, bitcoin doesn't help that much, and no technology can. If you attempt to actually execute this plan, the risk is extremely high that you will be detected, and a corrupt government doesn't have any shortage of ways to force you to comply with whatever they come up with.

Are there any examples of a Venezuelan moving a significant amount of wealth out of the country via bitcoin?

Re: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

#600

Post by cdestroyer »

good-idea wrote: post #242

I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems abov…

nothing triggers me more than the superficial environmental concerns people bring up while talking about bitcoin. Very hypocritical.
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