Everyone can calculate bitcoins with equal effort? Or is it still an arms race on who can gather more resources (energy/asics)?
You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet.
Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy.
Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
> Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud".
I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
I am quite familiar with mining, but I‘d argue that‘s besides the point: This is a question of economics much more than technology.
If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
True but irrelevant: The upper bound for rentability is the cost of electricity plus the capital cost of the mining equipment.
As soon as the sum of these two exceeds the expected mining reward, rational miners stop mining.
I don't doubt that there are inefficient miners out there, but I strongly suspect the majority to act according to their rational economic self-interest and not as players in an expensive technological lottery.
> it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck
Yes, but not consistently and therefore also not profitably so. The law of large numbers [1] applies.
The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.
The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.
The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).
Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.
We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.
A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.
"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.
Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.
Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that.
You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.
I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different.
"who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him" I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.
>No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin.
which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments.
Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content.
Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.
Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups').
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives.
However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point.
People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing).
> As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available.
Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.
Your transparency argument, while flaws have been shown from the other person commenting on it, is too much transparency. No one wants to have all transactions publicly available. It could make sense to use it for public funds.
I argue against Bitcoin itself as an independent tool and the power consumption of bitcoin and i don't think we need to spend that much Energy on Bitcoin right now to do further research on blockchain and crypto currencies.
I have never thought about how to write my arguments shorter as no-one every brought it up. But online also makes it quite hard to have a common ground. I will try to be more aware of this.
Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft!
Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would.
So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model.
I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?
When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet.
I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks?
I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not?
The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it