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I am beginning to wonder if energy is what will eventually doom Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina [1]. Another article suggests t

by cletus 6y ago

I am beginning to wonder if energy is what will eventually doom Bitcoin. Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina [1]. Another article suggests the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is equivalent to New Zealand [2]. It's not just the cost of mining new coins (which will ultimately end) but the cost of maintaining the network. The more valuable the collective Bitcoins are, the more energy you need to spend defending it against 51% attacks. To the apologists claiming there's no other good use for that energy, it's not simple. Using too much electricity can raise the price that everybody pays [3]. Miners will keep chasing cheap power but I expect, much like ArbBnB, municipalities, states and even countries will increasingly clamp down on it. The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies. Try and see ordinary people deal with a Bitcoin wallet and discover there's no recourse if a vulnerability in their computer means the contents are irreversibly stolen. I realize there are corner cases (eg sending money to and from Venezuela). There's also a lot of illegal use cases. Thing is, blockchains aren't really as immutable as pundits suggest. Bitcoin and Ethereum have had forks. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambridge%20researchers%20say%20it%20consumes,Bitcoin%20undermines%20its%20environmental%20image https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#:~:text=Cambrid.... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-worries-about-its-massive-carbon-footprint.html#:~:text=Bitcoin%20has%20a%20carbon%20footprint,Netherlands%2C%20Cambridge%20University%20researchers%20say https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor.... [3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-miners-to-this-small-city-then-came-the-backlash https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cheap-power-drew-bitcoin-m...

fearface 6y ago
Forks don’t mutate the origin chain.
- mortehu 6y ago
  Chains are amended, not mutated. Consensus about what new blocks to accept to the chain can change at any time. For example the chain following the original Ethereum rules is now called Ethereum Classic and its market cap is less than 0.5% of the new consensus.
- ubersync 6y ago
  Unfortunately, Ethereum did infact mutate its chain. Bitcoin never mutated the chain, but once a fork was done to abandon the original chain from a few blocks back, and start mining a new chain from there, thus invalidating some transactions. However Ethereum did something which is essentially a crypto-blasphemy. They reversed a single transaction without a valid signature. Ethereum-Classic is the original chain that still contains that transaction.
  - neillyons 6y ago
    The fact that they created a new chain diminishes one of the main characteristics of a blockchain. That it can't be altered. This has always been my biggest sticking point with cryptocurrencies. It doesn't take into account that sometimes you need to fix a mistake. Cryptos also have a usability problem. If you forget your login credentials you lose access to your account. If you forgot your credentials at a regular bank, they have multiple avenues for figuring out if you are who you say you are. Eg post etc.
    - zapdrive 6y ago
      Bitcoin did not break any "technicality". Technically speaking, the chain with most work is to be considered valid. What they did back then was, a bunch of miners got together and created an alternate chain with more work. So it's still technically the correct/longest chain. On the other hand, Ethereum just plain broke the sanctity by basically creating a chain that contains a transaction without a valid signature.
celticninja 6y ago
>Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. Same as Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. They may use less power but their negative influence is far greater.
- Tycho 6y ago
  What negative effects are those?
  - edem 6y ago
    https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224
    - sabhiram 6y ago
      aah the irony lol
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Is this supposed to be some reductio ad absurdum? Shut down bitcoin and social media. Humanity is better off without either.
mtalantikite 6y ago
> It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Just the other week an older relative asked me to help get them set up so they could buy Ethereum. Another friend asked me to help them setup an account to buy Doge. Neither have any intention of using it as anything besides a speculative store of value because they hear other people are buying it, which would be fine if it didn’t actually have such poor environmental externalities. What a time to be alive.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  Same thing happened when it peaked at 20k - the hairdressers were talking about Bitcoin and altcoins. The difference this time is big time investors started gambling with it - so who knows where it's going to go.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Silver was a big bubble at that time too. I knew the end was near when the owner of a restaurant I frequented showed me the silver statue he had made of his dog. Once you have real ETFs the crypto mania will turn into yet another debt fielded bubble. In the meantime, enjoy the ride!
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      It will be interesting to watch silver prices in the long term (20 years),as it's supply will be getting lower,while some important industrial applications will unlikely to ne replaced quickly enough.
      - Blueskytech 6y ago
        I think Silver is the straw that will break the camels back, it’s hard to know if it will be in 1 or 50 years but it’s fungible and affordable while also having increased industrial usage. At this point it is almost at parity for industrial consumption as it was in the 90s when silver was used to develop analog film. It’s certainly true that topological insulators may replace silver in many electron transfer applications. That being said medical uses due to the way it kills micro organisms through sulfur attraction, and it’s thermal properties, will possibly continue to expand industrial consumption.
TheBlight 6y ago
>The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies. Tell that to citizens of countries who have experienced hyperinflation and whose currencies became worthless almost overnight. There is a reason every asset is going up right now. Real estate, stocks, commodities, and crypto. More money is being printed this year than ever before. The financial media and the fed can claim minimal inflation but the markets are exposing that claim as dubious.
- grumple 6y ago
  > Tell that to citizens of countries who have experienced hyperinflation and whose currencies became worthless almost overnight. Yeah, it's almost as though they had invested in Bitcoin during one of its crashes. What do you think they will say next time Bitcoin crashes back to 10% of its value?
  - retrac 6y ago
    That they were foolish for holding onto Bitcoin itself. That's not what it's being used for. Here in the West there's basically no barriers for someone like me sending $10k or $10 million wherever, for whatever. Just ensure I pay any taxes on investment profits, and don't fund terrorists or drug cartels. Many countries are far more strict. E.g., Argentinians can only move $300 a month out of the country legally, as I understand it. If they want to purchase real estate in Canada or Australia as a hedge against inflation, for example, that can be very hard even if they have the funds. Getting around capital controls seems to be a niche for Bitcoin. I can think of few other ways to simply send $10,000 from Argentina to Nigeria in one hour, reliably and securely. Assuming people can exchange Bitcoin for cash or similar on both ends, it can be near-ideal for certain pairings compared to the legal and traditional financial system.
    - logifail 6y ago
      > Getting around capital controls seems to be a niche for Bitcoin Q: If you pitch up in, say, Canada or Australia, and offer to buy a chunk of expensive real estate and pay with Bitcoin, who is selling? Q2: ... or do you have to convert to AUD/CAD first, and if so, which bank(s) can you rely on to not worry about KYC? Q3: ... or do you have to actually travel to Canada or Australia first, in order to open a regular bank account first, in order to have somewhere to move your Bitcoin to, in order to have local currency, in order to be able to pay the local seller?
dale_glass 6y ago
Doubtful it will doom it. Bitcoin and similar crypto scale difficulty based on the amount of power spent. So if a bunch of miners drop off due to electricity prices or such concerns, the network will simply readjust and keep on going. BTC has a lot of issues, but nothing forces it to be ever power hungrier. It can scale down the energy consumption and keep on existing just fine.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  I'm sorry, this directly contradicts the principle of ever-increasing difficulty for the proof-of-work hash. Bitcoin and other proof-of-work (no actual useful work being done here either, opportunity wasted!) based crypto-currencies increase the proof-of-work algorithms complexity factor as a means of controlling the rate. Bitcoin cannot scale up without using an ever increasing literal waste of electricity. Want a better system? make a new crypto-currency trust basis... (proof of stake, etc.) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://changelly.com/blog/proof-of-work/#Proof-of-Work-Drawback https://changelly.com/blog/proof-of-work/#Proof-of-Work-Draw...
  - dale_glass 6y ago
    I don't think you quite understand it. Yes, BTC is proof of work. Yes, complexity increases to control the rate. But that's it. Complexity has nothing to do with scaling. BTC doesn't scale. It's fixed at 1 block per 10 minutes, 1MB per block. No amount of horsepower is going to give it more capacity, so BTC doesn't scale up by wasting more power. It stays the same. You can see this in forks like Bitcoin Cash, which took the exact same algorithm, and forked the exact same chain, but gained less miners. After some time it readjusted, and BCH is perfectly functional with less miners than BTC. I agree that BTC and its ilk suck in many, many ways. But saying that power usage must increase is incorrect. It can remain static or go down without changing the functionality or the capacity of the network to process transactions, because those things don't depend in any way on the hashrate.
xtracto 6y ago
I agree with you of the idea that Bitcoin's doom is going to be energy. In my case, I do think Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and other approaches like the ones used in ETH2, IOTA, Nano, etc will come to replace PoW. I think at some point, government is going to ban PoW mining in the same way they ban gasoline based cars or plastic bags. > The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies That's the key: citizens of stable countries are just speculating, but for people of not so stable countries (Mexico, Argentina, China, among several others) where people just do not trust their government & their banking system, Cryptocurrencies deffinitely have value. In my case, I have part of my portfolio on Bitcoins, because there is no easy way to open a USD account in Mexico, and storing USD or gold is just not practial. And with our stupid president having 4 more years to go, the country is quickly going to a deep recesion. I don't doubt that when a recession come, the government will "lock" the banks to prevent a "cash run" as they did before (and as it has happened in other countries like Venezuela and Greece)
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >but for people of not so stable countries (Mexico, Argentina, China, among several others) where people just do not trust their government & their banking system, Cryptocurrencies deffinitely have value Fair point, but curious in how many shops in those countries you can buys groceries or how many landlords take their rent in Crypto? Because if you can't use it to feed or house yourself then what's the point of owning it other than going back to BTC's only real use cases so far: storing it for speculation, drug trafficking and ransomeware payments. Plus, can you imagine paying a $26 transaction fee every time you buy a $0.30 loaf of bread with bitcoin?
  - wyre 6y ago
    Bitcoin is a store of value. When they need money to buy groceries or pay rent they will sell an amount of bitcoin. Stores and landlords won’t take payment in gold or index funds either.
vinger 6y ago
"Try and see ordinary people deal with a Bitcoin wallet and discover there's no recourse if a vulnerability in their computer means the contents are irreversibly stolen." I lived in a period without debit and credit cards. You dropped your cash it was gone. I'm not sure not having a reversal transaction is the killer missing feature.
- gota 6y ago
  Anecdote - to me it is. I know what life is like with the existing feature of getting thousands of stolen dollars back by relying on the banking (and/or legal) system. I won't willingly adopt a system without it.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  Even with cash you had consumer protection laws. So you could get your cash back. With bitcoin it's medieval ages at best.
  - hfsp 6y ago
    God forbid btc give people the option of freedom and asking them to take responsibility for themselves.
  - vinger 6y ago
    Wouldn't the same laws apply regardless of payment? If a store defrauds you or if you know who the other person is in the exchange (regardless if it's cash or bitcoin or gold). If you don't know the other person then cash or bitcoin it wouldn't matter. If you drop your cash it's gone. If you drop your bitcoin wallet and you backed it up you still have your bitcoin..
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      Ah. It was late last night when I wrote this, so for some reason I was thinking "drop cash" as in "drop cash on some purchases" :)
- heavyset_go 6y ago
briefcomment 6y ago
Look into how miners are making use of stranded methane that is otherwise flared and contributes greatly to global warming (23:00 to 1:11:00 in video below)[1]. [1]https://youtu.be/emc83bQYiF8?t=1358 https://youtu.be/emc83bQYiF8?t=1358 Also, consider the massive dis-incentivization of consumption that BTC will encourage. The environmental effects are ambiguous, and probably not nearly as bad as mainstream media suggests. It could even be net positive.
- wyre 6y ago
  Bitcoin is putting a cash price on energy consumption. I see this turning into a new positive.
fwiwm2c 6y ago
It is clear that you don't believe in Bitcoin ("Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody") and thus want to use this energy angle to take it down. Good luck. But if you are more open minded read this thread and educate yourself: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=20 https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=... Also, have fun staying po...
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > It is clear that you don't believe in Bitcoin Bo one believes in BitCoin except a few people who don't understand how the word works. Do educate yourself: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... and followup: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... As to your tweet, it is as ignorant and uneducated as anything coming from bitcoin apologists.
  - fwiwm2c 6y ago
    Looks like someone missed the bus
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      The bus of pure speculation with next to zero tangible value? Yes, I missed it.
      - fwiwm2c 6y ago
        Ohh no - someone is staying poor
        dmitriid 6y ago
        Im fine, thank you. But it's good that you inadvertently confirmed the only use case for bitcoin: to try and get rich.
qertoip 6y ago
> Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina How Argentina justifies using so much energy?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Argentina's economy supports the life and livelihoods of some 45 million people. Bitcoin supports the degenerate gambling habits of some nerds.
  - hfsp 6y ago
    Btc is insurance against the Argentinian government squandering Argentinians savings.
tom_mellior 6y ago
> The more valuable the collective Bitcoins are, the more energy you need to spend defending it against 51% attacks. I wonder how afraid one actually needs to be of 51% attacks. How would the attacker profit from a 51% attack? They might double-spend, or rewrite known history somehow, or decide to only include certain transactions in their blocks and leave other transactions stranded. In each of these cases, it would be clear to everyone that Bitcoin has been broken, and that it has lost its usefulness and the properties it became famous for. The attacker might then control a large amount of Bitcoin, but having lost everyone's trust in it, that large amount of Bitcoin would be worthless. It's not in any attacker's interest to actually break the system, since they would need a gigantic initial investment and get no return on it. (Except if it were very cheap and the attacker's motivation would really be to destroy Bitcoin.) I don't think we need to fool ourselves that miners are in it to "protect" the network. They're in it to make money.
- DenisM 6y ago
  Now that we have ETFs one could short Bitcoin and profit from collapse.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    Interesting point, thanks. I wonder how one would settle a short if the network effectively ceases to exist, or at least ceases to exist as a single, well-defined chain that everybody can agree on. If you short the New York stock exchange, then blow up the building, do you win? :-)
    - DenisM 6y ago
      If you short bitcoin-based ETFs on NYSE and Bitcoin subsequently tanks the value of the ETF goes to zero and you walk away with your proceeds from the original sale and with no obligation to give the original ETF back. There is no counter-party risk in a short sale for the seller.
  - cletus 6y ago
    Keynes said "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Trying to short Bitcoin seems like a great way of becoming more anecdata for this.
spinny 6y ago
The capability of performing a 51% attack and sustaining a 51% attack are very different. Performing a 51% attack by mining a single gets you nowhere (at most you can revert some transactions, that block will eventually be orphaned). Today i believe, most usage of Bitcoin is for legitimate purposes. There is always lots of illegal use cases for anything with value, if it has value, people will do illegal s** to get it and will use as payment. Human nature. The energy used since the inception of the network is what makes the network valuable. Think of it this way: to create a cryptocurrency you need some "value" attached to it, Bitcoin does this by converting energy->work->bitcoin, you add "value" to the network in the form of energy and get bitcoin back (you get your "value" back in the form of money when you sell the mined BTC). Ethereum took a different approach (token sale + PoW) and now are moving to PoS. Pure PoW seems the only way to launch a completely anonymous and decentralized crypto
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  > Today i believe, most usage of Bitcoin is for legitimate purposes. Like what? Aside from "speculating that it will increase in value", what are these legitimate purposes?
  - companyhen 6y ago
    https://blockfi.com https://blockfi.com - use your crypto for collateral and take a loan or earn interest on it.
  - spinny 6y ago
    Hedging for massive inflation of government controlled currency is a legitimate purpose. Are people that buy gold or silver doing it for illegitimate reasons ?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- pclmulqdq 6y ago
  Except bitcoin isn't anonymous or decentralized at all... Transaction wallet ids are public and Chinese miners control the currency.
danlugo92 6y ago
It's not just Venezuela that is a corner case. China is another one, a one billion "corner case". Lots of banking problems in your so called "stable" countries like your account getting blocked (try running a business on transferwise or paypal) because of some shit algortihm.
jwblackwell 6y ago
> Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody This is a very Western centric view. Also, I live in the west and see Bitcoin as a good alternative store of wealth.
ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
Bitcoin will die when it is broken and someone hovers up all them coins
hfsp 6y ago
This is a privileged take. You should ask a censored Belarusian, a national currency deprived Venezuelan, or a Nigerian receiving a remittance from a family member about btc. You should ask an Argentinian, a Turk, or a Zimbabwean about currency debasement.
mcbuilder 6y ago
I think what will doom Bitcoin is the uncertainty around the identity of Satoshi. Imagine bitcoin growing by a few orders of magnitude, now it's 10s to 100s of Trillions. Is it close to becoming a world reserve currency? At this point, just who is Satoshi becomes a matter on the level of nation states. Bitcoin grows by a factor of 100x, Satoshi is now a Trillionaire. He has vast reserves of money he can move around anonymously. Does he still exist? Well his coins haven't moved. Will the world be okay with the mystery?
- cletus 6y ago
  So no one knows for sure of course but many suspect that early mining by likely Satoshi owned wallets (2009 era) yielded some 1.1m BTC, worth >$50B today. So the likely reasons someone sitting in a notional value of $50B+ who hasn't cashed in any of it include: 1. He (or she) is dead (I believe the last confirmed post was 2012?); 2. He (or she) has lost access to these coins; 3. He (or she) has cashed in some wealth from wallets not linked to Satoshi; or 3. He (or she) is sitting on this mountain of wealth and not cashing any of it in. There's the possibility of course that Satoshi isn't one person but several. Let's consider (4). You would need to be an incredibly committed ideologue. We have ways now of essentially laundering crypto (ie by converting it to other crypto through a pooling mechanism that makes it difficult to identify the source wallet for what comes out). It's stated that perhaps Satoshi fears government persecution (eg the tenuous connection to Wikileaks). To me that seems... unlikely. It's not like Satoshi controls the network. Lots of people hold crypto now. Maybe Satoshi just really likes his, her or their privacy. But given that wealth... (1) or (2) become increasingly likely as time goes on. It's fun to speculate.
627467 6y ago
You know what else consumes more power than Argentina? Canada and Saudi Arbia[1] (among others) both countries with less population than Argentina but with higher overall consumption. Is that "good"? Is it "right"? How much energy do all atm machines (on idle) waste compared to miners? At least miners have incentive (dependent on local regulation/costs) to find cheaper sources of energy because it directly affects their bottom line. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electri...
scotty79 6y ago
Bitcoin is just a way to funnel money from financial markets into energy production. Since we need huge investments into renewables production, every mechanism for such capital reallocation should be welcomed. Our future is electticity. Currently we are producing a fraction of what we'll need.
tracedddd 6y ago
You need to think beyond the initial numbers. It’s a clean energy subsidy. Be it hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, or cold fusion - create it and the returns are yours indefinitely. Indeed, much of mining is already hydroelectric, and much is overage that can’t be stored. This is not just sugarcoating or PR. Miners are highly incentivized to find these situations and exploit them. The more that happens, the less “bad” miners can even compete.
EGreg 6y ago
WARNING: BITCOIN MINING IS GOING TO EAT THE WORLD’S ELECTRICITY SUPPLY. READ WHY BELOW. I realized something very sad this year. I used to think that Bitcoin was a poor currency, and if someone just made one that was actually scalable and better, then this whole first-gen system would fizzle out, like Friendster or AskJeeves in the presence of better technology. But no. You see, Satoshi had us all fooled with the title of his paper: “A peer to peer cash system.” FORGET about Bitcoin being a currency. It is a store of value. And it has all the features you’d ever need to store value and not have it be diluted. There is nothing that needs to be improved over and above those features, and that is its killer app: being a black hole of value. Constantly growing versus fiat. You see, just like gold, Bitcoin is a store of value becaus others say it is. It has reached critical mass and mindshare for “storing value” even from companies now. From here on out, even if a better system arises, if it becomes a sidechain of bitcoin that locks up the coins, then there will be less and less “unlocked” coins, and therefore each coin will be more valuable. Also, bitcoins are constantly lost as dust or misplaced private keys or other things. And so the supply shrinks. But bitcoin is divisible into extremely tiny pieces (satoshis) so this merely helps one bitcoin get more and more valuable. You can’t kill bitcoin by making something better because even if 1/1000th of it remains, it will actually just be more valuable. The scarcer bitcoin gets, the pricier bitcoin gets, like the Hulk. Ok so what does it mean for electricity consumption? Here is where the sad part comes in! You see, bitcoin miners are rewarded in bitcoin, and as long as the price of bitcoin outpaces the halvings, mining rewards will grow. Read the story again, and extrapolate. The year is 2035, and households are fighting for electricity against bitcoin miners, who are easily winning. Governments trying to ban bitcoin mining meet similar fate to Mexican governments trying to ban the drug cartels’ activity, that is to say their families are threatened and they do not have power anymore to stop it, etc. Their feeble attempts to print money fall short of the ever growing rewards. Everything in the article about bitcoin using “only” 6% is misunderstanding the expontnential function. In 2021 those stats are outdated and the Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than half the world’s countries. We are five minutes to midnight. By the time we realize it’s consuming more than half the world combined, it will be too late to stop this activity. It will be “too sweet” and too financial lucrative. If you think we can stop it as a society, then let’s see how we have done with killing off insects, reducing biodiversity and species, polluting the world with plastic and pumping greenhouse gases into the air. Take that last one for example — have we been able to make a reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions, or merely their rate of growth? What exactly will change between now and 2035, or 2135 that will make bitcoing mining NOT be more economical valuable than, say, airconditioning homes? Change my mind. Prove me wrong.
Transisto 6y ago
The bitcoin mining equipment have no other purpose than mining bitcoin so eventually once the block subsidy halves these miners will be sitting idle until someone need to process a contentious transaction (paying high network fee). Didn't read the rest, btw forks of a chain like bcash doesn't have much to do with immutability.

by cletus 6y ago

fearface 6y ago

Forks don’t mutate the origin chain.

mortehu 6y ago
Chains are amended, not mutated. Consensus about what new blocks to accept to the chain can change at any time. For example the chain following the original Ethereum rules is now called Ethereum Classic and its market cap is less than 0.5% of the new consensus.
ubersync 6y ago
Unfortunately, Ethereum did infact mutate its chain. Bitcoin never mutated the chain, but once a fork was done to abandon the original chain from a few blocks back, and start mining a new chain from there, thus invalidating some transactions. However Ethereum did something which is essentially a crypto-blasphemy. They reversed a single transaction without a valid signature. Ethereum-Classic is the original chain that still contains that transaction.
- neillyons 6y ago
  The fact that they created a new chain diminishes one of the main characteristics of a blockchain. That it can't be altered. This has always been my biggest sticking point with cryptocurrencies. It doesn't take into account that sometimes you need to fix a mistake. Cryptos also have a usability problem. If you forget your login credentials you lose access to your account. If you forgot your credentials at a regular bank, they have multiple avenues for figuring out if you are who you say you are. Eg post etc.
  - zapdrive 6y ago
    Bitcoin did not break any "technicality". Technically speaking, the chain with most work is to be considered valid. What they did back then was, a bunch of miners got together and created an alternate chain with more work. So it's still technically the correct/longest chain. On the other hand, Ethereum just plain broke the sanctity by basically creating a chain that contains a transaction without a valid signature.

celticninja 6y ago

>Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. Same as Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. They may use less power but their negative influence is far greater.

Tycho 6y ago
What negative effects are those?
- edem 6y ago
  https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224
  - sabhiram 6y ago
    aah the irony lol
ForHackernews 6y ago
Is this supposed to be some reductio ad absurdum? Shut down bitcoin and social media. Humanity is better off without either.

mtalantikite 6y ago

> It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Just the other week an older relative asked me to help get them set up so they could buy Ethereum. Another friend asked me to help them setup an account to buy Doge. Neither have any intention of using it as anything besides a speculative store of value because they hear other people are buying it, which would be fine if it didn’t actually have such poor environmental externalities. What a time to be alive.

reader_mode 6y ago
Same thing happened when it peaked at 20k - the hairdressers were talking about Bitcoin and altcoins. The difference this time is big time investors started gambling with it - so who knows where it's going to go.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Silver was a big bubble at that time too. I knew the end was near when the owner of a restaurant I frequented showed me the silver statue he had made of his dog. Once you have real ETFs the crypto mania will turn into yet another debt fielded bubble. In the meantime, enjoy the ride!
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    It will be interesting to watch silver prices in the long term (20 years),as it's supply will be getting lower,while some important industrial applications will unlikely to ne replaced quickly enough.
    - Blueskytech 6y ago
      I think Silver is the straw that will break the camels back, it’s hard to know if it will be in 1 or 50 years but it’s fungible and affordable while also having increased industrial usage. At this point it is almost at parity for industrial consumption as it was in the 90s when silver was used to develop analog film. It’s certainly true that topological insulators may replace silver in many electron transfer applications. That being said medical uses due to the way it kills micro organisms through sulfur attraction, and it’s thermal properties, will possibly continue to expand industrial consumption.

TheBlight 6y ago

>The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies. Tell that to citizens of countries who have experienced hyperinflation and whose currencies became worthless almost overnight. There is a reason every asset is going up right now. Real estate, stocks, commodities, and crypto. More money is being printed this year than ever before. The financial media and the fed can claim minimal inflation but the markets are exposing that claim as dubious.

grumple 6y ago
> Tell that to citizens of countries who have experienced hyperinflation and whose currencies became worthless almost overnight. Yeah, it's almost as though they had invested in Bitcoin during one of its crashes. What do you think they will say next time Bitcoin crashes back to 10% of its value?
- retrac 6y ago
  That they were foolish for holding onto Bitcoin itself. That's not what it's being used for. Here in the West there's basically no barriers for someone like me sending $10k or $10 million wherever, for whatever. Just ensure I pay any taxes on investment profits, and don't fund terrorists or drug cartels. Many countries are far more strict. E.g., Argentinians can only move $300 a month out of the country legally, as I understand it. If they want to purchase real estate in Canada or Australia as a hedge against inflation, for example, that can be very hard even if they have the funds. Getting around capital controls seems to be a niche for Bitcoin. I can think of few other ways to simply send $10,000 from Argentina to Nigeria in one hour, reliably and securely. Assuming people can exchange Bitcoin for cash or similar on both ends, it can be near-ideal for certain pairings compared to the legal and traditional financial system.
  - logifail 6y ago
    > Getting around capital controls seems to be a niche for Bitcoin Q: If you pitch up in, say, Canada or Australia, and offer to buy a chunk of expensive real estate and pay with Bitcoin, who is selling? Q2: ... or do you have to convert to AUD/CAD first, and if so, which bank(s) can you rely on to not worry about KYC? Q3: ... or do you have to actually travel to Canada or Australia first, in order to open a regular bank account first, in order to have somewhere to move your Bitcoin to, in order to have local currency, in order to be able to pay the local seller?

dale_glass 6y ago

Doubtful it will doom it. Bitcoin and similar crypto scale difficulty based on the amount of power spent. So if a bunch of miners drop off due to electricity prices or such concerns, the network will simply readjust and keep on going. BTC has a lot of issues, but nothing forces it to be ever power hungrier. It can scale down the energy consumption and keep on existing just fine.

hootbootscoot 6y ago
I'm sorry, this directly contradicts the principle of ever-increasing difficulty for the proof-of-work hash. Bitcoin and other proof-of-work (no actual useful work being done here either, opportunity wasted!) based crypto-currencies increase the proof-of-work algorithms complexity factor as a means of controlling the rate. Bitcoin cannot scale up without using an ever increasing literal waste of electricity. Want a better system? make a new crypto-currency trust basis... (proof of stake, etc.) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://changelly.com/blog/proof-of-work/#Proof-of-Work-Drawback https://changelly.com/blog/proof-of-work/#Proof-of-Work-Draw...
- dale_glass 6y ago
  I don't think you quite understand it. Yes, BTC is proof of work. Yes, complexity increases to control the rate. But that's it. Complexity has nothing to do with scaling. BTC doesn't scale. It's fixed at 1 block per 10 minutes, 1MB per block. No amount of horsepower is going to give it more capacity, so BTC doesn't scale up by wasting more power. It stays the same. You can see this in forks like Bitcoin Cash, which took the exact same algorithm, and forked the exact same chain, but gained less miners. After some time it readjusted, and BCH is perfectly functional with less miners than BTC. I agree that BTC and its ilk suck in many, many ways. But saying that power usage must increase is incorrect. It can remain static or go down without changing the functionality or the capacity of the network to process transactions, because those things don't depend in any way on the hashrate.

xtracto 6y ago

I agree with you of the idea that Bitcoin's doom is going to be energy. In my case, I do think Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and other approaches like the ones used in ETH2, IOTA, Nano, etc will come to replace PoW. I think at some point, government is going to ban PoW mining in the same way they ban gasoline based cars or plastic bags. > The thing is... Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody. It's almost entirely a speculative bubble. Citizens of stable countries are almost entirely better off with traditional currencies That's the key: citizens of stable countries are just speculating, but for people of not so stable countries (Mexico, Argentina, China, among several others) where people just do not trust their government & their banking system, Cryptocurrencies deffinitely have value. In my case, I have part of my portfolio on Bitcoins, because there is no easy way to open a USD account in Mexico, and storing USD or gold is just not practial. And with our stupid president having 4 more years to go, the country is quickly going to a deep recesion. I don't doubt that when a recession come, the government will "lock" the banks to prevent a "cash run" as they did before (and as it has happened in other countries like Venezuela and Greece)

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>but for people of not so stable countries (Mexico, Argentina, China, among several others) where people just do not trust their government & their banking system, Cryptocurrencies deffinitely have value Fair point, but curious in how many shops in those countries you can buys groceries or how many landlords take their rent in Crypto? Because if you can't use it to feed or house yourself then what's the point of owning it other than going back to BTC's only real use cases so far: storing it for speculation, drug trafficking and ransomeware payments. Plus, can you imagine paying a $26 transaction fee every time you buy a $0.30 loaf of bread with bitcoin?
- wyre 6y ago
  Bitcoin is a store of value. When they need money to buy groceries or pay rent they will sell an amount of bitcoin. Stores and landlords won’t take payment in gold or index funds either.

vinger 6y ago

"Try and see ordinary people deal with a Bitcoin wallet and discover there's no recourse if a vulnerability in their computer means the contents are irreversibly stolen." I lived in a period without debit and credit cards. You dropped your cash it was gone. I'm not sure not having a reversal transaction is the killer missing feature.

gota 6y ago
Anecdote - to me it is. I know what life is like with the existing feature of getting thousands of stolen dollars back by relying on the banking (and/or legal) system. I won't willingly adopt a system without it.
dmitriid 6y ago
Even with cash you had consumer protection laws. So you could get your cash back. With bitcoin it's medieval ages at best.
- hfsp 6y ago
  God forbid btc give people the option of freedom and asking them to take responsibility for themselves.
- vinger 6y ago
  Wouldn't the same laws apply regardless of payment? If a store defrauds you or if you know who the other person is in the exchange (regardless if it's cash or bitcoin or gold). If you don't know the other person then cash or bitcoin it wouldn't matter. If you drop your cash it's gone. If you drop your bitcoin wallet and you backed it up you still have your bitcoin..
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    Ah. It was late last night when I wrote this, so for some reason I was thinking "drop cash" as in "drop cash on some purchases" :)
heavyset_go 6y ago

briefcomment 6y ago

Look into how miners are making use of stranded methane that is otherwise flared and contributes greatly to global warming (23:00 to 1:11:00 in video below)[1]. [1]https://youtu.be/emc83bQYiF8?t=1358 https://youtu.be/emc83bQYiF8?t=1358 Also, consider the massive dis-incentivization of consumption that BTC will encourage. The environmental effects are ambiguous, and probably not nearly as bad as mainstream media suggests. It could even be net positive.

wyre 6y ago
Bitcoin is putting a cash price on energy consumption. I see this turning into a new positive.

fwiwm2c 6y ago

It is clear that you don't believe in Bitcoin ("Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody") and thus want to use this energy angle to take it down. Good luck. But if you are more open minded read this thread and educate yourself: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=20 https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=... Also, have fun staying po...

dmitriid 6y ago
> It is clear that you don't believe in Bitcoin Bo one believes in BitCoin except a few people who don't understand how the word works. Do educate yourself: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... and followup: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... As to your tweet, it is as ignorant and uneducated as anything coming from bitcoin apologists.
- fwiwm2c 6y ago
  Looks like someone missed the bus
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    The bus of pure speculation with next to zero tangible value? Yes, I missed it.
    - fwiwm2c 6y ago
      Ohh no - someone is staying poor
      - dmitriid 6y ago
        Im fine, thank you. But it's good that you inadvertently confirmed the only use case for bitcoin: to try and get rich.

qertoip 6y ago

> Currently, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina How Argentina justifies using so much energy?

ForHackernews 6y ago
Argentina's economy supports the life and livelihoods of some 45 million people. Bitcoin supports the degenerate gambling habits of some nerds.
- hfsp 6y ago
  Btc is insurance against the Argentinian government squandering Argentinians savings.

tom_mellior 6y ago

> The more valuable the collective Bitcoins are, the more energy you need to spend defending it against 51% attacks. I wonder how afraid one actually needs to be of 51% attacks. How would the attacker profit from a 51% attack? They might double-spend, or rewrite known history somehow, or decide to only include certain transactions in their blocks and leave other transactions stranded. In each of these cases, it would be clear to everyone that Bitcoin has been broken, and that it has lost its usefulness and the properties it became famous for. The attacker might then control a large amount of Bitcoin, but having lost everyone's trust in it, that large amount of Bitcoin would be worthless. It's not in any attacker's interest to actually break the system, since they would need a gigantic initial investment and get no return on it. (Except if it were very cheap and the attacker's motivation would really be to destroy Bitcoin.) I don't think we need to fool ourselves that miners are in it to "protect" the network. They're in it to make money.

DenisM 6y ago
Now that we have ETFs one could short Bitcoin and profit from collapse.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  Interesting point, thanks. I wonder how one would settle a short if the network effectively ceases to exist, or at least ceases to exist as a single, well-defined chain that everybody can agree on. If you short the New York stock exchange, then blow up the building, do you win? :-)
  - DenisM 6y ago
    If you short bitcoin-based ETFs on NYSE and Bitcoin subsequently tanks the value of the ETF goes to zero and you walk away with your proceeds from the original sale and with no obligation to give the original ETF back. There is no counter-party risk in a short sale for the seller.
- cletus 6y ago
  Keynes said "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Trying to short Bitcoin seems like a great way of becoming more anecdata for this.

spinny 6y ago

The capability of performing a 51% attack and sustaining a 51% attack are very different. Performing a 51% attack by mining a single gets you nowhere (at most you can revert some transactions, that block will eventually be orphaned). Today i believe, most usage of Bitcoin is for legitimate purposes. There is always lots of illegal use cases for anything with value, if it has value, people will do illegal s** to get it and will use as payment. Human nature. The energy used since the inception of the network is what makes the network valuable. Think of it this way: to create a cryptocurrency you need some "value" attached to it, Bitcoin does this by converting energy->work->bitcoin, you add "value" to the network in the form of energy and get bitcoin back (you get your "value" back in the form of money when you sell the mined BTC). Ethereum took a different approach (token sale + PoW) and now are moving to PoS. Pure PoW seems the only way to launch a completely anonymous and decentralized crypto

TomSwirly 6y ago
> Today i believe, most usage of Bitcoin is for legitimate purposes. Like what? Aside from "speculating that it will increase in value", what are these legitimate purposes?
- companyhen 6y ago
  https://blockfi.com https://blockfi.com - use your crypto for collateral and take a loan or earn interest on it.
- spinny 6y ago
  Hedging for massive inflation of government controlled currency is a legitimate purpose. Are people that buy gold or silver doing it for illegitimate reasons ?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pclmulqdq 6y ago
Except bitcoin isn't anonymous or decentralized at all... Transaction wallet ids are public and Chinese miners control the currency.

danlugo92 6y ago

It's not just Venezuela that is a corner case. China is another one, a one billion "corner case". Lots of banking problems in your so called "stable" countries like your account getting blocked (try running a business on transferwise or paypal) because of some shit algortihm.

jwblackwell 6y ago

> Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody This is a very Western centric view. Also, I live in the west and see Bitcoin as a good alternative store of wealth.

ed_elliott_asc 6y ago

Bitcoin will die when it is broken and someone hovers up all them coins

hfsp 6y ago

This is a privileged take. You should ask a censored Belarusian, a national currency deprived Venezuelan, or a Nigerian receiving a remittance from a family member about btc. You should ask an Argentinian, a Turk, or a Zimbabwean about currency debasement.

mcbuilder 6y ago

I think what will doom Bitcoin is the uncertainty around the identity of Satoshi. Imagine bitcoin growing by a few orders of magnitude, now it's 10s to 100s of Trillions. Is it close to becoming a world reserve currency? At this point, just who is Satoshi becomes a matter on the level of nation states. Bitcoin grows by a factor of 100x, Satoshi is now a Trillionaire. He has vast reserves of money he can move around anonymously. Does he still exist? Well his coins haven't moved. Will the world be okay with the mystery?

cletus 6y ago
So no one knows for sure of course but many suspect that early mining by likely Satoshi owned wallets (2009 era) yielded some 1.1m BTC, worth >$50B today. So the likely reasons someone sitting in a notional value of $50B+ who hasn't cashed in any of it include: 1. He (or she) is dead (I believe the last confirmed post was 2012?); 2. He (or she) has lost access to these coins; 3. He (or she) has cashed in some wealth from wallets not linked to Satoshi; or 3. He (or she) is sitting on this mountain of wealth and not cashing any of it in. There's the possibility of course that Satoshi isn't one person but several. Let's consider (4). You would need to be an incredibly committed ideologue. We have ways now of essentially laundering crypto (ie by converting it to other crypto through a pooling mechanism that makes it difficult to identify the source wallet for what comes out). It's stated that perhaps Satoshi fears government persecution (eg the tenuous connection to Wikileaks). To me that seems... unlikely. It's not like Satoshi controls the network. Lots of people hold crypto now. Maybe Satoshi just really likes his, her or their privacy. But given that wealth... (1) or (2) become increasingly likely as time goes on. It's fun to speculate.

627467 6y ago

You know what else consumes more power than Argentina? Canada and Saudi Arbia[1] (among others) both countries with less population than Argentina but with higher overall consumption. Is that "good"? Is it "right"? How much energy do all atm machines (on idle) waste compared to miners? At least miners have incentive (dependent on local regulation/costs) to find cheaper sources of energy because it directly affects their bottom line. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electri...

scotty79 6y ago

Bitcoin is just a way to funnel money from financial markets into energy production. Since we need huge investments into renewables production, every mechanism for such capital reallocation should be welcomed. Our future is electticity. Currently we are producing a fraction of what we'll need.

tracedddd 6y ago

You need to think beyond the initial numbers. It’s a clean energy subsidy. Be it hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, or cold fusion - create it and the returns are yours indefinitely. Indeed, much of mining is already hydroelectric, and much is overage that can’t be stored. This is not just sugarcoating or PR. Miners are highly incentivized to find these situations and exploit them. The more that happens, the less “bad” miners can even compete.

EGreg 6y ago

WARNING: BITCOIN MINING IS GOING TO EAT THE WORLD’S ELECTRICITY SUPPLY. READ WHY BELOW. I realized something very sad this year. I used to think that Bitcoin was a poor currency, and if someone just made one that was actually scalable and better, then this whole first-gen system would fizzle out, like Friendster or AskJeeves in the presence of better technology. But no. You see, Satoshi had us all fooled with the title of his paper: “A peer to peer cash system.” FORGET about Bitcoin being a currency. It is a store of value. And it has all the features you’d ever need to store value and not have it be diluted. There is nothing that needs to be improved over and above those features, and that is its killer app: being a black hole of value. Constantly growing versus fiat. You see, just like gold, Bitcoin is a store of value becaus others say it is. It has reached critical mass and mindshare for “storing value” even from companies now. From here on out, even if a better system arises, if it becomes a sidechain of bitcoin that locks up the coins, then there will be less and less “unlocked” coins, and therefore each coin will be more valuable. Also, bitcoins are constantly lost as dust or misplaced private keys or other things. And so the supply shrinks. But bitcoin is divisible into extremely tiny pieces (satoshis) so this merely helps one bitcoin get more and more valuable. You can’t kill bitcoin by making something better because even if 1/1000th of it remains, it will actually just be more valuable. The scarcer bitcoin gets, the pricier bitcoin gets, like the Hulk. Ok so what does it mean for electricity consumption? Here is where the sad part comes in! You see, bitcoin miners are rewarded in bitcoin, and as long as the price of bitcoin outpaces the halvings, mining rewards will grow. Read the story again, and extrapolate. The year is 2035, and households are fighting for electricity against bitcoin miners, who are easily winning. Governments trying to ban bitcoin mining meet similar fate to Mexican governments trying to ban the drug cartels’ activity, that is to say their families are threatened and they do not have power anymore to stop it, etc. Their feeble attempts to print money fall short of the ever growing rewards. Everything in the article about bitcoin using “only” 6% is misunderstanding the expontnential function. In 2021 those stats are outdated and the Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than half the world’s countries. We are five minutes to midnight. By the time we realize it’s consuming more than half the world combined, it will be too late to stop this activity. It will be “too sweet” and too financial lucrative. If you think we can stop it as a society, then let’s see how we have done with killing off insects, reducing biodiversity and species, polluting the world with plastic and pumping greenhouse gases into the air. Take that last one for example — have we been able to make a reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions, or merely their rate of growth? What exactly will change between now and 2035, or 2135 that will make bitcoing mining NOT be more economical valuable than, say, airconditioning homes? Change my mind. Prove me wrong.

Transisto 6y ago

The bitcoin mining equipment have no other purpose than mining bitcoin so eventually once the block subsidy halves these miners will be sitting idle until someone need to process a contentious transaction (paying high network fee). Didn't read the rest, btw forks of a chain like bcash doesn't have much to do with immutability.