Bitcoin Block 840000
mempool.space
mempool.space
Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.
Back in my earliest days, a CPU could mine bitcoin (it was just a check/enable box in the preferences).
HODL, erryday, frens.
I shut it down in July of that year because it was raising my electric bill by like $100/month. Possibly the biggest financial mistake of my life.
Of course this means you can only earn half of the year. Mine ejects its heat under desk toes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_bitco...
There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.
According to The Atlantic, the US military alone counts for 5.5% of global carbon emissions.
The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.
Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.
Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.
You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.
So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.
Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.
Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.
Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.
As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.
Icelander here, our main power generation is from hydroelectric not geothermal, it's a common misconception.
Also most of the mining here has moved on to easier places like Sweden and Norway. And for cooling / humidity reasons not solely electrical prices.
It was also just foreign owned companies most Icelandic folk don't like it here (I think it makes good use of our remoteness and shit latency however)
Geothermal always seemed to me, it's a pretty difficult source of energy to extract for factories n stuff. Like, a factory can melt steel, but no one wants the ground he stands on to melt as well.
Hydroelectric is a much easier source to work with. Humans have used rivers as a source of energy for thousands of years.
Hows that help carbon emissions?
Just moving bits around seems like a lot easier, efficient and cheaper than moving physical stuff around.
Edit: bad calculation fix
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.
It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.
The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).
What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.
Instead, people typically dismiss the small change they could bring into reality, and take the easier route, like talking about how big change is needed, and change nothing.
At some point you’re fighting human nature.
Or gold mining?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi...
Compare this to the linked wiki article:
> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.
So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.
There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.
Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?
Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?
I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.
Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.
Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.
Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.
If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/gold-rush-rot-lasting-environmental...
Most use of gold is speculative as a store of value, some is decorative, and a little bit is actually used to build products.
> Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it.
Of course, for transactions. But people don't want to use national currencies as a store of value. For good reasons.
If we could replace gold with bitcoin as the store of value, it'd be a net positive.
Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
What is money if it's not proof of work?
“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”
The same goes for gold. If only used for jewelry and industrial applications we wouldn’t need to strip mine so much of it.
Yes, better off without it, but it really makes no difference whatsoever...
Bitcoin passes reward "halvening" milestone at block 840000
You could sort of argue that the halvening concept is common-ish knowledge for tech people with passing familiarity, but hardly anyone outside the crypto space knows the significance of the number 840000.
It's not a superpower. It's just awareness of the need to provide context like you've described.
If you knew that inflation was going to rapidly increase, the smartest thing you could do would be to take out as many loans as you can and buy usable assets, like a car and a warehouse full of canned beans.
Imagine you take out a loan to buy a car. Tomorrow, hyperinflation happens and the currency has lost 99% of its value. You can now pay off your car with a can of beans.
Inflation is also an avenue for a government to steal the excess value produced by an economy over time. Probably just a coincidence though.
What's the incentive here? "The government" (unless we're talking monarchies or dictatorships?) usually isn't some monolithic, self-interested entity capable of benefiting from things like "stealing" via inflation. Who's the evil mustache-twister behind all this?
The way this is usually trotted out makes it sound like Nancy Pelosi—because there's almost always a Nancy Pelosi hot take—is siphoning $20's out of IRS revenue streams, and laughing her way to the bank.
Social security, Medicare, etc are indexed to inflation.
Tax brackets are indexed to inflation.
So when the government needs more money, it can create it by paying less to elderly, poor, and sick people, or taking more taxes without the population aware.
There are better ways of calculating inflation. But they allow less shenanigans.
You know what would really make it hard to siphon money off to a black budget project, or to the business of a politician’s brother-in-law that gets the contract? A deflationary asset where there’s a cryptographically secure immutable ledger of all transactions.
I’m not sure how Bitcoin is simultaneously completely transparent, bringing daylight to big bad government fraud and also a privacy-protecting, regulatory circumvention tool. These things seem at odds.
If scam artists and criminals can obfuscate their transactions sufficiently to avoid being tracked down, I’m confident any half-competent government could do the same for its black budget spending.
And if the answer is an obvious "yes", then the whole thing about "immutable ledgers stop governments from spending money sketchily!" is obviously incorrect.
The government corruption bitcoin stops is really bank corruption, but the central banks (including the fed) work hand in hand with the governments (control them in fact), so it's a kind of joint effort.
The corruption works like this:
When the Fed was formed in the early 20th century, it came to an agreement with the government to be able to print off unlimited amounts of money, providing it was in the form of loans and under the agreement that it would destroy the money when the loans were repaid. All under the Keynesian guise of "elasticity of money". The fly in the ointment is that the banks can charge interest on this money they print - if they didn't it would be a free-for all, because interest is what disincentivises debt.
What this led to was the doubling of the money supply every decade for the last 100 years, as the banks are incentivised to lend as much money as possible.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Each time you double the number of currency units, the total value of the money is diluted across double the number of units and so the value of each unit is halved. If you do this too quickly, people lose confidence in the money and you fall into hyperinflation, but if you throttle it just right, they don't catch on. It helps that the value of consumables (cars, food, toothbrushes etc) goes down by around 5%/year due to technology-driven manufacturing efficiency gains. This means that they can devalue the currency by 5% each year without prices going up. They then devalue it by a further 2% or 3%, simply because they can. This 2% or 3% is the CPI that's reported.
By holding interest rates lower than the free-market rate, banks both gain a monopoly on lending, and also ensure that people are incentivised to take on more and more debt - even though the money is destroyed when an individual debt is repaid, the total debt continuously increases.
The outcome of all this is that every year, the banking system is charging interest on every single dollar, euro, pound etc in existence. And it printed them all out of thin air. This has given it more power than you can even imagine and leads to all kind of evil and corruption. What's the best way to lend money? Start a war. Even better if it goes on for years and you can fund both sides...
It also results in the "Cantillon Effect" - an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the already rich without anyone noticing until it's too late.
This is because the newly printed notes take their value from all the existing currency units i.e. the value in the money in your pocket/bank account/pension/wages is being sucked out into the new notes they print off. You could bury your money in a concrete bunker a mile underground and they can still steal it. If you don't get a 7% nominal pay rise each year, you're actually getting a pay cut.
I highly recommend reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island" by Edward Griffin for all the history and details. This is a global problem.
The message in Bitcoin's genesis block reads "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."
Bitcoin's purpose is to shutdown the central banking scam, and is probably the only thing that can stop global domination by the bankers. Because its supply is hard capped, the more fiat currency the banks print, the more the price of bitcoin goes up. Over time it becomes more and more attractive as storage for large amounts of value. See Thiers and Greshams' laws for the result.
People worry about an AI machine taking over the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4), but its already here in the form of large human systems - an organisation with hive intelligence whose overall reward system is to make as much money as possible and a constraint of keeping the people happy (it does this largely by deception). And we gave this monster a money printer.
I'll leave you with a quote from F.A.Hayek (nobel prize winning economist who wrote "The Road To Serfdom" back in the 40s - he saw this coming):
"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBIidtaUCzs
Also note that buying stocks is only marginally more difficult than opening a bank account, and investing in major index funds via ETFs is almost as good as a term deposit (with minimal long term risk of realising a loss UNLESS you are forced to access the money at some time relatively soon after purchasing).
After you have created the account, buying more is easier than using a BTC ATM.
Given the risk of a) BTC going to 0 and b) being scammed and/or otherwise losing all of your BTC I'd say everday people are much, much better off putting their money in index funds.
Citation needed.
There's I think supposed to only ever be 21 million bitcoin. Bitcoin rewards for mining halve every ~4 years. Eventually they will stop; there will be no new bitcoin.
People will also lose bitcoin; this already happens. Famously, no one knows where ~1m bitcoin supposedly mined by Satoshi are, they are assumed to be permanently out of circulation. So not only is there a cap on maximum bitcoin, and over time less new bitcoin will be injected into circulation, existing bitcoin will also be removed from circulation over time.
This presents a strong incentive to hold bitcoin instead of spending it, since scarce assets become more valuable with increased scarcity. If a bitcoin is likely to be worth more tomorrow than it is today, you're less likely to spend it. Which has the compound effect of reducing bitcoin in circulation further.
This is why people say it's deflationary.
Also ethereum is actually deflationary now without relying on people losing their keys (and being excited about that)
tl;dr: international payments for digital goods using the Lightning Network is (arguably) a valid use for Bitcoin that is not speculation.
I guess with software margins there is a bit more room to move with price fluctuations. For ecommerce though accepting and holding a currency that moves this much could quickly erode the smaller margins.
My guess is that inflation-protection in a 3rd world country is only a very minor reason for Bitcoin ownership, i.e. the vast majority of Bitcoins are owned for different reasons. Which has implications for its future price.
There's value in this, Americans who are long America just hate admitting it.
Greatest heist of the century is the government convincing people that they don't need financial freedom and privacy.
You want to push for reforms to the current system that makes it easier to bring wealth to developing nations then I'd be all on board. To throw out the whole system in favour of something that enables oppression and hoarding of wealth only benefits those who already have power and wealth.
Anarchism sounds great when you think of being free to do whatever you want. It becomes less fun when you remember it also means the freedom to die in a ditch.
I'm not an anarchist by any stretch of the imagination, so to turn it around, "you can fuck all the way off with your strawman characterizations of my personal politics".
Upstack, and far less incendiarily, I merely advocate for alternatives (to the colonialist racist USG /s). Monocrops are as bad in government as they are in food production.
It is much safer and easier to hold than a sack of dollars. Also very easy for remittances.
Great article on Argentina: https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/crypto-argentina-black-m...
If BTC with such a volatility can be considered an inflation hedge, then anything else can be as well. There's no intrinsic guarantee that BTC will keep going up, its protocol only defines the supply and not the demand, hence not its price either.
Actually I'm not convinced that BTC is favored as an inflation hedge instead of even USD-based stablecoins for people with currencies devaluating faster than USD.
Then explain why the US government has confiscated so much of it.
If all of your money is being held by random companies, it's not really your money is it? Cryptocurrencies give you all the autonomy of cash, while still allowing you to send it to anyone over the internet.
That’s the very definition of “taken” isn’t it?
But through multi-sig, time-locked contracts, multiple wallets, bitcoin is more difficult than most.
There you go, was that so hard?
Bitcoin isn’t some magical panacea, the reality is it’s as easily stolen/taken/lost in 99% of cases as anything else.
Sure, there might be some ultra tiny percentage of folks who are truly secure with it, but there is virtually the _same_ number who are ultra secure with other non-bitcoin stored value systems.
Governments have a legal monopoly on the use of force, and they have the means to employ it. If you can access your bitcoin, and a government can access you, that government can access your bitcoin.
You don't have that option with digital fiat, even if you wanted to.
Yes, you could, you just need to acquire the digital fiat anonymously through one of many methods. Then burn all record of it and watch your money disappear the same way as taking it to the grave, just no death required. Or go ahead and die if you must, but you’ll still not prove that Bitcoin is any different or any less “takeable”.
I’d love to be convinced. If I hear a single convincing argument I’ll beat that drum all day alongside you.
But all you’ve given is:
- gambling exists
- “musical chairs”
- cults exist
So, hand-waving. Help me out here.
Bitcoin has value for the same reason that vintage sneakers or Pokemon cards have value; that is there is a fetish for them and thus some belief that at some later time, someone will want to buy it for personal reasons (either due to their own beliefs or sentimentality).
Actual currency, on the other hand, derives its value from the willingness of the issuing sovereign to accept it back in payment of taxes.
Fiat currency holds value because it is backed by a sufficiently large group with guns.
Crypto currency holds value because it is backed by a sufficiently large group with encryption.
Yep that's what I said: payment of taxes.
> Crypto currency holds value because it is backed by a sufficiently large group with encryption.
I disagree. There is no reason for bitcoin to hold its value. Miners expend real resources (which they pay for) to obtain bitcoin because they speculate that someone will pay more for it further down the line.
People buy bitcoin for the same reason.
The price of bitcoin could go to zero without any compromise of the underlying encryption.
The purchasing power of a currency issued by a soevereign can only go to zero as a result of the collapse of sovereignty (ie. no more guns, or being outgunned). This is the very definition of hyper inflation in terms of a currency: when a government cannot provision itself in exchange for that currency.
The greater fool is not required when one asset is inflationary and the other is deflationary. A falling denominator is all you need.
> There is no reason for bitcoin to hold its value.
It holds its value for the same reason as fiat. Because the chance of anyone executing a successful attack on it is prohibitively small.
And if someone does, as you said, then it goes to zero.
In your view, how would bitcoin go to zero without a compromise in encryption?
Everyone realises that it’s worthless and new buyers stop turning up to buy it for more money than the last round of fools
And yet the purchasing power of the dollar has fallen by 99.5% since moving off the gold standard. Bitcoin claims to hedge against this steady decline in value which is caused by money printing.
If you believe they will stop printing money and diluting the value of the dollar, the argument for Bitcoin fails. If not, Bitcoin’s hard supply cap and perfectly inelastic supply when faced with changes in demand make it a compelling hedge.
Betting on a single index even being around in 100 years is risky. Betting on the dollar lasting 100 years is risky. Betting on Bitcoin lasting 100 years is also risky.
I think looking at 5, 10, or 20 time horizons is more practical and I have high confidence that Bitcoin will continue to be the best performing asset on those time horizons.
The reason I said 100 years is because the US went off the gold standard in 1933 (although it had a weird modified version until the 70s).
There are individual stocks that have been around for over 100 years. The Dow Jones has been around since 1884. Stock exchanges have been around since the 1500s.
Indexes that apply to the averages of top, say, 200 stocks in a given country's econonmy will definitely be there in 100 years, absent a collapse so monumental that money itself has no meaning.
Bitcoin is a freakish sideshow by comparison. Might as well buy baseball cards.
The economic theory is that money printing is the primary cause of inflation and bitcoin, as the first purely fungible commodity with a fixed total supply that is perfectly inelastic to demand, is an ideal hedge against inflation.
Imagine if gold went up 100x in price. New gold mines would be opened. People would come forward with their gold jewelry, etc which would increase the supply of gold.
If bitcoin goes up 100x, it’s supply cap and inflation rate would remain unchanged.
If you believe the government or central banks will stop printing money, then the argument for bitcoin collapses.
Instead of finding a company active on both ends (which will have to be a major company like Western Union, with major fees), you can find two separate (potentially local and small, think "coner store money exchanger") entities to get fiat (regular) currency into Bitcoin on one end and out of Bitcoin on the other end. If there is no single company that does business at both your source and destination location/community, there's a good chance you're out of luck.
You have to trust those two exchangers to not defraud you, but these two don't need to trust, or even know, each other.
Of course, other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins etc. would also work for this, but network effect means Bitcoin is the coin where you're most likely to find participants on both ends.
That it'll become the main world reserve asset and suck in all the stored value in the world like a black hole? Then, you're bang on - that's the only reason I hold it.
The gist of it is this: Bitcoin can't perpetually grow faster than world wealth. If we assume, say, 3% inflation-adjusted growth in world wealth, it means that Bitcoin cannot perpetually make more than 3% annually. Stocks, bonds, real-estate don't have this constraint because they pay cash to investors.
At some point in the future, Bitcoin will be down over the last decade while S&P 500 will be up significantly. Bitcoin holders will start to think - wait, why am I holding Bitcoin instead of S&P 500?
Edit: Hacker News says I'm posting too fast so I can't reply to comments below.
Is this a fun thought experiment, or are you immortal?
You may be shocked to learn that GDP growth can't continue perpetually either, under reasonable assumptions:
My belief is that it would be shocking if Bitcoin's market cap got close to gold, because gold has substantial fundamental value (which prevents the price fron collapsing) and a long tradition.
Another reason is that the narrative that Bitcoin's price will at least double or triple won't be believable if Bitcoin gets to 1.5% of world wealth. When hodlers realize that they will not double their money, the rationale for hodling disappears.
If it's a claim about Bitcoin that's not self-evident, give some reasoning behind it.
If you don't understand why bitcoin has fundamental value, then I'd bet you don't understand why gold has either. If you understand why gold has fundamental value, it's self evident why bitcoin has it too (far, far more in fact).
Be specific, it seems like you're deliberately vague because you don't have a strong argument. (And I think I know what's the argument.)
But if you're genuinely interested in learning why bitcoin is fundamentally much better money than gold or fiat, or in fact anything else then I highly recommend listening to at least the first 9 episodes of this podcast series - one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever heard:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2jAZ0x9H0bQFY6wIbQfn...
In fact make that the first 10 - the tenth is called "The Death of Gold"
Example: Why is gold better than fiat currency? Because the government can't print more of it, thereby devaluing all the currency you possess. Sure, there's much more detail than that (on both sides), but the basic proposition can be stated in one sentence.
So if you can't say that for crypto, then it does sound like you don't have a very strong argument.
Why is bitcoin going to suck in all the stored value in the world? Because it's better money than fiat (or gold).
Why is it better money, well to explain that we need to answer the question, "what is money?". And that topic is so broad Robert Breedlove has a 453-epsiode podcast channel discussing the subject.
So please accept the 10 episodes I point you to as a quick summary, carefully selected by myself after 1000's of hours of research into the subject. You're welcome.
My country's currency is much better money than Bitcoin. I can pay basically everywhere with contactless payments, I did this 5 times today and it couldn't be any simpler. I can send money instantly to anyone in my country for free.
Volatility is minimal because the central bank actively tries to minimize it. Bitcoin or gold don't have this stabilizing mechanism, so they will always have worse volatility (assuming a responsible central bank).
Losses due to inflation are negligible if you have your money in a savings account and use other assets (stocks, bonds, real estate) for long-term saving.
If you want to use Bitcoin for long-term savings, the competitor is not fiat but stocks / bonds / real estate. And I don't see a good argument for Bitcoin. In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks are guaranteed to outperform Bitcoin given some weak assumptions.
You've been indoctrinated well. Here's an explanation I made on what the central bank is really doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114857
> In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks are guaranteed to outperform Bitcoin given some weak assumptions.
In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks will be priced in bitcoin. Rather than an index fund giving you 7% but with a 7-10% devaluation of your fiat (i.e. net return of -3% to 0%), it will return you 7% with no devaluation of the underlying money (net 7%).
Bitcoin is first proving itself as a store-of-value (fundamental for any money), then once it's growth has reached the point that it is stable enough to be used as a unit of account and medium of exchange, it will be, through demand from the people. Any volatility will be measured against bitcoin, not the other way round.
Bitcoin can consume the entire value that's stored in the dollar.
Does your model hold if it does 80% of that over the next, say 50 years? The S&P will be priced in bitcoin for a start.
> Bitcoin is expected to go through a "halving" within the next day or two, a preprogrammed event that could impact production of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
> A halving, which occurs about every four years, was designed by bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, to effectively reduce by half the reward that miners of the digital token receive. The idea is that by cutting in half the amount bitcoin miners currently make for their efforts, fewer bitcoins will enter the market, creating more scarcity of the cryptocurrency.
Usually after these events the energy usage of the network decreases temporarily for ~60 days and then settles to what it was before. [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/19/bitcoin-just-completed-its-f...
Conversely, energy waste is proportional to, the BTC price.
Energy waste could also be reduced by instituting a global tax on Bitcoin mining. The cost to miners would remain the same (because it's still equal to the rewards), but a part of what would be spent on wasted energy is now spent on taxes instead. Unfortunately this is highly dependent on avoiding tax cheating.
I can think of no other use of energy where this situation holds.
edit: this is sarcasm if not clear but it reflects how often stuff gets posted here without an indication what is interesting about the topic (and it's poor form!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
But in more general sense, less like https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and more like AWS...
It's the only way to have value, actually holding computing power in a distributed network.
More of a decentralized compute marketplace rather than a PoW/emission mechanism, but if general compute is what you're looking for, then there it is.
PoW requires that the "work" have a few special properties, which makes it really difficult for it to be something useful. I feel like we're kind of past the whole "looking for a better PoW" phase though now that most consensus runs off really mature PoS mechanics.
Try thinking of a useful problem that allows everyone in the world to endlessly generate puzzles worth solving, whose difficulty can also be ratcheted up and down to regulate block timing.
EDIT: The global Internet I mean. Assuming HEMP doesn't hit everywhere at once, just the USA, for (unfortunate) example.
- Valuation of BTC
- Size of block reward
- Cost of hardware GPUs or ASICs
- Cost of powerFurthermore, Bitcoin is "self-healing" in the sense that an attacker does not gain persistent control; they lose control if they lose 51% compute vs the rest of the planet (unlike, say, Ethereum with proof of stake).
Mining never becomes uneconomic because the difficulty adjustment makes mining easier and easier as miners drop out.
The value of BTC has increased nearly ~200x in the last 10 years. I don't anticipate it will do this again, but I'm sure some of these miners think it will continue to grow at some rate (plus, they have already capitalized on the last 10yrs of growth).
No need for all the capex, opex, uncertainty of hashing success, and time-limited acquisition of doing the work of mining.
My original point was that it was in the ballpark of $2M. Could be more, could be less, all depending on a number of variables--I believe one of those variable just doubled.
I'm not sure what the cost is now, but back in 2012-ish when I briefly looked into mining, it cost about $1 in energy to mine $1 worth of BTC. I used your logic and decided it didn't make sense to invest in mining, so I didn't. I wish I had, or at least purchased some BTC, but I was a broke college student just looking to capitalize on the hardware I already owned, and I didn't really know a thing about investing (other than investing in a 6 pack of beer to meet girls at parties--my ROI was not great, BTW, so I don't recommend this strategy).
> it cost about $1 in energy to mine $1 worth of BTC
This is the crux of it (we may be saying the same thing!). There is no 1:1 relationship between mining cost and reward on a single block. If there was, no one would do it, because they do not win every block. And all blocks you compete on cost the same, win or lose, but of course the blocks you don't win, pay zero.
There's a (very) roughly 1:1 relationship between a miner's overall cost and reward, averaged over many blocks. If reward increases (BTC price spikes), more competition comes online and your win frequency drops.
So if the question is "how much energy (cost) did it take to mine this specific $2MM block", the answer is closer to "The average block reward divided by the winning miner's win frequency", which is e.g. 5% for one of the bigger miners (I did not check this block or this miner). This was a high reward block, so the real miner cost might have been more like $50K. Less for energy alone.
But it's like the guy who buys a $10 lottery ticket every day. He needs to win a few hundred dollars per month to maintain the habit (gambling addiction notwithstanding!). Today he got lucky and won $700 on the $10 ticket.
Ah, I see what you mean.
I think I've been mixing up my costs. When I wrote the original comment, I was thinking about the total energy cost for mining this block, i.e., the energy cost of all the nodes that worked on it. But the truth is, I have no idea about the economics of BTC mining. I was just being facetious :)
To my understanding that'd be true if the energy cost was $2M per miner, but I think jpcfl was suggesting $2M total. i.e. that an individual miner would spend $100 on energy for a $100 expected return, which may be a 10% chance at $1000 or a 100% chance at $100.
Could adjust $2M up slightly for whatever portion was done by crypto-mining malware or dabblers with higher expected energy costs than return, and down for the portion done by professional miners who will be expecting a slightly positive return even after factoring in other costs.
(Approximated by Bitcoin's reported .5% share of global electricity consumption, which is around 25k Twh. A block is mined every ten minutes. Hopefully I didn't make any order-of-magnitude errors!)
ViaBTC, the winning pool, has about 13% of the global hashing power so perhaps spent $40k plus their other expenses.
https://mempool.space/tx/2fc565c457bf3202704f3b2e61c50312c07...
Edit: Since a block has a limited amount of space for transactions, transactions with more bytes have to pay a larger fee to get picked up by miners. This one looks really large.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee is at a current level of 16.50, down from 19.38 yesterday and up from 2.046 one year ago. This is a change of -14.88% from yesterday and 706.6% from one year ago.
So, for this transaction, they chose to pay a $5000 fee to guarantee their placement in this block.
Only 4MB of data can fit in a block. To get priority for your transaction you pay more.
The only thing Bitcoin really buys is freedom.
I get that HN comments tend to dismiss Bitcoin. But the fact that for the fourth time this pay cut has happened without a hitch speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting: It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it. And it's extremely resistant to change. It requires no governmental approval. All attempts at subversion or interference have failed. There aren't many systems that come close to that kind of record.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...
Yes It is interesting
It is not useful
It is a huge waste
Hypothetically, government can with severe enough punishment. Governments will do anything to squeeze tax from things, and as long as any digital transfer is not being taxed, it will find way to stop it or squeeze tax out of it.
I am not talking about the irs as you seem to be imagining.
The test doesn't enter hard mode until the venn diagram grows an intersection.
L2 chains are where I stopped being interested in crypto. It's like reading the plaque of Ozymandias and thinking to yourself "Ah, the desert. What a lovely place to build my next palace."
For as "inevitable" as it's supporters claim it to be, it sure is taking a long time for anyone to care about it, outside of bitcoin maxi twitter influencers.
The rest of the crypto industry has moved on. It simply took to long for bitcoin to be used for anything outside of speculation. And other chains have taken up the actual transactions usecase.
Bitcoin has no such issue, it's completely transparent and far cheaper.
Back in 2013, we'd get a BTC donation every week or two. Now we get one maybe every 3 months. In 2013, the average BTC transaction fee was about 3 cents. Today, the average fee was $19.76.
If you are a normal person in a stable country it's not terribly useful. If you are a normal person in a not so stable place, it can be very useful to you.
The difference, of course, is that the price of Bitcoin also goes up sometimes.
Inelastic supply means the price depends entirely on demand, so it will shoot up and down when demand changes. This is a speculator’s playground.
But another word for the situation causing a price increase is a shortage. Stability comes from elastic supply that responds to demand. Algorithmic stablecoins are snake oil, but they do appear to have more stable prices until they collapse.
To prevent that, there needs to be someone willing to buy back the currency when demand collapses (losing a lot of money in the process) rather than running away like everyone else.
Does Bitcoin have enough die-hard believers to do that? So far they’ve been able to stave off complete collapse and come back stronger, but in the future, who knows. When investors get spooked and sell off Bitcoin ETF’s, what happens?
Not being able to reverse transactions is itself a risk, and a deflationary currency that is susceptible to hoarding isn't a great idea IMHO. And given gold's fluctuating value (though better than BTC's), I'm not sure I'd consider it a good store of value; it certainly isn't a good inflation hedge:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789
Neither in the short-term, nor the longer-term:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
And being gold-backed does not help with price stability either:
* https://archive.is/FWKcL / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...
In fact, having a currency / monetary base that cannot be easy grown can hinder economic growth:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
The sooner countries abandoned the gold standard, the sooner they started recovering from the Great Depression:
* https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-great-depression-...
The US's financial power is strongly linked with their ability to project military power.
I've got a little precious metal in case of a SHTF situation, although I'm not sure how useful even that would be.
People probably care more about food or fuel or maybe some pills than they do about bartering for silver or gold in that situation. Might be able to convince a few people to go for it, but still might be difficult.
But if there's no internet, there's no way you can eventually cash it out.
In a real "collapse of the US government STHF situation" you're going to want to invest in beans and bullets, not crypto.
Re:SHTF for sure, which is why it's not really worth considering, unless you're so sure it's going to happen and you're already accumulating those beans and bullets (also nothing is stopping you from doing that while also buying other things in case it doesn't happen, or takes a lot longer to happen than you predict).
If it's temporary or limited to a country, then bitcoin doesn't really suffer much from that either. The blockchain will continue elsewhere and can be synched back up for your region later, or if it's everywhere, then it will just stay in a frozen state until the internet is back.
So you can go to a country where there's still internet (assuming you can, you might not be able to), or wait until the internet is back up.
Hopefully you have other assets or goods to get you by in the meantime. Bitcoin is too volatile for it to make sense putting all of your wealth into it anyway.
Lets assume you are in a country at war, with poor conectivity and you receive money via blockchain; Poor conectivity means the local places where you can spend your virtual money aren't synced, possibly for weeks. What good is for you money you can't access?
There are far better ways of carring value in warzones. Crypto currency is the most useless one - specially because you can't easily bribe anyone with it.
In contrast, a vlf transmitter can cover the globe consuming the same power as an old tv set. Its not high bandwidth, but enough for teletype.
Everything that requires stable power is able to function in modern warfare scenarios, as long as UN rules apply; ukranians have internet, palestinians have controlled internet, and sudan victims have neither.
Well in that case, there are people in Sudan that are using bitcoin[1], especially to help others escape the region.
And there are people in Africa using bitcoin without reliable internet access[2] (not just Sudan) using various methods mentioned in that article.
So it seems that bitcoin is not totally useless for a region that has limited or no internet access, as long as it's operating elsewhere.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/07/05/how-b...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/03/15/how-a...
Speaking of Sudan, woman are also using their body. What do you think is more popular, bitcoin or prostitution?
How many Sudanese do you know that are using bitcoin right now instead of money on their pocket? Yah, the article is about sending money to their families (since traditional wire transfers are not working -I wonder why?), not that people can actually cash it in.
Oh and lets not even talk on the fluff promotion piece of a L2 startup with gasp 3000 users across 7 nations - none of which are Sudan. Nigeria alone has 218 MILLION people. Are you kidding me?
If comms are temporarily disabled, your Bitcoin is still safe on tens of thousands of nodes.
Obviously it's possible, if you can make a TCP connection over carrier pigeon, you can make it over anything. I'm curious to see a working example however.
I guess that until a satellite shoots a wad of bills through your window some people won't give it credit.
And even if everyone did have receivers, commercial satellites are highly regulated by most nations, likely will be targeted during any future major war, and there's no guarantee they won't be coopted for other uses by their host nations. Blockstream is a tiny company and doesn't even own or operate any of these satellites. You might as well just use viasat or iridium.
you just needed a recycled satellite dish and some other off the shelf components.
Simple answer: yes, they can. For example a state actor or a crazy billionare could spend enough money to launch a 51% attack. Indeed the theoretical attack requires only around 20% of mining power.
Also, the next generation of people could choose another blockchain, Bitcoin turns irrelevant because another blockchain surpasses it in the audience.
You would need to duplicate TSMC to create enough ASICs.
It's very useful for Turkey as it has 100% inflation yearly and the ATM fees are 10-20% to withdraw money. Apparently (from other travellers), it's very useful for the Russians to withdraw money in Turkey as well.
At this point to argue crypto has no utility with a straight face is just being willfully blind.
"This product makes it easy to illegally bypass international sanctions" is not the compliment you think it is.
Bitcoin may not be the end all solution, but it's a great current option.
Those many everyday Russians punish people (Ukrainians mainly, Europeans in general) for someone else’s decision (Putin’s power trip).
I also wish to remind you that hardship in Russia does not compare to hardship in Ukraine right now.
I say this as someone with relatives in both countries today.
It doesn't work that way. Putin is not working in a factory building tanks and artillery shells. He is not in an office programming which cities ballistic missiles will hit. He is not piloting bombers or manning guns shooting at Ukraine. He is not sitting in tanks ravaging through Ukrainian countriside, he is not in cellars raping and torturing civilians, he has not personally committed any of the tens of thousands documented war crimes in Ukraine. Millions upon millions of "ordinary Russians" choose to do this every day. Without the majority of Russian society actively working to carry out Putin's ideas, or passively sitting on their asses and trying to pretend they have nothing to do with it, Putin would be just a raving madman without any influence on the world like Hitler in his final days.
USSR collapsed when "ordinary Russians" simply stopped following orders. They were told to go there and do this, and they said NO in large enough numbers that the leaders were simply unable to do anything, because eventually even police and military stopped listening them. Russia has not yet reached this breaking point, and millions upon millions remain Putin's willing executioners, and bear the guilt that comes with it.
Every day, Ukrainians put their lives on the line, and hundreds die, in a desperate attempt to stop the curse on the world that Russia has become, while "ordinary Russians" are unwilling to even stage a large protest.
The sanctions target the wrong ones.
As for "unwilling to even stage a large protest", there's simply no one left to organize it. Those people who could do it are either in jail, in exile, or dead.
I’d say yes. That’s the point of the sanctions. And somebody should be tracing that Russian money on the ledger and getting the ill gotten properties traced and arrested.
Of course Russians don’t deserve economic hardship, but they don’t deserve to live in an autocracy either. And Ukrainians don’t deserve to be invaded. The lesson here is probably that the “great man” theory of history kind of ignores the everyday people whose lives were ruined by leaders who didn’t have to deal with the worst consequences of their decisions.
It doesn’t look like any of these get accidentally launched onto Kremlin. Or turned against conscription. Or used in any kind of resistance.
There are people there that are sacrificing their lives. Only for some reason, they are sacrificing these lives on the wrong side. On the side of supporting the dictatorship.
Of course no one wants hardship for everyday Russians, but we should be able to say the same about everyday Ukrainians, many of whom have had their whole lives upended.
The war is continuing because of only one man on the planet, and since violent options are off the table, functioning sanctions are the next best thing.
There is an argument to be made that sanctions don't work. Maybe they used to in the long distant past, but they don't now.
Russia doesn't give even half a fuck, Iran gives negative fucks, North Korea gives no fucks, and China is turning the sanctions back against us, to name some prominent examples.
I appreciate the west's desire to settle diplomatic problems using something other than war, but sanctions aren't the solution (anymore?).
Every day that these sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are in place those countries fall further and further behind. Every day their economies become less and less competitive
Sanctions as they are right now don't work, and that is a problem.
Given that this thread concerns whether the legitimate use cases of Bitcoin outweigh the illegitimate ones, I think this is an argument strongly against the position.
Why beat around the bush? The reason we’re playing the sanctions game, or the proxy war game, or any other bullshit games nations are playing is because the alternative is worse.
I say that a very disgruntled Russian who hasn't had a sane, predictable life since 2020.
There is a _bit_ of hope you'll do something about it.
You're a feeble Internet nerd whose position is an aberration of history.
I'm sure you'll selectively apply your morals rather than having enough intelligence to understand what you're advocating.
This is pretty reprehensible and you should be embarrassed.
The one single issue is what happens to the nukes.
It's a shame you can't hear how pathetic you sound in your idealogical prison / echo chamber.
The price of energy would become unaffordable for all of Europe and spike across the globe. The additional pressure would create additional conflict and suffering for everyone.
I'm struggling to find any reason other than blind hatred for your genuinely stupid and brain dead position.
Nobody is scared of this Kremlin talking point either, the market would stabilize fine.
I'm happy to pay more in order to not fund the Russian terrorist mafia state.
Like, uhhh, wanting to stay alive and not go to jail? Is that a good enough reason?
The oligarchs could arrange to put something extra in the breakfast one day. Or there could be a chance meeting with a window.
Seems that it is has made it politically more difficult, if not economically so.
I’m asking because how on earth can you claim that? I’m close to the ecosystem involved and the sanctions work incredibly well. They’re not sufficient and there are bypasses but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.
Sanctions work by reducing growth and the economy of its target—usually a pariah state—over time by reducing growth year over year, which compounds (negatively) over time to make the target less and less influential.
> I say that a very disgruntled Russian who hasn't had a sane, predictable life since 2020.
And the alternative to economic sanctions would be… ?
Either it is a democracy and the majority of the population is on board with it - explicitly or by ineptitude - or it is a dictatorship and they are cumplicit by inaction.
If we were discussing nazi party sympathizers in 1940 you wouldn't be even giving them the benefit of the doubt; the truth is, many people got onboard with what was going on because it wasn't with them directly. They got on with the party because it was what every one was doing at the time.
Turning a blind eye to the atrocities performed by the leaders your motherland elects when you lived there just because you got out is the worst cowardice I can think of.
That is how these things work.
I understand this may be a shock to a US citizen, as it would be for me if I ever lived in a country where truth, facts and people interests matter little to nothing. And yes, I've also been in the military, so I was also coached in the art of defending the right of people having diverging opinions from my own.
Thats why when countries have mandatory drafts, you cant just say "no thanks, I didnt vote for it".
That has been used to justify a lot of atrocities throughout history. Which is to say, if you're using that to justify an action, you'd better take a dozen steps back and take a couple months to think about what you're doing.
Yes, it has. Because it is basically true. Thing is, there is a huge difference between what separates you from your enemy from the things you may have in common, but totalitarian governments tend to point to the differences (that are few) instead of the points in common (that are many).
So, if your government, your fellow men, mistreat a woman in Africa in some military operation, is that acceptable? Does that make the news? No. If your government, your fellow men, take decisions to invade/bomb/starve a country, is that acceptable for you?
Lets just say it isn't, because if it is, you're just an ahole.
Do you benefit* from the prosperity bestowed upon you by such government - such as using roads, having healthcare or basically being a productive member of the society? Lets assume you do. What is the difference between the government you tolerate for yourself and the government that mistreats a woman in Africa, or that bombs a syrian family, or that kills by -just being absent - thousands in Sudan?
None.
Isn't it the same government? How aren't YOU against of that?
> you'd better take a dozen steps back and take a couple months to think about what you're doing
American? Either that or a bot. Either way if you can't tie your own shoelaces OR you're living for the first time the fear of a 3rd world war, please refrain yourself.
What, did you expect to be morally above any other faction labelled as a "terrorist"? You aren't. I, as a citizen of a NATO country, obviously avoid countries where myself can be confused with the actions of my government. That is common sense.
You may argue "but I didn't agree with X or Y decision" - yes, but did you present yourself to scrutiny? Did you try to change things? Did you do any meaningful action to actually change the political course? Of course not, like most of us (myself included) don't. But don't try to skip on the responsibility - you, your people as a whole are responsible for the actions of your government.
Geez, are you *that* dense? Or just american? Cuz just being american would explain a lot.
And killing of enemy civilians is called "war". I like you keep post-1950's ideas, but the rest of the world hasnt caught on yet.
It feels like this is a wedge across the community here at HN right now.
If the goal of the technology is to draw sovereignty from math and implement it in a way that's useful, then the capacity to trivially bypass legacy bugs (such as illubrication occurring in places where states assert their boundaries) seems like an enormous and meaningful compliment.
Maybe you think those are features and not bugs, but that's a different discussion (one I'm happy to have and about which my heart sings true).
Bitcoin ATMs used to be on the rise where I live many years ago. And I could make purchases. Now they are all gone.
Seems like the people adopting crypto don’t have many choices.
Which actually is a huge compliment because it means that government permission is no longer required to spend your money how you please.
Otherwise you're implicitly suggesting that Russia is somehow able to weather these sanctions only because bitcoin exists, or that bitcoin should be "reigned" in some way to make it compatible with arbitrary foreign government sanctions.
For a regular human in the real world they will make very rational economic decisions in their best interests.
If the ATM fees are taking 20% of my money, of course I'm going to look for alternative systems of payments. If I can't use my Russian Rubles, of course I'm going to use BTC.
About as rare as email spam? Or SEO content farms? There's a lot of phenomenon that are hard to control in a distributed network; Internet Protocol was designed for exactly this.
This strikes me as a defective comparison: are there people who are trying to receive email spam, but are unable to do so due to international borders?
The health of the internet in resisting censorship is well-documented, as you point out - and it has ramifications both desirable and otherwise. The innovation of blockchain tech is that it adds a mechanism for transmitting value in this censorship-resistant environment.
Notably, there is nothing technically notable about Bitcoin's censorship resistance. It's no more resistant than the internet itself. What's notable is the scale and efficiency at which it attracts clean money to wash dirty money, and none of that is about Proof of Work or Merkle DAGs.
The argument I was responding to falls apart when you notice that The Pirate Bay, Libgen, and Scihub are all extremely resilient despite lacking all the Game Theory gobbledygook which BTC adds.
If BTC's marketcap is $1T and it'll only take $5B for a 51% attack, there can be some arbitrage opportunity for a large hedge fund determined enough.
The only thing preventing this is the attacker must execute this flawlessly including attacking all the forks that may happen.
Also, who decides which transactions to reverse? and why would an entity with 51% power agree to that?
No one in crypto has thought through this
And yet it is (extremely) improbable that individuals will pay many many billions of dollars/year to move money around (which is what it takes to secure the network).
The only way the network's security does not collapse is if bitcoin's value goes up faster than it declines over time (50% every four years (the halving)).
No one does the basic napkin math on this and it drives me nuts. Unless the code changes, Bitcoin inevitably fails.
And yet it is happening right now ! You should have looked at the data to see what fees are being paid :-) Looking at the average over the last 10 days: bitcoin users have been paying about 1 BTC in fees per block, so 6 BTC of fees per hour, or $8M per day, or $3B per year (yes, billion with a B): https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-...
I can't locate a source that calculates exact fees spent over the last 12 months, but per the chart above it seems to be around $1B per year.
I fully understand what "the havening" is, and this statement is grossly misleading. Yes, the mining rewards for each block were cut in half. That does not mean "miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves". A lower block reward means some combination of (a) transaction fees will go up, (b) mining competition goes down because it doesn't make as much sense to spend electricity on a smaller reward and (c) the overall deflationary economics built into Bitcoin mean while the rewards are nominally less, they are worth more.
The "economic incentive" is a deflationary currency that rewards hoarding.
> Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves.
The halvening timing was coded a long time ago, and in order to change it, the nodes would need to adopt the new code by installing updated clients, and at that point, you have a hard fork, because there will be nodes on the old rules, either accidentally through not updating or intentionally through using a modified core distro, and you have the new rules' valid blocks is a disjoint set from the old rules'.
The new rules' block set being a subset of the old rules' is a strictening of the consensus rules. A strictening consensus scheme is a soft fork and can keep the network in one piece.
So, there is no real way for the miners to avoid the halvening without a hardfork and a great risk to the network.
I trade BTC for swings, and have a vague belief in its future. It seems like more is happening with other coins in terms of platform development and r and d.
But the shills are grating on me more than ever in this cycle.