You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources.
EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?
His goal was to answer the interesting question: "how many hashes could I manually generate per day," not to generate hashes in the most efficient manner possible.
Also, the author did not spend two days. he spent 17 minutes and then did the math to calculate the block hash rate.
> Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds. At this rate, hashing a full Bitcoin block (128 rounds)[3] would take 1.49 days, for a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day
You don't get to judge, unless you want to detail what you did over the weekend and let the rest of us strangers decide if what you did was a waste or not.
Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree - instead you just shallowly dismissed their comment by saying it was shallow.
Also maybe I’m crazy but their comment seemed to be a joke/commentary on the environmental resources used by Bitcoin. That isn’t a shallow dismissal.
Moderation comments are certainly bad HN comments—they're off-topic, they're meta, they're repetitive as hell [1]. And you're right that they sometimes break the rules they're trying to enforce. They're also even more tedious to write than to read [2]. But, alas, they're necessary. You need an out-of-band feedback mechanism to nudge the system out of its failure modes.
I take your point about the GP being a joke, though—the edit makes that clear. The problem with one-liners that don't disambiguate intent [3] is that they pattern-match to the most common category they look like.
It's a shallow joke. One of the rules of HN is to attempt to have thoughtful and substantive discussions.
An entire comment that is just a joke is not how you end up with substantive discussion, which I think has been well proven by reddit long since.
It's fine to have a joke to lead into a well articulated point, but an entire comment shouldn't _just_ be a joke, unless it's the rare case of a joke that is insightful, not just a shared cultural reference (in this case to a common other argument on HN).
> Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment?
I think this is akin to the paradox of tolerance.
There's the saying "that with is presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence".
I think the HN analogue would be "that which is posted without an attempt to have a substantive discussion can be dismissed out of hand".
Similar to how a gish gallop works, it's absolutely not plausible for dang to respond to every comment that violates HN guidelines with a full breakdown of why he believes so. The volume of poor comments simply is so high that he would need to spend far more hours than he can spare for that.
It really wasn’t ‘just a joke’ though. There is a whole range of discussion to be had on the resources used by crypto - and if you can make a quip and also commentary I see that as valuable. Is it the pinnacle of HN comments? Not at all. But does it deserve to be moderated? Not in my book because it does bring up a valuable point of discussion.
> You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources.
It's for entertainment, and it looks like OP learned something. It's better use of resources than staring at a TV all day, which presumably you won't have an issue with.
>Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?
Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.
Likewise. Once in a while I force myself to do backprop by hand to make sure I still understand all the concepts and can walk myself through the calculus.
I just learned backprop for the first time a week ago and doing exactly what you described, working it out by hand, was absolutely invaluable. There's something about being able to visualize what my code is doing on a sheet of paper that just helped everything click.
I agree. For some reason, I didn't get the lambda calculus when I first encountered it but it became entirely obvious after doing just a couple of exercises by hand.
I love whiteboards, they are much better than paper: more space, nice colors, easy to see, very easy to collaborate on, simple redos. That's actually the biggest thing I miss from going into the office: nice huge whiteboards that cover the whole wall, not the little dinky ones that office depot sells for exorbitant prices.
I found a solution though: Lowe's sells a 4'x8' sheet of whiteboard for fifteen bucks, now I have my whiteboard covered wall in my home office so I'm happy again.
It's called "Smooth White Wall Panel", but honestly just go with a truck and ask an employee, apparently they're popular. The guy I asked said they even use them in the employee areas in the back. https://www.lowes.com/pd/47-75-in-x-7-98-ft-Smooth-White-Wal...
I like pencil and paper. Colored pencils are plentiful, and paper is easier to image and share than a whiteboard. You can write smaller on paper and don't get gorrila arms.
Hey, you can have preferences, even if they are wrong. ;)
Colored pencils are usually very difficult to erase. I've found whiteboards are great for sharing. Get a set of small tip dry erase pens, much better than the standard ones, and helps both writing small and gorilla arm (though I've never really had issues with the latter).
One more to add for consideration: electrostatic sheets. You can get a whole roll of them for just a few bucks and turn your entire office into a whiteboard. No hanging, no mess. Surprisingly effective as a low-cost whiteboard-like solution.
And if you're sharing that whiteboard (in any form) with remote colleagues, try sharetheboard.com. Our team put it together precisely because we didn't want to say goodbye to the ol' board.
I think this is due to some kind of muscle memory.
You only start hearing certain patterns in complex music, e.g. Mahler symphonies, if you listen often enough to it.
At some point you recognize stuff unconsciously.
I've noticed something similar in dance and language. I think it has something to do with mirror neurons feeding back into meaning making.
When you hear a word in a language you know, mirror neurons probably fire the patterns that would be required to make those sounds yourself. If you don't have experience making a sound, you're less likely to be able to detect subtle nuance in it, and those patterns tie into your memory of the times you have used that word.
The same with dance. While taking dance classes, I found that watching very good dancers gave a visceral thrill that wasn't there before... Like I could FEEL what they were doing.
I think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But its idea of what's not important is not well-tuned to many contexts. I think a lot of "secret tricks" are just ways of trying to bypass that heuristic and force yourself to do all the steps. E.g. rubber-duck debugging: putting the situation into words means putting it into concrete terms, which catches the parts that your brain let sit unexamined.
If I’m unfamiliar with a project I force slow work by first looking for existing process improvements, like organized GitHub milestones and well-described and meta’d issues.
I’ll commonly explore new tech by generating my own summarized documentation and through light tooling of initial configuration.
I am in the midst of this now where an existing operational “algorithm” needs better software support.
A lot of the discovery for that is starting with very general issues describing “problem” areas and then drilling them down to specific issues that might require action.
It can be tedious to go this “slow,” but it’s how I get to fast.
Both. And another aspect you missed: Doing things by hand stimulates regions of the brain which are directly tied to regions of creativity and to improve the ability to relate a new concept to existing concepts.
I've been doing this while optimizing leetcode problems recently. I just force myself to step through the same logic that the computer is doing to solve the problem. Not the code, but the same logical manipulations to calculate the answer the same way the code is.
Very often I'll find myself thinking "This is a waste of time, I could easily shortcut this by... X" and when I find the shortcuts that make the "by hand" process more manageable, I can apply that same logic to the code and make it faster as well.
A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.
If it still didn’t become popular until around the same time, all of the rewards would have been halved much earlier. The big miners would be fighting over even smaller rewards.
The network emission adjusts to the amount of computational power on the network, every 2016 blocks. So if there was 1/1000th of the computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in the same time span, 10 minutes. If there was 1000x more computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in 10 minutes.
If you understood that already then I'm not sure what you or the prior person is referring to exactly.
If you mean that all the halvings would happen a decade earlier because bitcoin started a decade earlier, I'm not sure what the point of mentioning that is.
If you mean the exchange rate would have been lower, the same scarcity drivers would exist, who knows who cares.
The "big miners" would be bound by market forces of what's anything worth to them, and would likely be 100% proportional to today's reality.
Does the mined volume practically matter? As a relative factor, yes, it needs to be big enough to be too expensive to compute, but, as computation grows more expensive the volume necessary is actually reduced.
It took a true genius & visionary to see that the whole is better than the sum of its parts. A masterclass of engineering, economics, & philosophy. Very few still understand the importance
The rate of information transmission was much higher in 2010 than in 2000.
If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. Since it was invented in 2010 it easily spread through Facebook, Reddit and other universal social media before making the jump via mainstream news to non-technical people.
> If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums.
It most certainly was this for at least 2 years. 2-4 years more if you count the time Satoshi was working on it before the public release
It's worth noting that the very first block was created with the following comment: 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.'
It seems there was a good reason why it was created when it was.
Most people seem to have missed the fact that this is an advertisement for his book [1]. The person who is going to go through the whole article is a very likely to make a purchase. It's unfortunate that the book doesn't seem to have many sales and apparently, it's not practically available anymore.
Umm, no. This is not an advertisement and I'm kind of offended that you say so. First, that's not even my book. The book author asked if he could put my bitcoin mining by hand process in his book; it's a small part of the book. Second, I wrote the post three years before the book. I know HN watches out for submarine advertisements, but really!
Do you or any one else here know of any other podcasts that are as 'unapologetically technical' as this one? It was very enjoyable, and I've now got an urge to listen to similar experts in the field of STEM that don't dumb it down for the listener as much.
AFAIK hashing algorithms are specifically designed so that you can't take shortcuts. That said, there was a technique that allowed you do do just that[1], but it has been patched.
Are you talking about whether you can skip steps for certain inputs to the hashing function? No not really. If you look at the reference implementation[1] the control flow is the same regardless of what the input is. There's no shortcuts you can take, other than just memorizing the results of certain operations, kind of like how you can memorize a multiplication table to multiply faster, compared to multiplying from scratch every time.
This is somewhat off-topic but I'm going to ask here because it's really hard to find "trusted" information regarding BitCoin and Ethereum mining online - it seems everyone's trying to make a commission or running a scam:
Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining? If that's true, is there a legitimate, low-fee pool a fellow HNer can recommend? All the ones I have run into are either on Google's list of "malware domains" or are else blacklisted by my pfSense DNS blacklist because they're on the list of malicious DNS names used by crytojacker plugins and malware. I understand false positives and work around these blacklists all the time, but each of these sites feels scammier and sleazier than the next...
(Edit: It's minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm mainly curious to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.)
Hahaha, point taken. Mainly as an experiment to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.
The only point in mining pools is to lower variance
If I have enough hardware to mine $10btc/day it would take on average ~70 years to mine a block (worth $300000), whereas with a pool I'd get my $10/day consistently
Correct, mining in a pool you are guaranteed your fair share of the mining (minus admin fee from the pool operators). Even if you never mine a single block, you get your fair share of the mined blocks by the pool.
If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery.
>If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery.
It's slightly better than that. A single 5700 xt mining ethereum can expect a block once every 43 months at current difficulty. That's still insanely high variance, but still far better than the lottery.
Interesting, that IS slightly better than I expected, at least for Ethereum. So if we treat each block being found as a lottery "ticket" and that solo miner with a 5700xt on average can expect to mine a block ("win the lottery") once every 43 months....
For Ethereum:
1 block every 15 seconds
5760 blocks in a day
172800 in a month (30day avg)
7430400 blocks in a 43 month period.
So about 1 in 7 430 400 odds when solo mining. Pool highly recommended specially because Ethereum is moving away from the current system of mining long before 43 months from now!
You could solo mine for a long time without finding a block. The math is fairly straightforward: your probability of winning each block is (your hashrate)/(total hashrate). Let's say you have one S19 Pro; that means you have roughly a 1 in 1.6 million chance of winning each block. There are only ~53,000 Bitcoin blocks per year so your chance of getting a block is basically zero.
In theory p2pool is trustless so you don't have to worry about sketchy operators but I don't know if anyone has used it in years.
Slush is the only old-school Bitcoin pool that still seems to be decent sized.
Being used by criminals doesn't mean anything; they want reliable and honest pools just as much as you do.
> Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining?
This is false. But you'd have to be incredibly lucky to find the right hash by yourself, so profit are split, luck is shared when pooling.
Edit:. Already answered, didn't refresh before replying.
A few years back I was mining Monero on 4 pieced together computers in my little 400sqft apartment with electric wall heaters. It's a bad investment to do that in my house with a gas furnace.
You can mine solo, but you are effectively playing the lottery. If you get lucky, you'll earn much more than in a pool, but if you don't get lucky you get nothing.
And since it's effectively lottery with amount of computer power you can have at home, you're going to need to be extremely lucky.
I did a couple of practices before recording this. The main thing was figuring out the best way to fit everything on a page so it made sense and I didn't run out of space.
I had one of the completed practice sheets next to me so I could check against it while I was recording and not mess up. I also verified the data against computer output before recording.
The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour.
Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.
That’s the question that I never see answered. Presumably if someone is using electricity to mine bitcoins, it’s because they couldn’t use that electricity for something more valuable (including things this commenter would probably consider more wholesome? or “valuable to society”?) like producing food.
Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.
Sure, but if you want it to be _sound_ money, it has to backed by some kind of inherent scarcity or guarantee which implies work and energy expenditure. If you want to be able to store it on a flash drive and transfer it to a different continent with no intermediaries, that too will cost something. If it were 'fictional' enough to be free, it wouldn't be useful.
I don't think that's inherently true. What's required is trust that one hasn't fiddled the numbers, and scarcity of some token is just one way of accomplishing that. Here's a monetary system, not unlike bitcoin:
All transactions occur in the market square, at the Town Ledger. Everyone's balance is public, and every transaction is witnessed by everyone else lining up for their turn at the Ledger. Everyone keeps an eye on their balance and the balance of a few friends. The mayor locks up the Ledger at night of course, but discrepancies tend to get the mayor lynched so she keeps a very close eye on it.
The system started by tracking barters, but it got too confusing to track all the different things, so it was agreed to simply write down a number equivalent to the trade's value in chickens as determined by average exchange rate over all previous transactions - nothing special about chickens, they were just a very commonly traded good which made for well-defined exchange rates.
After a few chicken runs, the villagers agreed to abandon the chicken standard in favor of shiny meteorites that fell from the sky once every ten years. They were technically slightly inflationary, but people lost them from time to time as well so it kind of evened out. Anyway, there weren't many of them around; most transactions were in fractions of a shiny meteor-pebble. It was just a convenient reference.
Because if there's a direct connection between the amount of electricity used and the amount of money generated, the only logical conclusion is for human society to burn up every possible available ounce of energy as quickly as possible.
Maybe we should blame the defenders of constant inflation and government overreach. You mentioned Argentina, which is a prime example of these problems.
If we didn't have those problems in the first place, Bitcoin wouldn't be as attractive.
Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.
They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.
Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.
If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.
Whether or not you can pay/receive currency anonymously has nothing to do with whether or not you can contribute source code and/or whitepapers anonymously.
I'd argue it doesn't actually matter. People only buying it as an investment vehicle is still enough to push into mainstream awareness and increase it's level of adoption and usefulness, and at its core, the reason it's an attractive investment in the first place is because it's deflationary, digital and decentralized.
It depends entirely on your time horizon. USD might be more stable day-to-day, but has lost 32.3% of its value in the past 20 years. This is just with CPI, if you're comparing to asset prices this is probably much worse.
I was talking more about hyperinflation specifically, rather than the normal ~2% annual inflation targets. I don't understand how lack of monetary policy would prevent hyperinflation.
The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.
In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding error... At the point where miners are willing to do things like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV. If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?
China is relying heavily on coal power (AFAIK, can't find reliable source quickly). Iceland has clean energy, but in contrary to the popular wisdom "only" ~30% is geothermal, most is hydro. See https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/IS for more detail.
They are taking about the miners, not the grid as a whole. There are some massive operation utilising hydro setups in the middle of nowhere that were otherwise unused
Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).
Aren't there significant technological obstacles to raising the transaction limit, not to mention the fact that large miners have actively obstructed attempts to raise it in the past? My understanding is that we only finally got a block size increase with segwit in 2017 and that only happened after people worked around miner sabotage.
There are no technological obstacles per se, but it will increase the rate which the size of the blockchain grows.
It's true miners have obstructed attempts to make these kind of changes but they don't control the price of Bitcoin. If market demand for a higher transaction rate becomes great enough and they don't adapt, then another coin with bigger blocks will simply outcompete Bitcoin.
Not mentioned: the electricity and heating/cooling of visa office buildings, the car and plane travel for visa execs and employees, the law and military in place to maintain the environment for visa to operate, the lawyers involved in visas and their energy expenditures.
If you google search "how much power is used by online banking" there are multiple analyses answering this question for you along with consumption estimates for Bitcoin. One pro-bitcoin one from my first 4 results attempts to estimate all the power consumption for every bank server, branch office, and ATM 24/7 around the entire globe and produces an estimate of 140TWh/yr vs bitcoin's (at the time) 32.56 TWh/yr estimate. You can compare their average transaction values for yourself to decide how favorable this comparison actually is for bitcoin.
An article I read today provides a comparison point for realtime transaction processing, Fedwire, along with its transaction volumes and server count. It's interesting to compare that with Bitcoin's volumes. The article also makes claims about the energy consumption (suggesting FAANG's energy consumption is already dwarfed by Bitcoin) but I can't manually verify those myself: https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c...
The above article estimates a best case total of 55.1 TWh/year for the major Proof of Work chains, and also provides estimates for various types of mining equipment, etc.
To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin!
Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind
Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices.
Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.
Banks that are for-profit companies add to the money supply (via loans) but don't 'create new money' in the same sense as mining Bitcoin.
Mining bitcoin is most similar to a central bank printing/issuing money (except it's issued to the person that can waste the most electricity or show proof of stake rather than being issued selectively by the central government).
Banks can add to the money supply by lending out money which has been saved in them by others, but there is nothing unique to fiat currencies about this, and the same can be done with Bitcoin or other crypto. I suspect you wouldn't say that 'banks can create new bitcoins without mining', but that's the same thing as saying 'banks can create new money without printing it'.
Companies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.
Bitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market value so you might say it always uses the smallest possible amount of energy (given the current valuation).
We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.
Right, the creation of Bitcoins only redistributes the value. The value mining provides is actually in outcompeting potential attackers who might want to change the consensus of the network.
Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network supports.)
Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the users using Bitcoin at volume?
It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a mechanism of currency.
Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system.
Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).
Transaction rate is the only possible way to judge the value of a monetary system.
A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get.
It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.
Not true. For example a monetary system might be valuable because it supports high transaction volumes even at a low rate, or because it has high costs to attack.
> The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it
Bitcoin isn't an economy. It is just a small part of the overall economy
> The cost to attack bitcoin is a lot lower than the cost to attack the euro, the usd, the yen, or even the rouble.
Those things should ought to have a much higher cost to attack since they hold significantly more value than Bitcoin currently.
> You just need the stroke of a pen, and it's price, and utility would collapse.
Then simply valuate it on what it will be worth in a post-regulation future rather than its current value. If you really believe that will happen, then it presents a great shorting opportunity for you and you would be helping to price in risks such as that.
Market cap of the Ruble is 800 billion USD, market cap of BTC is currently 900 billion USD.
Depending on the kind of regulation, its value would either be roughly the same (if the regulation is of the KYC form), or would go into free-fall (if the regulation is of the 'this is illegal, starting 30 days from now').
But that's not my point. My point is that the much touted BTC resilience to a 49% attack is a solution to a problem that nobody has.
Well interestingly, the cost to maintain the Russian military is only about 10x higher than the cost to maintain Bitcoin (and obviously the Russian military is defending more than just the currency).
> My point is that the much touted BTC resilience to a 49% attack is a solution to a problem that nobody has.
If nobody has the problem, then nobody will buy it.
For example, increasing the block size could have some disadvantages like increasing how quickly the size of the blockchain grows, which will make it harder for new users/miners to join the network and possibly increase centralization.
It's also not clear the market has a strong demand for an increased transaction rate yet. Eventually it will be almost unavoidable, but we might not be there yet. If that's the case then it might be harmful to increase the number of frivolous/unnecessary transactions for no reason.
Market cap is not a meaningful measure of a currency. A better measure is the velocity of money within a currency.
For context, just one part of the US economy is the stock market. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which came up in the news recently processed $2.15 quadrillion in securities in 2019.
The 30 day average for estimated transactions in Bitcoin is around 5-6 billion, or still around 1/1000th just one art of the US economy's transaction volume.
At 5 transactions per second, the average transaction size would have to be around $1,268,2308 to equal the velocity of just one portion of one sector of the US economy. 5 transactions per second is actually higher than the average transaction throughput over the past several years.
Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe.
Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy.
However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.
We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.
So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.
It sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618
I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).
Streetlights/ night time lights which (besides often consuming fossil fuels) have the additional feature of ruining the night sky for stargazers, insects, nocturnal animals, etc.
> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US
I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority.
Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there are a maximum of 178 ways to divide up the rest... it's simply not on that scale of usefulness, _and_ it is not comparable to fucking visa because it doesn't serve the worlds transactions, no one buys coffee with bitcoin. It's also not comparable to the USD for the same reason. Everything you compare it to will be of more material value to the world and almost always consume less energy, even if it's icecream. </rant>
I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.
> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies
That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.
Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.
We need an uninflatable store of value more than anything, which Bitcoin is.
Think of how much unnecessary transacting and consumption is going on right now to escape a constantly inflating dollar. "Investments" and consumptions will tank with a deflationary store of value.
>We need an uninflatable store of value more than anything
People keep repeating this as if it's a well known truth, and I'm wondering where they came up with the idea. Why are we to believe that inflation is the source of our current economic woes?
Do you feel like you're getting the appropriate share of money printing needed to maintain your purchasing power? Don't the really desirable assets, like the best land and houses, and the best education, get increasingly more expensive, relative to your purchasing power?
Certainly someone is gobbling up those dollars. I don't think it's most people though.
That isn't really how it works. Banks do not "print money," they expand the money supply through loans. When interest rates are low, savers move their existing money away from assets like bonds toward higher yielding assets like stock and real estate.
If the money supply were to suddenly shrink, the average person would not become richer; that added value would be concentrated in fewer hands. That's basically what is happening with bitcoin.
Sure, just as Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Paypal and several of the largest major banks just accepted its use and facilitation. And while companies such as Tesla, PornHub, etc accept it as payment. Its totally not going anywhere and will never make that transition.
But that high value (and the volatile prices) is entirely the problem (coupled with other issues like the extremely low potential number of transactions per second). As it stands, Bitcoin will never be anything other than an investment vehicle. Maybe another cryptocurrency will be a suitable replacement for fiat, but right now and for the foreseeable future, crypto is still too niche, too complex and volatile. At most we're seeing banks extend their offerings with cryptocurrency, but none of it points to widespread replacement of fiat outright. There are too many institutional, technical and social barriers.
Bitcoin plays a role in the crypto ecosystem. It's like gold. Ethereum is like the finance industry and things like DOGE are like currency. The value will be pegged to BTC, making it the foundation for the ecosystem.
>and things like DOGE are like currency. The value will be pegged to BTC, making it the foundation for the ecosystem.
I disagree. It is more realistic for existing currency based stable coins to become the currencies. For example countries like the US will create a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, China with the Yuan, and Europe with the Euro. Currently USD pegged stable coins are the most popular.
This. I've realized years ago that the current fiat system can be unsustainable because it's very hard for regulators to avoid the temptation of applying QE and other monstrosities. But I realized way too late that BTC is the vehicle to flee from that (in a simple way compared to moving physical assets across borders).
It already succeeded in helping rich people in China to bring their wealth out of control. This has maximum utility for a lot of people. I'm not sure what will come after the current financial system (and it most probably won't go anywhere and will co-exist for some years before crypto will be banned everywhere), but this new type of wealth transfer mechanism already gets used a lot. Everyone who distrusts the current financial system or is oppressed by their regime is interested in it.
I don't know how the world will look like (it'll probably be very hard to continue the current path because capital has found a new way to move across borders and avoid taxes, again) and I don't know if it's generally good for global society, but Pandora's box is open.
I agree with the energy discussion and that it's wasteful, but the utility of it (transacting without governmental permission) seems to be higher for the participants. And they don't care about its socioeconomic impact, they care about its utility for them (money for miners and speculators who keep BTC's value high and the network functional, permissionless transaction for the actual target audience / users of BTC). BTC was built for permissionless money transactions, the speculation is just a byproduct and everyone is focusing on it instead of looking at its actual value for its users.
edit for the sibling comments: You need BTC only to move your assets from one country/wallet to another. You can then move it to a stable coin like USDC and slowly and safely get it out of the crypto system without having to deal with the volatility. This takes you half an hour and you're done. It's currently an investment vehicle, but its utility comes from being able to get money from A to B regardless of government intervention. Even if BTC drops to $3k, it still has this value. Looking at the price of BTC is missing the point: it's more than $0 and you can do a transaction in 10 minutes and that is all that matters to move assets.
How would one measure that? The price of one bitcoin compared to the price of a kilogram of gold? That seems arbitrary. Total market value? Transaction volume?
The computationally wasteful bit is a temporary problem for which solutions are already being created. The Lightning Network is one such effort.
Governments are already taking efforts to fight against crypto. The fact that bitcoin is classified as an "asset" is the government adding friction to using it. Every time you transact in bitcoin you have to put that on your taxes because there's some capital gains/loss. Of course, they don't talk about it as if that is an attack, but it is. And they wouldn't be attacking it if they weren't scared. It's surely not guaranteed, maybe not even likely, but it's still possible that we will win.
The computationally wasteful bit will go away with things like the visa network where they will only have to persist back to the blockchain when you transact with a wallet that isn't on their network. Otherwise it'll just be records in a database not unlike regular currency.
Bitcoin is deflationary, isn’t it? How could it ever replace fiat if just by merely holding it you are guaranteed in the long run to increase value? You need mild inflation to get people to actually spend and not hoard. Bitcoin’s supply is fix so there is no point in ever spending it unless you want to cash out.
Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.
You see a lot of people buying groceries with BTC currently? What I see most people do is buy BTC and hold it, living off their regular paychecks, waiting for the BTC portfolio to hit some goal. They then trade it to the next investor who does the same. It’s not a currency so much as a store of value. It’s a stock, not money.
Obviously thats going to be the case through rampant price discovery. Youre not saying anything original. Are you smarter than Visa and Mastercard and Paypal? Maybe they know something about future consumers that you dont.
You clearly have some kind of chip on your shoulder either about me or about this subject. Acting like a snob won’t get you many conversation partners. Take care.
From everything I’ve read, it tends to stagnate society. Why buy a car when you can just hold onto your money and tomorrow you can buy a house? Why buy a house when tomorrow you can buy a mansion. No value is produced because there is little incentive to invest into anything since just holding onto your money is a safe investment.
People buy things for the utility they provide. I could have not bought a PC 20+ years ago and waited for today’s PCs which 100x faster and cheaper but I wouldn’t of had a PC for 20+ years. Deflation in PC did not stop me from purchasing something I needed. Did society stagnate because PCs got cheaper?
This is only a problem in a deflationary spiral, which is just as problematic as an inflationary spiral. Gold is deflationary and the industrial revolution was kicked off while most of the world was still on the gold standard.
> Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.
I've actually wondered about this -> why not use the SP500 as a form of currency? It seems like this would fit somewhere in between the US dollar and Bitcoin - store of value, increases in price over time (or at least historically does), pays dividends (so a productive asset). Downsides are no capped supply, and volatility (but so is Bitcoin).
This would be a massive wealth transfer to the companies on SP500 because demand for the stocks would go up and those companies would basically get infinite zero interest loans by issuing more stock, which would inflate your currency.
The first government to move their money onto a crypto us going to have massive control over their economy. Roll their own crypto, keep the keys that allow more money to be printed, have the ability to lock people out of their wallets on a whim? They could even extract taxation by running all the nodes and taking the transaction fees.
How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and it's not even to protect the users nor would it be effective in the current form as such.
Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)...
It's got to be on a similar playing field right? i wouldn't be surprised if it was a little more than 0.56% globally. But look at how much _billions_ of people get out of it all over the world: entertainment, art, education, something to connect to people with... it has a huge and invaluable impact on society - i dare anyone to try compare that to Bitcoin (not blockchain, not the utopian crypto dream, but Bitcoin).
The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube:
I generally work on the assumption that if it's being used to separate three digit separation, it's a thousand separator. If only two digits and it's a currency with cents, probably a decimal separator.
Comparing BTC mining to a small country is just absurd. You could do the same with hundreds of other applications aside from YouTube like all social media servers, gaming, existing banking infrastructure, etc. Also Bitcoin arguably replaces gold which uses more energy and is more destructive to land (while using fossil fuels instead of mostly renewable energy like BTC). Lastly how much energy do we think the dollar which is backed by the US military uses per year? Id wager a lot more.
The pitchforks are out in this thread quite simply because people dont like other people outmaneuvering them in purchasing power but of course is disguised as a virtue signal.
Your last statement is based on exactly zero data points.
Let me provide one counter though: I couldn't give a rats ass whether you outmanouver me financially, I do care whether my child has a livable planet for his lifetime.
HDCP's energy usage is marginal, but yes, it's pointless and I'd very much like to kill it. More critically, I'd also like all mobile phones to receive software support for three times as long as what Apple currently provides, and I'd like to build more wind farms and stop shutting down nuclear plants.
> than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority
That’s a bit simplistic and completely lacking in big picture perspective. You even underline “only” as if you’re very confident in what you’re saying. Please do some research.
Oh sorry, please replace "only" with 99.9%. Because of $20 transaction fees, because of the trend of companies that once accepted it shunning it due to aforementioned ridiculous transaction fees, and finally due to numerous papers presenting a statistical analysis of bitcoin transaction behaviour and coming to the same conclusion e.g DOI: 10.1016/j.intfin.2017.12
Having a reliable store of value - is itself extremely valuable. At least to me... and to quite a few others apparently, with more and more by the day.
Bitcoin is about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip placed on black on the blackjack table.
Bitcoin has many virtues, but a "store or value" is demonstrably not one of them. Why do you, and many others, feel that it is in spite of its volatility?
> about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip
Casino analogies are misleading because the problem with the casino is that the expected outcome is negative. The problem with the casino isn't the volatility.
There are plenty of stores of value which have extreme volatility but are still prized by investors, like real estate or artwork.
> demonstrably not one of them
We are talking about an asset class that has existed for about 1 decade. Nobody is really sure what it will be able to achieve, but its ability to act as a store of value seems promising. As more people form their opinion about this and other matters related to cryptocurrencies, we should expect the volatility to decrease. So the volatility at the current moment is not really a good indicator for the long-term volatility.
It's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be used for much much better purposes. Another good example, albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses 1% of the world's electricity output.
A good idea in theory that hasn't seem to have taken off in any major way is designing a PoW that is mobile device optimised so that the consensus can be driven by idle phones that are charging etc., Major problem being how can you ensure that the miners are indeed an idle device instead of a dedicated server farm. I have a feeling PoS such as in ADA or ETH 2.0 will likely emerge as the front runner in the next decade (by usage, BTC will likely hold top spot in total market cap for a while to come)
More like theres hundreds of things in the world that use more energy than BTC like gaming, gold mining, existing banking infrastructure, social media servers, etc - and the comparison is stupid in the first place. People just want to virtue signal because they dont like other people getting ahead of them and they didnt invest. Thats the crux of the outrage just like people get into stock investment wars.
The number of places where you can build a dam is limited, and when you find one it is not unlikely that you have to relocate > 1 million people to build it (Three Gorges Dam). That is on the other side of the scale you are talking about.
That is not just any "single" dam, but the world's second largest.
The largest dam in Sweden, which is my reference, a country where hydro is the biggest source of electricity, produces 2TWh/y.
(And sadly much of that energy now goes to heavily subsidized Facebook and Google servers because it is cool to have those companies in your town, and collect income tax from the 10-ish people that work there)
Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree.
Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.
Wow it's almost like the media is all propaganda and lies, people on the internet claim to be smart while they don't really understand what they are talking about, wow who knew. (Yes I include myself in the pulling shit out my ass on the internet group)
That's a very good point. It is sort of demonised in the media but tech people understand encryption and cracking, phreaking, p2p networks, finge topics are our speciality. An intrested mind does not sit in front of a powerful research platform to claim ignorance year after year. People in tech disporportantly ignore crypto and it's a shame.
Why would we want to create another currency system when we feel enslaved to the first one but at the same time aware we are the minority of people, and hold an incredible privilege.
It's easier to pretend you don't understand, or just don't think about it, look the other way and suck on those corporate titties to the tune of 250k USD/year because that's the attitude that got us to the top.
I have a theory that Hacker News is sufficiently influenced by the investor class that anything disrupting their business model gets special treatment quite outside the site's usual techno-optimist repertoire.
It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc into those other projects before righteous public sentiment gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human impacts of what they're investing in.
The cause and effect you describe hasn't applied to significant investors in oil or coal up to this point that I'm aware of, despite the disastrous effect those two revenue sources have had on the environment. I'm not sure why Bitcoin would be significantly different when its negative externalities are effectively invisible and a bunch of the mining occurs in mystery data-centers overseas, outside of the reach of central banks.
Ethereum is used more than bitcoin (measured in transactions per day), so that'd make it more likely to be considered the de facto cryptocurrency, no? It'd also make it more "popular" with cryptocurrency users, though definitely not as well known by the layman.
Ethereum is used as a computer, but it can also be a way to transfer value. So I don't agree on using that as a that metric.
It would seem that Bitcoin is more popular amongst those who don't use cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum is more popular amongst those who are. Just a thought.
Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency?
Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.
If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.
Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.
I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in contraband switching from btc to monero among others for that reason.
No, anonymity for the users is generally separate from the consensus algorithm. XMR, at least when I was mining it many years ago, was more about preventing leakage of wallet, funds info to every person you transacted with - and is probably the gold standard in anonymous transactions - which is why it's price is so stable.
Ripple is not proof-of-stake. It uses traditional consensus with trusted validators. It's basically a fiat currency that is run by a corporation to benefit them.
Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural level because it's basically centralized.
That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them. Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed as not a blockchain due to being centralized?
Eth 2.0 will be fully PoS (released fully in the next year or two, but staking is possible now).
Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS but are still very early in their development.
> "we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency"
I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get to where we are now.
Those two statements capture perfectly what I think of Bitcoin too with its ridiculously deflationary block reward-halving algorithm.
Anyway, yes, I agree that 99% percent of existing cryptocurrency implementations are at least partially affected by short-sighted greed.
However, I think it's important to note that there is no technological constraint preventing the potential success of more egalitarian implementations. In that sense, it's at least disappointing to see technological potential for societal benefit being so categorically dismissed due to the flaws of early prototypes such as Bitcoin.
I agree reward halving help to concentrate the wealth on early adopters. The simplest and arguably fairest emission would just fix the block subsidy. I'm aware of only one coin that has adopted such an emission.
That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin?
We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?
Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been.
Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like:
* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.
* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.
And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."
Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum attack exploits. I'm bullish on cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) but bearish long-term on Bitcoin. However, one thing Bitcoin is used for currently is as a decentralized collateral. You can wrap Bitcoin and deposit it on Ethereum and lend it out for interest. This is a fairly good use case in the short term, but Bitcoin the blockchain is not sustainable longterm.
Yeah, good answer. I hope Ethereum can make a full transition to Proof Of Stake. I remember they were already talking about it being close when I was looking into it in 2017.
As one of the clueless novices on this topic what I fail to understand is that proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms have been available for alt-coins now for a little while - yet BTC is still dominant. Is it just because of popularity of BTC? If so I struggle to understand how the market is rational here (not saying it has to be). And do other coins/forks issued with similar rules/characteristics cause a price decrease in BTC due to fungibility? The confusion you speak of may come because people see BTC as the successful coin and see other alternatives may have weaknesses that "are priced in". As a novice, because I assume there's no free lunch, other currencies not using PoW could have weaknesses that BTC does not have hence the price. For better or worse the most successful coin determines what people see as the successful approach to crypto at the time.
To your point I've also seen that some coins may still prefer PoW, and may have mitigated many of the disadvantages of it (e.g. made it harder to centralise mining).
Imagine you have created a new social media webapp with a few innovative new features not seen elsewhere. Would that spell doom for a now suddenly inferior Facebook/Twitter/etc. Possibly, but the network effect in terms of inertia and critical mass makes that an unlikely proposition.
Moreover, the driving force behind Bitcoin keeping it ahead of the pack so far is the promise of short/medium term profit as an investment vehicle due to the artificial scarcity of its deflationary algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies are better positioned toward forming a long-term solution as a low overhead global decentralized payment platform, but what they offer is more of a collective benefit rather than a strong monetary incentive to any individual backer/investor on an individual level. (Which arguably is just an emergent property of human greed within the regime of unchecked capitalism.)
The thing is for me, and maybe that's an opinion, is that the investment vehicle due to scarcity is the more important utility right now. Given all the QE and low interest rates across the board worldwide that is the real value prop. There is a need for an asset such as this to preserve wealth, and other assets such as gold have market mechanisms to stop them running away too far I think (e.g. gold certificates, reserve banks willing to liquidate, etc).
In first world countries for most people I would argue for all its faults the banking system is "good enough". In my local country can send money to people almost real time and pay by card quickly and easily without fees. Sure there is still room for improvement, but for most average people the need to change is low. Especially when I still need the banking system as "primary" to pay my taxes, settle my bills, etc - you know all the "real stuff".
There are many alternative cryptocurrency projects to solve the environmental, speed and cost issues of Bitcoin. Nano looks like a genuine project but ultimately it’s an experiement with a non-inflatonary currency with high-volatility. This model is bound to fail barring a miracle.
Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Many newer ones run PoS which doesn't 'waste' energy. The Celo network goes even further and is carbon negative. It sends a portion of block rewards to Project Wren, which uses them to buy carbon credits to offset more carbon than the network emits to run.
Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't consume any significant amount of electricity.
Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with climate change.
Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all. There are hundreds of others.
> the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China
Side concern but isn’t this concentration a red flag? Likely many miners are in China or Russia due to the electricity prices. Can’t they collude to execute a 51% attack?
They possibly can. Nearly all of them are in China, and nearly all of them are owned by a single company that manufactures the ASIC processors that do the mining.
This is why I'm not a bitcoin maximalist and I'm not a huge fan of it. I have a suspicion that eventually it will fail.
They could and can. The problem with both PoW and PoS is concentration of consensus/trust over time I think. There are models I've seen that break that up somewhat in PoW and potentially other forms by relying on something that is hard to concentrate (e.g. the market for consumer grade CPU's, social networks, etc). I would like something that anyone can run, but has some natural barrier that prevents it from being centralised.
Electricity consumption doesn't equal climate change per se - not all electricity is created equally. I see PoW cryptocurrencies as one of the most promising incentives to move to a sustainable energy future. Given the lack of political will for policy-based incentives for this goal, a market-based incentive is welcomed.
Power consumption is irrelevant if we're using green technologies for mining. The fact that the green lobby is staunchly anti-nuclear makes it very hard for me to care, though.
It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that.
Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people and the planet?
It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that.
Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people and the planet.
Does that follow? Surely as Bitcoin becomes more and more valuable there's more and more incentive to mine and the more entranched it becomes more important to defend against 51% attacks become.
It seems to me that what has happened historically i.e. ever more people starting to mine will continue as long as Bitcoin remains valuable.
Yeah and I simply don't see 51% attacks working or going on for long periods of time due to adoption and game theory. Nation states simply can't afford gain 51% because it would mean they're already losing legitimacy of their currency IMO.
Bitcoin is probably the most important social/technological innovation since the internet (which uses how much energy?). Most people realize that moving humanity forward requires energy. There's loud neo-luddite contingent that missed the boat on crypto (it's actually not too late), but I wouldn't take angry anti-crypto HN comments as public sentiment. The public is in desperate need of a finance system not tied to the existing oppressive establishment.
This is such a vague explanation of bitcoin's usefulness that I'm even more glad to use US dollars after reading it. "Most important social/technological innovation since the internet." "Moving humanity forward." "Not tied to the existing oppressive establishment." These are not real, concrete reasons for anyone to switch to bitcoin. These are statements I would expect to hear from someone who is trying to recruit me into a pyramid scheme.
People who save in FedBucks are no closer to owning a home in California. If you’re saving in FedBucks you’re treading water as the printer goes burrrr. Mostly likely you know saving in FedBucks is a fool’s errand and convert your money to Wall Street assets. Crypto is an alternative store of purchasing power that’s not currently run by New York bankers.
This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again
- bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining
- bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system
- bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the blockchain
> bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system
Those are both gigantic energy expenditures, and to say that BitCoin uses only a third of the energy that another despicable planet-destroying industry does doesn't speak much in the favor of BitCoin.
Nor does saying that something ~50 million people own (0.5% of the Earth's population) is "only" 15% of the entire global financial system used by 7.3 billion people.
...which is which? Since the global financial system clearly uses much, much less energy per person, I'm guessing that you're also calling it the "better system?"
Or are you pretending that if BitCoin were used by every person on Earth that it would still be using the exact same energy?
Did you read my initial comment? Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global financial system uses and its energy usage does not scale with adoption. Transactions are meant to be run on the Lightning Network which consumes next to nothing compared to Visa, and long term savings are meant to be stored on the blockchain. This argument that Bitcoin uses too much energy has been around since its whitepaper and has been countered multiple times.
*edit, not debunked but countered with practical solutions
And yet it has scaled, drastically, hundreds-fold over the past few years.
You could say that it scales with the price, which is true, but tell me with a straight face that if seven billion people started buying BitCoin that wouldn't affect its price to an extraordinary degree.
> Lightning Network
The magic words that have said every time energy is mentioned for the past six year, supposedly making us ignore the energy BitCoin is actually using.
Bitcoin's energy usage is not correlated with volume of use. The energy usage is correlated with the expected value of newly minted coins. When you think you can get $2 of "mined" currency for every $1 of power, you wont think twice about wasting lots of power on it. When you only expect $1.01 for every $1 spent mining, you'll give up. It self regulates. The current wild case of so much energy being spent on it is due to the value rising quickly over time and expected to rise further. When the overall expectation for the future of bitcoin is that it will plateau or only very slowly climb further, lots of miners will drop out and the energy usage will plummet to an easily justifiable level.
Sickening? Really? Don't you find it interesting that currency free of nation-state regulators would be attacked as anti-environmental?
These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.
Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting - they are very likely aligned with other -isms you would not support, or are a root cause of the issue you care about in the first place. Environmentalism is no exception.
Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does everything. I'd focus on how to generate that power renewably, not to argue against a technology that millions in the unbanked world could use to better their situation. I'd suggest you learn more about the problems that present cryptocurrency as a potential solution before just listing new problems.
I've been hearing for almost a decade how Bitcoin was going to change the world and help humanity and yet...nothing. Other than some speculators and early adopters getting rich.
I've yet to hear of anything "world-changing" BTC could do that isn't already done better by traditional systems.
For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin. One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment.
Bitcoin has already changed humanity for the better and it's only getting started.
> One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment
How has the US dollar been destroyed? It has enjoyed remarkable price stability, very close to the target rate, which is what everyone expects and can plan for.
The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and while it's currently enjoying a high value (just as tulips once did), it was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon.
The dollar has absolutely been destroyed. Housing, health care... true inflation is rampant.
> The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and which is currently enjoying a high price (just as tulips once did), but which was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon.
People have been saying this at their own expense for a decade.
Housing costs are not high because the dollar has been debased. They're high because of high demand and lack of supply in many urban locations, primarily because of local zoning and permitting processes.
If housing were expensive because the dollar had lost value, then you would expect it to be cheap to buy a house in SF in some other form of currency. But it's not, no matter what medium of exchange you want to use, it's still expensive.
And there are of course lots of locations with significant supply where housing in the US is dirt cheap, like Detroit.
Health care is more complex, but the same general idea applies. Whether you pay in USD, or anything else, it's still expensive.
0% interest is definitely inflating the cost of housing.
> Whether you pay in USD, or anything else, it's still expensive.
> no matter what medium of exchange you want to use, it's still expensive.
Not if you hold BTC. It's unfortunate that people are self-sabotaging by keeping USD based assets when there's actually an alternative that's not in a inflationary spiral.
I think the BTC hate on this site is unique though. In the "real" world people are pretty excited about crypto and acting in their own best interest by acquiring it.
> For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin.
The classic false dichotomy by people peddling crypto. Nobody is keeping their money in a savings account. There are productive investments that aren't crypto.
Ok, is Bitcoin a super speculative investment, or a savings account? Now you're just moving goal posts.
Ironically, crypto's returns are all due to Tether...which is purely inflationary printing. USDT is what you'd get with the USD if the Fed were run by actual criminals.
You're cherry picking a single point in time that happens to work with one stock (one might also argue the move to electric vehicles is actually a world changing event ala bitcoin).
What about November 2018 or November 2017? Like I said, Bitcoin has consistently been up in the long term for the past decade.
I’m pro crypto but this statement could of been made during the tulip mania. I think the better argument is being free from central bank devaluation of hard earned savings.
The risk profile of Crypto vs an index fund is exponentially worse.
What you should care about is what asset provides you the best return with the lowest risk.
At any time in history you can look back at the past ten years and say "Clearly X stock was the best choice for investors and you're foolish to claim otherwise!"
Having great returns and improving humanity are very different things. I'm pretty sure a lot of scams are benefiting their creators very well, and yet...
You can make the same claim for putting all your money in TSLA. Just because it has had good return in hinesight doesn't mean it wasn't an extremely high-risk investment.
While not world changing, it did allow for the paying for of illicit drugs over the internet. Silkroad was the peak of bitcoin usability IMO (regardless of my moral perspective on the matter). Ever since, its slowly transitioned into a Ponzi scheme built on the back of future "decentralized finance" promises.
BTC shouldn't be conceptualised as a killer app but a proof-of-concept. The world-changing thing the technology can do is eliminate graft, and I'm fine with it taking a while to get there.
Meantime, it's useful to keep track of who is most vocally against a technology that could eliminate graft.
> Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting
> Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does everything.
You jump immediately into whataboutism: what about all the other things that require power.
Bitcoin is not beyond criticism. It is currently 99.99% used for speculation. Does it have potential? Absolutely. Do a number of competing non-PoW/non-blockchain based solutions also have potential? Yes. Do those competitors potentially use far less energy? Also yes.
In the best case, Bitcoin is using a metric shit-ton of energy before actually hitting critical mass for its social use-cases. In its worst case, its a Tether-backed ponzi that is siphoning a tremendous amount of energy from more productive uses.
Bitcoin is barely a currency. Its deflationary nature is the main reason it's been somewhat successful so far (because it rewards early adopters) but it's also be its demise (because nobody wants to spend a "currency" today that's by design going to be more valuable tomorrow).
Cryptocurrencies is what happens when libertarian techbros try do "disrupt" basic financial systems without taking the time to figure out how it's really working.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Peaple saying that embracing bitcoin is going to create a fairest world for all are either deluded or trying to sell you something.
In 2017 hundreds of projects (be it premined coins or "ICOs") got literally billions of dollars for all sorts of revolutionary projects. What are the results? Where's the revolution? Why am I know posting on HN through the blockchain?
11 years on and still no use case besides pyramid schemes and buying drugs online. Great job folks.
> These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.
This is textbook conspiracy theory here. Don't forget that even if bitcoin was running 100% on renewable energy (which it definitely is not), the added load on the grid definitely causes coal/gas plants to fire up and make the grid CO2 emissions of the country where people mine bitcoin to get worse.
I don't buy the decentralised argument either, more than 51% of the hashrate is in China and the government can decide to shut all of this down the day they want to reduce their unproductive CO2 emissions.
It very well might. Bitcoin has first mover, an easier and better name, and more awareness behind it, but ETH might eventually take over. I'm rooting for both (and for bitcoin to eventually find a better solution to its power issues).
> Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
You could say the same thing about the US military, which is the world's single largest producer of CO2 emissions.
It really is terrible, and many enthusiasts don't seem to understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it. For so many it's just a way to make a quick buck when Elon tweets about it.
To put in in numbers, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index[1] (they link to other research that arrive at similar conclusions, if not worse): the total footprint is almost 37 million tons of CO2, a single transaction accounting for over 300 kg. A single transaction requires the same amount of energy as an average household over 22 days, or emits the same amount of CO2 as a 2020 Civic driving 1,000 miles.
The comparison with the visa network is just as wild: a single bitcoin transaction takes more energy than 432,000 visa transactions.
At this point it's highly irresponsible to continue using and supporting Bitcoin.
Take the cost of your house, divide by the amount of time you enter your house through the door. You get the price each time you get into your house. For a 300k$ house and entering the house twice a day for 20 years that's about 20$ each time you enter your house.
Does not make sense? Of course not because dividing the amount of electricity used to mine a block by the amount of transactions also doesn't make sense.
No, what you're saying makes no sense for a different reason. When you buy a house, you don't take $300,000 and set it on fire.
If you, after 20 years, sell that house for $600,000, does that mean that you were paid $20, each time you entered your house?
A bitcoin transaction, on the other hand, is quite literally a colossal waste of electricity, to enable an incredibly small amount of value (Settling one transaction.)
You may be able to argue that it also enables another kind of value (A bunch of bitcoin hoarders getting rich), but that's not value that's of relevance to literally anyone else in the world.
Look, you can make an argument that traditional billionaires help the world by much handwaving of invisible hands efficiently allocating resources in open markets.
What second order forms of value for the world does the existence of bitcoin speculators create?
Are we done pretending people like you are anything more than the new anti-industrialists yet? If it were up to the green crowd we'd be back to using candles and carrier pigeons.
We might have no choice at some point (like the choice will be made for us, by the planet), at the rate we're going.
But that being said, I think there are bigger fish to fry than bitcoin in that department right now.
And besides, if Proof-of-Stake becomes viable and desirable enough, they'll adopt it into Bitcoin's protocol, or some other Proof-of-Stake coin will eventually take over. Maybe it'll be Ethereum once it switches. Or something else. And then this will be a non-issue.
Bitcoin's security is a function of the electricity that is expended for its operation. Unfortunately, Bitcoin's unwavering commitment to a lack of technical innovation (via political coercion) will be the catalyst of its eventual downfall barring any adjustments to the economic goalposts ie when fees aren't enough to sustain security once block rewards dry up. Bitcoin is either a self fulfilling prophecy or it isn't. The biggest threat to Bitcoin are the much more efficient 2nd and 3rd generation distributed consensus mechanisms; See ETH, DOT, AVAX, etc.
Proof-of-stake blockchains are accomplishing more than was ever imagined possible with Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.
It's unfortunate how uninformed people willing to jump into a conversation/invest in cryptocurrencies can be.
Lol, it is probably one of the least unethical uses of electricity that i can think of while not being net positive. If you care about this, realign onto cloud computing or industrial equipment for deforestation. It's disingenuous to care more about btc mining.
The USD is backed by military might and risk of invasion, this is known as the petrodollar it currently requires a US military that uses the equivalent resources as 140 countries.
If you consider 98 million barrels per year used by the military to protect 1.5 trillion USD, every million in the bank uses 65.5 gallons of oil per year.
You're really attributing the entirety of the US military's oil consumption strictly to the preservation of US currency? That's quite disingenuous. Did I miss the part where moving to cryptocurrency will eliminate the need for a military?
The entire economic and technology infrastructure of the world is backed up by military power. I believe we should talk about all three things: Military expenditure, energy usage, and money systems. All can be improved or made more efficient independent of the others to a substantial degree.
The things that are worth buying with bitcoins are still largely produced by the conventional economy.
You know what else consumes heaps of electricty?
Your computer, your data centre, your AWS account the bank services you consume, your appliances and a large etcetera.
Bitcoin is the first financial break-through in a long, long time. Is designed to move control away from the few back into the hands of the people. In Argentina people love investing in Bitcoin because their currency is awful. It loses value because the government can print more. Just like in the US. No government can print more Bitcoin so the value keeps growing.
Bitcoin alternatives like Bitcoin cash (or regular Bitcoin but with a bigger block size) can be used across the border without censorship. Remember MasterCard banning donations to Wikileaks? Bitcoin cannot be banned.
Back to your comment. Now we have solar, we have wind power. All clean sources of energy. They are cheaper than coal and can power everything. Including Bitcoin.
Then there should be a global tax on carbon emissions. This is not a Bitcoin issue it's an issue with atmospheric carbon emissions not being priced correctly.
Is that any worse than our culture of disposable items that have no business being disposable? Washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers have no reason to not last 25 years, they haven't changed how they function in over 50 years. And all the smaller consumer crap that works maybe a dozen times before an irreparable part or piece fails. Or how many working cars were destroyed in cash for clunkers only to be replaced by trash that is harder to repair and maintain?
Using energy on "worthless" cryptocoins isn't great but we produce tons of other worthless shit using tons of energy and materials that will be worth nothing in just a few years without blinking an eye.
Agreed with your point of disposable items. Regardless of whataboutisms, the point about Bitcoin using more power than Argentina still stands.
(If person A says that traffic accidents are horrible, and person B says "Is that any worse than war?"; while B is correct, that doesn't make traffic accidents any less horrible.)
Of course not, but taken to extremes we would have nothing to compare actions to. At a certain level of abstraction we need to be able to compare at the fruit level and not apples or oranges.
I suspect one lifetime would not suffice to mine Grin with pencil and paper. Its Cuckatoo32 PoW puzzle is to find a 42-cycle in a random bipartite graph with 2^32 edges. each defined by 2 siphashes.
Arguing with Bitcoin shills is fruitless. Luckily there aren't actually that many of them out in the world. Leave them to sell their worthless bytes to each other for $40k while governments slowly regulate it out of existence
There is an idea! Slow-coin, all the hashes have to be calculated by hand and passed by mail. A kind of anonymous distributed sharia scheme. I think I just saved the US postal service. Beat that Kevin Costner.
I'm trying to understand Bitcoin as a store of decreased entropy. It's an interesting information-theoretical question as to how much information will eventually be captured by Bitcoin, and what this ultimately means.
There are lots of ways we already use "needless" competition to establish a consensus (or any natural system, really). Perhaps Bitcoin is just a trading platform for that competition.
If that's the case then I would be interested to see how the success of more efficient proof-of-stake systems like Ethereum 2.0 might increase the overall energy efficiency of our species.
After all the years I'm still having trouble comprehending what Bitcoin - and Bitcoin in specific - is useful for aside from speculation. I get that Ethereum and several other cryptocurrencies have the ability to execute code on the blockchain, enabling useful applications, and that stablecoins could be used for everyday payment due to it not fluctuating wildly (at least in theory). As I understand it, Bitcoin has neither of those characteristics. Can someone enlighten me on what it can be used for then?
Bitcoin is usefull as an entry point and a figurehead of the crypto world. Its fame fuels/advances other projects. It also has a historic value (first crypto currency).
What was the first computer useful for? Probably for more than bitcoin today, but its value was not its usefulness at the time.
the first computers were used in the study of nukes, code breaking, and filling out firing tables for artillery. the first computers did have geninuine use cases and weren't just cool looking toys or something
I get the historical relevance and figurehead aspect, but to follow your example, nobody actually uses the early first computers (ENIAC, UNIVAC, Altair, etc.) anymore -- everyone today uses their improved descendants. Why hasn't the same happened in Crypto? Hasn't its functionality been pretty much superseded by later improved coins?
Bitcoin can be a cautionary example for what happens when development grinds to a halt because of internal power struggles.
Today, bitcoin's underlying technology is unable to evolve, other crypto currencies have surpassed it and bitcoin will probably be taxed or outlawed due to its contribution to climate change.
Bitcoin is digital gold. The technology of it needn’t evolve further than the technology of casting a gold ingot, storing it safely or transporting it.
And FWIW, transporting $1M worth of gold in a secure way is going to cost you significantly more than BTC’s worst Tx fee day.
Other coins can serve the purpose of everyday transacting etc.
Though, wouldn't the BTC price fluctuating in the wrong direction one day instantly blow past whatever transaction fee there is? It seems way too volatile for long-term storage...
A decentralised, borderless, irreversible payments system, not tied to any state or government or bank, near-impossible for even the most powerful entities to censor or manipulate. There are some useful features in there.
But aren't those benefits also available in other cryptocurrencies that came later, with various added features and capabilities (eg. anonymity, stability, DApps, etc.) thanks to the benefit of hindsight? Why haven't the cryptocurrency mainstream (those who see value in crypto aside from speculation) abandoned Bitcoin and migrated en masse to those newer coins?
Simply no alternative has gained sufficient network effect to displace it. The answer might be more in behavioural psychology than technical arguments. That said Bitcoin's conservative (small c) stable development process might weigh heavily into trustowrthiness with buy money players.
Surprised nobody is complaining that the guy is wasting that paper and ruining the environment. I guess not all btc post on here is about the environment
EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?
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