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
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>
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.
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.
It has failed at being a usable currency, and not merely for socioeconomic reasons. A currency is more than just intrinsic value.
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.
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?
Certainly someone is gobbling up those dollars. I don't think it's most people though.
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.
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?
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.
Your government rant is a non-sequitor - bitcoin doesn't become any more efficient just because The Man doesn't like it.
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).
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 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.
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.
None of this excuses Bitcoin.
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.
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.
Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.
Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.
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'.
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.
There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.
Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.
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.
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).
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.
> 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
That's because you don't need a 50% attack to destroy bitcoin. You just need the stroke of a pen, and it's price, and utility would collapse.
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.
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.
> 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.
If it can, why hasn't it?
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.
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.
Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.
EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
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).
Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.
However idle devices power consumption also needs to be addressed.
I wonder how much electricity California will be consuming when we stop selling gas cars and go all electric...
If someone is murdered in one city, that doesn't suddenly become less bad when someone else is murdered in another.