5 ms·

>First of all, with current parameters that would mean that you need a good few hundred years to process a few seconds of world-wide transactions. Completely w

>First of all, with current parameters that would mean that you need a good few hundred years to process a few seconds of world-wide transactions. Completely wrong. Go run a testnet yourself and you will see. >And if the parameters were adjusted such that it would be that easy to mine blocks, bitcoin would become valueless, as everyone with a laptop could produce their own longest blockchain where they have half of all bitcoin. The difficulty adjusts automatically. The energy usage comes only from the competition aspect - people are competing to earn blocks. You are lacking basic understanding of how PoW functions.

simiones 5y ago
> Completely wrong. Go run a testnet yourself and you will see. If you imagine that a laptop has enough hashrate to mine all the world's transactions in realtime, then how do you explain to yourself that the actual Bitcoin network is only able to add a few hundred transactions per second to the chain? > The difficulty adjusts automatically. The energy usage comes only from the competition aspect - people are competing to earn blocks. You are lacking basic understanding of how PoW functions. PoW works because miners have to invest significant resources in building and maintaining their mining rigs. As such, no one who wins the race to add a new block will want that block to contain false transactions, as that would bring down the value of the currency and leave them with extremely expensive mining equipment that is useless (once the deception would be noticed by others). If the bitcoin network was run on 3 laptops, I could buy 100 laptops and start advertising my own blockchain which reverts the entire previous blockchain and replaces it with transactions I like. Since I can mine many more blocks with my 100 laptops, I can create a longer chain, so all clients will accept my chain and discard the old one, reverting all transactions that ever happened. Instead, if I wanted to mount such an attack on the actual bitcoin network today, I would have to spend billions of dollars on equipment and electricity - ensuring that I wouldn't want to do so.
- ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  I am struggling the follow the argument through the comment chain. Energy is used to secure the chain via mining; a secure network is required to be a payment system, but the energy usage is not from processing transactions. Originally the discussion is about people "using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds". Then the commenter erroneously stated, in response to that, that a "bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree". El Salvador is using the lightning network. These transactions are done off-chain. So the transaction fees do not even go to miners. There can be thousands of McDonalds transactions that occur off-chain and are eventually settled on-chain in one transaction. Processing and validating transactions is very computationally easy. You can indeed do it on a laptop. Mining blocks is a separate issue. If you ignore the competitive security race, then the network can indeed function on a laptop. Most the mining race that is currently occurring is because people are fighting to win the block reward - this would happen even if nobody were transacting, and someone doing a lightning network transaction has truly negligible effect on that energy usage. When you said "bitcoin would become valueless, as everyone with a laptop could produce their own longest blockchain where they have half of all bitcoin" this shows you don't understand the process, because the difficulty would rise until people can no longer produce blocks so rapidly. You're describing a situation where miners are not even on the same network so it doesnt make sense
  - chriswilmer 5y ago
    You are correct! The other person is wrong. Transaction volume has almost zero relationship with mining energy usage (there are some very subtle connections, but those nuances are hardly worth getting into for this discussion).
  - simiones 5y ago
    This is pretty muddled up. Let's look at it like this: a block on the blockchain has a maximum size. A transaction has a minimum size. So, each block contains a maximum number of transactions. Miners must waste a certain amount of energy hashing a block to ensure the security of the network (through the incentive mechanisms described above). So, we can compute a practical energy/block, which translates to an energy/typical transaction. Now, the block size is a kind of free parameter - the blockchain guarantees wouldn't be significantly different with 1GB blocks instead of 1MB. And that, in turn, would reduce the energy cost per transaction dramatically, and allow the network to process more transactions/second. Similarly, if there were fewer people putting fewer resources into mining bitcoin, the energy cost/block could go down. This would affect the security of the network though, as it also brings down the cost of a 51% attack. But miners are opposed to such changes, which have been proposed before. So, in practice, the bitcoin network as it is today has a huge energy cost/mined transaction. Again, if you don't believe this, you should ask yourself what stops the bitcoin blockchain from processing 1 billion transactions/second instead of the current pitiful ~2 hundred transactions.
    - ajkdhcb2 5y ago
      Do you know what the lightning network is? It changes all of these relationships, and it is key to what we are talking about, but you didnt mention it in this comment. Separately to the lightning network, the security (hashrate, energy usage) is still not directly linked to the number of on-chain transactions that are processed. You can compute "a practical energy/block" specifically for bitcoin but it does not translate to a meaningful energy/transaction value because the quantity of energy used is not directly caused by transactions. You can have a less-secure blockchain that does many more transactions than bitcoin with low energy usage (altcoins exist) - if these are low value transactions then people won't even be incentivised to attack it. The relationship is NOT just energy/transaction. Your estimated energy/transaction value will keep changing because that's not the relationship; the new coins in the block reward will eventually drop to zero, the value processed by the network will change, the ASIC development situation will change, etc. It's like finding a runner that eats icecream and computing icecream/kilometre. >Again, if you don't believe this, you should ask yourself what stops the bitcoin blockchain from processing 1 billion transactions/second instead of the current pitiful ~2 hundred transactions. Nothing is stopping it. Run your own lightning node and you can do more transactions than what you are erroneously claiming
wittycardio 5y ago
Please stop you clearly don't understand this at all

simiones 5y ago

> Completely wrong. Go run a testnet yourself and you will see. If you imagine that a laptop has enough hashrate to mine all the world's transactions in realtime, then how do you explain to yourself that the actual Bitcoin network is only able to add a few hundred transactions per second to the chain? > The difficulty adjusts automatically. The energy usage comes only from the competition aspect - people are competing to earn blocks. You are lacking basic understanding of how PoW functions. PoW works because miners have to invest significant resources in building and maintaining their mining rigs. As such, no one who wins the race to add a new block will want that block to contain false transactions, as that would bring down the value of the currency and leave them with extremely expensive mining equipment that is useless (once the deception would be noticed by others). If the bitcoin network was run on 3 laptops, I could buy 100 laptops and start advertising my own blockchain which reverts the entire previous blockchain and replaces it with transactions I like. Since I can mine many more blocks with my 100 laptops, I can create a longer chain, so all clients will accept my chain and discard the old one, reverting all transactions that ever happened. Instead, if I wanted to mount such an attack on the actual bitcoin network today, I would have to spend billions of dollars on equipment and electricity - ensuring that I wouldn't want to do so.

ajkdhcb2 5y ago
I am struggling the follow the argument through the comment chain. Energy is used to secure the chain via mining; a secure network is required to be a payment system, but the energy usage is not from processing transactions. Originally the discussion is about people "using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds". Then the commenter erroneously stated, in response to that, that a "bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree". El Salvador is using the lightning network. These transactions are done off-chain. So the transaction fees do not even go to miners. There can be thousands of McDonalds transactions that occur off-chain and are eventually settled on-chain in one transaction. Processing and validating transactions is very computationally easy. You can indeed do it on a laptop. Mining blocks is a separate issue. If you ignore the competitive security race, then the network can indeed function on a laptop. Most the mining race that is currently occurring is because people are fighting to win the block reward - this would happen even if nobody were transacting, and someone doing a lightning network transaction has truly negligible effect on that energy usage. When you said "bitcoin would become valueless, as everyone with a laptop could produce their own longest blockchain where they have half of all bitcoin" this shows you don't understand the process, because the difficulty would rise until people can no longer produce blocks so rapidly. You're describing a situation where miners are not even on the same network so it doesnt make sense
- chriswilmer 5y ago
  You are correct! The other person is wrong. Transaction volume has almost zero relationship with mining energy usage (there are some very subtle connections, but those nuances are hardly worth getting into for this discussion).
- simiones 5y ago
  This is pretty muddled up. Let's look at it like this: a block on the blockchain has a maximum size. A transaction has a minimum size. So, each block contains a maximum number of transactions. Miners must waste a certain amount of energy hashing a block to ensure the security of the network (through the incentive mechanisms described above). So, we can compute a practical energy/block, which translates to an energy/typical transaction. Now, the block size is a kind of free parameter - the blockchain guarantees wouldn't be significantly different with 1GB blocks instead of 1MB. And that, in turn, would reduce the energy cost per transaction dramatically, and allow the network to process more transactions/second. Similarly, if there were fewer people putting fewer resources into mining bitcoin, the energy cost/block could go down. This would affect the security of the network though, as it also brings down the cost of a 51% attack. But miners are opposed to such changes, which have been proposed before. So, in practice, the bitcoin network as it is today has a huge energy cost/mined transaction. Again, if you don't believe this, you should ask yourself what stops the bitcoin blockchain from processing 1 billion transactions/second instead of the current pitiful ~2 hundred transactions.
  - ajkdhcb2 5y ago
    Do you know what the lightning network is? It changes all of these relationships, and it is key to what we are talking about, but you didnt mention it in this comment. Separately to the lightning network, the security (hashrate, energy usage) is still not directly linked to the number of on-chain transactions that are processed. You can compute "a practical energy/block" specifically for bitcoin but it does not translate to a meaningful energy/transaction value because the quantity of energy used is not directly caused by transactions. You can have a less-secure blockchain that does many more transactions than bitcoin with low energy usage (altcoins exist) - if these are low value transactions then people won't even be incentivised to attack it. The relationship is NOT just energy/transaction. Your estimated energy/transaction value will keep changing because that's not the relationship; the new coins in the block reward will eventually drop to zero, the value processed by the network will change, the ASIC development situation will change, etc. It's like finding a runner that eats icecream and computing icecream/kilometre. >Again, if you don't believe this, you should ask yourself what stops the bitcoin blockchain from processing 1 billion transactions/second instead of the current pitiful ~2 hundred transactions. Nothing is stopping it. Run your own lightning node and you can do more transactions than what you are erroneously claiming

wittycardio 5y ago

Please stop you clearly don't understand this at all