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> All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs The work performed is required for the currency to be secure. My browser burns electricity verify

by Chris2048 9y ago

> All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs The work performed is required for the currency to be secure. My browser burns electricity verifying SSL certs.

yorwba 9y ago
Burning electricity is not the only way we know to secure a currency, though. It's the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies that requires their high operational costs, because the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are equal from the point of view of the protocol, so the "good guys" need to spend more than any "bad guy" can afford. A centralized currency lets the central source of trust protect their security at far lower cost.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Then you aren't comparing like-for-like. Value in bitcoin represents a disagreement with your consideration of who is "good", in the same way investment in a currency might be seen as confidence in the institutions that back it. You could just as well argue there should only be one monetary currency. How much effort do credit-rating, fraud etc agencies make? A centralized currency requires trust, which crypto-currencies don't. To compare value, you need to add a price tag to this liability. The lower cost comes from the savings made in not having to secure against the central authority itself.
- prepend 9y ago
  But this decentralization is a feature, not a bug. It might be more efficient on the surface to centralize and just have everyone trust a mint, but that defeats the purpose of decentralization. There are other upsides like independence. It’s more efficient for everyone to take a bus and never drive a car alone. But cars give freedom. It’s more efficient for the world to eat soy lent instead of a diverse diet. Complaining about how cars use more fuel than buses or how strawberries take more water and fertilizer than soy neglects to capture all the benefits gained for those higher costs.
lmm 9y ago
Not the same thing. Your browser does a necessary computation and nothing more; if computers get twice as fast, your browser will spend half as much electricity, but bitcoin "miners" will be burning as much as ever.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  What do you mean by twice as fast? More energy efficient? Doesn't SSL have an increase in bit size too?
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Doesn't SSL have an increase in bit size too? Recommended bit sizes for a given cipher do increase but only very gradually, since the attack cost is exponential in the number of bits. 20 years ago 1024 or 2048 bit RSA was standard; now 2048 is recommended as a minimum for extremely high-value and long-lived keys (i.e. CA root certificates) but that's all. Host key lengths are actually shorter these days than they were 10 years ago, since algorithmic improvements (elliptic curves) allow the same level of security with much shorter keys.
Chris2048 9y ago
Just to clarify, are we talking about verification of the block-chain, or mining costs?

> All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs The work performed is required for the currency to be secure. My browser burns electricity verifying SSL certs.

yorwba 9y ago

Burning electricity is not the only way we know to secure a currency, though. It's the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies that requires their high operational costs, because the "good guys" and the "bad guys" are equal from the point of view of the protocol, so the "good guys" need to spend more than any "bad guy" can afford. A centralized currency lets the central source of trust protect their security at far lower cost.

Chris2048 9y ago
Then you aren't comparing like-for-like. Value in bitcoin represents a disagreement with your consideration of who is "good", in the same way investment in a currency might be seen as confidence in the institutions that back it. You could just as well argue there should only be one monetary currency. How much effort do credit-rating, fraud etc agencies make? A centralized currency requires trust, which crypto-currencies don't. To compare value, you need to add a price tag to this liability. The lower cost comes from the savings made in not having to secure against the central authority itself.
prepend 9y ago
But this decentralization is a feature, not a bug. It might be more efficient on the surface to centralize and just have everyone trust a mint, but that defeats the purpose of decentralization. There are other upsides like independence. It’s more efficient for everyone to take a bus and never drive a car alone. But cars give freedom. It’s more efficient for the world to eat soy lent instead of a diverse diet. Complaining about how cars use more fuel than buses or how strawberries take more water and fertilizer than soy neglects to capture all the benefits gained for those higher costs.

lmm 9y ago

Not the same thing. Your browser does a necessary computation and nothing more; if computers get twice as fast, your browser will spend half as much electricity, but bitcoin "miners" will be burning as much as ever.

Chris2048 9y ago
What do you mean by twice as fast? More energy efficient? Doesn't SSL have an increase in bit size too?
- lmm 9y ago
  > Doesn't SSL have an increase in bit size too? Recommended bit sizes for a given cipher do increase but only very gradually, since the attack cost is exponential in the number of bits. 20 years ago 1024 or 2048 bit RSA was standard; now 2048 is recommended as a minimum for extremely high-value and long-lived keys (i.e. CA root certificates) but that's all. Host key lengths are actually shorter these days than they were 10 years ago, since algorithmic improvements (elliptic curves) allow the same level of security with much shorter keys.

Chris2048 9y ago

Just to clarify, are we talking about verification of the block-chain, or mining costs?