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It is a waste of resources. I do agree with you. The good news, I suppose, is that all possible the bitcoins will be eventually mined (https://www.investopedia.

It is a waste of resources. I do agree with you. The good news, I suppose, is that all possible the bitcoins will be eventually mined (https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-happens-bitcoin-after-all-21-million-are-mined/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-happens-bitcoin-after...). At that point, it will likely be transaction fees that drive the economy, not mining.

sadgit 9y ago
And whos going to create the blocks? It's still mining. However, tx fees might not be enough to pay for security in the network.
- rufugee 9y ago
  I didn't think of it that way, but you are very correct.
cslarson 9y ago
There will still be mining, just no block reward. The "payment" would instead be solely from transaction fees.
- andruby 9y ago
  If we make the transactions more efficient, lowering the fees, we might remove the huge incentive to mine so much. That would be great.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    This is nonsensical and wrong. Transactions aren't what causes energy consumption in Bitcoin, you can process all the transactions in the whole Bitcoin or Ethereum network on a Raspberry Pi. It's the proof-of-work hashing that makes Bitcoin energy-inefficient, and that's purely a make-work problem, just a way to make mining arbitrarily difficult so the block times hit the expected average. The problem with scaling to larger numbers of transactions is that block sizes become bigger and it takes more disk space and bandwidth to run a node. But, the bigger we make them, the more transaction fees there are, so incentives for miners would actually go up. (very marginally so - block rewards are like 100x as high as the transaction fees, which actually leads some miners to not include transactions at all - trading off a 1% lower payout for faster propagation times and an increased chance of "winning" if they successfully mine a block at nearly the same time as another miner)
    - andruby 9y ago
      Maybe I wasn't clear in my original message. I meant that with lower block rewards and lower transaction fees (through lightning and other advances), the total reward for mining would go down, removing the incentive for the large number of mining operations. On the large scale, I don't see mining efficiency affecting total bitcoin power usage, but I do see rewards impacting it. (higher BTC price => higher economic incentive to mine => more investments in mining operations => more power usage) I think a lower bitcoin Hashrate would actually be a good thing (for power consumption and pollution)
wufufufu 9y ago
It irks me that the wastefulness of bitcoin is proportional to how valuable it is, and I don't think that changes even when miners are only competing for transaction fees. edit: Waste might even be exponentially proportional to bitcoin value...?
- nokcha 9y ago
  In economic equilibrium, the world-wide energy cost to mine one block would be approximately equal to the revenue from mining the block (transactions fees + newly generated bitcoins).
rtkwe 9y ago
That's incorrect. Mining will still be required it just means instead of block rewards driving miners it'll be transaction fees. Bitcoin will never not require miners because they provide the entire validation/verification process for transactions.
- jobigoud 9y ago
  I think the confusion is because the mining analogy makes people think miners mine Bitcoins, when they actually mine blocks.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Bitcoin is entirely arbitrary. Given that the concept of cryptocurrency (as a get-rich-quick scheme) has been proven, there's nothing stopping people from creating another one. And then another, and another, and another. The problem really is with the whole concept of cryptocurrencies.

sadgit 9y ago

And whos going to create the blocks? It's still mining. However, tx fees might not be enough to pay for security in the network.

rufugee 9y ago
I didn't think of it that way, but you are very correct.

cslarson 9y ago

There will still be mining, just no block reward. The "payment" would instead be solely from transaction fees.

andruby 9y ago
If we make the transactions more efficient, lowering the fees, we might remove the huge incentive to mine so much. That would be great.
- paulmd 9y ago
  This is nonsensical and wrong. Transactions aren't what causes energy consumption in Bitcoin, you can process all the transactions in the whole Bitcoin or Ethereum network on a Raspberry Pi. It's the proof-of-work hashing that makes Bitcoin energy-inefficient, and that's purely a make-work problem, just a way to make mining arbitrarily difficult so the block times hit the expected average. The problem with scaling to larger numbers of transactions is that block sizes become bigger and it takes more disk space and bandwidth to run a node. But, the bigger we make them, the more transaction fees there are, so incentives for miners would actually go up. (very marginally so - block rewards are like 100x as high as the transaction fees, which actually leads some miners to not include transactions at all - trading off a 1% lower payout for faster propagation times and an increased chance of "winning" if they successfully mine a block at nearly the same time as another miner)
  - andruby 9y ago
    Maybe I wasn't clear in my original message. I meant that with lower block rewards and lower transaction fees (through lightning and other advances), the total reward for mining would go down, removing the incentive for the large number of mining operations. On the large scale, I don't see mining efficiency affecting total bitcoin power usage, but I do see rewards impacting it. (higher BTC price => higher economic incentive to mine => more investments in mining operations => more power usage) I think a lower bitcoin Hashrate would actually be a good thing (for power consumption and pollution)

wufufufu 9y ago

It irks me that the wastefulness of bitcoin is proportional to how valuable it is, and I don't think that changes even when miners are only competing for transaction fees. edit: Waste might even be exponentially proportional to bitcoin value...?

nokcha 9y ago
In economic equilibrium, the world-wide energy cost to mine one block would be approximately equal to the revenue from mining the block (transactions fees + newly generated bitcoins).

rtkwe 9y ago

That's incorrect. Mining will still be required it just means instead of block rewards driving miners it'll be transaction fees. Bitcoin will never not require miners because they provide the entire validation/verification process for transactions.

jobigoud 9y ago
I think the confusion is because the mining analogy makes people think miners mine Bitcoins, when they actually mine blocks.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Bitcoin is entirely arbitrary. Given that the concept of cryptocurrency (as a get-rich-quick scheme) has been proven, there's nothing stopping people from creating another one. And then another, and another, and another. The problem really is with the whole concept of cryptocurrencies.