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>To utilize bitcoins, you do not need to go through the now extremely electricity intensive process of mining them each and every time. Yes, you do not, but so

>To utilize bitcoins, you do not need to go through the now extremely electricity intensive process of mining them each and every time. Yes, you do not, but someone does. Unless you are trading them off the blockchain (in which case you are correct, and they add no value), every transaction must be included in a mined block, which takes a significant amount of electricity to mine and add to the blockchain. And that must happen each and every time a transaction occurs on the blockchain. >For example, the electricity transaction cost to send my friend a coin for payment for something, is trivial. It is not, it costs a fraction of all of the electricity used to mine the block your transaction was included in, proportional to it's size compared to the rest of the block, minus the mining reward. In other words (ignoring block reward for simplicity right now), if your transaction was 200 bytes, and 5000 of your transactions can fit in a block, and it costs roughly $20,000 in electricity to mine a block (average in september 2017), then your transaction cost roughly $4 in electricity. At the rates I used to calculate the $20,000 per block, that's 480 watt-hours on the mining alone! Ignoring the cost of transmission, relaying, validation, storage, and other smaller more trivial costs. That is the whole basis behind bitcoin, and the entire reason for it's existence. I urge you to do a little reading on bitcoin and how it works before trying to speak about it. The whole "proof of work" is why bitcoin is valuable, it's the entire thing that bitcoin brought to the world, without it bitcoin is nothing more than a walmart gift card. >Bitcoins are almost exclusively mined as a value store / value swapping device, as is the case with gold. You seem to be willfully ignoring the entire point of bitcoin, which is that it isn't mined as a value store, but as a service which secures transactions and allows them to be trustless. Just like how mining lithium isn't to use lithium as a coin, mining bitcoin isn't about using bitcoin as a simple coin, but about securing those transactions and making them trustless. As long as you continue to completely ignore this, I don't think there is any more point in discussing this. You are willfully ignoring the net value that bitcoin creates while saying that it creates no value.

adventured 9y ago
> That is the whole basis behind bitcoin, and the entire reason for it's existence. I urge you to do a little reading on bitcoin and how it works before trying to speak about it. I'm fully aware of how Bitcoin works. Using argument from intimidation is not a valid argumentation line. My position was factually correct. It does not cost even remotely as much for me to buy 1 bitcoin (eg from coinbase) or accept 1 bitcoin as payment (eg as a merchant), as it does to originally mine it today. As such, the electricity cost of each bitcoin on unit of utilization, plunges over time vs the origination. That electricity cost is not going to perpetually climb such that each bitcoin represents an eventual eg trillion dollars of electricity cost, your premise is false and absurd. After each bitcoin is mined today, its electricity cost per amount of N time existing declines, it does not increase. The first action, the mining, is extremely expensive; each action thereafter, is less expensive compared to that. Further economic use of a given coin mined today involves lower cost than the initial cost of mining it. If that weren't the case, Bitcoin would collapse instantly, it would become entirely unusable over a short amount of time (and it would never be worth mining). I notice you ignored that you entirely blew the argument premise about the physical mining world. Bitcoin could hardly be any more different from oil or coal or numerous of other things we mine from the ground, precisely because natural gas, oil, coal are not primarily used as value stores or value swapping devices, as Bitcoin is. > You seem to be willfully ignoring the entire point of bitcoin, which is that it isn't mined as a value store, but as a service which secures transactions and allows them to be trustless. For someone that keeps proclaiming that I'm ignorant, you're making a very wrong claim. The supposed "point" of Bitcoin is not strictly defined and has shifted in the last several years based on circumstances. There's no single central authority of Bitcoin that can define its point. If transaction fees are very low, it will be utilized differently than if its transaction fees are very high, thus its utilization shifts. There is no singular rigid "point."

adventured 9y ago

> That is the whole basis behind bitcoin, and the entire reason for it's existence. I urge you to do a little reading on bitcoin and how it works before trying to speak about it. I'm fully aware of how Bitcoin works. Using argument from intimidation is not a valid argumentation line. My position was factually correct. It does not cost even remotely as much for me to buy 1 bitcoin (eg from coinbase) or accept 1 bitcoin as payment (eg as a merchant), as it does to originally mine it today. As such, the electricity cost of each bitcoin on unit of utilization, plunges over time vs the origination. That electricity cost is not going to perpetually climb such that each bitcoin represents an eventual eg trillion dollars of electricity cost, your premise is false and absurd. After each bitcoin is mined today, its electricity cost per amount of N time existing declines, it does not increase. The first action, the mining, is extremely expensive; each action thereafter, is less expensive compared to that. Further economic use of a given coin mined today involves lower cost than the initial cost of mining it. If that weren't the case, Bitcoin would collapse instantly, it would become entirely unusable over a short amount of time (and it would never be worth mining). I notice you ignored that you entirely blew the argument premise about the physical mining world. Bitcoin could hardly be any more different from oil or coal or numerous of other things we mine from the ground, precisely because natural gas, oil, coal are not primarily used as value stores or value swapping devices, as Bitcoin is. > You seem to be willfully ignoring the entire point of bitcoin, which is that it isn't mined as a value store, but as a service which secures transactions and allows them to be trustless. For someone that keeps proclaiming that I'm ignorant, you're making a very wrong claim. The supposed "point" of Bitcoin is not strictly defined and has shifted in the last several years based on circumstances. There's no single central authority of Bitcoin that can define its point. If transaction fees are very low, it will be utilized differently than if its transaction fees are very high, thus its utilization shifts. There is no singular rigid "point."