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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

> I’d rather folks bought BTC

Why? Presumably because you're long BTC. With all due respect, you make a lot of handwavy comments about ERC-20 scams and I agree with you, but aside from a highly speculative investment, BTC is nothing.

It failed as a currency. It failed as a unit of account. Now the narrative has shifted to "store of value" which only anyone without an understanding of what that means could say.

What does BTC do that DOGE doesn't do? Or any other scam coin? It's all speculation, you have happen to find one more acceptable (and it so happens the one you're probably invested in).

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It’s the energy. Energy usage means security. ArcticBull will argue it’s bad, I’ll argue it’s the best thing ever. Follow the energy.

Why has it failed? Works fine for me and many others…

I'd argue that it has no negative feedback mechanism. More security isn't always useful. There's a reason you don't wear 25 seatbelts in a car or drive a tank to work. At some point more security is ineffective, and then eventually detrimental.

Yes, more energy is more security in this case - which of course you can obtain in alternative ways. But so is driving a tank. So is living in bubble wrap in a missile silo in the middle of an open field. We don't do those things, though, because we have negative feedback mechanisms. Bitcoin does these things (analogous versions) because it doesn't.

And as for why it's failed as an L1, it set out to be a digital cash. 2-3tx/sec isn't enough to support a mid-sized Costco or a flea market let alone a global currency. 1 transaction per person on earth today would take over 75 years and cost 1/3 of a trillion dollars, and 100% of the remaining block reward. It's like a soviet-era phone line - better put in your order early, I guess.

I don’t think a negative feedback cycle could exist that doesn’t introduce a huge vulnerability to a Nakamoto consensus. It is the pure externality of the metric (as opposed to chain balances or state) that makes it work in a trustless and censorship resistant way. How does one even decide a reasonable “limit” to hash rate. I want sufficient security such that when new power generation tech comes online it does not threaten the history of the chain. If we have to drive a tank to work, ok, better than getting hit by stray rifle fire on the highway.

I think the reality is no L1 can scale to digital cash for the everyone on planet to allow L1 txs. we need more layers and more innovation in transaction aggregation and transaction primitives, such as covenants.

Where we don't see eye to eye is I don't think we should unleash a grey-goo esque power virus onto the world. The obvious reason is we have one now, we're using 0.1% of all the earth's power, and generating as much e-waste as a entire country to write a few hundred bytes into a tiny database once in a while. Work that can easily be done on a single raspberry pi.

L2+ don't offer the same guarantees as a L1, and once you drop any of the guarantees the whole thing becomes basically worthless.

So using the same information as you, we arrive at different conclusions: I don't think this solution is viable, good, worthwhile or should exist. I don't think if new power technology comes online a good use is making Bitcoin guzzle it like a dog at a sprinkler. I think China has the moral high ground on this one.

We will probably be arguing as I build my dyson sphere. 0.1% is nothing. :-p

The goo scenario is inevitable, either build some kind of antigoo shield tech or be consumed. Complaining about the goo is irrelevant to the goo.

I very much disagree that was a moral high ground decision — it was an authoritarian move to crush opposition to its financial dystopia, the e-CNY, and prevent its people from escaping the all seeing eye.

Everything you say makes sense within the context of Bitcoin's proof-of-work paradigm, that there aren't any reasonable solutions to these problems within it (there's no good way to add negative feedback to lower the hashrate, there's no good way to calculate a better lower hashrate), but it misses that there are alternative paradigms like proof-of-stake that avoid the problem of too much energy use entirely. Once proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies become more popular and fully prove the technique works at large scale, I hope other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin follow along.

Sorry, Bitcoin will never be PoS. PoS doesn’t offer anything near the same security model, censorship resistance or decentralization. It is not a viable alternative for Bitcoin.

Proof-of-stake has much more ability to enact censorship resistance (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/06/the-problem-of-censorsh...) than proof-of-work. PoW imposes huge entry barriers by restricting mining to those who can build and then operate expensive mining rigs, which are resources not equally available even to people with the same amount of money and may be monopolized (how many competitive mining rig manufacturers are there, and how many countries do they operate in?); PoS makes participating a much more level playing field by removing dependence on physical and monopolizable resources.

PoW does have sheer simplicity and a proven record of working on its side, but the idea that whatever upsides to PoW over PoS that exist are and will stay worth more than 0.5% of global electricity production seems extremely biased.

> Energy usage means security

Umm.. No.

"More energy = More security" is a slogan now being used to scam non-technical users to buy into the crypto ecosystem, but that does not make any sense if you are willing to think about for a second. Also very convenient that this slogan started getting popular when BTC started getting bad press for energy usage.

BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.

I am not a non technical user, and I know how this works.

Btw, you are not correct. The entire history of the chain and balances is protected by the hashrate. With sufficient energy you can rewrite history. This is because every block secures the blocks before it. Yeah checkpoints can be used to force a known sync point, but this vastly undermines the decentralization of the chain.

>BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.

I think you're drawing an unnecessary line here. Attacking consensus is attacking the value stored in the accounts. Attacking consensus by using your own miners to pull off a double-spend can directly take value back out of accounts. Attacking consensus by doing a perpetual 51% attack can block people from using their accounts, decreasing the real monetary value of them.

Drawing the lines so that the "security" of a cryptocurrency only refers to the security of the public-key cryptography involved in it is useless. It ignores practically all of the important design considerations and attack vectors in the system. Public-key cryptography is just one component of a cryptocurrency.

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