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Comment by keymone | Hacker News Reader

1) the point is, we’ve just started

How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project?

Energy spent correlates with incentive, incentive is based on price, price is based on demand/value. Where is demand/perceived value derived from is debatable.

The rest of your message equally applies to all other endeavors where early movers have profited. Yes it’s a bubble, yes markets are inefficient, yes people get hurt, how is any of that different from the what was happening in other sectors? Cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

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1) Yes, and bitcoin isn’t the only player in town.

2) It’s not assured that major breakthroughs will occur within the bitcoin ecosystem, nor that they will fold back into it.

I’m pretty familiar with bitcoin’s current technology developments. There are opinions, theories, and experiments flying around about how to build that rocket ship. Very very early and unclear.

The energy usage is not sustainable; we don’t have “decentralized logarithmically increasing clean energy sources” upon which to build bitcoin’s network to the stratospheric levels needed to achieve moonshot valuations, not without a serious innovation in technology to evolve the usage of bitcoin as a currency. Something better and more energy efficient for a trustless solution could come along.

Most everyone knows cryptocurrencies are here to stay but that’s not directly related to bitcoin, it’s price, it’s tech evolution specifically, and how it may or may not evolve into a viable currency.

It’s energy producing companies that worry about sustainability, not energy spending. Energy spending endeavors only worry about profitability. So it’s absolutely misguided to scold bitcoin over it’s use of energy and not do the same for instance to people heating up their apartments or driving cars or insert your energy spending activity.

Increasing efficiency of bitcoins proof of work will simply bump the difficulty so energy use will remain the same.

There’s a difference between scolding energy usage and pointing out that the design itself, even if efficiency of that design is increased, is what leads to this spiraling energy expenditure that powers massive computational hashing power only to support that currency and nothing else (no other social or technical goals). There are better ways to design such a system to do more than perform endless hashing that is merely self-serving. Furthermore, there could be innovations related to a trustless system that will make bitcoin itself obsolete; the future of bitcoin as leader isn’t guaranteed.

This isn’t related to heating or driving efficiency.

You seem to be convinced there are better ways to implement a distributed consensus mechanism that doesn’t depend on proof of work. Feel free to present it to the world and become the next satoshi. Meanwhile - face the reality. PoW will consume as much energy as is profitable and only market decides that.

I’m convinced people are searching for it. I’m convinced there’s a huge nouveau academic interest in this area. This just helps to estimate likelihood of bitcoin’s longevity.

Yes, precisely, you always need buyers to push price further. Market decides up or down, miners play along as it makes sense to them. Kind of like the swap over to bcash about a month ago, because it made sense financially.

> How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project?

I mean, are you even following the project? Very, very basic changes like "let's change this parameter from 1 to 2" are incredibly contentious, leading to hard forks and loud debates and furious accusations that people are shills trying to ruin Bitcoin for personal profit. If we can't even behave ourselves for a trivial proposal like Segwit2x, how could a truly significant protocol change ever get anywhere?

Bumping blocksize is contentious hardfork because not everybody is convinced it is the right way to scale (and i somewhat agree). Segwit otoh was implemented as backward compatible soft fork. Segwit2x is a deliberate attack on the network and i’m happy it failed.

Overall everybody got what they wanted - big blockers have BCH, conservatives have original BTC plus the capacity increase from segwit.

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