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You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race. The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has

by Hermio 5y ago

You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race. The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening. The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption. The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit). Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore. We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore. A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control. "the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being. Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.

hparadiz 5y ago
None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.
- lanternfish 5y ago
  This is a remarkable regressive perspective. Nothing is 'unblockable'. If global powers decided tomorrow that bitcoin was a blight on humanity, they could effectively wipe out the network in a variety of ways; it wouldn't take very much coordinated regulation to deflate the hype to a point where the utility of crypto basically tanks for the average user (who are mostly speculators at this point). Just because a system _could_ theoretically replace fiat currencies doesn't mean it will; there's a reason fiat powers are fiat. Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    > If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up? Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that. You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
    - MrMan 5y ago
      If what you say is true then what is the logical outcome? As you become more economically powerful due to the price of bitcoing going up, but you need to defend ever larger investment in mining and power generation infrastructure, you will either need to capture government and become the government, or go to war with government, or mobs of starving people, or militias of other bitcoin cartels. That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
- Hermio 5y ago
jkepler 5y ago
You stated, "We all LIKE that current system... " Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft! Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would. So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model. I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?
- Hermio 5y ago
  "we all" references here my parents, my siblings and probably all people around me. I don't mean to use like as love, but no one complains about it. When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet. I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks? I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not? The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it

by Hermio 5y ago

hparadiz 5y ago

None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.

lanternfish 5y ago
This is a remarkable regressive perspective. Nothing is 'unblockable'. If global powers decided tomorrow that bitcoin was a blight on humanity, they could effectively wipe out the network in a variety of ways; it wouldn't take very much coordinated regulation to deflate the hype to a point where the utility of crypto basically tanks for the average user (who are mostly speculators at this point). Just because a system _could_ theoretically replace fiat currencies doesn't mean it will; there's a reason fiat powers are fiat. Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
- hparadiz 5y ago
  > If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up? Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that. You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
  - MrMan 5y ago
    If what you say is true then what is the logical outcome? As you become more economically powerful due to the price of bitcoing going up, but you need to defend ever larger investment in mining and power generation infrastructure, you will either need to capture government and become the government, or go to war with government, or mobs of starving people, or militias of other bitcoin cartels. That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
Hermio 5y ago

jkepler 5y ago

You stated, "We all LIKE that current system... " Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft! Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would. So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model. I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?

Hermio 5y ago
"we all" references here my parents, my siblings and probably all people around me. I don't mean to use like as love, but no one complains about it. When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet. I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks? I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not? The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it