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>"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no

>"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.

rglullis 4y ago
Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
- belltaco 4y ago
  Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
    - rcxdude 4y ago
      The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks. IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
        petmon 4y ago
        The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.
        rglullis 4y ago
        You are reversing cause and effect. The original promise of Bitcoin was to become a p2p payment system that could be an alternative (not a replacement) for cash. All of the speculation around it comes from that. The unethical thing is to keep BTC around just because there are so many sunk costs associated with it.
    - belltaco 4y ago
      Friendster isn't currently the largest social network. The point is that people associate the biggest product of the category with the category itself. Like web search is synonymous with Google.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Ether market cap alone is about 50% of Bitcoin's (~230 vs ~470 billion USD). Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still another ~$100B there. Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening will come fast.
      - woojoo666 4y ago
        Android has a far larger market share than iOS. And yet people still voice their dislike of Android without dismissing smartphones in general.
      - saurik 4y ago
        the problem though is that the argument is unhelpful and disingenuous at that point: people--apparently including yourself--argue against "crypto" painting a broad brush because of how a handful of projects work. Are you against the concept of chat applications as a whole due to the privacy issues of the dominating players? If so, that would suck, as there are certainly projects in the space of chat that don't exhibit those properties. But when you just go around yelling "crypto is bad because X" when X isn't really a property of crypto you might emotionally feel justified but hopefully you know that intellectually you are holding back progress with FUD.
      - codehalo 4y ago
        One would expect that association at a sports bar, not on hacker news.
baby 4y ago
Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce their computations, or users will be required to pay a pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you have bitcoin, that’s my advice
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to scrutinize Bitcoin.

>"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.

rglullis 4y ago

Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.

belltaco 4y ago
Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
- rglullis 4y ago
  And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks. IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
      - petmon 4y ago
        The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.
        rglullis 4y ago
        You are reversing cause and effect. The original promise of Bitcoin was to become a p2p payment system that could be an alternative (not a replacement) for cash. All of the speculation around it comes from that. The unethical thing is to keep BTC around just because there are so many sunk costs associated with it.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    Friendster isn't currently the largest social network. The point is that people associate the biggest product of the category with the category itself. Like web search is synonymous with Google.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Ether market cap alone is about 50% of Bitcoin's (~230 vs ~470 billion USD). Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still another ~$100B there. Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening will come fast.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      Android has a far larger market share than iOS. And yet people still voice their dislike of Android without dismissing smartphones in general.
    - saurik 4y ago
      the problem though is that the argument is unhelpful and disingenuous at that point: people--apparently including yourself--argue against "crypto" painting a broad brush because of how a handful of projects work. Are you against the concept of chat applications as a whole due to the privacy issues of the dominating players? If so, that would suck, as there are certainly projects in the space of chat that don't exhibit those properties. But when you just go around yelling "crypto is bad because X" when X isn't really a property of crypto you might emotionally feel justified but hopefully you know that intellectually you are holding back progress with FUD.
    - codehalo 4y ago
      One would expect that association at a sports bar, not on hacker news.

baby 4y ago

Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce their computations, or users will be required to pay a pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you have bitcoin, that’s my advice

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to scrutinize Bitcoin.