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This is the first interesting paper I see here on HN about Bitcoin. While many people think that Bitcoin's energy usage is too high, I honestly hope that it's
by xiphias2 6y ago
This is the first interesting paper I see here on HN about Bitcoin.
While many people think that Bitcoin's energy usage is too high, I honestly hope that it's high enough to deter a nation state sized attacker.
Many Bitcoiners argue that miner rewards shouldn't decrease more, but at the same time it's too late to change the concensus on it.
- elcomet 6y ago> I honestly hope that it's high enough to deter a nation state sized attacker. What's the point though? Bitcoin has no real use case apart from speculation.
- witweb 6y agoSo people living in countries without a stable currency due to hyperinflation don't count as a real use case? It's sometimes the only way they can secure their capital. I think that we need to think outside of our elitist western bubble more often. Not all people live in a stable democracy with (semi-)stable currencies.
- afiori 6y agoBut for them there are better alternatives to BTC, one being BCH for example
- orwin 6y agoAnd even if they do use BTC (they don't really, at least in Africa, i don't know about Venezuela), they do not trade using BTC but a second layer anyway.
- hfsp 6y agoThis is either an uninformed or misleading take. It isn't necessarily "Africa" or "Americas". The heuristic is "is my local fiat shitcoin stealing my purchasing power". Counter to your claim and easily provable with a basic search Nigeria is one of, if not the leading in BTC adoption %. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/nigeria-is-the-second-largest-bitcoin-market-after-the-us/ar-BB1c1U1C https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/nigeria-is-the-second-l... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194735/bitcoin-online-search-interest-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194735/bitcoin-online-s...
- imtringued 6y agoIs it the shitcoin or is it the fact that the economy itself is gone and thus your currency isn't worth anything because nobody is selling things to you? Here is an interesting article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas-paradox-people-are-hungry-but-farmers-cant-feed-them/2017/05/21/ce460726-3987-11e7-a59b-26e0451a96fd_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas...
- hfsp 6y agoBCH is trending to 0 in BTC. How does this solve Venezuelans or Lebanese store of value problem? https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/ https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/
- uncletammy 6y agoYet they just passed BTC's daily transaction volume (regularly) . Like it or not, BCH is about to eat BTC's lunch and good for them. They've earned it.
- ad31mar 6y agoSoV first and only then medium of exchange. Not the other way around.
- afiori 6y agoThat is because BTC extremely unstable, which is good for speculation but not for a currency
- lottin 6y agoBTC isn't a stable currency in case you haven't noticed. Do you actually have evidence of BTC being used as currency in any of these dysfunctional countries you talk about or is it just a supposition that you're making?
- will_pseudonym 6y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/venezuela-bitcoin-economy-digital-currency-bolivars https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/venezuela...
- p_l 6y agoIn Venezuela, BTC is heavily restricted towards friends of the regime, for whom it serves similar experience as having hoards of "hard foreign currency" did in USSR...
- lottin 6y agoThey say nobody uses it but a "tiny minority". So basically what we already knew, BTC adoption as a currency is anecdotal even in those dysfunctional places where according to its proponents it's particularly suited for.
- joubert 6y agoThe article you linked to is from 2016 so I found something more recent: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research The article I linked to is from crypto folks, so caveat emptor.
- imtringued 6y agoWhat we need is a global organization that ensures that every nation will be self sufficient in regards to nutrition and only imports non essential foods for varieties sake. That's how you solve hyperinflation. The problem isn't that the currency is bad. The problem is that the government is utter garbage and since when did Bitcoin market itself as a political tool to subvert authoritarian leadership? No, it's just another "currency" like the dollar.
- Nextgrid 6y agoBesides speculation there is a minority who does use it as an actual currency, often in countries where their domestic currency is unusable (sanctions, inflation, etc). Also, just because there isn't a use-case now doesn't mean it isn't valuable to keep a currency immune to government interference around just in case you end up having a use-case for it later.
- loceng 6y agoOkay, so then how do we protect ourselves, security services, where normally we'd use financially penalty against known bad actors via the Magnitsky Act - but can't do so through Bitcoin?
- Leherenn 6y agoThere certainly are some valid use cases. But the current usefulness/energy consumption ratio is pretty dreadful, and from my point of view it's future is not looking very good either. If energy was free, then who cares; otherwise I think it's legitimate to question whether the valid use cases of a few thousand people (total shot in the dark here, numbers appreciated) is worth using the same amount of electricity as Argentina, a country with 45M people.
- imtringued 6y agoI am dreaming of a crazy world where instead of foreign aid the US government simply enacts a bill that the largest agriculture companies have to expand into foreign markets with food shortages instead of exporting their food to them and replace the incompetent local farmers. It would be far more effective at solving inflation than a crappy cryptocurrency.
- steve_gh 6y agoMaybe we need a heavy Carbon Tax on Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. Using the energy consumption of Argentina to verify financial transactions does not fit with moving to a Net Zero economy.
- lifty 6y agoWe definitely need a heavy carbon tax on any energy production that has negative externalities. I don't care if its cryptocurrency, video gaming, datacenters or dryers, if it consumes a lot of electricity we need to incentivise people to use less of it or use energy from sources that have smaller carbon footprints. Same should be done for cars.
- moralsupply 6y agoGaming uses more energy than Bitcoin. Shall we place carbon taxes on gaming too? How about a carbon tax on Gold and Silver, and on the whole of the banking system, which also consume more energy than Bitcoin? In any case, feel free to contact the Bitcoin CEO and discuss your ideas on how to implement those taxes.
- bronzeage 6y agoExcept you're wrong and all those things consume far less power than bitcoin. That's the entire point.
- moralsupply 6y agoNo they don't. Gaming is the sole demand for all consoles and GPUs produced in the world. Those devices alone consume a lot more energy than Bitcoin miners (by about an order of magnitude). Gold and Silver are extremely expensive to mine energy-wise. The banking system is amazingly expensive to run. Not only it requires lots of buildings and transportation for millions of workers, it also requires a lot of computing resources to be run -- without even guaranteeing you can withdraw your money from banks, and with your money there being corroded due to inflation. Bitcoin, in comparison, is actually pretty "green" once you consider the value it provides: a distributed ledger with 10+ years of operation and no flaws/attacks detected, meaning it's the safest store of value known to mankind, while not being under any control of any organization or government. In any case, even if your point that Bitcoin is "evil" as it requires "too much energy to run" is true, what are you going to do about it? Feel free to short Bitcoin in a futures market, and leave all your wealth allocated in assets associated to fiat currencies.
- loceng 6y agoSomeone made a comment the other day stating that a 50%+1 attack is more and more likely as it's becoming only a handful of people doing the mining.
- xiphias2 6y agoI'm more worried about the concentration of miners in China than the miners themselves. For them it's not worth it to try the attack. But for China it may be worth to do it if too much Bitcoin is concentrated in American people's hands.
- loceng 6y agoI'd rather you switch your language slightly to state that it'd be the CCP who could easily force the concentration of miners in China to do bad actions; afaik the CCP allows mining to occur in China but not for the Chinese to own Bitcoin?
- jki275 6y agoThat's technically true. But. A 50% attack has the problem that an attacker with enough hash power to do it has enough hash power to simply mine on chain legitimately and create blocks and get 50% of the block reward and make tons of money that way, while actually doing the attack decreases confidence in the chain and might end up with massive losses in price.
- pjerem 6y agoYour point makes sense if your goal is making money. If what you want is more power over the global economy. As a government, you may have more interest, say, in stopping Tesla rise (if you consider that making BTC a 0.1$ asset would harm them) than making some "tons of money".
- zie 6y agoWhat would a nation state level attack look like? If they took over the network, it wouldn't really give them anything useful. If they took all the bitcoins, the value would plummet rapidly towards zero, unless they were willing to prop it up with their own currency. Easier to just tax the crap out of BTC. i.e. any BTC mining done in this country owes us 80% of their BTC mining rewards.. etc. If China did that, and they are currently doing some 60+% of the mining... it would change the incentives for mining BTC in China drastically, but China would make some sweet cash for a while, and eventually effectively ban BTC in China. Rinse repeat in other countries, if they decide to hate on BTC. Though really, I don't see any country wanting to do that right now. They are having too much fun watching who is transacting on BTC thinking they are hiding their transactions from the govt(which they aren't).