6 ms·
Can we have "cash you can email" that doesn't consume as much electricity as several nation states combined?
by majewsky 6y ago
Can we have "cash you can email" that doesn't consume as much electricity as several nation states combined?
- ineedasername 6y agoLooking solely at that criterial, ACH transfers work.
- wmf 6y agoNot across countries.
- justusthane 6y agoDoes it work internationally though? Edit: Or I should say, “Could it work internationally?” Because afaik it does not currently.
- syshum 6y agoACH is US Banking only. You can not do Direct person to person transfers, you must go through a US Bank for ACH ACH is also SLOW and painfully insecure relaying on the banking institutions to stop gap the security and its built in slowness to allow for reversals of fraud or error transfers ACH is not a model people should be promoting as good method to do money transfer
- ineedasername 6y agoThanks, I didn't know ACH was US only. As for slow, I've had things go through literally instantly, where I make the transaction, login to my bank account, and see it posted. When it's been slow, that always seems to be a factor with the sending entity (like PayPal) not my receiving bank. (Could be bank specific though)
- Izkata 6y agoMight be something else going on (wire transfer, maybe?); ACH payments are batch-processed a couple times a day, and so can't be instant.
- IshKebab 6y agoBank transfers don't have to be slow. Within the UK they are almost always instant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service
- DeafSquid 6y agoHow much electricity do you think traditional money printing and transfers consume?
- TulliusCicero 6y agoA lot less per transaction than Bitcoin? But I'm no expert.
- graeme 6y agoMuch less? Bitcoin currently powers almost none of the world’s transactions, yet consumes all that energy. The entire us consumes 75 twh in a year, the same as bitcoin’s global energy use. Of that, the entire commercial sector is about 12 twh. That’s not just banks. That’s every company. Banks alone are surely far less. Maybe 2-3 twh? And the us is 15% of global gdp. So, global finance might consume about 14-32 twh. Again, that is while doing all of global finance. Bitcoin powers a rounding error of transactions yet consumes 75 twh. There’s just no comparison energy wise. My math could be off by several orders of magnitude and bitcoin would still consume more if it were actually powering the world’s transactions. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- blake1 6y agoThe US consumes about 4 PWh/year, so bitcoin isn't comparable with the nation as a whole. However, that is more power consumption than many individual states, so your overall point remains completely valid.
- graeme 6y agoWhoops yeah that should have been 9.4 quadrillion BTU. The online calculator I used for TWH conversion was very wrong. Looks like the correct value is about 2,000 twh for the us commercial sector? If we assume banks are 10% of that, then it’s 200 twh. 3x bitcoin. But also, handling literally all finance and banking in the US. Vs essentially nothing for bitcoin, compared to the scale of the us economy.
- everfree 6y agoMany coins are experimenting with alternative consensus algorithms, the most promising imo is proof of stake. No wasted energy beyond the cost of running a normal computer.
- majewsky 6y agoIs this 2021 or 2015?
- wyldfire 6y agoYes. Proof of stake coins like nano don't require any proof of work. Peercoin, too. Ethereum is considering PoS IIRC.
- DennisP 6y agoEthereum has a proof of stake chain in production right now, in the sense that it is running with over a billion dollars worth of real ETH. But it won't run user transactions and contracts until the EVM migrates over, probably late 2021, and that's when PoW will go away.
- cesarb 6y agoHere in Brazil, we have that since last month. The new money transfer system (Pix) allows anyone to send money to a key, which can be a person's CPF (the tax ID number nearly everyone has), a phone number, an email, or a randomly-generated number. These all map to a bank account (you can also use Pix to send directly to a bank account number); the directory with these mappings is kept by the Brazilian Central Bank, and the mappings are inserted by the participating financial institutions. So assuming my email was something@example.com, and I had asked my bank to map the Pix key "something@example.com" to my bank account, anyone could "send cash" through Pix to my something@example.com email; the cash would arrive at my bank account nearly instantly (even during weekends and/or holidays).
- Kinrany 6y agoFrom this description it sounds like just name resolution that still uses the regular banking system.
- cesarb 6y agoThe name resolution is just part of it (though the most visible part); there's also a new message exchange protocol, over the national inter-bank network, which does the instant transfers (before this new protocol, inter-bank transfers were only instant during banking hours, not on nights/weekends/holidays).
- bigphishy 6y agoFascinating, this is the first time I've heard of Pix. Can you own the private key? Can you create an account without having a bank account?
- ignoramous 6y agoCan't talk for Pix, but UPI, a similar system implemented by Indian banks, wouldn't accept "private keys" or not having a bank account. No international payments either. UPI is more like venmo on steroids, but it is no crypto-currency replacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
- mareko 6y agoWhat about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2? Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number. Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com
- nyhc99 6y agoPolkadot, Cardano, Stellar, soon to be Ethereum 2.0. Proof of Stake is where it's at if you are concerned with the power consumption of Proof of Work.
- nmlnn 6y agoSure, you just need to trust people.
- biolurker1 6y agoYou got Pos wrong there is no trust involved
- nmlnn 6y agoSure, not until some entity gets over 50% of the stake
- mareko 6y agoFor newer PoS protocols, they would need over 66% and they would lose money if they misbehaved making it likely uneconomical to do so. This is the big advantage of PoS over PoW. There are both positive incentives (e.g. block rewards) but also negative ones (e.g. getting slashed for trying to stage a double spend attack).
- biolurker1 6y agoSorry you do not understand how the system works. You can't buy 50% because the price would be worth more than all world gdp since each order is incrementally how gher and the supply of coins is not unlimited. Good to dig into things before you mindlessly dismiss them. Did you actually believe that people are designing and talking about Pos as a breakthrough when the main idea is "nobody rich enough will want to buy 50%"?