bitcoins show the nasty nature of the people
all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their investment
all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their investment
I can't fault someone for making a profit by researching a technology, investing, holding for the long term, and selling. We want capital to flow to the best ideas. But this is more MLM-style dog-eat-dog money making. It's unclear how it could have been prevented.
Ultimately greed and excess ruins everything.
It solves the problem of corporate censorship. Visa for example is notorious for refusing to do business with people they don't like (porn companies, 4chan, etc). If the US government wants more people to use the dollar and less to use Bitcoin, they can come out with a public, first-amendment-protected payment system.
You're saying here that it's a problem that Visa isn't forced to sell credit or payment processing to porn sites. I'm saying that's their right under the First Amendment.
But if a customer wants to do business online with someone Visa doesn't approve of, they have very few options. And currently Bitcoin is the best option.
And if the government does not want Bitcoin to prosper, they should come out with a better alternative in the form of a public (government run) payment system so we have the digital equivalent of the dollar.
Because unlike private entities, the government is bound to the first amendment. Unlike Visa, the government does not have the right to pick and chose who they do business with.
I get what you're saying here but, the odds of someone taking actual BTC as payment are pretty low right now. It's way, way more likely I can just use another credit card company, a debit card, Venmo/Cash App/PayPal, etc. I think this argument, while common amongst BTC folks, is pretty hypothetical.
> And if the government does not want Bitcoin to prosper, they should come out with a better alternative in the form of a public (government run) payment system so we have the digital equivalent of the dollar.
The problem with this is that we'd lose lots of the tools we have to fight organized crime. These are people who run the drug trade, the weapons trade, and the modern slavery trade. It would probably also destroy our political system because of the ensuing corruption. I don't know exactly which side of the debate I fall on on this one (it's mostly the same as the encryption debate, although I think money isn't speech, but it also does seem like it sometimes, etc.), but I do know the consequences are pretty severe if we create a right to privacy for financial transactions.
> Unlike Visa, the government does not have the right to pick and chose who they do business with.
Believe it or not, I didn't exactly want to get into a BTC discussion here, I was trying to focus on your claims about 1A. I think this is another false claim; the government chooses who they do business with all the time--there's a contract bidding process, there's affirmative action, etc. etc. The government simply can't tell us whom we can do business with (as long as they're also Americans).
It's the only way you can buy a 4chan pass for example
>The problem with this is that we'd lose lots of the tools we have to fight organized crime
Well right now we have bitcoin where there is high anonymity and the government has no power over. In a government payment system they would have the power to freeze accounts and track transactions. I don't see how that's a worse system in regards to fighting crime.
>I was trying to focus on your claims about 1A
You completely misunderstood my original claim and went on a tangent bringing up common talking points. As if it were a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the words "corporate censorship" and "first amendment" in the same paragraph. I'm still not sure that you understand.
Sure, I said "It's way, way more likely I can just use another credit card company, a debit card, Venmo/Cash App/PayPal". There are zillions of products, you named one for which there's very little demand, it looks like we agree.
> Well right now we have bitcoin where there is high anonymity and the government has no power over.
At least the US government regulates BTC. Lots of people have been arrested for violating finance laws re: BTC. The US could easily outlaw BTC or mandate further regulation. BTC is also not at all anonymous, the only thing that makes it "anonymous" is a tumbler.
> In a government payment system they would have the power to freeze accounts and track transactions. I don't see how that's a worse system in regards to fighting crime.
> You completely misunderstood my original claim...
Yeah, sorry again I wanted to dispute your 1A claims. Insofar as your idea of nationalizing a payment infrastructure and using a blockchain, I guess that's fine. I broadly think most things don't make sense as markets, and in democratic societies people should nationalize almost everything. However, I don't think blockchain should be involved because it's generally junk tech. It's like, yet again a normal database would be just fine.
What worries me more are some "inhuman" traits in cryptocurrencies. Most notable is one where if your crypto gets stolen, there is no standard way to "enforce the justice" by catching the thief, and give the money back to the rightful holder. This is something very non-intuitive and I doubt majority of people would accept this model.
I agree, there is literally not a single wide spread us beyond the aforementioned.
But seriously, what's the difference?
You simply don’t understand what is that energy used for. It’s definitely not for processing transactions.
Your understanding of how it all works is simply flawed.
Energy is required to satisfy difficulty requirement, which has to do with chain security, not with transaction processing.
When people say "transactions cost X amount to process", they mean "in the current state of bitcoin", not in the past when there were very few transaction validators. The more transaction validators (typically called "miners") there are, the higher the cost of validating a transaction, due to Bitcoin's difficulty scaling.
I'm not sure why you separate out chain security from transaction validation and treat them as separate, when the chain security is there to protect against invalid transactions. It's sort of the entire point of it.
there are only so many miners (and so much energy spent) because security of bitcoin is what gives it value. so when people say "transactions cost X amount to process" they are saying something non-sensical, because it's not transactions that cost, it's security of those transactions.
it's important to separate, because there are many kinds of transactions in bitcoin ecosystem with various security characteristics that land anywhere from very low to on-chain settlement with multiple confirmations.
Logically wrong, but let's follow the reasoning.
Let's assume Bitcoin transactions were indeed not secure (and thus, according to you, costing little energy).
- Would these unsafe-but-cheap transactions still be considered "Bitcoin transactions" in the way that we know them? - Would these unsafe-but-cheap transactions fulfill the requirements that Bitcoin has in place for itself? - Would an unsafe-but-cheap Bitcoin still be a great option in your eyes to replace the worldwide financial system?
If you agree with all these statements and their corollaries, I can follow you in saying "Bitcoin transactions do not cost energy".
You are creating a false dichotomy: security is an integral component of bitcoin transactions, and if security costs, transactions cost as well. You cannot just summon it away and pretend it is unrelated to the nature of Bitcoin transactions itself, when in fact it is one of its largest selling points.
that would be true if only on-chain settlements would count as transactions in BTC ecosystem. there are more ways to exchange BTC with security landing anywhere between very low and on-chain settlement.
thing is, that it's not even transactions that have security, it's blocks. energy is spent to make sure that it's expensive to override/rollback blocks. and it's true that blocks exist to assert ordering of on-chain settlements, but it's not true to claim that there is 1-1 correspondence between on-chain settlements and transactions.
each on-chain settlement can embed trillions of bitcoin transactions (in colloquial sense, exchanges of an asset). what does that do to your "energy per tx" metric?
perpetrator in this case being people who want to secure their assets via energy expenditure. if bitcoin disappears - exactly the same amount of energy will be used because the cat is out of the bag - satoshi showed the world how asset security can be expressed as energy expenditure and for as long as there is a demand on the market for that kind of security, energy will be spent.
The statement is essentially "guns are bad, more guns means more death, less guns means less death" which is far from nonsensical independently with how much you agree with it or not.
Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins.
saying that it is the security requirements that waste energy is like saying that bullets are the real culprits not guns: they go hand in hand. Bitcoin without security is no bitcoin at all.
It is technically feasible to have bitcoin with no security just like you can have an army with rifles and no bullets.
In both cases obviously the root cause is people, we still haven't found out neither our lucertoloid overlords nor the simulators to blame, so it is lapalissian: "people are the cause of people's action" but it is not a particularly useful rebuttal to many arguments.
That is not proof that bitcoin uses energy, in fact bitcoin only does about 2k on chain settlements every 10 minutes, and it has been like that for a decade, but energy usage has grown multiple orders of magnitude over that time period. Obviously energy is used for something other than transactions.
many people claim that eventually Bitcoin will be able to be extremely power efficient (with the lightning network and whatnot), I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy.
you are clearly more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than me so if your position is that the internal operation called "transaction" nodes perform consumes a negligible amount of energy I have no qualms with it.
but I believe I have overwhelming external evidence that the operation called transaction by the laypeople users of the network to transfer ownership and grow the blockchain in any meaningful way under the dynamic consensus model uses lots of energy by design.
Edit: upon reflection I feel like what you are saying is that the nodes "consume" zero energy, but that I as the Bitcoin use am asking them to burn energy to produce a more secure block that will be better accepted on the blockchain. So the operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value. I you are arguing this I can see how you could say that in good faith, I would still think that is a completely backward opinion
they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchanges. same as interbank settlements - done once a day, represent millions or billions of individual transactions. what does that do to your energy / tx metric?
> but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy.
transferring doesn't, securing it against an attack does.
> operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value
that's exactly right, people that choose transacting on bitcoin chain do so knowing that they pay for certain level of security and you can see it from the correlation between bitcoin price and bitcoin hashrate. it's a system with many feedback loops that self-balances at a level of security that is demanded by the market.
you may think it's backward opinion but i appreciate that you recognize i'm not arguing in bad faith.
Not at all. The efficiency of the network is intentionally degraded such that the rate of Bitcoin transactions remains constant despite the increased energy use. You are assuming that the energy is being spent for some tangible benefit, and drawing conclusions from that assumption. I would say that the energy is being wasted, with the sole result being a receipt showing how much electricity has been thrown away.
I don’t assume, I know what it’s being used for - security against chain overrides/rollbacks.
Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure.
It's the bankers who have jets, mansions and yachts, not the bitcoiners.
Edit to clarify:
Not that riches is somehow "wrong" - it's just that with major value comes major costs, which in practice mean major energy usage.
Why does the currency have anything to do with the wealth of the bankers.
Bitcoin is, as far as i know, a fiat currency too. The value depends on the believe (demand-supply) of the people. You accepting it as means of payment gives it value.
The reason bankers and others have yachts are interests, Investmens, tax avoidance schemes and so on. Nothing Bitcoin solves. The issue is a political one and how we do business and laws.
One is literally supporting the world and the other is used by a few million people as a speculative asset, money laundering scheme or to buy drugs online.
And on top of that you're wrong...
And please explain how my question is ignorant but the stance you're taking isn't?
Bitcoin isn’t using any energy, bitcoin is a marketplace where security of financial asset is represented in terms of energy expenditure.
You may not like how much energy is spent on maintaining security, but it’s not bitcoin that necessitates it, it’s the market.
Bitcoin opened a Pandora’s box by showing the world how it can be done and now if people say they want an attacker to take 1gigawatt to overtake the network then that’s what will be spent to protect against such attack. With or without bitcoin.
> If you made a Bitcoin miner that is two times more efficient - it wouldn’t lead to reduction in energy use, it would lead to increase in difficulty requirement
this is not considered problematic for something meant to replace current army-based currency. It points toward a direction where the economy becomes a zero-sum game.
Security of assets is understood to be best effort and preventive measures are well known to be unreliable (often replaced by inefficient punitive measures).
Bitcoin strives to build a trustless economy and thus its operation has far greater costs (fraud prevention with usual money generally costs proportionally with fraud attempts, while bitcoin is constantly tuned to 100% prevention).
In a more fair comparison we should compare the cost of all the world police + law enforcement + armies to the cost of mining energy + mining hardware and even given conservative estimates of corruption it isn't clear which side would be better under the total cost metric.
We could stop here and consider bitcoin an (almost) infallible trustless economy based on burning commodities compared to our usual fallible economy based on trust and force.
Personally I fell that this comparison suggest that bitcoin _should_ remain like it is today, relatively small with little influence on the world as a whole but readily available to who might need its peculiar service.
Bitcoin
Currently, the answer is a little over $6: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... That number has been over $50 on occasion.