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>> ... too energy intensive This argument has become so triggering to me. When I hear this, two things become immediately clear to me about the speaker. The
by uncletammy 9y ago
>> ... too energy intensive
This argument has become so triggering to me. When I hear this, two things become immediately clear to me about the speaker. They do not recognize the vast economies of scale of a network secured by proof-of-work. They also do not fully understand Bitcoin's value as not only as medium of exchange but also a STORE OF VALUE.
The total number of Bitcoin addresses is 2^160. Yes, the Bitcoin network is currently securing 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 payment addresses. That's enough for each person alive on this earth (~7.44 billion in 2016) to have 196,385,600,286,334,710,857,791,565,804,391,698,421.92 separate bank accounts that all fit in your pocket.
How much energy do people think it would take to build a bank (or group of banks) that could collectively account for and secure the wealth in 2^160 bank accounts? Don't even consider that it needs to be accessible from all over the world. It would take A LOT OF ENERGY! Now, how much more energy would it take to also run a payment network on top of it? It would take EVEN MORE.
What I want to know from everyone who cites this tired old argument is this. Just what is an acceptable amount of energy to secure potentially all of the wealth in the world?
- monochromatic 9y agoDo we need a trigger warning on comments about bitcoin energy consumption now?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoYou've made up a requirement to fit your argument. Why would we need to secure 2^160 bank accounts?
- Faark 9y agoFor privacy reasons you probably want to create a new bank account for every atomic "coin" you have and might want to transfer. Also you might want to move them to new wallets in random intervals to make it look like they have been transferred and more difficult to identify/correlate actual transfers. That would of cause be impossible with Bitcoin's current 7 transactions per second. Its a long road ahead til crypto currencies will replace the current banking system, even ignoring POW's questionable energy consumption.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Faark 9y ago> Just what is an acceptable amount of energy to secure potentially all of the wealth in the world? As little as necessary. While Bitcoin incentivize to spend as much energy as possible, up to the (partially arbitrarily specified) mining reward as financial cap. Also it is very dishonest to compare potential address space to actually used address space. You could easily extend the number of digits of current bank account without really increasing energy consumption. If you'd actually start to use those address spaces Bitcoin again would scale a lot worse, since nodes would actually have to spend computing power to process all wallets. Hell the current bitcoin blockchain size already makes running a node not worth it for me, thus we might should not promote its scalability. Though this has less to do with proof of work. By the way i wonder how different POW algorithms and chains with similar ones will be able to coexist in the long term without weakening its POW.
- wmf 9y agoWhat if I told you that it's possible to create a medium of exchange and store of value without consuming appreciable energy?