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Your understanding of why bitcoin uses energy is completely skewed. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy to process transactions or ensure a functioning p2p network, bitc

Your understanding of why bitcoin uses energy is completely skewed. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy to process transactions or ensure a functioning p2p network, bitcoin is the first time in history of money, that money can be expressed as energy units. Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy, or more specifically bitcoin is as much energy as people value the function and security of money. Trying to reduce it is absolutely misguided - if you figure out a thousand times more efficient way to generate sha hashes (mine bitcoin), it won’t matter in the slightest - bitcoin mining difficulty will rise thousandfold and exactly the same amount of energy will be spent going forward.

adrianratnapala 8y ago
> Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy Or a little more precisely a bitcoin is a provable record that a significant quantity of free energy was once turned into heat. So it does use energy, in the creation and once it is created, that energy is wasted unless the created also needed to heat something.
- keymone 8y ago
  energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    ...which is a trivial result, and could be reproduced by simple trust (which is essentially free)
    - keymone 8y ago
      that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Trust is dangerous, we’ve been dealing with trust based financial system failures for hundreds of not thousands of years.
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.
        antidesitter 8y ago
        Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?
        JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        Of course they are just like religion, law, right and wrong and on and on. You can tell what is real, and what is all in Sapiens' heads - ask your dog. They know what real is.
        keymone 8y ago
        It costs way less than current financial system costs even normalized for market cap or transaction volume because it involves politics and military.
        JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        The internet depends on politics and the military too. Don't be fooled.
        keymone 8y ago
        oh yeah, they have so much control, they've totally fixed the problem of torrenting, child porn and illegal markets. don't be naive, you can't block bitcoin any more than you can block porn. besides, internet is no longer the only information transfer medium bitcoin can work over.
      - Nursie 8y ago
        > that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Well that's nonsense for a start. Bitcoin simply shifts trust from a middleman to a vendor I am interacting with. A middleman that is highly regulated, with all sorts of protections and restrictions in place to protect me. A vendor who has a financial incentive to rip me off, and thousands of years of history to show us just how much they do when given the chance. The trustlessness of cryptocurrencies is a lie. They move trust from a small number parties you can actually trust most of the time, to a huge number of unknown entities with perverse incentives.
- hndamien 8y ago
  My miner dries my washing.
lvs 8y ago
I don't think you understand what you think GP doesn't understand. Bitcoin uses energy to establish distributed consensus. What's technologically missing from the protocol is an energy-efficient way to establish distributed consensus, not a faster PoW algorithm.
- keymone 8y ago
  Bitcoin is the most energy efficient way to establish distributed and trust less consensus. Have better ideas - link me to your whitepaper, I’m sure you will become more famous than satoshi.

adrianratnapala 8y ago

> Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy Or a little more precisely a bitcoin is a provable record that a significant quantity of free energy was once turned into heat. So it does use energy, in the creation and once it is created, that energy is wasted unless the created also needed to heat something.

keymone 8y ago
energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  ...which is a trivial result, and could be reproduced by simple trust (which is essentially free)
  - keymone 8y ago
    that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Trust is dangerous, we’ve been dealing with trust based financial system failures for hundreds of not thousands of years.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.
      - antidesitter 8y ago
        Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?
        JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        Of course they are just like religion, law, right and wrong and on and on. You can tell what is real, and what is all in Sapiens' heads - ask your dog. They know what real is.
      - keymone 8y ago
        It costs way less than current financial system costs even normalized for market cap or transaction volume because it involves politics and military.
        JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        The internet depends on politics and the military too. Don't be fooled.
        keymone 8y ago
        oh yeah, they have so much control, they've totally fixed the problem of torrenting, child porn and illegal markets. don't be naive, you can't block bitcoin any more than you can block porn. besides, internet is no longer the only information transfer medium bitcoin can work over.
    - Nursie 8y ago
      > that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Well that's nonsense for a start. Bitcoin simply shifts trust from a middleman to a vendor I am interacting with. A middleman that is highly regulated, with all sorts of protections and restrictions in place to protect me. A vendor who has a financial incentive to rip me off, and thousands of years of history to show us just how much they do when given the chance. The trustlessness of cryptocurrencies is a lie. They move trust from a small number parties you can actually trust most of the time, to a huge number of unknown entities with perverse incentives.
hndamien 8y ago
My miner dries my washing.

lvs 8y ago

I don't think you understand what you think GP doesn't understand. Bitcoin uses energy to establish distributed consensus. What's technologically missing from the protocol is an energy-efficient way to establish distributed consensus, not a faster PoW algorithm.

keymone 8y ago
Bitcoin is the most energy efficient way to establish distributed and trust less consensus. Have better ideas - link me to your whitepaper, I’m sure you will become more famous than satoshi.