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by Kadin 3130 days ago
> Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress

Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.
3 comments
keymone 3129 days ago
How is that “worse” though? This is free market at work. Energy being spent securing the bitcoin network will always correlate with value of bitcoin.

The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation.

Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with.

As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.

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FranOntanaya 3129 days ago
That's the puzzling part. A lot of work has gone into Stake / Mixed proof chains that don't depend on consuming horrendous amounts of energy. There isn't a good reason to expect money not to shift to more efficient ledgers when things settle down.
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keymone 3129 days ago
Proof of work has one big advantage over proof of stake - it makes bitcoin backed by value of infrastructure and energy dedicated to mining it.

In contrast with proof of stake there is quite literally nothing at stake.

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mrb 3130 days ago
Miners use less electricity (~15 TWh/yr today) than Christmas decorative lights in the world (probably 20 TWh/yr, of which 6.6 for the US alone according to US DoE). If we can afford to spend that much energy not even on useful lighting—just decorative—surely we can afford to run a transformative financial system such as Bitcoin.

The "small country" comparison is deceptive as the energy is equivalent to just a single nuclear power plant: 15 TWh/yr = 1.7 GW

http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/

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