Comment by pintxo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pintxo | Hacker News Reader

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> Both the Eurosystem TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) and alternatives such as blockchain were proven capable of processing more than 40,000 transactions per second. The experiments also suggested that architectures combining centralised and decentralised elements are possible.

Sounds like they are evaluating to make Bank accounts obsolete?

Sidenotes:

> Experiments were conducted in the four following areas: the digital euro ledger; privacy and anti-money laundering; limits on digital euro in circulation; end-user access while not connected to the internet and facilitating inclusiveness with appropriate devices. No major technical obstacles were identified to any of the assessed design options.

I am interested to hear about a system providing privacy and anti-money-laundering capabilities at the same time. Aren't they mutually exclusive?

> According to these experiments, a digital euro core infrastructure would be environmentally friendly: for the architectures that were tested, the power used to run tens of thousands of transactions per second is negligible compared with the energy consumption of crypto-assets such as bitcoin.

Bitcoins power usage per transaction is outrageous, if they choose this as their benchmark, it sounds like their transactions are quite power hungry compared to the status quo?

It is only outrageous if you don't understand why we spend the energy on security. Decentralization is an expensive endeavor. Centralized solutions are generally cheaper in every way. Bitcoiners believe that energy is essential for the security of the chain, to ensure it is decentralized and censorship resistant.

When and if you come to understand this, you see growing energy usage as a good thing, infact, the best thing. It is too simple to think of it as 'energy per tx', this is a bad metric, and illogical. One must consider the energy being used to secure every block and transaction that came before it in an externally observable fashion.

> When and if you come to understand this, you see growing energy usage as a good thing, infact, the best thing.

I guess that depends on whether one values decentralization of currency higher than other topics like e.g. climate change/the survival of the human race/biodiversity etc.

Bitcoin depends on a proof of work, so unsurprisingly energy usage is a natural property of the thing. It is literally a answer to the question which resource is scarce/limited in the digital domain.

The enemies of decentralization will use things like "climate change" as an excuse against PoW. I personally believe that arguments against using energy are ridiculous. Humans will be using 100x the energy we use today in 20 years. However I do believe we should do it as cleanly as possible! Solar, Wind, Geothermal -- all good! Trying to limit how humans spend energy is like trying to dictate what they will eat for lunch. All we can do is generate that energy cleanly, safely.

Energy usage itself should be an orthogonal issue to climate change -- indeed, for the survival of human race we need to spend lots of energy, as cleanly as possible!

Your statement frames this, as if there wasn't extensive studies done precisely on these questions. It is a very comforting believe that we just can make our energy systems greener, our houses/machines more efficient, spend energy however we like and we somehow manage to maintain a liveable planet or reach our (quite unambitious) climate goals, but it is also wrong. And I really wish it wouldn't be.

Sorry for not having the time to cite some studies here, but I assure you that your statement sounds overly optimistic or maybe even naive to anybody who has insight into current climate science.

If a wallet is issued by government and you are the only one that can see the amounts, then government can ask for a view key with which they can confirm your balance.

This way there’s no way for anyone to store digital euros outside of government issued wallets.

I guess you could also do zero knowledge proofs to allow more privacy preserving queries compared to a view key.

But currently it is certainly possible to keep amounts and transactions private while at the same time have mechanism where a third party can inspect the true details but not require privacy preserving keys.

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