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That's not even a little true. The transaction requires little/no work whatsoever. The miners require precisely as much work as there is speculative value for b

That's not even a little true. The transaction requires little/no work whatsoever. The miners require precisely as much work as there is speculative value for bitcoin. If Bitcoin were worth $10,000 per bitcoin - the energy burned per transaction would be 40 times higher. But that is not to say that the transaction itself required this expense. Mt Gox had as much to do with bitcoin as it did to do with http. I wouldn't argue with you that centralized databases are way more efficient than blockchains (hence why some nodes went down), but you simply don't understand the basics of what's going on with bitcoin.

TheDong 11y ago
The transaction has to be included in a block. That requires proof of work. As you say, the energy burned should be proportional to the value of bitcoin; if I have 100 BTC then I have a vested interest in mining outside of gaining new BTC -- I also want to protect the BTC&transactions I have from attacks. The argument that it's okay to spend that amount of money securing that amount of money, however, is nonsensical. Transactions in traditional databases do take almost no work. There's no thousands of computers computing and discarding hashes just to be able to add and subtract some numbers. I'll acknowledge that MtGox isn't a good thing to reference here, but the fact of the matter is that bitcoin is rife with things that a regular man would call "unreliability". I don't appreciate that you immediately condescend that I don't understand anything to do with bitcoin when your response has little substance. Your response is basically "transactions don't require that energy is burned but energy is burned for transactions" and you have the gall to say I don't understand anything?
- brighton36 11y ago
  Your claim was that there was a 'cost per transaction'. This is easily proved false when you examine the number of transactions in a block. If there were a cost per transaction, some blocks would cost less to produce than others (and/or returning varying rewards to miners. 2. the cost per transaction is directly relative to the price per bitcoin. As for traditional databases,they are almost always more efficient - I think many of these bitcoin companies are absurd. As for your pennies reference, I simply don't understand why the cost of a penny is at all relevant. At best, Bitcoin isn't "real" money, and even if it were, I don't know what seniorage costs add to this discussion. The unreliability of bitcoin may be worth discussing, but that's tangential to your original post. Thus far, I think it's done pretty well in that department considering how new and exotic this technology is. Your hubris on matters that you clearly don't understand justifies my response, which IMO was fair, balanced, and respectful. Don't rephrase my response unless you wish to misrepresent them, my words stand alone and don't need a tldr.
TylerE 11y ago
That's not really true at all. Right now the cost of mining is MASSIVELY subsidized by the block reward, currently to the tune of just under $6k per block. Without the subsidy the actual cost of a transaction would be approximately $4...and it's only that cheap if every block is full.

TheDong 11y ago

The transaction has to be included in a block. That requires proof of work. As you say, the energy burned should be proportional to the value of bitcoin; if I have 100 BTC then I have a vested interest in mining outside of gaining new BTC -- I also want to protect the BTC&transactions I have from attacks. The argument that it's okay to spend that amount of money securing that amount of money, however, is nonsensical. Transactions in traditional databases do take almost no work. There's no thousands of computers computing and discarding hashes just to be able to add and subtract some numbers. I'll acknowledge that MtGox isn't a good thing to reference here, but the fact of the matter is that bitcoin is rife with things that a regular man would call "unreliability". I don't appreciate that you immediately condescend that I don't understand anything to do with bitcoin when your response has little substance. Your response is basically "transactions don't require that energy is burned but energy is burned for transactions" and you have the gall to say I don't understand anything?

brighton36 11y ago
Your claim was that there was a 'cost per transaction'. This is easily proved false when you examine the number of transactions in a block. If there were a cost per transaction, some blocks would cost less to produce than others (and/or returning varying rewards to miners. 2. the cost per transaction is directly relative to the price per bitcoin. As for traditional databases,they are almost always more efficient - I think many of these bitcoin companies are absurd. As for your pennies reference, I simply don't understand why the cost of a penny is at all relevant. At best, Bitcoin isn't "real" money, and even if it were, I don't know what seniorage costs add to this discussion. The unreliability of bitcoin may be worth discussing, but that's tangential to your original post. Thus far, I think it's done pretty well in that department considering how new and exotic this technology is. Your hubris on matters that you clearly don't understand justifies my response, which IMO was fair, balanced, and respectful. Don't rephrase my response unless you wish to misrepresent them, my words stand alone and don't need a tldr.

TylerE 11y ago

That's not really true at all. Right now the cost of mining is MASSIVELY subsidized by the block reward, currently to the tune of just under $6k per block. Without the subsidy the actual cost of a transaction would be approximately $4...and it's only that cheap if every block is full.