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An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a

An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. That said, I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currency will magically topple governments and financial structures, but mainly so people can transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value. We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. I'm glad this problem is being worked on. However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.

sjeohp 8y ago
> “However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.” Great! I look forward to seeing your solution in action.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  Nano does it in action.
  - sjeohp 8y ago
    Nano claims to do it in action. So do others. Some of them might even be proven right, the vast majority will not, so acting like it's some kind of trivial solved problem is disingenuous. Ethereum's PoS has been in development for years and there is still no consensus that it will be a better mechanism than PoW.
    - orthecreedence 8y ago
      > acting like it's some kind of trivial solved problem is highly disingenuous I said it's possible. I didn't say it was easy. That said, PoW on a small scale is an interesting experiment. On a large scale, it's a horrible way of allocating energy usage. So while the databases running on PoW are working, they are a stupid waste of energy. I welcome any alternative.
      - sjeohp 8y ago
        That's like saying space travel is a stupid waste of energy because it costs more than driving. Some things are expensive, sometimes they get cheaper. In the meantime if you want to get to Mars you either buy the proven rocket or the cheap one.
malvosenior 8y ago
" it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second." I think it's more accurate to talk about the amount of value the Bitcoin network is storing than the transactions per second. Bitcoin currently has a market cap of $68B. I'm not aware of any other distributed system that's worth that much money. It's definitely interesting that a fully distributed system has been able to achieve that valuation without any centralization or governing authority (debates over developer and miner power aside).
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  If bitcoin users went to make withdrawals en masse, I suspect they'd quickly find it's not "storing" anything like USD 68 billion of value. Market cap is a farcical number to look at for a thinly-traded asset on unregulated markets. If I make my own new cryptocurrency, print 100 million tokens, and then talk my friend into buying one for $10, does that mean my token has $1 billion market cap?
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    While I agree that the valuation can rapidly fluctuate. Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists. There is a huge incentive to create transaction fraud with that much money on the line and Bitcoin is working and intended and acting as a distributed, transaction fraud free public ledger with a trade-able currency.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold. Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and digital then perhaps you're correct. But the more qualifications you tack on, the less impressive your claims to fame become. Don't bother mistaking me for some sort of gold bug either. Real Estate is another form of distributed wealth storage that blows bitcoin's pathetic market cap out of the water.
ppod 8y ago
>An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. This is begging the question.
dwighttk 8y ago
>...transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value. We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. nearly no value = many more transactions per second for much less energy cost.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  The "value" is the payment network itself (plus stupid things like rewards which are taken from the businesses and distributed to the consumers). However, the payment network can easily be superseded by the internet, and all that's really needed is to build a ledger on top of it (and using something like PoS it could use an amount of energy probably on par with Visa, or at least comparable to it for the same number of transactions).
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    I mean, it's at least not "easily"... I'm sure in 5 or 10 years looking back it might seem easy, but looking back over the past 5 or 10 years it doesn't seem like it's easy.
baddox 8y ago
> An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. Objectively? No, I'm pretty sure that isn't "a complete fucking waste" to the people who are benefitting from it. Which is literally the definition of "subjective." Removing externalities of electricity pricing solves this. That's the point. If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact, then who cares if a tiny minority of people are doing some wacky confusing things with their computers?
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  > If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact The day that markets actually price externalities into the costs of goods and services, whether by benevolent owners or force of regulation, I'll gladly declare Bitcoin useful.
  - baddox 8y ago
    The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. It doesn’t make sense to make the environmental argument for things that you consider wasteful, but not for other things that other people may consider wasteful.
    - orthecreedence 8y ago
      > The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. Yes, I agree that my argument would be completely irrelevant if only something that will never happen happens. Until then, I'd rather see some form of distributed currency that doesn't rely on pissing finite resources away to function. I get where you're coming from, but our planet is at a critical point right now objectively. Pouring pollutants into the atmosphere so people can play with FunBux is an incredibly stupid use of resources. Yes, markets should price in externalities. That would solve SO MUCH MORE than just bitcoin's energy usage. But unfortunately that concept is at odds with market capitalism, and as such, I believe my critique of bitcoin stands. Markets are not rational, prices are not accurate, bitcoin is a polluting waste of energy.
ecwilson 8y ago
> You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn cool. > I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currency will magically topple governments and financial structures, but mainly so people can transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value. It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be. > We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. I'm glad this problem is being worked on. However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second. 10 transactions per second on the L1 network (averaging $10k-20k each), and many thousands possible today on L2. Plus a way to securely store the transacted value. To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing. You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go. It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  > I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn cool. No, you can have 30K BTC in your brain, but unfortunately the USD value fluctuates so wildly that as a store of value, it's useless. > It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be. Probably, yes. Bitcoin is a failed project. It spawned many others, some of which may be successful. I am interested to see how they do. > To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing. That's assuming that banking is JUST storing and sending value. Banking does a whole lot more. I understand the drive behind taking that power away from banks, but it's just not going to happen until one can fluidly exchange USD for some for of highly-stable distributed currency. And once that happens, banks are still going to exist and handle most of the transactions! Please, take a stroll in r/cryptocurrency or r/bitcoin and see how many people are whining about how their private key got lost or stolen or etc etc. Banks exist because they not only store value, but protect it in numerous ways. They will continue to exist past whatever cryptocurrency-revolution people envision. > You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go. Great? So a fraction of the energy would have been wasted anyway. Fine, use that for bitcoin mining. For everything else, it's pouring carbons into the atmosphere so idiots who don't know how investing works can leverage 100x on margin while the exchange they're betting on is manipulating the price to call their bets and wipe them out. > It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants. Really? "Let's buy a bunch of toxic waste and dump it into the river because the government will be incentivized to not output toxic waste" isn't the best argument for why bitcoin is useful.
VMG 8y ago
> using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second. does this number include off-chain transactions?
plankers 8y ago
I can use bitcoin to buy things on the internet, or send money across borders, or bring money across borders, all without anybody's permission. So it's pretty successful in my book. Oh wait, you're bringing sin into the argument. My bad, I thought we were being rational. And just a side-note, it irks me when people say that bitcoin uses as much energy as the country of Iceland like that's some kind of horror. Iceland is pretty damn small, with a population smaller than the mid-sized city I live in.
- yownie 8y ago
  It also doesn't use as much energy as the country of Iceland (living in Iceland here). You what we use the MOST electricity for here? Aluminum smelting. No one seems to care a lot about that waste, it seems.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    Making aluminum isn't a waste! You can build airplanes out of aluminum. You can also relatively easily recycle aluminum into more aluminum things, so it's not like you have to pay that smelting cost every single time you want to purchase anything.
    - ric2b 8y ago
      It's still subjective. We can argue all night about what does or doesn't deserve to have energy used on it, that doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is a rounding error in terms of global warming. If the purpose is to limit environmental impact, why are we choosing by subjective value instead of actual impact?
Ar-Curunir 8y ago
> An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You're just describing capitalism there ;)
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  To be fair, I feel the same way about the stock market as I do about bitcoin, so yeah some of the sentiment is shared. At least with capitalism, for better or worse, just about everyone participates. That said, I don't think a complex economy can really operate very well without some form of market (at least not until we're at 80%+ automation). And with markets come waste. I guess I'm not saying anything should be done about bitcoin, but rather that I personally believe it's a complete waste of energy when there are already many better alternatives.
trsfgbb 8y ago
>pathetic ~10 transactions per second. It's only an artificial limit of Core fork of Bitcoin. Increasing it to 10 000 transactions per second doesn't use more energy for mining. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is_incredibly_energy_efficient_it_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is...
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Right, so bitcoin main stands out as especially terrible, even among the ecosystem of terribly inefficient PoW cryptocurrencies.

sjeohp 8y ago

> “However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second.” Great! I look forward to seeing your solution in action.

koonsolo 8y ago
Nano does it in action.
- sjeohp 8y ago
  Nano claims to do it in action. So do others. Some of them might even be proven right, the vast majority will not, so acting like it's some kind of trivial solved problem is disingenuous. Ethereum's PoS has been in development for years and there is still no consensus that it will be a better mechanism than PoW.
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    > acting like it's some kind of trivial solved problem is highly disingenuous I said it's possible. I didn't say it was easy. That said, PoW on a small scale is an interesting experiment. On a large scale, it's a horrible way of allocating energy usage. So while the databases running on PoW are working, they are a stupid waste of energy. I welcome any alternative.
    - sjeohp 8y ago
      That's like saying space travel is a stupid waste of energy because it costs more than driving. Some things are expensive, sometimes they get cheaper. In the meantime if you want to get to Mars you either buy the proven rocket or the cheap one.

malvosenior 8y ago

" it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second." I think it's more accurate to talk about the amount of value the Bitcoin network is storing than the transactions per second. Bitcoin currently has a market cap of $68B. I'm not aware of any other distributed system that's worth that much money. It's definitely interesting that a fully distributed system has been able to achieve that valuation without any centralization or governing authority (debates over developer and miner power aside).

ForHackernews 8y ago
If bitcoin users went to make withdrawals en masse, I suspect they'd quickly find it's not "storing" anything like USD 68 billion of value. Market cap is a farcical number to look at for a thinly-traded asset on unregulated markets. If I make my own new cryptocurrency, print 100 million tokens, and then talk my friend into buying one for $10, does that mean my token has $1 billion market cap?
- malvosenior 8y ago
  While I agree that the valuation can rapidly fluctuate. Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists. There is a huge incentive to create transaction fraud with that much money on the line and Bitcoin is working and intended and acting as a distributed, transaction fraud free public ledger with a trade-able currency.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > "Bitcoin is successfully storing a large amount of value in a distributed manner. More than any other system that exists." No it isn't. The market cap of bitcoin, which is a bullshit number anyway as already explained, is dwarfed by other forms of distributed wealth storage such as (but certainly not limited to) old fashioned pieces of gold. Gold is distributed. If you revise your assertion to be distributed and digital then perhaps you're correct. But the more qualifications you tack on, the less impressive your claims to fame become. Don't bother mistaking me for some sort of gold bug either. Real Estate is another form of distributed wealth storage that blows bitcoin's pathetic market cap out of the water.

ppod 8y ago

>An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. And given the amount of energy it uses to perpetuate its own failure, it's nearly sinful to keep it going. This is begging the question.

dwighttk 8y ago

>...transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value. We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. nearly no value = many more transactions per second for much less energy cost.

orthecreedence 8y ago
The "value" is the payment network itself (plus stupid things like rewards which are taken from the businesses and distributed to the consumers). However, the payment network can easily be superseded by the internet, and all that's really needed is to build a ledger on top of it (and using something like PoS it could use an amount of energy probably on par with Visa, or at least comparable to it for the same number of transactions).
- dwighttk 8y ago
  I mean, it's at least not "easily"... I'm sure in 5 or 10 years looking back it might seem easy, but looking back over the past 5 or 10 years it doesn't seem like it's easy.

baddox 8y ago

> An enormous amount of energy used to support a tiny minority of people participating in a highly-manipulated wealth redistribution mechanism is, objectively, a complete fucking waste. Objectively? No, I'm pretty sure that isn't "a complete fucking waste" to the people who are benefitting from it. Which is literally the definition of "subjective." Removing externalities of electricity pricing solves this. That's the point. If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact, then who cares if a tiny minority of people are doing some wacky confusing things with their computers?

orthecreedence 8y ago
> If a kilowatt of electricity usage costs enough to offset its environmental impact The day that markets actually price externalities into the costs of goods and services, whether by benevolent owners or force of regulation, I'll gladly declare Bitcoin useful.
- baddox 8y ago
  The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. It doesn’t make sense to make the environmental argument for things that you consider wasteful, but not for other things that other people may consider wasteful.
  - orthecreedence 8y ago
    > The point is that the environmental argument is completely irrelevant if externalities are removed, which they absolutely should be. Yes, I agree that my argument would be completely irrelevant if only something that will never happen happens. Until then, I'd rather see some form of distributed currency that doesn't rely on pissing finite resources away to function. I get where you're coming from, but our planet is at a critical point right now objectively. Pouring pollutants into the atmosphere so people can play with FunBux is an incredibly stupid use of resources. Yes, markets should price in externalities. That would solve SO MUCH MORE than just bitcoin's energy usage. But unfortunately that concept is at odds with market capitalism, and as such, I believe my critique of bitcoin stands. Markets are not rational, prices are not accurate, bitcoin is a polluting waste of energy.

ecwilson 8y ago

> You cannot look at bitcoin by any measure and say that it's a practical success for any of its goals. I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn cool. > I do support some form of decentralized currency. Not because people are ever going to be smart enough to be their own bank or because I think some currency will magically topple governments and financial structures, but mainly so people can transact without overly-censorious middle-men who take a cut while adding nearly no value. It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be. > We have the internet, now. Payment networks should have died years ago. I'm glad this problem is being worked on. However, it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second. 10 transactions per second on the L1 network (averaging $10k-20k each), and many thousands possible today on L2. Plus a way to securely store the transacted value. To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing. You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go. It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants.

orthecreedence 8y ago
> I can memorize 20 words and cross whatever border I want with $100 million in my brain, and full confidence that that money is mine. That's pretty damn cool. No, you can have 30K BTC in your brain, but unfortunately the USD value fluctuates so wildly that as a store of value, it's useless. > It sounds like you're projecting what you think Bitcoin should be. Probably, yes. Bitcoin is a failed project. It spawned many others, some of which may be successful. I am interested to see how they do. > To argue that a small country's worth of energy being used to secure Bitcoin is a poor use of resources, you really have to consider how much energy the worldwide banking system consumes in all its complexity to do the same thing. I don't know how to do that calculation, but my point is there's more to it than you're seeing. That's assuming that banking is JUST storing and sending value. Banking does a whole lot more. I understand the drive behind taking that power away from banks, but it's just not going to happen until one can fluidly exchange USD for some for of highly-stable distributed currency. And once that happens, banks are still going to exist and handle most of the transactions! Please, take a stroll in r/cryptocurrency or r/bitcoin and see how many people are whining about how their private key got lost or stolen or etc etc. Banks exist because they not only store value, but protect it in numerous ways. They will continue to exist past whatever cryptocurrency-revolution people envision. > You have to also consider which energy is being used. Dirty energy is certainly part of it. But a lot of the energy used is through geographic renewables arbitrage. For example, there are hydro power facilities in China that were built and never fully utilized or connected to the main grid. You can set up miners nearby those facilities to use the surplus energy, and as long as you are connected to the internet, you're good to go. Great? So a fraction of the energy would have been wasted anyway. Fine, use that for bitcoin mining. For everything else, it's pouring carbons into the atmosphere so idiots who don't know how investing works can leverage 100x on margin while the exchange they're betting on is manipulating the price to call their bets and wipe them out. > It's also a potentially great incentive for governments to start NEW renewables facilities, because they have a way to use the surplus power until their populations grow to use the full capacity of those plants. Really? "Let's buy a bunch of toxic waste and dump it into the river because the government will be incentivized to not output toxic waste" isn't the best argument for why bitcoin is useful.

VMG 8y ago

> using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second. does this number include off-chain transactions?

plankers 8y ago

I can use bitcoin to buy things on the internet, or send money across borders, or bring money across borders, all without anybody's permission. So it's pretty successful in my book. Oh wait, you're bringing sin into the argument. My bad, I thought we were being rational. And just a side-note, it irks me when people say that bitcoin uses as much energy as the country of Iceland like that's some kind of horror. Iceland is pretty damn small, with a population smaller than the mid-sized city I live in.

yownie 8y ago
It also doesn't use as much energy as the country of Iceland (living in Iceland here). You what we use the MOST electricity for here? Aluminum smelting. No one seems to care a lot about that waste, it seems.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Making aluminum isn't a waste! You can build airplanes out of aluminum. You can also relatively easily recycle aluminum into more aluminum things, so it's not like you have to pay that smelting cost every single time you want to purchase anything.
  - ric2b 8y ago
    It's still subjective. We can argue all night about what does or doesn't deserve to have energy used on it, that doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is a rounding error in terms of global warming. If the purpose is to limit environmental impact, why are we choosing by subjective value instead of actual impact?

Ar-Curunir 8y ago

orthecreedence 8y ago
To be fair, I feel the same way about the stock market as I do about bitcoin, so yeah some of the sentiment is shared. At least with capitalism, for better or worse, just about everyone participates. That said, I don't think a complex economy can really operate very well without some form of market (at least not until we're at 80%+ automation). And with markets come waste. I guess I'm not saying anything should be done about bitcoin, but rather that I personally believe it's a complete waste of energy when there are already many better alternatives.

trsfgbb 8y ago

>pathetic ~10 transactions per second. It's only an artificial limit of Core fork of Bitcoin. Increasing it to 10 000 transactions per second doesn't use more energy for mining. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is_incredibly_energy_efficient_it_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7nn5wa/bitcoin_cash_is...

ForHackernews 8y ago
Right, so bitcoin main stands out as especially terrible, even among the ecosystem of terribly inefficient PoW cryptocurrencies.