This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
However, this does nothing for the overall energy efficiency of Bitcoin, which could be defined as transactions processed per gigawatt. If energy gets cheaper, that number only gets smaller.
However, if the ultimate utility of Bitcoin is to store trillions of dollars of value, transmit it into the future, across borders, quickly, pseudonymously, and without capital controls from coercive and corrupt governments, then energy-per-transaction is an inappropriate metric.
Bitcoin is the only asset with these properties, and it doesn't need many transactions to do what it does best.
If you find you're angry about Bitcoin's energy usage but you're not even more angry about the energy wasted by industries and technologies that have much less social utility, then maybe it's not the wasted energy that you're angry about after all.
And conversely too! letting corrupt governments and corporations transfer money with ease!
You would use Monero or physical cash for those activities.
Bitcoin is much easier to trace once you have a lead.
Note that my argument was pro btc - I can see underground demand sustaining its price in the long run.
This is such an old, tired take.
A somewhat trustworthy state having control over or transparency into money transfers generally is a very good thing. If your government isn't trustworthy enough, you have bigger problems than the currency.
The amount of energy used in equilibrium in Bitcoin mining is proportional to the price of Bitcoin (between halvings and holding the fraction of total mining costs spent on energy constant). If the price of Bitcoin rose enough that it had a 2TN market cap tomorrow, miners would have incentives to burn 3-4x more energy.
I agree that transaction-based accounting is flawed, but it doesn’t make the problem go away.
How do you bootstrap a node in the face of conflicting history? How do you handle network partitions?
There are also open question surrounding security, prevent actors from colluding and so on. Most other blockchains do not even bother. At least the Ethereum people have the ambition to have something practical. Let's study the design when it you can make an eth transfer with it.
These discussions are like when in a discussion about uranuium waste management someone inevitably cries about how we should just scrap it and go with fusion energy instead.
Great idea, but let's have something working first.
That's not the use case something like Bitcoin is built for.
Tezos, as an example, is governed by voting and on-chain governance. It isn't "run by a single entity."
Ripple or Tether are, though, sure.
There is a "Tezos Foundation". They control 30% of all staked XTZ. They checkpoint the blockchain regularly to provide correct history.
(They weren't on the list since Mina hasn't launched quite yet, Zcash isn't PoS though it might switch, and NEAR isn't PoS in its current form, but will be soon.)
Last time I checked for altcoins that are trying to solve Bitcoin‘s various scalability problems I ended up with a proof of stake coin too, Nano (using the rather new idea block lattice, small but so far quite low-toned development team that seemed to focus on problem solving rather than scammy marketing).
I’m surprised that Ethereum is convinced that they can „just move“ from proof of work to proof of stake. Should be possible for Bitcoin too then, shouldn’t it? (Maybe I’m missing something about this transition.) Nano required a whole new development.
So, while Bitcoin techinically could switch to proof of stake, it probably won't.
Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, again, for another digital gold rush?
Bitcoin holders are financially incentivized to steer everyone else toward Bitcoin.
As long as early adopters are financially invested in alternative currencies failing, we’re going to continue seeing a focus on Bitcoin.
This is my main beef with the system we live in already.
See ; Bullshit Jobs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_jobs
"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues for the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth."
I am not contesting the Bitcoin situation is ... interesting.
(edit = comment layout )
Not exactly "proof of work" in the same sense its being used, but I wish that the project would get more attention.
A kilo of gold once mined is perpetual. A bitcoin needs the whole network to keep running (and be large enough so that miners can't collude) to keep it's value.
the behavioral econ assumption is that you will seek to recover that loss someday, thus requiring you to hold and protect the receipt token representing it until that time.
In a tautological way, sure, everything's worth what somebody's willing to pay for it. But the above examples must call into question whether there is a distinction between what something is worth in dollars, and what its merit is.
There is only a limited supply of Bitcoin, but there will be more and more dollars printed over the next decades (making the dollar even less valuable compare to the constant Bitcoin). So Bitcoin will be interesting to watch - quite exciting for future and to see what's gonna happen.
There are more and less sucky ways to produce energy, but let's be clear: all of them suck to some degree. There is no type of energy production where the mere act of producing that energy is a net positive.
Then the argument turns to whether or not the gains from proof of wasted energy-type systems outweigh the drawbacks of producing the required energy -- even if that energy is produced in the least sucky way. I'm firmly in the no camp.
Or am I missing something here?
Then miners will get only the transaction fees. But it's still the same process. (Anyway, that won't happen, the number of available BTC to mining will asymptoptically approach 0, but will never get there.)
Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death ever so slightly.
I guess my point is, some uses of energy are acceptable, even desirable. And every use of energy accelerates the heat death of the universe, but we humans are insignificant on this scale; there is really nothing that we can do to even accelerate our Sun's death. We're not even Kardashev-1 :)
I was trying to view things in a bigger picture. Ofcourse we are using too much fossil fuels at this time. Ofcourse our functioning is pretty unsustainable.
What I am trying to say, is that sometimes high energy usage is acceptable. Should we stop launching things in orbit? Should we stop the LHC?
I think that for _some_ people, having a thing such as bitcoin is worth the energy expenditure. It is perfectly okay that for you, it _isn't_ acceptable. I am not trying to convince you of anything. Just affirming that there exists a subset of humans that find value in it, and therefore are willing to allocate resources -- be that electrical energy, fiat money, or mindshare.
The discussion about energy use of Bitcoin is within the context of the effectively closed system of Earth.
Until such a time that solar generated electricity is too plentiful to meter and ubiquitous, Bitcoin mining will cause huge demand for fossil fuel based energy, with the associated consequences for climate change.
All the plants, algae, and everything with chlorophyll would beg to differ. I really think we cannot consider Earth a closed system, because we're not a rogue planet in the insterstellar void.
Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".
> Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".
That's both pedantic and irrelevant. The rest of the solar system (other than the Sun) have practically zero bearing in any way on the energy consumption of BTC mining, or the damage to the climate it causes when powered by fossil fuels.
At one point he was asked about his long term view on global warming, and he said "In billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future."
Gary's response was obviously tongue-in-cheek, even somewhat flippant. My comment wasn't trying to be ironic, though I now see that it could be interpreted so.
>but we humans are insignificant on this scale; there is really nothing that we can do to even accelerate our Sun's death. We're not even Kardashev-1 :)
I am shocked that you are brave enough to write these things in the same comment. The problem with Bitcoin and proof of work is that it's literally capable of consuming our sun and all energy in the universe.