The Stacks 2.0 blockchain implementation in Rust
github.com
github.com
It also pretty liberally uses the phrase “layer 1” despite relying on another blockchain, Bitcoin, for “security.” Seems more like a layer 1.5 blockchain or something.
Your dislike of it doesn’t change laws of physics.
It's true, but it's irrelevant: we don't need a decentralized trustless digital "money" ledger any more than we need non-radioactive solid fuel power plants.
It would be nice to have decentralized trust-less digital money, but Bitcoin doesn't work as money, and it's not that nice compared to its no good very bad terrible energy waste.
Edit: oh, and no, it doesn’t waste anything, all the energy is used with a purpose and maximum efficiency.
A few people shouldn't get to use as much energy as a modern industrial country of millions for any purpose that only serves them. And calling this "maximum efficiency" when Visa can process the same amount of transactions on a few watts is quite comedic.
Bitcoin is a speculative bubble + illegal goods exchange token. No more.
> Visa can process the same amount of transactions on a few watts
comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network.
> Bitcoin is a speculative bubble
Bitcoin is speculative investment for sure, doesn't make you right about everything else.
> illegal goods exchange token
very much legal.
Bitcoin uses energy to secure transaction processing. Every node in the network must prove that it has spent at least this much money/effort on electricity (the exact computational requirements to prove this are constantly adjusted upwards if the algorithm/hardware is becoming too efficient). This works as the signature of a block, which the miner applies to a block that it has verified contains only correct transactions.
Now, the Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks, and each transaction has a size of its own - so being able to process N blocks per second (limited by the necessary work imposed by the burden of PoW) is directly proportional to a number of transactions per second that the Bitcoin network can confirm.
Visa does the same by updating its ledger, roughly - no need to for the extreme cost of PoW, since you just trust the ledger.
Lightning is a separate technology, with different guarantees. It has definitely not been tested on Visa's scale, so any claims about its scalability should be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees of transaction validity. In fact, if a Lightning node goes offline, its trivial to double spend bitcoin on the Lightning network - with the only risk that you may lose all the bitcoin you added to the channel if the node later comes back online and verifies this before you can cancel. It's also trivial to do denial of service attacks on a Lightning node, as you can always advertise channels then drop them, reverting all transactions at little cost to you.
> very much legal.
There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC.
Note that some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire - such as donations to wikileaks.
Visa doesn't do "the same", specifically, Bitcoin does what Visa is doing but in a decentralized, trustless and permissionless manner. That's where the cost of security comes from and why there is no waste of energy.
> Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees
lightning allows to make tradeoff between liquidity and transaction cost/reachability, but settlement is still done on bitcoin, so bitcoin's security guarantees apply.
and yes, it's possible to DoS and possible to lose money if the node isn't operated correctly, it's emerging technology on the extreme bleeding edge of largest financial revolution in hundreds of years. give it time.
> There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC.
irrelevant.
> some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire
also irrelevant, but i'll point out that purchasing illegal good/service with bitcoin doesn't make bitcoin illegal same as purchasing it with usd wouldn't make usd illegal. bizarre that i even need to spell this out.
As someone who would be fine in recyclable coveralls a la The Dispossessed, I think clothes drying is a waste. Thankfully I'm not the arbiter of what's useful to everyone.
What's the ratio of people?
Clothes dryers in the US alone (5% of humans) use the same order of magnitude electricity as global bitcoin mining. This claim is based on this back of the envelope estimate from the guy who led the decentralized identity project at Microsoft, ION, which also uses bitcoin as a foundational layer, https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/1361342448014778369
And these US clothes dryers are probably responsible for much more carbon emissions, because where people choose to live doesn't necessarily correspond with the cheapest or greenest energy sources, unlike bitcoin mining which is ludicrously mobile.
A paper about the wasteful energy usage of dryers:
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf
On average, Americans dry five loads of laundry a week, spending about
$100 a year to power a typical electric dryer, or $40 a year to operate a
similar natural gas dryer. In total, dryers now represent a $9 billion
annual national energy bill – about 6% of residential electricity consumption
and 2% of residential natural gas consumption. They consume as much
electricity per year – 60 billion kWh – as the entire state of
Massachusetts, and are responsible for 40 million metric tons of annual
carbon dioxide emissions. By any measure, their energy use and
environmental impact are large enough to be worth doing something about.
Of course that does mean we should stop with _both_.
That's absurd. Energy use is not the problem. Burning carbon fuel we dug out of the ground and spewing the carbon into the atmosphere is the problem.
I want a future where no human has to waste time thinking about drying their clothes, because that's a more interesting world.
I want a future of abundant and cheap energy. Why don't you think we can get there?
We are talking about drying clothes. The sun (and wind) _is_ abundant and free for at least some part of year (yes, depending on your location). I'm not talking about not using dryers any more at all, but that it is quite easy to not always use one. And most people in 'developed nations' still don't use one.
I've just found some data for Germany: 43% of households in Germany have had a dryer in 2021.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/516868/umfrag...
In the UK the numbers are higher: 58% of households in 2018
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289140/tumble-dryers-in-...
Numbers from the 90s:
USA: 72% Belgium: 39% UK: 32% Netherlands: 27% Switzerland: 27% West Germany: 17% France: 12% Italy: 10% Spain: 5%
https://www.infoplease.com/world/economic-statistics/percent...
> Energy use is not the problem.
Not necessarily directly, no. But somebody needs to build and maintain 'stuff' that generates, 'transports' and uses this energy. So in the end there is a need for more of many other resources too.
Currently, there is no path to generating abundant and cheap energy without fossil fuels, and fossil fuels only seem cheap because they're not pricing in global warming.
All other forms of generating power are more expensive overall, or much more limited by other issues. Solar is very cheap, but having enough solar + storage to power a northerly country for a bad winter is decidedly not. Not to mention, the cheap storage solutions (batteries) don't actually scale up if you want to move entirely to solar + wind (there simply isn't enough lithium in the world, or at least not enough mined per year to achieve 100% solar + wind in a few decades).
Even that's generous because households often consist of multiple people with separate financial systems, so they'd be sharing the dryer metrics, but multiplying the Bitcoin wallet metric. That could make the ratio already much higher at 3:1 or 4:1
That's not even getting into peak hour timings. A financial network needs to run all day, you can incentivize people to run dryers at off peak hours quite easily.
Lastly, either way it's just whataboutism. We should be reducing all energy waste, including dryer usage, not pointing to it and saying "well why don't you care about that, therefore mine is fine"
All waste is bad.
Is it wasteful to have a 1000W gaming PC that only one person can use at a time when a Nintendo Switch uses a tiny fraction of the power and can support up to 4 players?
I think it is, because I don't personally value PC gaming. But I also don't think it's right for me to dictate how people spend their money (energy allotment) just because I think it's a wasteful use of energy compared to other things they could be doing.
Or are you just a hypocrite that will readily use an unnecessarily energy wasteful product for some light convenience while berating something that uses energy that other people, but not you, consider to be valuable.
Or do you want to have an actual adult conversation about how we can actually solve GHG emissions by properly internalizing the costs of polluting via these dirty sources, rather than wasting political and social capital on a thing that uses <1% of the worlds energy, and if it disappeared tomorrow would have almost zero effect on our planet's climate trajectory?
Also, in modern city we are starting to live densely. Some people live in 1 or 2 rooms and they don't have accessibility to dry their clothes. And drying clothes in room has its own problem like latent heat issue.
We should dry cloth by hanging it if we can. If people aren't doing it, then I think we should discourage it. It just becomes essential during rainy or winter season where we can't dry clothes. And with modern dense urban style of living, which I disdain, has made people dependence on such tools because there is less space for gardening, drying clothes etc… And drying cloth by hanging require rotation otherwise color may fade etc.
The problem with bitcoin is its incentive to burn energy. Miners are competition to burn energy. While drying clothes, we aren't in competition with each other. One is game, the other is not. That's a big difference, IMHO.
Yes, traditional financial system is also bad that it requires loads of server etc. to maintain. But again, there is no incentive to burn energy just to win probability games.
How about we acknowledge that bitcoin is really problematic. Just like with everything, it has some miniscule benefits like it provides a way to live in certain countries like Argentina. But, just like with engineering difficulties, we should be able to weight its advantage and disadvantage. Bitcoin is clearly a bane for this world.
If you had compared drying clothes with 10x energy and increment of it as people dry more using machines, it would be analogous, but as of now your argument doesn't hold water.
There's simply too much to consider to know for sure, and the experiment of making a better version of money is probably at least worth as much as drying clothes, especially when you consider it's as equally opt-in.
I believe it is. Replace BTC with an identical system except with a reward curve that isn't logarithmic and you have a strictly superior system for the world, except that early adopters no longer make off with gazillions of dollars.
What's stopping you?
If they aren't building an EVM compatible chain, they are going to fall quickly behind in the space and never recover
No reason EVM can't evolve to be less cumbersome
Stacks is pushing all these CityCoins (or vice versa, hard to tell) to municipalities and to gullible mayors who are trying to seem fintech trendy and it is embarrassing. None of these coins have a demand system, it is just supply inflation exclusively.
Its just too bad that this less optimal experience is going to burn so many municipalities as their first exposure to crypto.
Stacks 2.0 is a layer-1 blockchain that connects to Bitcoin
for security and enables decentralized apps and predictable
smart contracts.
By hashing the state of whatever project every - say - hour on the Bitcoin chain, it would be nicely finalized with no way to be tampered with, right?
Also, more legit projects actually DO use bitcoin as it's base layer. See Microsoft's ION project, the bitcoin lighting network (just rolled out in CashApp), and the upcoming RGB protocol.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1geg5HHgDO-ht0u6CSTHp...
There is the Bitcoin and UTXO ecosystem. These exist in silos of each other and everything else.
There is the Cosmos/Tindermint ecosystem. These typically have some form of interoperability with each other.
There is the EVM ecosystem. These have high degrees of interoperability and where the most development occurs.
There are other niches that are mostly development dead ends, or possibly just completed. Won't name them as its not the point:
All of the above rely on low to medium performance hardware and internet infrastructure, and base the idea of consensus relying on reaching most of the other nodes that also have poor infrastructure.
Outside of that category there are a few that tweak the concept by raising the performance bar on all nodes.
Solana simply has extremely high performance requirements.
Radix follows that model while simply going multithreaded.
People often re-launch blockchains that follow one of the above concepts, with the purpose of having a different distribution of the cryptocurrency associated with it. For example, many people don't like that Ethereum or Solana have a large group of holders from prior investment pre-launch. So someone would just launch another one without the pre-allocation, hoping their new one gains traction.
Anyway, looking at just this sector does exclude many other potentially interesting ones. There isn't a good way to get a summary but fortunately lots of youtubers give summaries these days, so you can watch something once a week. The sad thing about that approach is that it is easy to tell what communities someone is in or influenced by, based on the crypto networks they talk about or have heard of.