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This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commerci
by derefr 6y ago
This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commercialized and in mass production. (And this happened with CFLs and then LED bulbs; and then we did ban incandescents, here in Canada and in many other places.)
But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-Stake networks. They exist, but none have the transaction load (and thus the network build-out to absorb the transaction load) that Bitcoin has.
Forcing a switch to PoS now, would be like trying to force a switch to CFLs or LED bulbs only a year or two after they were invented. What would you imagine would happen as a result? The incandescent manufacturers would go out of business, and the CFL/LED manufacturers wouldn’t yet have been able to absorb the demand. Nobody would be able to buy lightbulbs. This kind of a ban is effectively just demanding to kill the sector as a whole.
Once an old technology is on its way out in the market anyway — and it’s only stubborn locked-in enterprise hold-outs, rather than greenfield adoption, continuing the relevance of the old tech — then it can be banned, to force those enterprise hold-outs to switch over to the new tech. That’s entirely appropriate. But the market knows when tech is mature, and the market itself switches over when that happens. Trying to force the market is just acting without the same distributed knowledge the market represents. It’s central top-down allocation trying to solve distributed problems, like the failure of the USSR.
To be clear, I’m a developer for Proof-of-Stake ecosystem tooling myself. But I think all PoS developers would agree that there’s no Proof-of-Stake mainnet network that yet has the capacity to absorb all of Bitcoin’s transaction flow—and there’s no reason that one or more governments saying “you have a year to transition to PoS” would change this.
The existing PoS chains are at the level of infrastructure development now, that the CFL+LED bulb industries were at around the year 1990. Do you think they could have suddenly achieved their 2014 (= the year Canada banned incandescents) level of infrastructure development in one year, if people just threw money at them? Technology—its productization, its operationalization, and ecosystem tooling adaptation—takes time.
- maxerickson 6y agoOther ledgers are better than bitcoin. Less energy use, faster, cheaper, better failure modes for users, etc.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Yes, and they are being banned, in many places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...
- oauea 6y agoAs someone who used to believe in bitcoin, the way it's used today is a net loss for society. So banning proof of work wouldn't be a bad idea.
- stopBurncoins 6y agoso... we have Proof of Stake, in various forms. And we can say "it will be banned in 1-2 years, you have the time to change the underlying tech. With those premises the value will not change much, and the global advantages are big.
- mr_woozy 6y ago> so... we have Proof of Stake, in various forms. And which one of those Proof-of-Stake forms are you already heavily invested in?
- Deukhoofd 6y ago> This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned They are banned in the EU, and are slowly being banned in the US.
- derefr 6y agoDid you read the parenthetical after that sentence? My point was that we waited until after we had practical alternatives to ban them. We didn’t ban them in order to magically force practical alternatives into existence.
- eli 6y agoThe practical alternative for most blockchain applications is just a public ledger
- pureliquidhw 6y agoThere's no digital currency or methods to transact that are more efficient than Bitcoin? Like ACH, Venmo, wire transfers, etc? Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. An unfortunate ecological misstep while trying to improve what was available. I'll agree the parallel is clunky since CFLs still saved energy, bit bitcoin burns through it.
- derefr 6y agoThose other methods (ACH, Venmo, wire transfers) are owned by companies/banks and thus censorable. The whole thing Bitcoin is doing that everyone is spending all this money/electricity on, is allowing the global market to route around market inefficiencies introduced by government control (e.g. trade sanctions, tariffs, “capital flight” export controls, taxation double-binds [like for dual US/somewhere-else citizens], AML laws, etc.) That’s the base cryptocurrency “value prop” — before you add on the smart-contract programmable-financial-instrument stuff. There are also other PoW chains, like Monero, that are “cheaper for now” — but if everyone using Bitcoin switched to those, they’d be just as expensive as Bitcoin is. PoS chains (including maybe PoS state-channels for PoW base chains) are the good alternative — everyone in the space can see that. But they’re not ready yet. > Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. I agree: like CFLs, Bitcoin is better than what we had before in some ways, but worse in others, and we can clearly see that we’re going to need to replace it. (The bad-actor analogy even holds up: both CFLs and PoW chains have externalized consequences. CFLs put mercury into the environment; Bitcoin contributes to climate change.) But we didn’t try to muscle CFLs out of the ecosystem. They just disappeared from relevance — and production went to 1/1000th of peak — once we got good, cheap LED bulbs into the market. Until then, the market concentrated on CFL bulbs, because they really were a (rational-selfish-economic-actor) “better” option than incandescent. It made economic sense for property developers and other mass-buyers to fill their lighting neeeds with CFLs. And then — once LEDs were good and cheap — it didn’t.
- eli 6y agoIncandescent light bulbs are already banned in California. People there are still able to see in the dark.
- jariel 6y agoNot only is BTC not a replacement for anything - there's no real reason for it it use so much energy. It's an absurd idea. There are 1000 ways to print money and give it out. Making people spend effort wasting energy is just an arbitrary and bad way to do it.
- howinteresting 6y agoLighting serves a basic human need. Bitcoin does not.
- derefr 6y agoAlternative, non-state-controlled currencies serve a basic human need under authoritarian regimes. They also enable trade to continue between nations that trade-sanction/blockade one-another, which is usually seen as a global-economic net good (in the sense that a trade-sanction/blockade is essentially an infinity% tariff, and economists have analyzed to death how tariffs hurt both the target and source economies.) (Some countries accomplish this by just using some other country’s physical currency — e.g. Venezuela using USD. But in really authoritarian [and technologically-modern] countries, any type of movement of physical currency exchange is heavily tracked, so this isn’t usually an option.)