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Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and

Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8

superkuh 8y ago
But it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance. And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.
- IntelMiner 8y ago
  Bitcoin has proven time and time again to be a giant ponzi scheme https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin contains good reading
- dx034 8y ago
  Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? Bitcoin already used as much energy as medium-sized countries (I believe it was as much as Ireland last year or the year before) and nearly no one uses it for daily payments. Compared to that, I'm not aware that the Swift Network or Visa/Mastercard would run whole power plants to support their energy needs. They just need a medium sized data center to support hundreds of millions of payments a day.
  - tapland 8y ago
    Mainframes running a ton of financial transactions bill by CPU usage from IBM. Banks etc want to use as little computer resources as possible.
  - superkuh 8y ago
    >Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? The problem was the original poster in this thread setting up the strawman that bitcoin is for every single transaction (or even a decent fraction of them). But to answer your direct question: because the security and processing of it's transactions depends on the security of a nation state. That nation state's security stems from the military among other things. The energy expenditure is enormous and the influence of the nation state's desires on what transactions are processed is an everyday factor. This is obvious in watching the Justice Dept. interact with the major credit card companies.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      Transactions that indirectly depend on bitcoin also increase its price, and cause more energy to be burned on mining. If bitcoin starts to secure any notable fraction of business it will cost much more than the amount of army needed to keep a currency stable.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Agreed. I'd like to add that even if Swift/Visa/etc. combined use power plants worth of energy (which I actually assume they do, though it's hard to tell), they do orders of magnitude more payments with it.
  - h1d 8y ago
    Running fiat involves more than just electricity. People, offices and everything related requires power and physical location too.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
  This might be the case, no way to proof, but bitcoin has been proven to be useless as a medium of exchange so it's best to stop wasting all that energy on it. I believe there is a future for virtual currencies but there's still work to be done to work out the bugs.
- endless1234 8y ago
  If bitcoin had global adoption, there would be no more armies in the world? That's quite a stretch...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
paulsutter 8y ago
Bitcoin transactions don’t use a material amount of energy: no matter how many miners the transaction capacity is fixed. Energy use just increases as miners compete for the block reward.
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  World adoption -> increase in BTC/USD value (lambos!) -> USD block reward increase -> more GWs spent mining. It's not linear at every stage (for example, more USD per block reward will reboot Bitmain to produce even more efficient miners, which will eat up some of the rewards) but it's close enough to be concerned.
siwatanejo 8y ago
You're misinformed, please read https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186 https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum...
- looeee 8y ago
  Bitcoin.org is not likely to be an unbiased source when it comes to the negative aspects of Bitcoin.
  - clarky07 8y ago
    I'm guessing nature.com is also not likely to be an unbiased source...
    - zamalek 8y ago
      Nature has nothing to do with "nature," apart from the fact that science is concerned with the behavior of nature. It originated in 1869, long before climate change or energy waste was a known phenomenon. It's a scientific journal, they would likely accept any paper in support of cryptocurrencies that earned enough reviews. Additionally, if you are implying that anything "natural" should be biased against cryptocurrencies, you are actually showing support for the root comment. It's admitting that cryptocurrencies are harming nature.
tfha 8y ago
Why don't people rail like this against the aluminum industry? It's just as wasteful. Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society, the energy to secure bitcoin is a cost just the same as the energy to smelt aluminum.
- tirpen 8y ago
  > Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society Do you have any proof of this dubious statement?
  - lozaning 8y ago
    I've been reading through True Names and the various essays that proceed it in it's most recently published edition and I see crypto currencies as the fulfilment of many of the ideas talked about there. Particularly uncensored anonymous value transfers between parties. The idea that you can send "money" to anyone regardless of who you or they are does provide some value. Unlike any other financial transaction system that proceeded it that I'm aware of, you can't be deplatformed from crypto. How valuable you find this likely coincides with the value you place in the ideas of crypto (the original definition) anarchy.
    - rootlocus 8y ago
      > I see crypto currencies as the fulfilment of many of the ideas talked about there. As it stands, crypto currencies are a promise, not a fulfillment. They will become a fulfillment after they actually solve those problems. But it's a long way from theory to practice, even after all the technology is deployed.
    - belltaco 8y ago
      Here's a well reasoned essay by Bruce Schneiner about why cryptocurrencies are useless. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...
- nightfly 8y ago
keymone 8y ago
there are few things on this planet that are less wasteful and more useful/important for our civilization than bitcoin. it's the first time in history we've been able to express and implement monetary value and security thereof in terms of pure energy without any middlemen.
- jayd16 8y ago
  Except for, you know, all the miners wastefully vying for a chance to be the middleman for a given block.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    There's value in competition, though. Bitcoin doesn't eliminate trust, but it does commoditize that function. Commoditization necessarily means "many producers", so there's no way to achieve that without duplication of effort - but I guarantee that one Bitcoin ASIC has a lot less environmental impact than one human.
    - thefounder 8y ago
      Many producers are actually few with specialised hardware(i.e bitmain)
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        But to enter the market, you just need to buy those Bitmain ASICs and find a cheap power source. That's what makes it a commodity market: barriers to entry are low, so if a big player gets too dominant, a bunch of new entrants with money but not necessarily expertise can take them down. You can't really do that to say Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo, where a large portion of the competitive advantage they've built up is the trust (har har) and relationships they've developed over the past 150 years. There's perhaps worries that Bitmain could get too big and poison the chain, but they're hamstrung in that by Bitcoin being an open protocol. If they did that the network would fork, and despite the higher hash rate in the Bitmain fork, holders would dump the Bitmain coins and buy the original fork, since they wouldn't trust the poisoned chain.
mrb 8y ago
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_TableS1.csv https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_Tabl... (when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9). This error causes their calculated average efficiency (J/GH) to be much overestimated as their dataset contains mostly inefficient obsolete ASICs * They overestimate future power consumption by ~50x by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate (in reality it doesn't). Power consumption grows with miners revenues, proportional to {block rewards + transaction fees}. Fees account for currently ~2% of revenues (average of last 60 days). Rewards decline over time, so that fees will eventually account for close to 100% of revenues, which will happen on the authors timeline of 100 years. So if fees per transaction remaimed constant, we could see a 50x tx rate growth with no increase of power consumption. * They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?), and that Bitcoin consumes more fossil fuels than what the entire world currently consumes (infinite fossil fuel reserves?). It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today. Overall, these errors combined mean their scenario overestimates CO2 emissions by a factor of about a thousand: (3 to 5) x 50 ÷ 20% = 750x to 1250x Edit: simplified bullet point #2
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value elegance and efficiency can defend bitcoin with a straight face. I can only assume they have a lot of money tied up in bitcoin, because otherwise it makes no sense.
drak0n1c 8y ago
There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies. Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? It certainly has before. I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
- flatfilefan 8y ago
  Why would a devaluing Yuan be bad for working class Chinese? What are they buying that’s getting disproportionately more expensive? We assume you call devaluation lower FX to dollar, don’t you? Because dollar is also subject to inflation obviously.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - once_inc 8y ago
    Bread. Look at the Arab spring. All countries that revolted did so in a period when the price of bread exploded. That price explosion was caused by financial mismanagement of the leaders of the country. The dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power over the past 100 years, and in recent years has been watered down enormously with QE. That money had to go somewhere, which is why stocks and corporate debt is currently at record highs. QE isn't possible in Bitcoin, and the coin itself is deflationary to 0 in about 2140.
kaolti 8y ago
Funny and sad to see how, instead of seeing opportunities, the forum with the most open minded tech people will rather go with "SHUT IT DOWN"
- mercer 8y ago
  Seeing opportunities doesn't mean plucking out and leaving your critical eye at the door.
  - kaolti 8y ago
    Agree, point still stands though. There's pros and cons to everything. Why focus on the latter?
    - kadendogthing 8y ago
      Because the cons are really bad. And the pro's are nifty.
    - ThalesX 8y ago
      Do y'all just expect people to put their head in the sand, accept your currency of the future and accept their stupidity when compared to the crypto-Evangelists? I'm in a position where being able to make fast and cheap transactions between countries would benefit me, I don't even care for anonymous. Can I use crypto for that without a massive overhead? No, I can't. Should I stop focusing on the fact that I can't? If I understood your beef, you'd suggest I do just that. Ignore the fact that it's not delivering on the promise and just focus on the pros of the system. <rant> I'm sick and tired of this anti-con attitude. I've been encountering it a lot while talking to people about their ideas, especially from those that can't hold their idea together. As a product builder, I meet with a lot of people who pitch me their ideas and I decide if I help them build it or not. Now, I do spend a lot of times before actually building the product to understand what problem the customers solve and what solution they chose. That means asking a lot of questions and asking a lot of why. I've had a lot of clients become defensive and giving me the pros and cons to everything so why focus on the latter speech. This is before we even start building the product. Asking for input on how something works, and they become defensive that I'm a pessimist... I've had three outcomes from this: * first is a group of people that will not work with me anymore, will tell their friends not to work with me and none of which I've heard a lot about after we discussed; * second is a group of people that went with my analysis and most of them are still my customers and refer me to their network; * third is a group of people that pivoted based on my analysis and work with me with open ears and trust; these are the customers that give me the best return on investment and the best referrals. </rant> While I agree that when someone showcases an achievement, it's rather bad to focus on the cons; when analysing a technology, a cult and or something that combines both of these, especially when it gets shoved down your throat every once in a while, I think we can assume a default not-interested position. I think it's in the people presenting the benefits to focus on the benefits, and the people that they want to convince to hang on as tight as they can to what they feel this technology is not solving for them. Anyway, sorry about the unstructured rant, I just feel like this 'why focus on the latter?' attitude is damaging for products, for technologies and society in general. Don't focus on the good, or the bad, focus on whatever needs to be in focus to solve your current query...
DennisP 8y ago
Luckily, proof of stake research seems to be going really well. We can have decentralized blockchains without the climate impact.
- frontloadpro 8y ago
  POS hasn't been proven to work without centralization. It's why alt coins have stayed basically irrelevant.
- kbody 8y ago
  Security-wise they haven't been really tested yet, but Ethereum moving to a PoS model will be a good case. The only reason they are accepted at the moment is that it's free money, especially for the initial coin holders(founders/friend investors etc.). For some reason people now accept fully pre-distributed coins. At least Ethereum went through a PoW phase to allow for some non-ICO distribution.
coretx 8y ago
Both gold mining & forex consumes magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin mining. Whatever the chinese rationale is, it ain't about the climate.
- gruez 8y ago
  >forex consumes magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin mining Source on this?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
imhoguy 8y ago
I am not bitcoin proponent, however to be fair I wouldn't judge only one side. The World's economy is currently based on assumption of constant growth therefore it is going to be catastrophic as well. I have no hard data but look how much resources the present monetary systems consume, that including cost of running air-condition in any big financial hub offices.

superkuh 8y ago

But it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance. And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.

IntelMiner 8y ago
Bitcoin has proven time and time again to be a giant ponzi scheme https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin contains good reading
dx034 8y ago
Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? Bitcoin already used as much energy as medium-sized countries (I believe it was as much as Ireland last year or the year before) and nearly no one uses it for daily payments. Compared to that, I'm not aware that the Swift Network or Visa/Mastercard would run whole power plants to support their energy needs. They just need a medium sized data center to support hundreds of millions of payments a day.
- tapland 8y ago
  Mainframes running a ton of financial transactions bill by CPU usage from IBM. Banks etc want to use as little computer resources as possible.
- superkuh 8y ago
  >Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? The problem was the original poster in this thread setting up the strawman that bitcoin is for every single transaction (or even a decent fraction of them). But to answer your direct question: because the security and processing of it's transactions depends on the security of a nation state. That nation state's security stems from the military among other things. The energy expenditure is enormous and the influence of the nation state's desires on what transactions are processed is an everyday factor. This is obvious in watching the Justice Dept. interact with the major credit card companies.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    Transactions that indirectly depend on bitcoin also increase its price, and cause more energy to be burned on mining. If bitcoin starts to secure any notable fraction of business it will cost much more than the amount of army needed to keep a currency stable.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Agreed. I'd like to add that even if Swift/Visa/etc. combined use power plants worth of energy (which I actually assume they do, though it's hard to tell), they do orders of magnitude more payments with it.
- h1d 8y ago
  Running fiat involves more than just electricity. People, offices and everything related requires power and physical location too.
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
This might be the case, no way to proof, but bitcoin has been proven to be useless as a medium of exchange so it's best to stop wasting all that energy on it. I believe there is a future for virtual currencies but there's still work to be done to work out the bugs.
endless1234 8y ago
If bitcoin had global adoption, there would be no more armies in the world? That's quite a stretch...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

paulsutter 8y ago

Bitcoin transactions don’t use a material amount of energy: no matter how many miners the transaction capacity is fixed. Energy use just increases as miners compete for the block reward.

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
World adoption -> increase in BTC/USD value (lambos!) -> USD block reward increase -> more GWs spent mining. It's not linear at every stage (for example, more USD per block reward will reboot Bitmain to produce even more efficient miners, which will eat up some of the rewards) but it's close enough to be concerned.

siwatanejo 8y ago

You're misinformed, please read https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consumption-4526d4b56186 https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum...

looeee 8y ago
Bitcoin.org is not likely to be an unbiased source when it comes to the negative aspects of Bitcoin.
- clarky07 8y ago
  I'm guessing nature.com is also not likely to be an unbiased source...
  - zamalek 8y ago
    Nature has nothing to do with "nature," apart from the fact that science is concerned with the behavior of nature. It originated in 1869, long before climate change or energy waste was a known phenomenon. It's a scientific journal, they would likely accept any paper in support of cryptocurrencies that earned enough reviews. Additionally, if you are implying that anything "natural" should be biased against cryptocurrencies, you are actually showing support for the root comment. It's admitting that cryptocurrencies are harming nature.

tfha 8y ago

Why don't people rail like this against the aluminum industry? It's just as wasteful. Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society, the energy to secure bitcoin is a cost just the same as the energy to smelt aluminum.

tirpen 8y ago
> Bitcoin provides substantial utility and value to society Do you have any proof of this dubious statement?
- lozaning 8y ago
  I've been reading through True Names and the various essays that proceed it in it's most recently published edition and I see crypto currencies as the fulfilment of many of the ideas talked about there. Particularly uncensored anonymous value transfers between parties. The idea that you can send "money" to anyone regardless of who you or they are does provide some value. Unlike any other financial transaction system that proceeded it that I'm aware of, you can't be deplatformed from crypto. How valuable you find this likely coincides with the value you place in the ideas of crypto (the original definition) anarchy.
  - rootlocus 8y ago
    > I see crypto currencies as the fulfilment of many of the ideas talked about there. As it stands, crypto currencies are a promise, not a fulfillment. They will become a fulfillment after they actually solve those problems. But it's a long way from theory to practice, even after all the technology is deployed.
  - belltaco 8y ago
    Here's a well reasoned essay by Bruce Schneiner about why cryptocurrencies are useless. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...
nightfly 8y ago

keymone 8y ago

there are few things on this planet that are less wasteful and more useful/important for our civilization than bitcoin. it's the first time in history we've been able to express and implement monetary value and security thereof in terms of pure energy without any middlemen.

jayd16 8y ago
Except for, you know, all the miners wastefully vying for a chance to be the middleman for a given block.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  There's value in competition, though. Bitcoin doesn't eliminate trust, but it does commoditize that function. Commoditization necessarily means "many producers", so there's no way to achieve that without duplication of effort - but I guarantee that one Bitcoin ASIC has a lot less environmental impact than one human.
  - thefounder 8y ago
    Many producers are actually few with specialised hardware(i.e bitmain)
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      But to enter the market, you just need to buy those Bitmain ASICs and find a cheap power source. That's what makes it a commodity market: barriers to entry are low, so if a big player gets too dominant, a bunch of new entrants with money but not necessarily expertise can take them down. You can't really do that to say Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo, where a large portion of the competitive advantage they've built up is the trust (har har) and relationships they've developed over the past 150 years. There's perhaps worries that Bitmain could get too big and poison the chain, but they're hamstrung in that by Bitcoin being an open protocol. If they did that the network would fork, and despite the higher hash rate in the Bitmain fork, holders would dump the Bitmain coins and buy the original fork, since they wouldn't trust the poisoned chain.

mrb 8y ago

No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_TableS1.csv https://github.com/moracamilo/Bitcoin/blob/master/Randi_Tabl... (when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9). This error causes their calculated average efficiency (J/GH) to be much overestimated as their dataset contains mostly inefficient obsolete ASICs * They overestimate future power consumption by ~50x by assuming it grows linearly with the transaction rate (in reality it doesn't). Power consumption grows with miners revenues, proportional to {block rewards + transaction fees}. Fees account for currently ~2% of revenues (average of last 60 days). Rewards decline over time, so that fees will eventually account for close to 100% of revenues, which will happen on the authors timeline of 100 years. So if fees per transaction remaimed constant, we could see a 50x tx rate growth with no increase of power consumption. * They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?), and that Bitcoin consumes more fossil fuels than what the entire world currently consumes (infinite fossil fuel reserves?). It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today. Overall, these errors combined mean their scenario overestimates CO2 emissions by a factor of about a thousand: (3 to 5) x 50 ÷ 20% = 750x to 1250x Edit: simplified bullet point #2

ForHackernews 8y ago
You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack. It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value elegance and efficiency can defend bitcoin with a straight face. I can only assume they have a lot of money tied up in bitcoin, because otherwise it makes no sense.

drak0n1c 8y ago

There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies. Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? It certainly has before. I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.

flatfilefan 8y ago
Why would a devaluing Yuan be bad for working class Chinese? What are they buying that’s getting disproportionately more expensive? We assume you call devaluation lower FX to dollar, don’t you? Because dollar is also subject to inflation obviously.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- once_inc 8y ago
  Bread. Look at the Arab spring. All countries that revolted did so in a period when the price of bread exploded. That price explosion was caused by financial mismanagement of the leaders of the country. The dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power over the past 100 years, and in recent years has been watered down enormously with QE. That money had to go somewhere, which is why stocks and corporate debt is currently at record highs. QE isn't possible in Bitcoin, and the coin itself is deflationary to 0 in about 2140.

kaolti 8y ago

Funny and sad to see how, instead of seeing opportunities, the forum with the most open minded tech people will rather go with "SHUT IT DOWN"

mercer 8y ago
Seeing opportunities doesn't mean plucking out and leaving your critical eye at the door.
- kaolti 8y ago
  Agree, point still stands though. There's pros and cons to everything. Why focus on the latter?
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    Because the cons are really bad. And the pro's are nifty.
  - ThalesX 8y ago
    Do y'all just expect people to put their head in the sand, accept your currency of the future and accept their stupidity when compared to the crypto-Evangelists? I'm in a position where being able to make fast and cheap transactions between countries would benefit me, I don't even care for anonymous. Can I use crypto for that without a massive overhead? No, I can't. Should I stop focusing on the fact that I can't? If I understood your beef, you'd suggest I do just that. Ignore the fact that it's not delivering on the promise and just focus on the pros of the system. <rant> I'm sick and tired of this anti-con attitude. I've been encountering it a lot while talking to people about their ideas, especially from those that can't hold their idea together. As a product builder, I meet with a lot of people who pitch me their ideas and I decide if I help them build it or not. Now, I do spend a lot of times before actually building the product to understand what problem the customers solve and what solution they chose. That means asking a lot of questions and asking a lot of why. I've had a lot of clients become defensive and giving me the pros and cons to everything so why focus on the latter speech. This is before we even start building the product. Asking for input on how something works, and they become defensive that I'm a pessimist... I've had three outcomes from this: * first is a group of people that will not work with me anymore, will tell their friends not to work with me and none of which I've heard a lot about after we discussed; * second is a group of people that went with my analysis and most of them are still my customers and refer me to their network; * third is a group of people that pivoted based on my analysis and work with me with open ears and trust; these are the customers that give me the best return on investment and the best referrals. </rant> While I agree that when someone showcases an achievement, it's rather bad to focus on the cons; when analysing a technology, a cult and or something that combines both of these, especially when it gets shoved down your throat every once in a while, I think we can assume a default not-interested position. I think it's in the people presenting the benefits to focus on the benefits, and the people that they want to convince to hang on as tight as they can to what they feel this technology is not solving for them. Anyway, sorry about the unstructured rant, I just feel like this 'why focus on the latter?' attitude is damaging for products, for technologies and society in general. Don't focus on the good, or the bad, focus on whatever needs to be in focus to solve your current query...

DennisP 8y ago

Luckily, proof of stake research seems to be going really well. We can have decentralized blockchains without the climate impact.

frontloadpro 8y ago
POS hasn't been proven to work without centralization. It's why alt coins have stayed basically irrelevant.
kbody 8y ago
Security-wise they haven't been really tested yet, but Ethereum moving to a PoS model will be a good case. The only reason they are accepted at the moment is that it's free money, especially for the initial coin holders(founders/friend investors etc.). For some reason people now accept fully pre-distributed coins. At least Ethereum went through a PoW phase to allow for some non-ICO distribution.

coretx 8y ago

Both gold mining & forex consumes magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin mining. Whatever the chinese rationale is, it ain't about the climate.

gruez 8y ago
>forex consumes magnitudes more energy than Bitcoin mining Source on this?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

imhoguy 8y ago

I am not bitcoin proponent, however to be fair I wouldn't judge only one side. The World's economy is currently based on assumption of constant growth therefore it is going to be catastrophic as well. I have no hard data but look how much resources the present monetary systems consume, that including cost of running air-condition in any big financial hub offices.