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It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother Gaia" talking point pop up every cou

by tal8d 6y ago

It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother Gaia" talking point pop up every couple of years - but I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. It is a silly complaint, because it never considers the wastefulness of the status quo. But it is an interesting method of attack, trying to conceal the fact that it is a call for others to act against their own interests, while also tickling their envy. It could be a dangerous gambit though, while most people can't see far enough ahead to realize that global carbon caps effectively freeze the international market's structure, they can see when somebody is ham-fistedly screwing with their money.

arcticbull 6y ago
That’s a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100% of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.
- tal8d 6y ago
  lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      I wasn't kidding when I said "parroting". You are regurgitating a number derived from lazy thinking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      The only misconception is you can’t scale Bitcoin to visa without a hard or soft fork.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Yep, I agree completely. I’ve seen the argument that the status quo is somehow less efficient on a per transaction basis than Bitcoin is today, and that’s thermodynamically impossible.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    virtually all of those services will still have to exist under crypto. Regulatory frameworks will still exist, centralized entities will provide lightning channels to small-fry actors, firms will still host servers to execute trades based on the network, etc.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      Yes, but they will be dealing with a currency that has mathematical guarantees - which changes things entirely. Imagine a scenario in which self driving cars are not only the norm, but they've achieved a perfect safety record due to an open source, formally verified, code-base. In that scenario, do you think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still needs 600 employees and a 900 million dollar budget? I have no doubt that it would still exist, but it would be addressing an infinitely simpler problem - and the reduction in resource requirements would cut it down to a skeleton crew that would operate much like stubcode in the wake of a refactor.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        600 employees is nothing. That’s a skeleton crew already. Yeah they’d probably still keep them on payroll to work on developing and maintaining safety standards. That aside you’re not operating with facts just speculation. You’ve not quantified what you think the fully realized cost is today or what it would go down to in the future.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Bitcoin's transaction throughput is independent of its energy consumption. If its block size limit was raised to allow Visa-scale transaction throughput, its per transaction energy cost would be 1/1000ths what it is now. Bitcoin Cash forks Bitcoin to provide a block size limit that allows these kinds of throughput levels, while Ethereum enables both sophisticated transaction compression methods and layer 2 models, that can achieve Visa-scale throughput without raising layer 1 block sizes. So attacking the cryptocurrency concept based on Bitcoin's peculiar shortcomings is misguided.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. This is also why bcash got so much early support from Chinese miners.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      > When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s. A $10 vps is 80,000 times faster than that. > because fractions of a second make a big difference No they don't. The examples you are talking about are rare and have very little impact. If the entire network makes blocks once every 10 minutes on average, each miner finds blocks much less frequently. > Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. Where are your numbers here? How long do you think it takes to send around 900KB ? A single twitch stream will propagate more than that around the world every second to thousands of individuals. Cryptocurrency only has to send the same tiny amount of data every few minutes to miners. High frequency traders trying to be physically closer to a connection are operating on the scale of single micro seconds. You are comparing that to something 600 MILLION times slower.
Animats 6y ago
I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. The scale of the thing is getting out of hand. Cryptocurrency mining is eating up power on the scale of a small country, a sizable fraction of GPU manufacturing capacity, and a noticeable fraction of wafer fab capacity. This has some parallels in how Spain went broke mining gold in the Americas in the 1500s. Expeditions went to the New World and gold came back. They were rich! Well, no. They had only created inflation by creating a gold glut. At a much higher operating cost than printing money, too, because it took ships and armies to make this happen.
- tal8d 6y ago
  I've never seen an estimate that withstood any kind of scrutiny. I've seen estimates based on both fundamental misunderstanding of the function of mining, and wild assumptions regarding miner behavior and out of date asic specs. Have you bothered fact checking any of those claims you just made? I mean actually reading the papers they cite, and learning the methodology they used. Because while you're thinking about conquistas, I'm thinking about the field of cybernetics in the 70's, and how it killed itself dead with ridiculously flawed methodology for modeling population growth - as the Davos types all nodded in agreement. "Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on the one hand...', then 'but on the other..." -- Harry Truman
tal8d 6y ago
Oh and it gets better: known bad data is still repeated, despite the poster being told why it was bad data - over a year ago. Pointing this out results in flagging, for reasons that have nothing to do with ego or narrative continuity... surely.

by tal8d 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

That’s a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100% of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.

tal8d 6y ago
lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)
- arcticbull 6y ago
  I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    I wasn't kidding when I said "parroting". You are regurgitating a number derived from lazy thinking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    The only misconception is you can’t scale Bitcoin to visa without a hard or soft fork.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Yep, I agree completely. I’ve seen the argument that the status quo is somehow less efficient on a per transaction basis than Bitcoin is today, and that’s thermodynamically impossible.
- paulmd 6y ago
  virtually all of those services will still have to exist under crypto. Regulatory frameworks will still exist, centralized entities will provide lightning channels to small-fry actors, firms will still host servers to execute trades based on the network, etc.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    Yes, but they will be dealing with a currency that has mathematical guarantees - which changes things entirely. Imagine a scenario in which self driving cars are not only the norm, but they've achieved a perfect safety record due to an open source, formally verified, code-base. In that scenario, do you think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still needs 600 employees and a 900 million dollar budget? I have no doubt that it would still exist, but it would be addressing an infinitely simpler problem - and the reduction in resource requirements would cut it down to a skeleton crew that would operate much like stubcode in the wake of a refactor.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      600 employees is nothing. That’s a skeleton crew already. Yeah they’d probably still keep them on payroll to work on developing and maintaining safety standards. That aside you’re not operating with facts just speculation. You’ve not quantified what you think the fully realized cost is today or what it would go down to in the future.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
Bitcoin's transaction throughput is independent of its energy consumption. If its block size limit was raised to allow Visa-scale transaction throughput, its per transaction energy cost would be 1/1000ths what it is now. Bitcoin Cash forks Bitcoin to provide a block size limit that allows these kinds of throughput levels, while Ethereum enables both sophisticated transaction compression methods and layer 2 models, that can achieve Visa-scale throughput without raising layer 1 block sizes. So attacking the cryptocurrency concept based on Bitcoin's peculiar shortcomings is misguided.
- tal8d 6y ago
  When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. This is also why bcash got so much early support from Chinese miners.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    > When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s. A $10 vps is 80,000 times faster than that. > because fractions of a second make a big difference No they don't. The examples you are talking about are rare and have very little impact. If the entire network makes blocks once every 10 minutes on average, each miner finds blocks much less frequently. > Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. Where are your numbers here? How long do you think it takes to send around 900KB ? A single twitch stream will propagate more than that around the world every second to thousands of individuals. Cryptocurrency only has to send the same tiny amount of data every few minutes to miners. High frequency traders trying to be physically closer to a connection are operating on the scale of single micro seconds. You are comparing that to something 600 MILLION times slower.

Animats 6y ago

I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. The scale of the thing is getting out of hand. Cryptocurrency mining is eating up power on the scale of a small country, a sizable fraction of GPU manufacturing capacity, and a noticeable fraction of wafer fab capacity. This has some parallels in how Spain went broke mining gold in the Americas in the 1500s. Expeditions went to the New World and gold came back. They were rich! Well, no. They had only created inflation by creating a gold glut. At a much higher operating cost than printing money, too, because it took ships and armies to make this happen.

tal8d 6y ago
I've never seen an estimate that withstood any kind of scrutiny. I've seen estimates based on both fundamental misunderstanding of the function of mining, and wild assumptions regarding miner behavior and out of date asic specs. Have you bothered fact checking any of those claims you just made? I mean actually reading the papers they cite, and learning the methodology they used. Because while you're thinking about conquistas, I'm thinking about the field of cybernetics in the 70's, and how it killed itself dead with ridiculously flawed methodology for modeling population growth - as the Davos types all nodded in agreement. "Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on the one hand...', then 'but on the other..." -- Harry Truman

tal8d 6y ago

Oh and it gets better: known bad data is still repeated, despite the poster being told why it was bad data - over a year ago. Pointing this out results in flagging, for reasons that have nothing to do with ego or narrative continuity... surely.