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wow, it's amazing how you got that completely backwards. saying "guns kill people" is exactly the same as saying "bitcoin uses energy" - it's a way to shift bla

wow, it's amazing how you got that completely backwards. saying "guns kill people" is exactly the same as saying "bitcoin uses energy" - it's a way to shift blame from the real perpetrator to the instrument. perpetrator in this case being people who want to secure their assets via energy expenditure. if bitcoin disappears - exactly the same amount of energy will be used because the cat is out of the bag - satoshi showed the world how asset security can be expressed as energy expenditure and for as long as there is a demand on the market for that kind of security, energy will be spent.

afiori 5y ago
That is perfectly a way to look at it but saying that "guns kills people is nonsensical" is making a straw-man of the argument. The statement is essentially "guns are bad, more guns means more death, less guns means less death" which is far from nonsensical independently with how much you agree with it or not. Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins. saying that it is the security requirements that waste energy is like saying that bullets are the real culprits not guns: they go hand in hand. Bitcoin without security is no bitcoin at all. It is technically feasible to have bitcoin with no security just like you can have an army with rifles and no bullets. In both cases obviously the root cause is people, we still haven't found out neither our lucertoloid overlords nor the simulators to blame, so it is lapalissian: "people are the cause of people's action" but it is not a particularly useful rebuttal to many arguments.
- keymone 5y ago
  > Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins. That is not proof that bitcoin uses energy, in fact bitcoin only does about 2k on chain settlements every 10 minutes, and it has been like that for a decade, but energy usage has grown multiple orders of magnitude over that time period. Obviously energy is used for something other than transactions.
  - afiori 5y ago
    by the same logic you can prove that CPUs occupy no physical space at all given how much they have shrunk over the years. many people claim that eventually Bitcoin will be able to be extremely power efficient (with the lightning network and whatnot), I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy. you are clearly more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than me so if your position is that the internal operation called "transaction" nodes perform consumes a negligible amount of energy I have no qualms with it. but I believe I have overwhelming external evidence that the operation called transaction by the laypeople users of the network to transfer ownership and grow the blockchain in any meaningful way under the dynamic consensus model uses lots of energy by design. Edit: upon reflection I feel like what you are saying is that the nodes "consume" zero energy, but that I as the Bitcoin use am asking them to burn energy to produce a more secure block that will be better accepted on the blockchain. So the operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value. I you are arguing this I can see how you could say that in good faith, I would still think that is a completely backward opinion
    - keymone 5y ago
      > I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchanges. same as interbank settlements - done once a day, represent millions or billions of individual transactions. what does that do to your energy / tx metric? > but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy. transferring doesn't, securing it against an attack does. > operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value that's exactly right, people that choose transacting on bitcoin chain do so knowing that they pay for certain level of security and you can see it from the correlation between bitcoin price and bitcoin hashrate. it's a system with many feedback loops that self-balances at a level of security that is demanded by the market. you may think it's backward opinion but i appreciate that you recognize i'm not arguing in bad faith.

afiori 5y ago

That is perfectly a way to look at it but saying that "guns kills people is nonsensical" is making a straw-man of the argument. The statement is essentially "guns are bad, more guns means more death, less guns means less death" which is far from nonsensical independently with how much you agree with it or not. Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins. saying that it is the security requirements that waste energy is like saying that bullets are the real culprits not guns: they go hand in hand. Bitcoin without security is no bitcoin at all. It is technically feasible to have bitcoin with no security just like you can have an army with rifles and no bullets. In both cases obviously the root cause is people, we still haven't found out neither our lucertoloid overlords nor the simulators to blame, so it is lapalissian: "people are the cause of people's action" but it is not a particularly useful rebuttal to many arguments.

keymone 5y ago
> Bitcoin transaction use energy. The proof is that if no more transaction happened no energy would be spent in bitcoins. That is not proof that bitcoin uses energy, in fact bitcoin only does about 2k on chain settlements every 10 minutes, and it has been like that for a decade, but energy usage has grown multiple orders of magnitude over that time period. Obviously energy is used for something other than transactions.
- afiori 5y ago
  by the same logic you can prove that CPUs occupy no physical space at all given how much they have shrunk over the years. many people claim that eventually Bitcoin will be able to be extremely power efficient (with the lightning network and whatnot), I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy. you are clearly more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than me so if your position is that the internal operation called "transaction" nodes perform consumes a negligible amount of energy I have no qualms with it. but I believe I have overwhelming external evidence that the operation called transaction by the laypeople users of the network to transfer ownership and grow the blockchain in any meaningful way under the dynamic consensus model uses lots of energy by design. Edit: upon reflection I feel like what you are saying is that the nodes "consume" zero energy, but that I as the Bitcoin use am asking them to burn energy to produce a more secure block that will be better accepted on the blockchain. So the operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value. I you are arguing this I can see how you could say that in good faith, I would still think that is a completely backward opinion
  - keymone 5y ago
    > I have no idea about how these planned future improvements work. they already work. every on-chain bitcoin settlement can represent trillions of BTC exchanges. same as interbank settlements - done once a day, represent millions or billions of individual transactions. what does that do to your energy / tx metric? > but today transferring Bitcoin (the main action that users of the network are supposed to perform) consumes a lot of energy. transferring doesn't, securing it against an attack does. > operations themselves consume nothing but rather use the value of energy as ingredient that ends up inside the block as stored value that's exactly right, people that choose transacting on bitcoin chain do so knowing that they pay for certain level of security and you can see it from the correlation between bitcoin price and bitcoin hashrate. it's a system with many feedback loops that self-balances at a level of security that is demanded by the market. you may think it's backward opinion but i appreciate that you recognize i'm not arguing in bad faith.