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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 bee

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.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.
    - gdhbcc 8y ago
      Much less secure too
    - celticninja 8y ago
      By that analogy we use plenty of people, buildings and power in traditional banking. I'm guessing that easily outweighs the power and costs of bitcoin mining.
    - m-i-l 8y ago
      There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible percentage of the total number of transactions, and a single Visa transaction (again factoring in datacentres etc.) is 41Wh per transaction whereas a single Bitcoin trasaction is around 20,000 more at ~826kWh. That was also 5 months ago, so the situation is likely to have got worse for Bitcoin, given the traditional banking system is incentivised to reduce energy consumption whereas Bitcoin is explicitly designed to increase energy consumption over time.
      - Nursie 8y ago
        Bitcoin also provides very, very few of the features of the global banking system, which does a lot more than run transactions!
      - keymone 8y ago
        do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts? because entire banking system exists on a premise that there is an army behind every fiat currency, so it's not really honest to exclude that from communication. bitcoin security on the other hand is backed purely by energy spent by miners.
- keymone 8y ago
  your understanding of bitcoin is very lacking. miners never waste any energy, they spend it to acquire proof that they spent it. that proof has value and while value of the proof is larger than market value of bitcoin rewarded for the proof - miners will keep mining. also miners are not middlemen - they don't control transactions, they don't control the peer to peer network. they are there to publish the proof and get their reward. you really should inform yourself on the topic before debating it.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    Miners are literally there to skim value out of a transaction. They're middlemen. And it is a waste. There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a transaction. I get that bitcoin is designed around this waste but that's hardly an excuse.
    - keymone 8y ago
      There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure ownership of money, peer to peer exchange and immutable fiscal policy. What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies. Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middleman has control over the process they facilitate, miners have no control over anything but construction of blocks and how much energy they are willing to spend. you could argue miners can choose to ignore transactions coming from me (if they manage to figure out how to identify them), but it's a competition of independent parties so there will always be other miners that do not choose to ignore me. for that to be an issue big enough to call miners middlemen you'd need majority of miners to collude on something quite obvious and demonstrable, which would undermine bitcoin project itself, rendering miners' own investments in bitcoin and infrastructure worthless - not in their interest. besides, with confidential transactions this entire point will be moot.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency Hold on, the response to “Bitcoin is inefficient with energy” is that efficiency doesn’t matter? That isn’t moving the goalpost so much as removing it.
rwmj 8y ago
If you exclude gold and every other physical commodity ever.
- BubRoss 8y ago
  Gold can't be used electronically without permission from a third party.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Do not cryptocoin transactions only work through the literal agreement of a large number of third parties?
    - keymone 8y ago
      third parties only observe what's published in a blockchain. they can choose to disagree with blockchain. when all/majority third parties disagree with blockchain - it becomes irrelevant and worthless while some other branch of that blockchain becomes "the real one". it's really not the same as having limited number of third parties proclaim which version of blockchain is correct. but more importantly - one doesn't have to ask permission from any third party to publish their transaction either via internet or radio or satellite or morse code. if you still think trading in gold is safer/easier - i don't know what else to say.
      - EliRivers 8y ago
        If you think I indicated anything about how safe trading in gold is - I do know what to say, and I've pretty much just said it :)
- keymone 8y ago
  > in terms of pure energy without any middlemen
Nursie 8y ago
This is such utter nonsense. There are a whole class of middlemen! And decentralised currency is not useful or important, unless you've got some sort of decentralisation fetish, which most people don't. This is honestly one of the most inflated, ridiculous claims I've ever seen in the cryptocurrency space. A space which is already riddled with ridiculous, overblown claims!
- keymone 8y ago
  as you don't provide any elaboration to your claims i'll just disregard them as ungrounded and/or irrelevant. try again.
  - Nursie 8y ago
    Exactly as ungrounded and irrelevant as your fantastic claims of usefulness then?
    - keymone 8y ago
      i provided an elaboration: 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. you're welcome to provide actual refutation.
      - Nursie 8y ago
        You ignored it - there are middlemen and your claims are ridiculous fantasy. Miners are the middlemen, complete with fees. Bitcoin is not pure energy any more than any other electronic currency. Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. The whole "pure energy" thing is just air-headed utopianism AFAICT
        keymone 8y ago
        > there are middlemen and your slaims are ridiculous fantasy this is an assertion from your previous message. > Miners are the middlemen this is an elaboration for your assertion, that was missing from your previous message. you don't have to lie, it's fine if you admit your mistake and fix it. > Miners are the middlemen, complete with fees this is false. middlemen have control over the process. miners don't control who can transact with whom and transaction fees are still orders of magnitude lower than the actual flat block reward. moreover - miners don't set the fees either, market does. miners only participate in a competitive environment of providing proof of work and getting paid for it. they are "contractors", not middlemen. > Bitcoin is not pure energy any more than any other electronic currency. Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. bitcoin is not pure energy and i never claimed it was. if you go back and try to read carefully you'll see that i was talking about monetary value and security. bitcoin is just a record in a ledger and not different in t hat regard from thousands other cryptocurrencies. what's different is the difficulty number of every block in the bitcoin blockchain - that's where security comes from, that's how hard it is to modify history and that is where big chunk of bitcoin's value is coming from. > Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. again, you're misunderstanding what i'm saying. you can't convert bitcoin back into energy that was used to create the blockchain, however you do have to spend equivalent amount of energy for each block to be able to mutate the history. that's what i mean when i say that bitcoin is security of money backed by pure energy.

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.
- jayd16 8y ago
  We already use computers in traditional banking in a much more efficient way than bitcoin.
  - gdhbcc 8y ago
    Much less secure too
  - celticninja 8y ago
    By that analogy we use plenty of people, buildings and power in traditional banking. I'm guessing that easily outweighs the power and costs of bitcoin mining.
  - m-i-l 8y ago
    There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible percentage of the total number of transactions, and a single Visa transaction (again factoring in datacentres etc.) is 41Wh per transaction whereas a single Bitcoin trasaction is around 20,000 more at ~826kWh. That was also 5 months ago, so the situation is likely to have got worse for Bitcoin, given the traditional banking system is incentivised to reduce energy consumption whereas Bitcoin is explicitly designed to increase energy consumption over time.
    - Nursie 8y ago
      Bitcoin also provides very, very few of the features of the global banking system, which does a lot more than run transactions!
    - keymone 8y ago
      do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts? because entire banking system exists on a premise that there is an army behind every fiat currency, so it's not really honest to exclude that from communication. bitcoin security on the other hand is backed purely by energy spent by miners.
keymone 8y ago
your understanding of bitcoin is very lacking. miners never waste any energy, they spend it to acquire proof that they spent it. that proof has value and while value of the proof is larger than market value of bitcoin rewarded for the proof - miners will keep mining. also miners are not middlemen - they don't control transactions, they don't control the peer to peer network. they are there to publish the proof and get their reward. you really should inform yourself on the topic before debating it.
- jayd16 8y ago
  Miners are literally there to skim value out of a transaction. They're middlemen. And it is a waste. There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a transaction. I get that bitcoin is designed around this waste but that's hardly an excuse.
  - keymone 8y ago
    There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure ownership of money, peer to peer exchange and immutable fiscal policy. What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies. Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middleman has control over the process they facilitate, miners have no control over anything but construction of blocks and how much energy they are willing to spend. you could argue miners can choose to ignore transactions coming from me (if they manage to figure out how to identify them), but it's a competition of independent parties so there will always be other miners that do not choose to ignore me. for that to be an issue big enough to call miners middlemen you'd need majority of miners to collude on something quite obvious and demonstrable, which would undermine bitcoin project itself, rendering miners' own investments in bitcoin and infrastructure worthless - not in their interest. besides, with confidential transactions this entire point will be moot.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency Hold on, the response to “Bitcoin is inefficient with energy” is that efficiency doesn’t matter? That isn’t moving the goalpost so much as removing it.

rwmj 8y ago

If you exclude gold and every other physical commodity ever.

BubRoss 8y ago
Gold can't be used electronically without permission from a third party.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Do not cryptocoin transactions only work through the literal agreement of a large number of third parties?
  - keymone 8y ago
    third parties only observe what's published in a blockchain. they can choose to disagree with blockchain. when all/majority third parties disagree with blockchain - it becomes irrelevant and worthless while some other branch of that blockchain becomes "the real one". it's really not the same as having limited number of third parties proclaim which version of blockchain is correct. but more importantly - one doesn't have to ask permission from any third party to publish their transaction either via internet or radio or satellite or morse code. if you still think trading in gold is safer/easier - i don't know what else to say.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      If you think I indicated anything about how safe trading in gold is - I do know what to say, and I've pretty much just said it :)
keymone 8y ago
> in terms of pure energy without any middlemen

Nursie 8y ago

This is such utter nonsense. There are a whole class of middlemen! And decentralised currency is not useful or important, unless you've got some sort of decentralisation fetish, which most people don't. This is honestly one of the most inflated, ridiculous claims I've ever seen in the cryptocurrency space. A space which is already riddled with ridiculous, overblown claims!

keymone 8y ago
as you don't provide any elaboration to your claims i'll just disregard them as ungrounded and/or irrelevant. try again.
- Nursie 8y ago
  Exactly as ungrounded and irrelevant as your fantastic claims of usefulness then?
  - keymone 8y ago
    i provided an elaboration: 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. you're welcome to provide actual refutation.
    - Nursie 8y ago
      You ignored it - there are middlemen and your claims are ridiculous fantasy. Miners are the middlemen, complete with fees. Bitcoin is not pure energy any more than any other electronic currency. Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. The whole "pure energy" thing is just air-headed utopianism AFAICT
      - keymone 8y ago
        > there are middlemen and your slaims are ridiculous fantasy this is an assertion from your previous message. > Miners are the middlemen this is an elaboration for your assertion, that was missing from your previous message. you don't have to lie, it's fine if you admit your mistake and fix it. > Miners are the middlemen, complete with fees this is false. middlemen have control over the process. miners don't control who can transact with whom and transaction fees are still orders of magnitude lower than the actual flat block reward. moreover - miners don't set the fees either, market does. miners only participate in a competitive environment of providing proof of work and getting paid for it. they are "contractors", not middlemen. > Bitcoin is not pure energy any more than any other electronic currency. Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. bitcoin is not pure energy and i never claimed it was. if you go back and try to read carefully you'll see that i was talking about monetary value and security. bitcoin is just a record in a ledger and not different in t hat regard from thousands other cryptocurrencies. what's different is the difficulty number of every block in the bitcoin blockchain - that's where security comes from, that's how hard it is to modify history and that is where big chunk of bitcoin's value is coming from. > Proof of work is energy already used, not somehow carried in a bitcoin. again, you're misunderstanding what i'm saying. you can't convert bitcoin back into energy that was used to create the blockchain, however you do have to spend equivalent amount of energy for each block to be able to mutate the history. that's what i mean when i say that bitcoin is security of money backed by pure energy.