[danShumway]

> If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks.

That's worse, not better. What you're telling me is that a gaming "transaction" doesn't make sense as a comparison because Ethereum never stops making transactions.

In which case... yeah, a person who's invested into video games is unquestionably doing something better for the environment than someone who's invested into NFTs on a proof-of-work chain, because the person playing video games has the ability to turn their console off when they stop playing.

A system that requires miners to run their GPUs 24x7 is worse for the environment than a system that requires you to run a GPU just for an hour or two.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

I was not talking about better or worse, I was pointing out the flawed way to compare crypto mining energy usage with other industries.

>In which case... yeah, a person who's invested into video games is unquestionably doing something better for the environment than someone who's invested into NFTs on a proof-of-work chain, because the person playing video games has the ability to turn their console off when they stop playing.

The issue is energy consumption, not the moral feel goods of the gamer. It doesn't matter if you can turn off the gaming console if all the consoles as a whole consume more energy than mining.

[danShumway]

> if all the consoles as a whole consume more energy than mining.

It does matter if you're advocating for mining and chain capacity to scale to the point where it can replace a financial institution. If proof-of-work chains are putting out the same amount of energy as the total energy expenditure of gaming right now as a niche system that isn't used by most people for daily transaction or as common assets, then proof-of-work chains are not an environmentally feasible solution at scale.

If your niche product uses the same amount of energy as one of the largest global entertainment mediums on the planet, then your niche product isn't scalable or environmentally friendly. Because you're going to keep adding more miners as you scale, as new chains are built, as mining becomes more competitive, and the problem is going to keep getting worse.

Looking at total energy expenditure and ignoring the actual amount of usage that energy expenditure allows is just a flawed way of thinking about these comparisons. Use some other substitute for transactions if you don't like thinking about playtime or sessions, but any comparison that takes usage into account is going to conclude that cryptocurrency is heckin inefficient: more inefficient than other technologies like games.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

>If proof-of-work chains are putting out the same amount of energy as the total energy expenditure of gaming, then proof-of-work chains are not an environmentally feasible solution at scale.

Chain capacity does not scale as new miners are added. Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it.

>Looking at total energy expenditure and ignoring the actual amount of usage that energy expenditure allows is just a flawed way of thinking about these comparisons.

Not really, you're trying to include subjective value into the simple issue of wasting energy. From my point of view, videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what?

[danShumway]

> Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it.

Eh... you are correct that capacity is separate from the number of miners. You are incorrect that the number of miners don't increase as chains get more attention, and incorrect that miners don't increase as new chains get created.

Somewhat worse, we're both kind of glossing over the fact that mining cost/profit is what puts a limit on the number miners more than anything else including demand. That means that widely available cheap electricity becomes something of an impossibility under this system because as electricity gets cheaper, more mining operations get set up. As coins go up in value, the cost/benefit of mining changes, and more miners get set up.

There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors.

> videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what?

What's now is that you haven't got a decentralized monetary system, all of it has been a pointless waste.

Bitcoin's fees are too high for normal transactions and the transaction speed is too low, the Lightning Network hasn't really worked out the way people hoped it would and has helped re-centralize parts of the chain and make it less secure. The ecosystem is fragmented because people fork chains when they're not high-enough capacity and build new ones, and the vast majority of Bitcoin holders are treating Bitcoin as a speculative asset, not as a daily currency -- which the government has bowed to and now recognizes for the purposes of tax returns, making the 'currency' wildly complicated to use legally as a normal transaction method.

Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them. They're plagued with copyright issues and asset theft, which has demonstrated that these so-called decentralized systems actually rely a lot on traditional centralized power-structures like governments to force legal norms and to prevent scams. And half of your community is running around saying things like "energy is security", which really does not bode well for the future of blockchain or the environment.

So you've spent all of this energy and wasted all of this power and you didn't even get the subjective thing you wanted out of it. At least the rest of us can actually boot into Crysis today with our GPUs.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

Bitcoin is a decentralized monetary system. Nobody controls it, nobody can print new bitcoins out of thin air, nobody can confiscate your bitcoins as they could from a bank account. The fees are quite low, considering that you can securely transact hundreds of millions of dollars of value for the cost of about $1.

And I don't understand how does LN centralize the chain. Who gets more control and what exactly can they do with that control? Can they print more bitcoin? Can they seize funds? Can they censor your transactions? No.

>Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them

So they are beneficial only to a subset of artists, not all of them. I can live with that.

upd:

>There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors.

This can be said about any industry that has to consume energy to create profit. All the actors compete for energy and try to outbid each other, eventually finding an equilibrium. The solution is to get more energy, so that there is enough both for mining and for videogames.

[danShumway]

> And I don't understand how does LN centralize the chain.

It takes transactions temporarily off-chain making them more vulnerable to attack. Lightning Network is a system where the blockchain congestion is eased up by doing fewer things directly on the chain. It's also had a nontrivial number of privacy issues, some of them solvable but at least a few only solvable by expecting people to make lots of pools, which drives up transaction cost again, which kind of defeats the point. That decreased privacy guarantee feeds into fears about centralization and censorship.

The irony behind all of this is that systems like Lightning and even Bitcoin itself are kind of ripe for censorship. The blockchain maintains your entire transaction history immutably in public, and the only thing protecting you from having all of that leaked is if you use pseudonyms or mixers (again, increasing transaction fees and congestion) to transact on it. But then when you start reporting that stuff on taxes... it just becomes way easier than it should be to track people.

This is also something coming up a lot with NFTs, it turns out that censorship and centralization is about more than where your database gets stored, it's also about which exchanges will work with you and who will haul you into court.

----

> So they are beneficial only to a subset of artists, not all of them. I can live with that.

Right, but I think the point is still that the rest of us aren't fine with y'all spending the equivalent of an entire worldwide entertainment industry's worth of power just to benefit an extremely tiny subset of the population, and that we see that as a very different outcome from decentralized finance.

You can bring up Bitcoin's benefits if you want, but it's not being used as a currency though by most people. It's not a financial system, it's a decentralized asset that people are speculating about. And maybe that is subjectively valuable to you, but it's not serving as a currency for most people, and maybe it's not good for a tiny subgroup to argue that their interests should be given equal resource budgets to activities that are accessible and useful to the majority of the world?

If the majority of the world was using Bitcoin, we might be having a different conversation, and we could potentially argue about whether the benefits of a decentralized financial system outweigh the downsides. But you don't have a dencentralized financial system, you have a set of assets that are being taxed as assets by the IRS, and that aren't really benefiting most of the world outside of some speculators.