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Cryptos with less of a footprint are on the way. This issue will be solved. In the meantime after a year of the US government printing 20% of all dollars ever
by zpeti 6y ago
Cryptos with less of a footprint are on the way. This issue will be solved.
In the meantime after a year of the US government printing 20% of all dollars ever made, perhaps an alternative form of currency is a slightly more complex issue than just it destroying the environment. Maybe some people realise the monetary crisis that's inevitably coming.
- kritiko 6y agoYet most people purchasing Bitcoin are treating it as an asset denominated in USD, not a currency.
- loceng 6y agoThey're also treating it like an MLM - where they know if any significant amount of people sell before regulatory capture occurs - then their Ponzi-Pyramid scheme will crash; the ones with the most to lose are the later adopters who buy high, and ones with the most to gain are the earlier adopters as gains are weighted towards earlier adopters. It's quite the clusterfuck.
- loceng 6y agoThe first counterargument always seems to be that at some point in future the energy consumption problem will be solved, but isn't the rate of computation a or the main factor against 50%+ attacks? Else the solutions proposed seemed to rely on centralized services that don't actually play on the blockchain to reduce the actual amount of transactions and load, also then avoiding the delays - but then re-adding the supposed main issue of having a "trustless" blockchain.
- sneak 6y agoNo, there are other systems that work to solve the same trust issue such as Proof of Stake or Delegated Proof of Stake, as well as other variations on that theme. The issue will be getting people to use something other than Bitcoin, not solving the technical challenge. Bitcoin mining will always be Proof of Work, and thus energy-intensive.
- loceng 6y agoIt's simple: democratically elected governments (save regulatory capture skewing policy to self-interests, continuing the status quo of directing policy to benefit certain individuals more than society as a whole) can create a blockchain with failsafes, without the Ponzi/MLM scheme/wealth transfer from later adopters to earlier adopters, and make it mandatory to use.
- elif 6y agoNo his point is not about limitless energy or about off-chain transactions. It is about a proof-of-stake scheme like ETH2 where the blockchain is still immutable, but due to a purely abstracted notion of "mining" which rather than electricity at all relies upon mechanisms where attempts to mutate the blockchain turn into pointless losses of money. It is fully trustless, and I would argue even more trustless because it is accessible to all users, unlike mining.
- loceng 6y agoCan't such a blockchain structure exist where there's no transfer of wealth from weighted from the later adopters to the earlier adopters?
- stuaxo 6y agoWho is solving it, and how ? "proof of work", is by definition waste. They will have to do something than increasing difficulty and and an ever increasing transaction log, as both are unsustainable.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoTesla could have legitimized one of them by choosing one of them instead. I don't think Tesla investing into BTC really helps the alternative PoS chains all that much.
- dumbfounder 6y agoBitcoin is risky enough, you want them to store a billion dollars in a currency that is much much more risky?
- aisengard 6y agoThere's nothing about the way Bitcoin is created (via massive energy draw) that makes it especially useful as an alternative form of currency. It was just there first.
- nullifidian 6y agoIt would be very weird if governments don't end up heavily regulating cryptos to the point of extinction, due to their inability to block, forbid, sanction, track (to some degree), including money laundering, "know your customer", tax, apply financial regulations in general.