7 ms·

I propose we move to a new system. Proof of Wasted Electricity

by Heston 4y ago

jagger27 4y ago
That's the current system.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yeah, but maybe we could do something more spectacular with the electricity - maybe run giant Tesla coils and reward who can create the longest / most durable / most spectacular / etc. sparking events . . .
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  That's the joke.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Then how about proof of steak, based on holding beef call options?
hammock 4y ago
Goes to show you that energy is the real base metal of the world. Whether you are mining bitcoin or gold, or drilling oil - the power rests in the hands whoever controls the energy to pull it out of the ground/air.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
  Exactly. You could use anything as currency. Prisoners use cigarettes or ramen. Its not about the product being mined so much as work being done, and therefore work being stored. Replace any currency with any power generation you want. In prison, its the work of smuggling that stores economic value in cigarettes. In a gold based system, its the work of mining elements out of the earth that stores economic value in base metals. In a peer to peer network, its the work of electricity(of any kind whatsoever, clean or polluting) that stores economic value on a fair distributed ledger. Money is about storage of work, and quite frankly the weaker the money used to store energy, the more lethargic and rusted the whole economic system gets. Fiat, i.e. "proof of wasted energy" just does a lot of work and lets it evaporate in economic terms leaving the entire society that uses it in constant need of more and more fiat because that energy, that work done, keeps dissipating. It doesn't matter what money is: seashells, carved rai stones, arrowheads, cigarettes, ramen, non-livable apartment homes sold solely for wealth storage, luxury cars, art, gold, printed paper with your uncle sam's face and "guarantee" stamped on it, centralized entry in a private database, decentralized entry on a public blockchain. Society needs money in order to achieve higher levels of cooperation. Might as well use the strongest form of money that exists. And as far as I know, it aint proof of wasted electricity, i.e. fiat.
  - otterley 4y ago
    I don’t think anyone disagrees that money is an exchange medium for work. The question is whether the practice of mining Bitcoin is work worth valuing for its own sake. Nobody is getting fed, housed, or clothed when mining cryptocurrencies, nor is it improving business productivity in some way. In other words, it’s a question of “useful work,” not just “work.” And this is an especially important question in light of the fact that a lot of energy used to mine cryptocurrency is produced in environmentally harmful ways.
    - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
      You asked a very good and important question. I don't want to share the answer, but know that it explains a very important topic on economic systems. Since I'm not going to be giving away the answer, I want you to at least ask yourself: Does the practice of pressing buttons and printing dollars provide value at the value the units represent? And since your concern seems to be the environmental cost of bitcoin mining, what are the environmental costs to pressing buttons on a computer adding dollars into a digital dollar network along with running printers to create a few sheets of paper money? Are there any environmental costs beyond the electricity that runs the printers and the computer and the trees cut down to print the money on? If so what would those environment costs be and where would they be coming from? If not, where is the value of that dollar coming from to begin with?
      - otterley 4y ago
        Can you get to your point, please?
        RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
        From my previous comment: > I don't want to share the answer I'm not here to win arguments. No. I wont be "getting to the point" because I'm going to keep it for later.
    - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
- Thorentis 4y ago
  Energy has always been the real measure of wealth, whether that be in the form of human Labor: number of slaves or peasants you owned, number of workers you employed, amount of power you can generate from coal, and so on.
- marvinblum 4y ago
  I really like that they use Energy as currency in Stellaris (the game made by Paradox). I think it shows what really matters.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  The problem with cryptocurrency, unlike eg. gold, is that you can't melt it down and get the energy back somehow. It's just wasted entropy somewhere. This means that when the music stops, someone ends up holding a big bag of nothing, since there's no backstop.
  - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
    > when the music stops When the music stops, your account in the global open distributed ledger is stored in hundreds of thousands of harddrives distributed evenly throughout the entire free world. And when the music starts again, your account is still exactly where it was when it stopped, available to you wherever you want to go in the free world.
    - rcxdude 4y ago
      Assuming the music starts again. Not just in terms of whether anyone ever decides they want the money in your account again, but also in terms of whether you can actually restart the network again, if the music stopped particularly abruptly.
      - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
        It only takes one guitarist to start a song, and I can play a few chords.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      Sure, you can have tons of BTC. Just like right now you could buy a lot of Luna. Maybe you can even find someone to buy it from you. Maybe.
    - xeyownt 4y ago
      Account stay the same, actual value not.
      - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
- prox 4y ago
  Aren’t you just describing “labour” ie “work” , which is indeed energy.
RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
You mean fiat? Thats not new at all. We've used it for decades now it only leads to boom and bust cycles, while pushing the power of work done into the hands of people who didn't do the work.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Fiat is more of “proof of a monopoly on the use of violence”. You may not like the idea of relying on such a proof, but it has the important feature of still being both necessary and sufficient regardless of what system you use with it. That it isn’t present in Bitcoin is actually a reason why Bitcoin is a bad idea as a currency, because you can’t get your money back when you’re scammed.
  - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
    > because you can’t get your money back when you’re scammed. Thats a feature not a bug. Not your keys not your coin. Neither scammers nor government can take it from you without you voluntarily giving it up. Which makes "proof of a monopoly on the use of violence" obsolete since no amount of force can pry it from your dead body.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
      - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
        Which is why you store just a little in one address to "give up". And store the rest elsewhere. And never tell anyone how much you really have. For example, you hold 100 bitcoins. Randall Munroe's wrench hacker holds you up for bitcoin because he knows you have some. You give him 0.1 from an address. He lets you go. You keep 99.9 of your bitcoins, but your attacker thinks he took got the whole bag.
        4y ago
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
Let's call the coin "Entropy".
angusturner 4y ago
Isn't this just proof of work?

I propose we move to a new system. Proof of Wasted Electricity

by Heston 4y ago

I propose we move to a new system. Proof of Wasted Electricity

jagger27 4y ago

That's the current system.

toss1 4y ago
Yeah, but maybe we could do something more spectacular with the electricity - maybe run giant Tesla coils and reward who can create the longest / most durable / most spectacular / etc. sparking events . . .
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
That's the joke.
thfuran 4y ago
Then how about proof of steak, based on holding beef call options?

hammock 4y ago

Goes to show you that energy is the real base metal of the world. Whether you are mining bitcoin or gold, or drilling oil - the power rests in the hands whoever controls the energy to pull it out of the ground/air.

RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
Exactly. You could use anything as currency. Prisoners use cigarettes or ramen. Its not about the product being mined so much as work being done, and therefore work being stored. Replace any currency with any power generation you want. In prison, its the work of smuggling that stores economic value in cigarettes. In a gold based system, its the work of mining elements out of the earth that stores economic value in base metals. In a peer to peer network, its the work of electricity(of any kind whatsoever, clean or polluting) that stores economic value on a fair distributed ledger. Money is about storage of work, and quite frankly the weaker the money used to store energy, the more lethargic and rusted the whole economic system gets. Fiat, i.e. "proof of wasted energy" just does a lot of work and lets it evaporate in economic terms leaving the entire society that uses it in constant need of more and more fiat because that energy, that work done, keeps dissipating. It doesn't matter what money is: seashells, carved rai stones, arrowheads, cigarettes, ramen, non-livable apartment homes sold solely for wealth storage, luxury cars, art, gold, printed paper with your uncle sam's face and "guarantee" stamped on it, centralized entry in a private database, decentralized entry on a public blockchain. Society needs money in order to achieve higher levels of cooperation. Might as well use the strongest form of money that exists. And as far as I know, it aint proof of wasted electricity, i.e. fiat.
- otterley 4y ago
  I don’t think anyone disagrees that money is an exchange medium for work. The question is whether the practice of mining Bitcoin is work worth valuing for its own sake. Nobody is getting fed, housed, or clothed when mining cryptocurrencies, nor is it improving business productivity in some way. In other words, it’s a question of “useful work,” not just “work.” And this is an especially important question in light of the fact that a lot of energy used to mine cryptocurrency is produced in environmentally harmful ways.
  - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
    You asked a very good and important question. I don't want to share the answer, but know that it explains a very important topic on economic systems. Since I'm not going to be giving away the answer, I want you to at least ask yourself: Does the practice of pressing buttons and printing dollars provide value at the value the units represent? And since your concern seems to be the environmental cost of bitcoin mining, what are the environmental costs to pressing buttons on a computer adding dollars into a digital dollar network along with running printers to create a few sheets of paper money? Are there any environmental costs beyond the electricity that runs the printers and the computer and the trees cut down to print the money on? If so what would those environment costs be and where would they be coming from? If not, where is the value of that dollar coming from to begin with?
    - otterley 4y ago
      Can you get to your point, please?
      - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
        From my previous comment: > I don't want to share the answer I'm not here to win arguments. No. I wont be "getting to the point" because I'm going to keep it for later.
  - CTDOCodebases 4y ago
Thorentis 4y ago
Energy has always been the real measure of wealth, whether that be in the form of human Labor: number of slaves or peasants you owned, number of workers you employed, amount of power you can generate from coal, and so on.
marvinblum 4y ago
I really like that they use Energy as currency in Stellaris (the game made by Paradox). I think it shows what really matters.
snovv_crash 4y ago
The problem with cryptocurrency, unlike eg. gold, is that you can't melt it down and get the energy back somehow. It's just wasted entropy somewhere. This means that when the music stops, someone ends up holding a big bag of nothing, since there's no backstop.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
  > when the music stops When the music stops, your account in the global open distributed ledger is stored in hundreds of thousands of harddrives distributed evenly throughout the entire free world. And when the music starts again, your account is still exactly where it was when it stopped, available to you wherever you want to go in the free world.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    Assuming the music starts again. Not just in terms of whether anyone ever decides they want the money in your account again, but also in terms of whether you can actually restart the network again, if the music stopped particularly abruptly.
    - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
      It only takes one guitarist to start a song, and I can play a few chords.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    Sure, you can have tons of BTC. Just like right now you could buy a lot of Luna. Maybe you can even find someone to buy it from you. Maybe.
  - xeyownt 4y ago
    Account stay the same, actual value not.
    - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
prox 4y ago
Aren’t you just describing “labour” ie “work” , which is indeed energy.

RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago

You mean fiat? Thats not new at all. We've used it for decades now it only leads to boom and bust cycles, while pushing the power of work done into the hands of people who didn't do the work.

ben_w 4y ago
Fiat is more of “proof of a monopoly on the use of violence”. You may not like the idea of relying on such a proof, but it has the important feature of still being both necessary and sufficient regardless of what system you use with it. That it isn’t present in Bitcoin is actually a reason why Bitcoin is a bad idea as a currency, because you can’t get your money back when you’re scammed.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
  > because you can’t get your money back when you’re scammed. Thats a feature not a bug. Not your keys not your coin. Neither scammers nor government can take it from you without you voluntarily giving it up. Which makes "proof of a monopoly on the use of violence" obsolete since no amount of force can pry it from your dead body.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
      Which is why you store just a little in one address to "give up". And store the rest elsewhere. And never tell anyone how much you really have. For example, you hold 100 bitcoins. Randall Munroe's wrench hacker holds you up for bitcoin because he knows you have some. You give him 0.1 from an address. He lets you go. You keep 99.9 of your bitcoins, but your attacker thinks he took got the whole bag.
      - 4y ago

MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago

Let's call the coin "Entropy".

angusturner 4y ago

Isn't this just proof of work?