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Bitcoin Is Time

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Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#91

Post by cousin_it »

leppr wrote: post #70
arbawk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is the most durable money we've had, it can never be disposed of. Lost, perhaps. Energy consumption != energy production. Bitcoin is incentivizing reusable energy and moving energy to cheaper locations, further from cities. I suggest you look into how it's actually quite positive for the Earth.

There's nothing about Bitcoin that incentives mining with green energy sources more than dirty one. If coal electricity is cheaper, then bitcoin incentives burning coal. The only somewhat valid rebutals to the energy consumption arguments I know of are: - a lot of it is spare power that would be wasted otherwise (only partially true). - it uses less energy overall than governments spend protecting their fiat money's…

> gold mining uses a lot of energy too (but I doubt Bitcoin will reduce the energy spent on gold mining, it will probably just add up).

I'm not sure it will add up. It seems to me that different stores of value compete directly with each other, because you can store value one way or the other way.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#92

Post by lxgr »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #23
joosters wrote: post #8

Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.

Everything on the planet uses energy. Why are people so obsessed with Bitcoin's energy usage in particular?

A lot of resources on our planet are wasted every day, but only very little of that waste is intentional (as opposed to negligent).

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#93

Post by beaconstudios »

reilly3000 wrote: post #83
joosters wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, pickin…

I think you’re right on, but good luck with provable timestamps. You’re trying to coordinate and validate a measurement which in itself denies the reality of space time physics at least subtly. Time precision across space is hard enough, but adding bad actors and gravitational time dilation into the equation means... well I wouldn’t want that to keep track of my assets.

On the bright side, if approaching the speed of light would give you a viable attack on the bitcoin blockchain I'm sure our space propulsion technology would transform overnight!

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#94

Post by olah_1 »

gt565k wrote: post #66

Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech. Yes it's old, yes it's slow, yes it wastes resources. It is legacy software after all. PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. Cardano's Ouroboros is a provable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...

I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king.

Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_.

Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#95

Post by gillesjacobs »

Proof-of-history using verifiable delay functions (VDF) is a valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks [1]. Solana is build on top of it and it looks very promising as a fast consensus mechanism.

OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effect.

1. https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#96

Post by bearerofgarbage »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #95

Proof-of-history using verifiable delay functions (VDF) is a valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks [1]. Solana is build on top of it and it looks very promising as a fast consensus mechanism. OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effe…

what problem of value does it solve?

every post including cryptocoin here gets a generic comment like yours about some other cryptocoin that is 'very promising'

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#97

Post by tromp »

hanniabu wrote: post #82
tromp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inverse exponentially approaching the 21 million limit, which it can never reach [1]. [1] https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-nev...

It's a stepped linear emission that mimics an inverse exponential emission. You can even see it in that chart if you expand it. Between the halving periods the emission is constant.

The block subsidy is constant between halvings. And is thus a step function. But "emission" refers to cumulative block subsidies. And thus is piecewise linear, with 34 pieces of exponentially decreasing slope, the last one ending up flat.

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#98

Post by joosters »

tromp wrote: post #74
joosters wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, pickin…

> The total energy usage would be reduced 600-fold! It wouldn't. If X$ worth of bitcoin is handed out every block, then miners competing for that prize are willing to collectively spend up to X$ per block on average. If they could only mine for part of the time, then they'd simply acquire more hardware and mine at a higher hashrate during the shorter time.

Good point! We'd be living in a world where the lights flicker every ten minutes as gigawatts of power are momentarily switched on and off :) Or miners would have to install gigantic capacitors to fill with charge, just to power their machines for the brief instant of usage!

My example is also missing the obvious next step though - once you are using a trusted source of data (or even a wide selection of trusted sources), the whole blockchain idea becomes pointless, you don't need to do any mining at all, you can let the trusted sources run a distributed database...

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#99

Post by jtms »

bearerofgarbage wrote: post #96
gillesjacobs wrote: post #95

Proof-of-history using verifiable delay functions (VDF) is a valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks [1]. Solana is build on top of it and it looks very promising as a fast consensus mechanism. OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effe…

what problem of value does it solve? every post including cryptocoin here gets a generic comment like yours about some other cryptocoin that is 'very promising'

It appears that it solves the problem of there needing to be yet another cryptocurrency

Re: Bitcoin Is Time

#100

Post by doomroot »

Dzugaru wrote: post #27
dmak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so salty? Care to elaborate?

It's just natural, that people are salty about proof-of-work that leads to computation devices scarcity. No one asked for this and it's really scary - society can economically decide, that distributed ledger protection is more important, than gaming and science. Just like we economically can decide that global warming is not important.

I think it naive to assume we can aggregate the desires of all people. Oh wait we can.
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