kevinak

It incentivises using the cheapest energy which is renewable. Bitcoin could even be greenhouse negative - just stick a mine on top of every landfill around and you have a recipe to get rid of methane gas. Or on oil fields where they accidentally run into gas pockets.

Looks to me like GHG emissions are going down this year, from that report. I would expect that to continue going forward as more miners are deployed on top of cheap electricity sources :)

No Bitcoin does not need to change its power consumption ways. It literally incentivises the build out of renewable energy. It will fix itself in time.

What would the batteries do?

Another idea:

1. Build turbines

2. Stick Bitcoin miners in them (or the off-shore substation?)

3. Disconnect Bitcoin miners when export cable is complete

4. Repeat

5. Save the world

No.

Pretty sad to see so many people hate on proof-of-work. I can only assume it's because they have read shallow articles that tell them "Bitcoin uses X amount of energy therefore it must be bad, because using energy is bad" or something along those lines. It's not so simple.

Proof of work solves issues like: - What to do with electricity before the generating source is connected to the grid

- Reduces carbon emissions by incentivising the burning of methane gas (20x worse than CO2)

- Makes it more viable to research new energy sources by lowering the cost.

- Acts as a load-balancer for the grid and makes it way more stable. This in turn means that we can build out huge amounts of solar and wind that rely on the weather.

Of course there are situations where Bitcoin is mined using non-renewable sources but if you believe that Solar and Wind are so cheap, then that issue will sort itself out, no? And it won't take long.

If you're an environmentalist and you want to solve the global issue of CO2 emissions, Bitcoin (and PoW) is a very very valuable tool. Don't throw it away because of a faulty belief.

No more dealing with SvelteKit changes, we've hit RC! :)

I think the comments in here really highlight how little people understand the banking system. This is nothing at all like PayPal, credit cards, WePay or other systems.

This is to settle between banks. The thing banks do at the end of the day.

Most definitely. Bitcoin has never gone up 10-20x in a short timespan before. It will never happen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

Don't forget to add the "totally not income tax" aka arbetsgivaravgift at another 30% :D

Actually... Sweden has a large loophole for extremely rich people. Stick it all in a "Capital Insurance" product and pay a low yearly tax on the amount, rather than the gains.

It kind of makes Sweden into a low tax haven if you're only living off capital.

I’m aware that you can do this with credit cards. I was replying to someone who wanted guaranteed settlement but at the same time the ability to reverse transactions (read: settled transactions). You can’t have both at the same time.

The article is wrong. They stopped their miners and thus freed up electricity to be used in other more acutely important industries. Bitcoin mining is very predictable and can be turned on and off at a moments notice. It works great as a grid stabilizer.

By making agreements with miners ERCOT can sell electricity cheaply during times of excess (where energy simply just goes into the ground) and in situations like these, they ask the miners to turn off their machines, preventing large spikes in electricity prices due to lack of supply. The question that should be asked is how much electricity did ERCOT sell to the miners?

Absolutely brilliant way to incentivice the build-out of cheap energy sources (wind, solar), since you always have a "buyer of last resort" - the bitcoin miners.

So… you want guaranteed settlement but at the same time the ability to reverse a transaction? How do you propose that would work?

That is not what the lightning network is though - it is trustless, just like the baselayer.

The parent here is exaggerating. It's not free, just very very very cheap. Nodes with channels can set fees and get paid when they a transaction is routed through them.

There is work being done on non-custodial escrow services for LN. Here's one: https://lightningescrow.io

No Layer 1 Blockchain can effectively scale to billions of users when you also take into account that you want the system to be decentralized.

In practice, for Bitcoin, there is only one real L2 and that is the Lightning Network.

Why is it a hack?

It’s worth pointing out that you can only see public channels on these trackers. Large players probably have large private channels open with each other to guarantee better payment flows and less fees.

Expedia, Steam and Microsoft not a likely reason cobnest ion got lowered. More likely exchanges and large players got better at handling their wallets.

Here’s a wallet that runs a node on your phone: https://blixtwallet.github.io

The subject of this thread is the literal solution to micropayments using “blockchains”. And it works amazingly well! “

This is just your opinion, and wow is it a privileged take. Of course there is value in being able to trade with whoever you want, regardless of jurisdiction. Just because YOU do not see the value doesn't mean it's not there.

You're optimizing for the wrong thing here IMO. You should optimize for decentralization. Without it, there is no point to Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency for that matter). Increasing the block size won't solve the inherent problems with scaling the bitcoin blockchain. The only thing it will end up doing is push the can down the road and result in less full nodes running on the network.

The solution is of course to not increase the block size but to scale in other ways, like for example the Lightning Network.

Every cycle brings in more “true” bitcoiners that will DCA and buy BTC at any price. It will go up again. Just a matter of time.

A bit tired of these “Bitcoin is dead” articles. They almost never adds anything to the discussion.

If your state is simple enough you can just use a custom store or a writable store. If it gets hairy you could pick something like xstate or rxjs, they both conform to the store contract that svelte uses so they are pretty much plug and play.

…or maybe a censorship resistant peer 2 peer cash that could also subsidise these plants

A bunch of them are and more are working on it. Here are some non custodial crypto to crypto ones: https://wiki.ion.radar.tech/tutorials/lightning-exchanges

And here are some traditional ones: https://github.com/theDavidCoen/LightningExchanges

Maybe not eliminate them, but they won’t be able to use the money printer as they please, effectively funding things like forever wars.

How does this refute the argument that you can use it, for legal purchases, in El Salvador?

Also this doesn’t really apply unless you use the custodial wallet. McDonalds isn’t, and you don’t have to either. If you self custody you’ll be fine.

You can use it as an everyday currency in El Salvador. Here's an example from three months ago: https://youtu.be/6IAc1G8xaDs?t=62