[cloakandswagger]

>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.

The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

[zepto]

> The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.

But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.

Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.

[solosoyokaze]

This is true, because the vitriol was there prior to anyone complaining about Bitcoin's power usage (i.e. when it was too small to matter).

I remember when I first heard of Bitcoin. I quite frankly found it technically intimidating. It was a totally new concept. I didn't get it. I took my own discomfort as a sort of signal that it was really important; something totally new. So I studied it. I had to put time and effort to read the books, play with the code... Eventually I got it and found it to be one of the most elegant pieces of technology and sociology of my lifetime.

I think a lot of geeks never made that first push past the intimidation. As the value has gone up, the sour grapes have as well. This is a group of people that should have been first on the wagon, but instead many of us found out the hard way we weren't on the cutting edge as much as we liked to think. Myself included, I have some Bitcoin but I'm not a BTC millionaire, like I would have been had I pushed harder through my intimidation faster.

[noxer]

If you do the same kinda research about FBA you will "get it" too and you will know that PoW is useless. You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it. I myself saw "the beauty" in bitcoin once and later saw it in FBA again. After all it solves the same problem just in a very different way.

[olah_1]

> You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it

There is something to say for incentives. The positive incentive loop is what drives adoption, innovation, security etc.

[noxer]

There are FBA coins out there so people who want can trow money at something an maybe make profit if they gain value. But its not new so who knows how early people who join now really are. Can't compare it with buying bitcoin at a few bucks that's for sure.

[zepto]

The problem is that there could easily be flaws in Bitcoin that have been there all along. We’ll know the answer to this if it eventually fails.

I too wish I’d made more effort to buy it earlier. Presumably that sentiment applies to the majority of humans on earth, whether you are now a Bitcoin millionaire or not.

[mortehu]

Counterexample: when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust, at roughly today's prices. I've held almost continuously since 2011, although I trimmed my position a few times.

If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.

[elixirist]

This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/.

The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives.

EDIT: it's not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.

See: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/chris_peikert_joins_... and https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-contributes...

[mortehu]

Can you explain how this prevents forks? An example of a fork would be someone creating a new client that rejects transactions from old clients.

[capableweb]

What exactly is the "threat" of forks? Being able to fork the network is often seen as a feature, not a issue. If you're building a decentralized network, you sometimes have to have consensus when doing upgrades globally. This is in reality a fork but everyone agrees to keep with one of them. Those who don't agree, can continue running the other one if they feel like it.

[noxer]

unwanted/unplanned forking is a "threat" in the sense that it causes uncertainty. Idk about this specific project and how they handle this but for example the XRPL has amendments which come with software update but are not enabled they are open to votes. Each amendment must constantly get over 80% positive votes for 2 weeks to be accepted. The validator nodes who voted against it are overruled by this they must install the latest version to be able to vote on the amendment therefore they do have the code and if the consensus is to enable the new code their node will do so. This prevents forking.

Intentional forking as a feature is ofc still possible. Validators owner who disagree with an amendment to the point that if it is accepted they would want to stay on the "old chain" and thus fork it, can simply remove the "yes" votes from their validator list essentially ignoring their votes and thus separate from each other. By the time one cluster enabled an amendment and the separated cluster does not, a fork happens*. This requires some kind of coordination and is unlikely to happen unexpected. A largely unpopular amendment would simply not reach the 80%. And one that reached 80% is unlikely to be consider so bad by the remaining 20% that they would want to fork. But the possibility is there it just never happened in the 8+ years its running.

*ofc it would also go the other way around. An amendment that wont reach 80% could also cause a cluster to intentionally separate and enable it there which would also case a fork.

[capableweb]

First you bring up something that is neither a cryptocurrency or properly decentralized (XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple]) then you simply miss the question as a whole.

The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"

Your answer seems to be the answer to the question "How can we prevent forks?"

"Uncertainty" is certainly getting at some sort of answer, but falls short as you're not really explaining what kind of uncertainty and why it's bad in the first place.

[olah_1]

> when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust

You fell for the meme...

Energy consumption as compared to what? What energy sources? This line of argumentation feels very misleading to me and always has because it is presented with a very specific framing. Here's an alternative framing for example:

https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...

At least you sold high, so good on you!

[noxer]

As per my original message you should look into FBA. Its not a coin but some coins do use it. Whether you want to buy such coins and which one is none of my business, but the tech is there and works since years.

[cyphertruck]

Good. I hope you git rid of your hair dryer as well.

It’s not too late, you can get back in, though you will have a tax bill. Maybe it can be a wash trade.

But if FUD that’s dishonest about bitcoin mining scared you off then you haven’t learned enough about bitcoin yet.

This us how bitcoin seeks the strongest hands. HFSP

[mortehu]

The hair dryer, unlike a blockchain, is not a technology for durable, immutable and highly available storage, so I wouldn't judge it based on energy per byte second.

[cyphertruck]

That us not the purpose of bitcoin. (There is no “blockchain technology”)

While bitcoin is a record of transactions, and as such a database, it was not created to be a database.

Did you read the OP article?

[boringg]

That seems inflammatory (covetousness?).

My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.

[noxer]

Funny how there was no "environment" argument in the whole message but someone came alone an made sure to devaluate it anyway.

The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future. For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would not scale.

[cyphertruck]

I don’t understand the recent preference for taking assertions and declaring them “obviously objectively verifiable fact”.... but that is a good indicator they are false.

Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.

[noxer]

Last time I checked block time was 10 min just like 10 years ago. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) Last time I checked max TPS was like 7 or something so it has like what doubled in the last years? (obviously objectively verifiable fact) LN is forever beta (obviously objectively verifiable fact) and does not even address bitcoins scalability problem. It just off loads Tx to reduce on-chain Tx. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) That does not make bitcoin any better. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) Just like Wrapped Bitcoin does not make bitcoin any better but it did reduce load on the chain so thanks to WBTC the chain inst as much fu**ed as in 2017 yet. (obviously objectively verifiable fact)

Compared to FBA solutions with block times in the single digit seconds and TPS way over 1000 These improvements are as irrelevant as its gets. There is no proposed way to make bitcoin scale to any level that would make it useful on a global scale. And the fun part is, even a proposal that could do this would not go trough. It would just lead to another fork.

[hannasanarion]

The energy wastage argument isn't "environmental concern". If bitcoin were to scale up enough to combat Visa, it would twice as much energy as all the generators in the world put together can produce, just to do what Visa already does, but without fraud detection, ID verification, or reversibility.

[drdeca]

I'm not confident that it would. There doesn't seem to be a clear connection between the transaction rate and the power use. That's not to say that the power use is or isn't "worth it" or whatever.

But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea. First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.

Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate. But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate. Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate, but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.

Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like. If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.