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>> mathematically impossible for BTC to succeed until they change their POW Citation desperately needed, and not random rantings, please.
by icelancer 8y ago
>> mathematically impossible for BTC to succeed until they change their POW
Citation desperately needed, and not random rantings, please.
- asdionio 8y ago4 transactions per second is not very many. 8 gigawatts is a lot.
- wmf 8y agoBut that's an artificial limit that has nothing to do with POW.
- asdionio 8y agoSo you move to Bitcoin Cash, which can do 60 transactions a second. Big deal. It's still orders of magnitude slower than it has to be to be useful. Blockchains don't scale. Period. If you know of a way to make them scale, publish it and you'll find instant fame and fortune. The power consumption will continue to increase, and that is purely the fault of POW.
- wmf 8y agoBlockchains don't scale. Period. If that's your position then changing the POW won't help. (I know no one cares, but there could be a pragmatic scaling path where you increase on-chain throughput while you do sharding/layer 2 research.)
- icelancer 8y ago>> Blockchains don't scale They don't need to scale linearly with off-chain transmissions acting as a secondary transmission network.
- constantlm 8y agoDoes segwit and (eventually) lightning not solve the TX shortcoming?
- Alex3917 8y ago> Citation desperately needed, and not random rantings, please. It's just math. The amount of electricity needed to secure the network is directly proportional to the price (or more technically, the profitably of mining). This is because if you don't arbitrage out the profitability of mining, then the network is open to a 51% attack because the marginal cost of adding more hash power makes it profitable to keep adding more miners until you have control of the network. Basically the way the current POW is designed, BTC is only secure as long as it isn't obvious in advance whether or not mining at scale will be more profitable than buying BTC after it's been mined. So given that for BTC to become a successful reserve currency it would need to be worth at least 100x what it's worth today, that means it would need to use at least 100x as much electricity. But that's more electricity than currently exists, and there's no way it would be feasible for BTC to even use a fraction of that. This means that BTC can't actually ever reach those price levels, because if it did then it would no longer be secure, so would need to immediately drop back down in price in order to account for (and mitigate) the security risk.
- AndrewBissell 8y ago> But that's more electricity than currently exists This is not a variable that will remain constant once it starts becoming profitable to invest in power generation solely for the purpose of bitcoin mining.