6 ms·

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

by chistev 7mo ago

iwontberude 7mo ago
Clearly not because they created wallets that they can’t even use without unmasking their pseudonym. Seems pretty stupid to me.
- nomel 7mo ago
  Doesn't this assume that traceability of all transactions wasn't a goal?
kibwen 7mo ago
Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.
- KetoManx64 7mo ago
  Now compare it to the annual energy use for the creation/printing of money and funding of infinite wars due to the Federal Reserve having the ability to print money out of thin air at the cost of future generations.
  - wafflemaker 7mo ago
    >Federal Reserve having the ability to print money out of thin air at the cost of future generations. As a non-American, it's hard not to notice that it's not future generations. It's everyone using dollars. And since your country will be invaded if you try not using dollars to trade oil, and everyone needs oil (transport, food/fertilizers, medicine synthesis), then it's literally the whole world paying. Which incentives USA to print money, because they only shoulder a small part of that burden.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  Isn't this kind of the opposite? Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too. Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at night and it varies based on weather during the day. Mining hardware wants a fixed constant amount of power. The logical thing for miners to do is to somewhat overbuild the amount of generation they need and then sell any surplus to the grid, and sell to the grid during the day and buy it back at night. The same incentives hold if the miners and the generators are two different parties, and the result is to increase the amount of generation capacity by more than the amount of consumption and have "too cheap to meter" during periods of above-average generation. (You were never going to get "too cheap to meter" during periods when generation is low and demand is high.) And even during short periods when demand significantly outstrips supply, then their incentive is to stop operating those few days out of the year because the spot price of electricity makes mining unprofitable then, which allows the generation capacity installed to do mining be used to support the rest of the grid and inhibits the price of electricity from rising above the point where mining becomes unprofitable even for people who already have mining hardware. It's basically a buffer that buys electricity when it's cheap and sells when it's expensive. Bitcoin has a volatile price. When the price is high, miners buy hardware and increase or pay someone else to increase generation capacity. When the price declines, the mining hardware becomes idle but the power generation capacity still generates fungible electricity that can be used for any other purpose. The result is that miners pay to install a lot of generation capacity during the boom, and have the incentive to prioritize investing in more generation rather than newer/more efficient mining hardware because it's the thing that's still worth something if the price declines, and that generation capacity then gets offloaded into the grid during the bust, with the result that grid prices go up some during the boom and down by even more during the bust. By the next boom some of the generation added last time has already been sold to non-miners or locked into long-term contracts so now they're back to adding new capacity again. "Incentive to fund increases in generation capacity but then not use all of it" has what effect on average prices?
  - oblio 7mo ago
throwaway85825 7mo ago
Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute. Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain.
- sph 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hggh 7mo ago
    > it takes less than one second to go through Like Bitcoin used to be before someone had the brilliant idea of destroy the possibility of zero-confirmation transactions on-chain with Replace-by-fee transactions
  - sapphicsnail 7mo ago
    How does this work? I read the wikipedia article but I don't understand how Lightning enforces the transaction.
    - jenadine 7mo ago
      This link explains it a bit better: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ and see the paper at the end for the exact details
    - phire 7mo ago
      The peers generate two sets of transactions. One is a quick summary of the current balance in a channel. A new transaction is created each time the balance in the channel changes. It's somewhat cheap to put on the blockchain (And the main saving is that you only need to post the final update when you close the channel), but venerable to one side putting an old stale transaction onto the blockchain to profit. The other transaction forms a chain of proof for current state, invalidating previous balance update transactions. It's somewhat expensive to post, as it will pull in the whole history. Both peers need to continually watch the chain (or contract a 3rd party to watch) to make sure the other peer isn't cheating by posted a stale balance transaction. These special transactions are time locked, so once one is posted, you have like 24 hours to post the proof transaction and reverse it.

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

by chistev 7mo ago

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

Clearly not because they created wallets that they can’t even use without unmasking their pseudonym. Seems pretty stupid to me.

nomel 7mo ago
Doesn't this assume that traceability of all transactions wasn't a goal?

kibwen 7mo ago

Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.

KetoManx64 7mo ago
Now compare it to the annual energy use for the creation/printing of money and funding of infinite wars due to the Federal Reserve having the ability to print money out of thin air at the cost of future generations.
- wafflemaker 7mo ago
  >Federal Reserve having the ability to print money out of thin air at the cost of future generations. As a non-American, it's hard not to notice that it's not future generations. It's everyone using dollars. And since your country will be invaded if you try not using dollars to trade oil, and everyone needs oil (transport, food/fertilizers, medicine synthesis), then it's literally the whole world paying. Which incentives USA to print money, because they only shoulder a small part of that burden.
AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
Isn't this kind of the opposite? Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too. Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at night and it varies based on weather during the day. Mining hardware wants a fixed constant amount of power. The logical thing for miners to do is to somewhat overbuild the amount of generation they need and then sell any surplus to the grid, and sell to the grid during the day and buy it back at night. The same incentives hold if the miners and the generators are two different parties, and the result is to increase the amount of generation capacity by more than the amount of consumption and have "too cheap to meter" during periods of above-average generation. (You were never going to get "too cheap to meter" during periods when generation is low and demand is high.) And even during short periods when demand significantly outstrips supply, then their incentive is to stop operating those few days out of the year because the spot price of electricity makes mining unprofitable then, which allows the generation capacity installed to do mining be used to support the rest of the grid and inhibits the price of electricity from rising above the point where mining becomes unprofitable even for people who already have mining hardware. It's basically a buffer that buys electricity when it's cheap and sells when it's expensive. Bitcoin has a volatile price. When the price is high, miners buy hardware and increase or pay someone else to increase generation capacity. When the price declines, the mining hardware becomes idle but the power generation capacity still generates fungible electricity that can be used for any other purpose. The result is that miners pay to install a lot of generation capacity during the boom, and have the incentive to prioritize investing in more generation rather than newer/more efficient mining hardware because it's the thing that's still worth something if the price declines, and that generation capacity then gets offloaded into the grid during the bust, with the result that grid prices go up some during the boom and down by even more during the bust. By the next boom some of the generation added last time has already been sold to non-miners or locked into long-term contracts so now they're back to adding new capacity again. "Incentive to fund increases in generation capacity but then not use all of it" has what effect on average prices?
- oblio 7mo ago

throwaway85825 7mo ago

Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute. Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain.

sph 7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- hggh 7mo ago
  > it takes less than one second to go through Like Bitcoin used to be before someone had the brilliant idea of destroy the possibility of zero-confirmation transactions on-chain with Replace-by-fee transactions
- sapphicsnail 7mo ago
  How does this work? I read the wikipedia article but I don't understand how Lightning enforces the transaction.
  - jenadine 7mo ago
    This link explains it a bit better: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ and see the paper at the end for the exact details
  - phire 7mo ago
    The peers generate two sets of transactions. One is a quick summary of the current balance in a channel. A new transaction is created each time the balance in the channel changes. It's somewhat cheap to put on the blockchain (And the main saving is that you only need to post the final update when you close the channel), but venerable to one side putting an old stale transaction onto the blockchain to profit. The other transaction forms a chain of proof for current state, invalidating previous balance update transactions. It's somewhat expensive to post, as it will pull in the whole history. Both peers need to continually watch the chain (or contract a 3rd party to watch) to make sure the other peer isn't cheating by posted a stale balance transaction. These special transactions are time locked, so once one is posted, you have like 24 hours to post the proof transaction and reverse it.