4 ms·

I sincerely don't understand why do people call it wasted energy. If your car runs on electricity, is taking your from place A to B waste of energy? That ener

by comboy 12y ago

I sincerely don't understand why do people call it wasted energy. If your car runs on electricity, is taking your from place A to B waste of energy? That energy is used to secure transactions. And even with its decentralized nature which is usually less efficient that centralized systems (but more reliable, and without single point of failure), it seems to be so far doing it more efficiently than banking systems.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
danbruc 12y ago
It is wasting energy because a Raspberry Pi could easily handle one or two transaction per second(1). If you are worried about having a single point of failure, use ten or a hundred. Bitcoin is paying an enormous price for its decentralized nature. (1) I am of course ignorant of peak loads here.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Peak as in mountain peak. To reach a peak, or top. Not peek as in to look. This is one of those annoying misspellings that is making the rounds recently, especially on reddit.
  - danbruc 12y ago
    Of course, fixed. Confusing heterographs is quite easy if you are not writing in your native language so maybe don't be to harsh with them.
- blfr 12y ago
  Those rasps still have a single point of failure: their operator. Bitcoin is decentralized, resilient, trustless, and actually managed to see some adoption. If anyone can do better, they should.
  - danbruc 12y ago
    What about for example Mt. Gox? Until you can use Bitcoin without ever having to go through an exchange you still have these kinds of trust in the chain. And even then there is still the risk of a mining pool achieving more than fifty percent of the hash rate and you have to trust them that they will not abuse this power or voluntarily split up.
    - grubles 12y ago
      You can use Bitcoin without an exchange. Have you ever heard of the #bitcoin-otc IRC channel? It is a peer-to-peer marketplace.[0] [0]http://bitcoin-otc.com/ http://bitcoin-otc.com/
      - danbruc 12y ago
        You still have to trust the other party.
        wongarsu 12y ago
        You can meet the other party in person (e.g. https://localbitcoins.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/). That should reduce the amount of trust needed to a minimum.
        danbruc 12y ago
        Doesn't that actually increase the amount of trust required? What if the other party »convinces« you using a gun to hand over the money without giving the Bitcoins to you?
        haneefmubarak 12y ago
        Then perhaps you also ought to have a friend and some weapons to guarantee your personal safety too. Alternatively, meet up in a relatively safe, public, conspicuous area where that is unlikely to happen.
- comboy 12y ago
  OK, let's go with it. Apart from the fact that people are happily paying for the energy bitcoin is using (so if people want something it is not wasted). Let's try to take this idea seriously. The task is not to have some spreadsheet with transactions that you could have of course on the oldest computers. The task is to provide a global payment system that people trust. So obviously we're not going to use RPi. We need some solid machine. No problem, best server is cheap for the global payment system. Well we also need reliability. So at least a few of these machines. Real reliability, so actually they must be in some separate geographical locations. At this point there are already some problems with consensus but they can be solved since we control the whole system. Cool. But what if one location is compromised? We have to care about that, our global payment system must not be destroyed by servers being compromised in any way. So first, we need some really good software security. Solvable, it can be open source, maybe people who depend on it will review it. Then we need hardware security. Security at these locations must be really good. It's global so we might actually want to be able to protect ourselves from some country's army - that bumps cost of these facilities a bit. Actually, a bit too much. We want to be independent from governments. They have a lot of money, it's really hard to protect physical locations. Then there's the trust problem. Who runs it? Some organization I assume that have some cut of the cost of the whole operation. I won't even dive into details here. Throughout human history there probably was not a single organization that could be trusted, objective and rational once it gained enough power. And to make it complete, unrelated to your comment, some people are mentioning proof of stake. Apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to provide any provable security, you have a trust problem again. Proof of stake is based on the assumption that most holders (in terms of money) want bright future for the currency. I wouldn't assume that. I'm happy that it is completely irrelevant for me who is Satoshi and what is she going to do with her coins. And then, there's initial distribution problem... I don't really see any more efficient solution to what Bitcoin currently provides. It is of course probable that such solution will appear in the future, but the network effect is huge. It's really first time in history we have such kind of money and Patrick Byrne (overstock CEO) explains it nicely in some of his talks. So even if such technology appears, I think it will get implemented in what is currently called Bitcoin (sidechains seem to be some baby steps of that). (OK, I got a bit of topic, but these WASD keyboards are such a pleasure to type on.)
inoop 12y ago
It's a waste because Bitcoin's entire transaction volume could easily be handled by a single raspberry pi on a Starbucks Wi-Fi connection. The price of Bitcoin is dictated by greed and speculation, not by its utility.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Well, in a way the whole financial system is a "waste" of energy - but we unfortunately need it. I'd rather use the word "upkeep" here. Financial systems is one of those things we do because as human beings, we're handicapped in terms of coordinating with each other. We depend on external feedback loops to do anything as a big group. Perhaps if we were smarter, we could all just agree to do things for common benefit. But we're not that smart, and hence we need an economy. Maintaining it takes energy, but it should be seen as civilization upkeep costs - something we have to pay, but would do well to reduce as much as possible. It's a trade-off between amount of energy we use and the utility we get from it, and so it's fair to call unneccessary energy expenditure a waste. The reason people call Bitcoin a waste of energy is that because it makes it clear how ridiculous the whole thing is - you're literally throwing away useful resources to generate abstract numbers that exist solely because we suck at coordinating with each other. In case of traditional banking the energy expenditure is hidden under many layers of indirection (the mentioned AC costs, for example), so it's not that obvious to people. The other problem with Bitcoin is that resource usage is - as far as I understand the mechanics of that cryptocurrency - locked in a zero-sum game. You need to throw more and more electricity away just to keep up with other people doing exactly the same thing. This is the worst case of waste imaginable - because you can scale up your energy use ad infinitum without any marginal benefit. That's why also political campaign and advertising is mostly waste - everyone's effort just goes to cancel out the effort of everyone elses. We'd do well as a civilization to reduce our upkeep to the minimum required.
- kordless 12y ago
  Efficiencies take care of themselves - setting intent is pointless in that regard. Human based consensus already takes tons of power and is excessively wasteful when it breaks. Credit card theft is wasteful for example. And besides, money has always been about storing work.
oco101 12y ago
I agree but how about you take the same car and it will take you from place A to B but instead you only use just 5% of the energy you used before? Witch electric car you would chose ?

by comboy 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

danbruc 12y ago

It is wasting energy because a Raspberry Pi could easily handle one or two transaction per second(1). If you are worried about having a single point of failure, use ten or a hundred. Bitcoin is paying an enormous price for its decentralized nature. (1) I am of course ignorant of peak loads here.

mattmanser 12y ago
Peak as in mountain peak. To reach a peak, or top. Not peek as in to look. This is one of those annoying misspellings that is making the rounds recently, especially on reddit.
- danbruc 12y ago
  Of course, fixed. Confusing heterographs is quite easy if you are not writing in your native language so maybe don't be to harsh with them.
blfr 12y ago
Those rasps still have a single point of failure: their operator. Bitcoin is decentralized, resilient, trustless, and actually managed to see some adoption. If anyone can do better, they should.
- danbruc 12y ago
  What about for example Mt. Gox? Until you can use Bitcoin without ever having to go through an exchange you still have these kinds of trust in the chain. And even then there is still the risk of a mining pool achieving more than fifty percent of the hash rate and you have to trust them that they will not abuse this power or voluntarily split up.
  - grubles 12y ago
    You can use Bitcoin without an exchange. Have you ever heard of the #bitcoin-otc IRC channel? It is a peer-to-peer marketplace.[0] [0]http://bitcoin-otc.com/ http://bitcoin-otc.com/
    - danbruc 12y ago
      You still have to trust the other party.
      - wongarsu 12y ago
        You can meet the other party in person (e.g. https://localbitcoins.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/). That should reduce the amount of trust needed to a minimum.
        danbruc 12y ago
        Doesn't that actually increase the amount of trust required? What if the other party »convinces« you using a gun to hand over the money without giving the Bitcoins to you?
        haneefmubarak 12y ago
        Then perhaps you also ought to have a friend and some weapons to guarantee your personal safety too. Alternatively, meet up in a relatively safe, public, conspicuous area where that is unlikely to happen.
comboy 12y ago
OK, let's go with it. Apart from the fact that people are happily paying for the energy bitcoin is using (so if people want something it is not wasted). Let's try to take this idea seriously. The task is not to have some spreadsheet with transactions that you could have of course on the oldest computers. The task is to provide a global payment system that people trust. So obviously we're not going to use RPi. We need some solid machine. No problem, best server is cheap for the global payment system. Well we also need reliability. So at least a few of these machines. Real reliability, so actually they must be in some separate geographical locations. At this point there are already some problems with consensus but they can be solved since we control the whole system. Cool. But what if one location is compromised? We have to care about that, our global payment system must not be destroyed by servers being compromised in any way. So first, we need some really good software security. Solvable, it can be open source, maybe people who depend on it will review it. Then we need hardware security. Security at these locations must be really good. It's global so we might actually want to be able to protect ourselves from some country's army - that bumps cost of these facilities a bit. Actually, a bit too much. We want to be independent from governments. They have a lot of money, it's really hard to protect physical locations. Then there's the trust problem. Who runs it? Some organization I assume that have some cut of the cost of the whole operation. I won't even dive into details here. Throughout human history there probably was not a single organization that could be trusted, objective and rational once it gained enough power. And to make it complete, unrelated to your comment, some people are mentioning proof of stake. Apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to provide any provable security, you have a trust problem again. Proof of stake is based on the assumption that most holders (in terms of money) want bright future for the currency. I wouldn't assume that. I'm happy that it is completely irrelevant for me who is Satoshi and what is she going to do with her coins. And then, there's initial distribution problem... I don't really see any more efficient solution to what Bitcoin currently provides. It is of course probable that such solution will appear in the future, but the network effect is huge. It's really first time in history we have such kind of money and Patrick Byrne (overstock CEO) explains it nicely in some of his talks. So even if such technology appears, I think it will get implemented in what is currently called Bitcoin (sidechains seem to be some baby steps of that). (OK, I got a bit of topic, but these WASD keyboards are such a pleasure to type on.)

inoop 12y ago

It's a waste because Bitcoin's entire transaction volume could easily be handled by a single raspberry pi on a Starbucks Wi-Fi connection. The price of Bitcoin is dictated by greed and speculation, not by its utility.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

Well, in a way the whole financial system is a "waste" of energy - but we unfortunately need it. I'd rather use the word "upkeep" here. Financial systems is one of those things we do because as human beings, we're handicapped in terms of coordinating with each other. We depend on external feedback loops to do anything as a big group. Perhaps if we were smarter, we could all just agree to do things for common benefit. But we're not that smart, and hence we need an economy. Maintaining it takes energy, but it should be seen as civilization upkeep costs - something we have to pay, but would do well to reduce as much as possible. It's a trade-off between amount of energy we use and the utility we get from it, and so it's fair to call unneccessary energy expenditure a waste. The reason people call Bitcoin a waste of energy is that because it makes it clear how ridiculous the whole thing is - you're literally throwing away useful resources to generate abstract numbers that exist solely because we suck at coordinating with each other. In case of traditional banking the energy expenditure is hidden under many layers of indirection (the mentioned AC costs, for example), so it's not that obvious to people. The other problem with Bitcoin is that resource usage is - as far as I understand the mechanics of that cryptocurrency - locked in a zero-sum game. You need to throw more and more electricity away just to keep up with other people doing exactly the same thing. This is the worst case of waste imaginable - because you can scale up your energy use ad infinitum without any marginal benefit. That's why also political campaign and advertising is mostly waste - everyone's effort just goes to cancel out the effort of everyone elses. We'd do well as a civilization to reduce our upkeep to the minimum required.

kordless 12y ago
Efficiencies take care of themselves - setting intent is pointless in that regard. Human based consensus already takes tons of power and is excessively wasteful when it breaks. Credit card theft is wasteful for example. And besides, money has always been about storing work.

oco101 12y ago

I agree but how about you take the same car and it will take you from place A to B but instead you only use just 5% of the energy you used before? Witch electric car you would chose ?