6 ms·

1) You're right, and perhaps its a position of privilege to say this, but this does not seem to be a real problem worth solving? I've transacted a lot of money,

by voz_ 5y ago

1) You're right, and perhaps its a position of privilege to say this, but this does not seem to be a real problem worth solving? I've transacted a lot of money, both ingress and egress, buying a modest home, a car or two, paying off student loans, etc. No one has ever tried to censor me. 2) Beyond censorship, one needs safety. It may not be censored, but its certainly traceable, so how useful is the lack of censorship without anonymity? 3) If we take it that it solves this (both 1 and 2), then moving on to the other part of the question, how does it solve it better than any other distributed infrastructure? You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth (like the gold mining analogy in the payment article), and without the insane environmental impact. 4) Let's say it solves 1, and 2, but we can't do better and I am wrong in 3. Is this problem worth the massive environmental cost to solve?

errantmind 5y ago
As for '4', you have an implicit assumption that I see a lot on HN. No, BTC doesn't have a massive environmental cost. Please re-examine that premise. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Bitcoin is perhaps a rounding number today (my guess is that it is more than that due to Chinese miners not reporting energy usage correctly but could very easily be wrong), but what it solves is even less of a rounding number. Said in a different way to do all financial transactions on the blockchain would use a lot more energy then it currently does.
  - errantmind 5y ago
    BTC does not require every single transaction to be processed on-chain in the way that you describe. Please refer to the Lightning Network.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      But then you are moving the goal posts, blockchain is not really needed for lighting.
  - throwaway248329 5y ago
    That's not how it works, energy usage does not scale with the number of transactions.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      Uh, why not?
- hectormalot 5y ago
  Sorry, but 0.1% of global energy consumption still adds up to a lot of coal power plants.
  - errantmind 5y ago
    This appears to be a semantic deflection. Are you arguing that less than 0.1% of the world's energy consumption equates to a "massive environmental impact"?
    - hectormalot 5y ago
      If we want to put it this way, yes. 140TWh out of 170000TWh is about 0.8%. relative impact is bigger than 0.08%. Coal is 36% of the power mix. Under the assumption that most bitcoin mining happens connected to the grid (seems reasonable) and that these grids contain coal powerplants (also reasonable with the exception of Iceland), that 0.08% translates to 0.22% of global coal based emissions. On a global scale, being responsible for 1/500th is a lot (for me at least) the numbers are more relatable when looking at absolute impact. Assuming a average coal power plant of 600MW (you can find bigger, but this is a representative plant near me[1]). That’s 5TWh/yr per plant. Bitcoin then represents 28 of such coal powerplants running at 100% capacity 24/7. That - to me - seems like a massive amount of CO2 for a niche application. And if I read your source correctly, that’s just bitcoin 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale Coal is about 36%
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      The reason why the argument that it is only using 0.1% of the worlds energy consumption so it doesn't matter is a stupid argument is because it can be used about absolutely everything. This particular coal plant only emits a 0.01% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it doesn't matter. That is true about that coal plant too, and that one. So just leave them all because no single coal plant matters in the whole.
  - chaxor 5y ago
    Btc still uses far less energy than the banking industry. The relevant comparisons are important to consider.
beebmam 5y ago
Some people deserve to have their ability to financially transact censored. Pedophiles, rapists, violent criminals in general. Bitcoin empowers them.
- alex_sf 5y ago
  Really? A 'what about the children' argument? I'm not even pro-Bitcoin, but skip the moral panic.
- tux1968 5y ago
  There's already a mechanism for that, it's the legal system. We don't need another shadow force of executioners.
  - oblio 5y ago
    1. That shadow force is regulated by the legal system. 2. If the centralized legal system is needed, then what's the point? The immutable crypto ledger say GO, the people with guns say NO. Which one's right?
    - throwaway248329 5y ago
      The point is that you can grab your Bitcoin and move to a less disturbing jurisdiction.
- throwaway248329 5y ago
  Don't forget WikiLeaks. /s
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Or anyone trying to earn a living on OnlyFans.
- cpursley 5y ago
  Ah, the old "but what about the children" argument.
wmf 5y ago
You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth A key tenet of crypto is that you cannot, in fact, do that. To make the system secure it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated, of course, but so far blockchains that don't have "number go up" have been stillborn.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated I don't think this is even debatable anymore. We were promised decentralization and transaction costs at a fraction of traditional payments. Instead we have astronomical transaction/gas fees and effective centralization around a different cast of characters. Of course there are positives. For instance, if you are sending large sums, it can be cost-effective. But, this is far from the world of micropayments and fractional penny transaction costs, and that money is going somewhere. Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital. I'm not anti-crypto, but it is kind of silly to keep pretending it's close to or even on track to realizing its early promise.
  - BoiledCabbage 5y ago
    > Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital. And yet again a bunch of tech-enthusiasts are forced to face that fact that their breakthrough technology does not infact lead to the techno-utopia they imagined, and instead is heavily directed by human factors, and leveraged/exploited by the same types of systems and entities that had the most power/influence prior to it. Can't wait till we start again on this cycle with widely deployed machine learning systems in about 15 years. The same exact arguments of "it's just a technology." "It doesn't matter how it will be used in society." "By nature it's more [democratic/egalatarian/...]" "It will help to remove people problems by being tech". Which will yet again change to: "Wait what?" "Not like that." "It's not supposed to be used like that". "It's been corrupted and taken over by X. Who could've foreseen this??" If you're designing tech without designing how it will interact with society, you're just designing foot-guns. Hopefully at somepoint as an industry we'll get past this stage from teenage "look what I can do isn't this cool" to resonsible adult "Yes I have the freedome/ability to do this, and here's how I'll do it responsibly."
mrb 5y ago
«No one has ever tried to censor me» No offense, but that's a very egocentric view. You may be (probably) a middle/upper-class westerner who has never encountered censorship, but I assure you there are billions (literally) of people on the planet for whom censorship is an issue.
- querez 5y ago
  So another spin on what you're saying is that middle/upper-class westerners have no use for blockchain, which certainly is in line with my experience that the only people who really need to rely on cryptocurrencies are ransomware people.
  - bradwood 5y ago
    Yeah. And anyone unlucky enough to live in a place where the govt fucked the local fiat currency with hyperinflation. Zimbabwe, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      The problem still remains of how do you get crypto if all you have is near-worthless paper. Who would trade it to you? How much crypto is actually "produced" internally? International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat. Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD? There's probably already a decent stream of it into the country (from exporters and remote workers) so exchange could be done internally, lessening the above problem. Its value is far more stable than any crypto, it can actually be used in foreign trade without lossy conversions, it's just as easy to use, you can get bank accounts, etc.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        No, in these places banks will steal your money.
      - mettamage 5y ago
        > International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat. I'm sure there are local traders savvy enough to get a +30% premium in local cash which they then immediately exchange for more durable assets. So international traders wouldn't but national ones that know the country, they would. If I could sell my crypto for +30% and then immediately use that money to buy gift cards at a store (just brainstorming here) and could put those online and redeem them and cash out with a 10% slippage, allowing me to keep +20%. Why wouldn't I do it? I don't know such a method since I'm Western-European. But if I'd be from Venezuela, then I'd know to what extent a plan like this is feasible among: friends, family and perhaps even certain strangers.
sweetbitter 5y ago
1) This indifferent attitude is what enables censorship to occur in the first place. 2) Not all currencies have the privacy implications of Bitcoin. 3) Not all currencies have the inherent environmental cost that 'proof of work' currencies like Bitcoin do. Is preventing the hoarding of wealth really a goal here?
- oblio 5y ago
  Regarding censorship, that will continue. Anti money laundering laws for example tend to popular support. If crypto wins out it will have to have a mechanism for blocking or canceling some transactions due to people with guns deciding that.

by voz_ 5y ago

errantmind 5y ago

As for '4', you have an implicit assumption that I see a lot on HN. No, BTC doesn't have a massive environmental cost. Please re-examine that premise. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

kmonsen 5y ago
Bitcoin is perhaps a rounding number today (my guess is that it is more than that due to Chinese miners not reporting energy usage correctly but could very easily be wrong), but what it solves is even less of a rounding number. Said in a different way to do all financial transactions on the blockchain would use a lot more energy then it currently does.
- errantmind 5y ago
  BTC does not require every single transaction to be processed on-chain in the way that you describe. Please refer to the Lightning Network.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    But then you are moving the goal posts, blockchain is not really needed for lighting.
- throwaway248329 5y ago
  That's not how it works, energy usage does not scale with the number of transactions.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    Uh, why not?
hectormalot 5y ago
Sorry, but 0.1% of global energy consumption still adds up to a lot of coal power plants.
- errantmind 5y ago
  This appears to be a semantic deflection. Are you arguing that less than 0.1% of the world's energy consumption equates to a "massive environmental impact"?
  - hectormalot 5y ago
    If we want to put it this way, yes. 140TWh out of 170000TWh is about 0.8%. relative impact is bigger than 0.08%. Coal is 36% of the power mix. Under the assumption that most bitcoin mining happens connected to the grid (seems reasonable) and that these grids contain coal powerplants (also reasonable with the exception of Iceland), that 0.08% translates to 0.22% of global coal based emissions. On a global scale, being responsible for 1/500th is a lot (for me at least) the numbers are more relatable when looking at absolute impact. Assuming a average coal power plant of 600MW (you can find bigger, but this is a representative plant near me[1]). That’s 5TWh/yr per plant. Bitcoin then represents 28 of such coal powerplants running at 100% capacity 24/7. That - to me - seems like a massive amount of CO2 for a niche application. And if I read your source correctly, that’s just bitcoin 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amercentrale Coal is about 36%
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    The reason why the argument that it is only using 0.1% of the worlds energy consumption so it doesn't matter is a stupid argument is because it can be used about absolutely everything. This particular coal plant only emits a 0.01% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it doesn't matter. That is true about that coal plant too, and that one. So just leave them all because no single coal plant matters in the whole.
- chaxor 5y ago
  Btc still uses far less energy than the banking industry. The relevant comparisons are important to consider.

beebmam 5y ago

Some people deserve to have their ability to financially transact censored. Pedophiles, rapists, violent criminals in general. Bitcoin empowers them.

alex_sf 5y ago
Really? A 'what about the children' argument? I'm not even pro-Bitcoin, but skip the moral panic.
tux1968 5y ago
There's already a mechanism for that, it's the legal system. We don't need another shadow force of executioners.
- oblio 5y ago
  1. That shadow force is regulated by the legal system. 2. If the centralized legal system is needed, then what's the point? The immutable crypto ledger say GO, the people with guns say NO. Which one's right?
  - throwaway248329 5y ago
    The point is that you can grab your Bitcoin and move to a less disturbing jurisdiction.
throwaway248329 5y ago
Don't forget WikiLeaks. /s
- verve_rat 5y ago
  Or anyone trying to earn a living on OnlyFans.
cpursley 5y ago
Ah, the old "but what about the children" argument.

wmf 5y ago

You could build a censorship resistant payment system without the insanely excessive hoarding of base wealth A key tenet of crypto is that you cannot, in fact, do that. To make the system secure it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated, of course, but so far blockchains that don't have "number go up" have been stillborn.

unclebucknasty 5y ago
>it needs to make the people running it rich or they wouldn't bother. This is debated I don't think this is even debatable anymore. We were promised decentralization and transaction costs at a fraction of traditional payments. Instead we have astronomical transaction/gas fees and effective centralization around a different cast of characters. Of course there are positives. For instance, if you are sending large sums, it can be cost-effective. But, this is far from the world of micropayments and fractional penny transaction costs, and that money is going somewhere. Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital. I'm not anti-crypto, but it is kind of silly to keep pretending it's close to or even on track to realizing its early promise.
- BoiledCabbage 5y ago
  > Seems pretty clear that we've just dislocated some percentage of the financial incumbents to create new ones. And, even the old incumbents are buying back in. Reminds me of the early promise of the Internet itself giving way to corporate overlords and capital. And yet again a bunch of tech-enthusiasts are forced to face that fact that their breakthrough technology does not infact lead to the techno-utopia they imagined, and instead is heavily directed by human factors, and leveraged/exploited by the same types of systems and entities that had the most power/influence prior to it. Can't wait till we start again on this cycle with widely deployed machine learning systems in about 15 years. The same exact arguments of "it's just a technology." "It doesn't matter how it will be used in society." "By nature it's more [democratic/egalatarian/...]" "It will help to remove people problems by being tech". Which will yet again change to: "Wait what?" "Not like that." "It's not supposed to be used like that". "It's been corrupted and taken over by X. Who could've foreseen this??" If you're designing tech without designing how it will interact with society, you're just designing foot-guns. Hopefully at somepoint as an industry we'll get past this stage from teenage "look what I can do isn't this cool" to resonsible adult "Yes I have the freedome/ability to do this, and here's how I'll do it responsibly."

mrb 5y ago

«No one has ever tried to censor me» No offense, but that's a very egocentric view. You may be (probably) a middle/upper-class westerner who has never encountered censorship, but I assure you there are billions (literally) of people on the planet for whom censorship is an issue.

querez 5y ago
So another spin on what you're saying is that middle/upper-class westerners have no use for blockchain, which certainly is in line with my experience that the only people who really need to rely on cryptocurrencies are ransomware people.
- bradwood 5y ago
  Yeah. And anyone unlucky enough to live in a place where the govt fucked the local fiat currency with hyperinflation. Zimbabwe, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    The problem still remains of how do you get crypto if all you have is near-worthless paper. Who would trade it to you? How much crypto is actually "produced" internally? International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat. Wouldn't it make more sense to use fiat from elsewhere like EUR or USD? There's probably already a decent stream of it into the country (from exporters and remote workers) so exchange could be done internally, lessening the above problem. Its value is far more stable than any crypto, it can actually be used in foreign trade without lossy conversions, it's just as easy to use, you can get bank accounts, etc.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      No, in these places banks will steal your money.
    - mettamage 5y ago
      > International traders wouldn't want your shitty fiat. I'm sure there are local traders savvy enough to get a +30% premium in local cash which they then immediately exchange for more durable assets. So international traders wouldn't but national ones that know the country, they would. If I could sell my crypto for +30% and then immediately use that money to buy gift cards at a store (just brainstorming here) and could put those online and redeem them and cash out with a 10% slippage, allowing me to keep +20%. Why wouldn't I do it? I don't know such a method since I'm Western-European. But if I'd be from Venezuela, then I'd know to what extent a plan like this is feasible among: friends, family and perhaps even certain strangers.

sweetbitter 5y ago

1) This indifferent attitude is what enables censorship to occur in the first place. 2) Not all currencies have the privacy implications of Bitcoin. 3) Not all currencies have the inherent environmental cost that 'proof of work' currencies like Bitcoin do. Is preventing the hoarding of wealth really a goal here?

oblio 5y ago
Regarding censorship, that will continue. Anti money laundering laws for example tend to popular support. If crypto wins out it will have to have a mechanism for blocking or canceling some transactions due to people with guns deciding that.