Bitcoin has a max throughput of 7 transactions per second. It's utter lunacy to suggest that it could function as a currency for a country.
This will only end in tears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#2021_adoptio...
https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1435197879795212291?r...
I am not surprised to see hyperbole like this, but i'm disappointed that they are so routinely upvoted. I've personally used bitcoin for sending money across borders (for legitimate purposes) and never for drugs or money laundering.
Apologies for my reactivity, but i think highly of the HN community and get deeply frustrated that this sort of ignorant hyperbole is peddled and supported.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
edit: typos
https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1435197879795212291?r...
Also. Lightning network can give unreliable transaction costs ( eg. When sending to an unknown wallet)
It's weird that everyone is supporting an off chain solution. It kinda defeats the purpose of Bitcoin in general.
While Blockchain can be valuable, Bitcoin is not.
Note : i did hold btc until late 2017.
That El Salvador is adopting it refutes your second claim.
Then there's the lightning network which increases the transaction throughput.
Everything is going to be okay.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
I struggle to find hand wringing about bitcoin's energy consumption as anything but naive or sour grapes.
Society is never going to voluntarily reverse total energy consumption. Either price bitcoin mining out of the market, or focus on voting with your wallet and regulating carbon emissions at the energy production level. Arguing about how people should spend their money on energy is a waste of political energy.
Millions of people believe that bitcoin is worth the energy costs. "Too much" energy usage is entirely subjective.
This would be true only if electrical capacity were completely inelastic. It is not. Electrical capacity is relatively slow to respond to changes in demand, sure, but it does respond.
Consider the scale of the increase in electrical capacity that will be needed to fully move the US alone to EVs. That change will not have a hard cost cap, either - people are willing to pay quite a bit to operate their automobiles, and the current cost to operate an EV is substantially less than the cost of operating a similar ICE vehicle. Bitcoin mining does have a hard cost cap: ([Bitcoin price] * 6.25 + [Bitcoin price] * [~10 minutes of transaction fees]). In about 2024, that 6.25 will drop to 3.125.
Ultimately Bitcoin mining is driven by economic forces, and those same forces are the same that control the scale of power generation worldwide.
You can see Bitcoin’s energy use as being used only to secure the network; I see it as securing the network and driving incentives for the development and expansion of electrical infrastructure.
The question is not if there is a factor that is positive, but whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Every source I have seen is confident they do not.
The claim that consumption of renewable energy is equivalent to consumption of fossil fuels, because that renewable energy would have otherwise offset fossil fuel consumption I don't agree with though.
Do you think they are wrong? By how much?
I’ll go a step further - Bitcoin’s energy use is centralized around the cheapest sources due to economic forces. If renewables are cheaper at scale than fossil fuels, Bitcoin’s energy use could in fact become a net positive for the world.
To put it another way, the profitability of mining is directly proportional to the cost of electricity compared to the global average. This should drive the development of less expensive forms of energy over time. Even if fossil fuels are cheapest today (and I’m not certain that’s true), there is an ongoing cost floor due to it relying upon extraction, processing, transportation, and burning. Solar, for example, has a higher capital cost but presumably a lower ongoing $/kWh.
Finally, ~5% (2.2-13.3%) of electricity generated in the US is lost due to transmission from the point of generation to the point of consumption. India loses 20-30%. [0] Bitcoin mining, given its high power consumption, should specifically drive decentralized power generation. This in turn could help make such technology available for other uses, resulting in a less centralized, more robust power grid.
0: http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
I divested from all PoW coins except ETH in expectation that PoS will be completed soon.
It is if it spurs development of the underlying tech.
Pornography isn’t necessary, but because it was consumed in volume we ended up with ubiquitous household VCRs in the 80s and 90s.
How does that work? For example, if leave a lightbulb on all day long, does that spur adoption or development of renewable energy sources?
Breaking a window isn’t going to be a net positive. If everyone breaks a window and replaces it, every week, at some point it’s highly likely that a more efficient process for window replacement will be developed.
Again, though - we’re not talking about increasing the overall economic output. We’re talking about spending resources to incentivize technological progress.
I’m also not saying it’s a good idea to start doing it because it’ll surely work. I’m only saying that it may well end up having positive effects outside of the primary use case.
Bitcoin miners can respond to energy price in minutes, where most industry is hours, sometimes days (for capacity that already exists - months to years for capacity that does not). Stop/start costs are very low, so its easy to run only in profitable energy conditions.
And let's ignore the actual criminals who legally counterfeit US dollars to finance war all around the world.
I've not heard of a legal counterfeiter. How's that work?
The rest still stands.