[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.

[hrhrhrhrhr]

Transactions on LN are almost as secure as regular transactions onchain. There is no centralized party involved that you have to trust, to use LN. The funds just get locked on a multisig UTXO and can be unlocked at any moment by broadcasting an onchain transaction. This is more than enough, considering that LN is only needed for small purchases.

The privacy is also better with LN, since nobody but the recipient of the funds knows that you sent them money - LN routing is similar to onion routing that is used in TOR. The node that you are connected to, knows that you're sending money, but doesn't know the recipient. The last but one node knows who is the recipient but doesn't know the sender.

Despite the public ledger, I find blockchain much better for privacy than having to trust my credit card details with actual PII to various companies.

>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?

I don't think that it matters, but it's not a tiny subgroup of people anymore. I think it would even be comparable to the amount of PC gamers worldwide.

The fact is that crypto miners are paying for the energy that they are consuming on the free market, but for some reason, they are criticized for that, unlike other industries.

Gold is quite similar to crypto. It is used as a financial asset (Bitcoin) and as a luxury item (NFTs) which makes up most of the usage of Gold. Gold mining also consumes much more energy than Bitcoin mining, but nobody seems to be upset about it or really care.

Same goes for various entertainment industries, including videogames. Does anyone care that gamers consume X amount of energy for their entertainment? No, because that's not what people normally do. But when it comes to crypto, it's all double standards.

[danShumway]

> Transactions on LN are almost as secure as regular transactions onchain

Almost being the key word there.

> LN routing is similar to onion routing that is used in TOR.

You should look into this more, not all routing on Lightning Network goes over Tor today, I think the highest numbers I've seen are around 50%, although maybe it's grown a bit since I last checked. And importantly, every hop in a Lightning Network transaction needs to be paid. I have heard so many people talk about Lightning Network multi-hop transactions or disposable channels like they're a silver bullet for privacy while failing to point out that all of these privacy mitigations cost extra money and there's a strong incentive for users not to pay extra for privacy.

> I find blockchain much better for privacy than having to trust my credit card details with actual PII to various companies.

I've experimented with crypto exchanges, and I had to provide them all with a frankly obscene amount of PII to set up accounts. For the mainstream average user who isn't exchanging coins in private or setting up their own exchanges, moving money into and out of the system using popular providers requires giving up a ton of data. And importantly, when you do give up that data it's then associated with a wallet that you transact with on that exchange, which the exchange can then use to track all of your coins that you associate with that wallet.

----

> I think it would even be comparable to the amount of PC gamers worldwide.

I promise you this isn't the case, take a look at the average concurrent users on Steam -- not even just the number of people who have an account, the number of people actively playing games at the same time at any given moment. And that's before we ever factor in other PC storefronts, or consoles, or mobile phones, or web games. Zero chance that the number of people using cryptocurrency is the same as the number of people who play games. Zero chance that it's even the same as only the number of people who play PC games, even if we ignore the rest of the market.

And remember, if you do ignore the rest of the gaming market, the energy comparison between cryptocurrency and gaming starts to look a lot worse because PCs only make up a portion of the gaming power consumption you're trying to compare to.

> Gold mining also consumes much more energy than Bitcoin mining, but nobody seems to be upset about it or really care.

Er, no. People are upset about mining, particularly in environmental movements. No one is really giving gold a free pass. See also diamonds. This stuff gets criticized all the time, evil unethical mining is practically a media trope at this point.

> Does anyone care that gamers consume X amount of energy for their entertainment? No, because that's not what people normally do.

Okay, so first of all, people also do care about this, it's a strong motivator behind efforts to make consoles more power efficient and to work on power consumption and battery life. It also plays pretty heavily into the right to repair movement. Both Microsoft and Sony have gotten criticism over broken low-power modes in their consoles, and practically every piece of hardware in a modern gaming setup will be looking at energy standards during its production.

But second of all, it's not a double standard to say that one of the largest entertainment industries in the world is allowed to consume more power than a niche currency that isn't being used as a currency by most people -- because again, it is servicing more people. If I and 3 other people go out and start driving around in a new automobile that spits out the equivalent carbon of the entire rest of the transportation industry, we can't point at the entire rest of transportation industry and say, "see, transporting millions of people uses the same amount of energy as transporting the 4 of us, so it's just double standards to criticize us over our energy use."

Cryptocurrency is niche, extremely niche compared to other entertainment industries and currency systems. It's not a workable system or environmental standard for niche products to consume the same amount of power as mainstream products that service many times as many people. It's very reasonable for people to point out that small groups of people are using disproportionately more power, particularly if those people are trying to expand those power-hungry systems, and particularly if those systems are set up in such a way that they are naturally inclined to use as much power as possible.