[camjohnson26]

For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incentives.

[beaconstudios]

There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams.

Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

[anderber]

> Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory

Keep in mind that not all Cryptocurrency use mining. Nano, for example, is zero fee, environmentally friendly coin that is incredibly fast. Bitcoin gets all the talk but there are some great and interesting tech out there. Get yourself a wallet (https://natrium.io/) and I'll send you some so you can try it out.

https://nano.org/

[veltas]

https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/

> Every block must also contain a small, user-generated Proof-of-Work value which is a Quality-of-Service prioritization mechanism allowing occasional, average user transactions to process quickly and consistently. The PoW computation for a transaction typically takes a few seconds on a modern desktop CPU.

Seems to me like this hasn't changed anything.

[anderber]

The proof of work is done on the user end, there are no miners.

[Yuioup]

I keep hearing bitcoin apologists saying "Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly but... check this out" as if that would solve the record temperatures we're having at the moment.

How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely. Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

[notch656a]

You can't ban it. I mean you can say you've banned it, but you can't ban crypto. It's way harder than banning the drugs found everywhere in the world (I guess not a lot in Singapore, you willing to start chopping heads off for your goal?)

The best you can do is decide you don't like it, tell people not to use it, choose not to accept it, not to buy it, and rally your friend not to. That's all cool with me. But you can't stop crypto. If it dies it will be because something that replaces the advantages it presents comes along and people can't help but switch over to that.

[matheusmoreira]

Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption.

> How about we stop using cryptocurrency completely.

> Time for the UN to get together and get this banned.

How about we get the developed nations to stop trading with China instead? How about we get them to stop burning fossil fuels?

They're the ones ruining this world. Cryptocurrency is merely a little raindrop compared to that ocean.

[squarefoot]

> Cryptocurrency's not responsible for even 1% of global energy consumption.

1% is huge, especially considering the trend: Bitcoin alone tripled their energy consumption during last year. Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

Why shouldn't I think that 5 years from it could become 25% or more?

[matheusmoreira]

That's the figure responsible for my "less than 1%" statement and I'm not even sure how accurate that estimate is. Honestly it makes no sense to me.

> The index is built on the premise that miner income and costs are related.

> Since electricity costs are a major component of the ongoing costs, it follows that the total electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network must be related to miner income as well.

> To put it simply, the higher mining revenues, the more energy-hungry machines can be supported.

So BTC price shoots up all the way up to nearly $70k. This means miner profits will also increase proportionally since they get paid in BTC.

The problem is they try to correlate energy consumption with miner income. Profits are up so energy consumption must have risen proportionally as well? I'm not sure I buy that. When BTC prices rise, profits must be higher and therefore the costs will represent a smaller percentage of miner income, not the constant 71.44% that's apparently assumed by this study.

The way they estimate the minimum energy consumption does make lot more sense.

[donkarma]

What is your issue? If my dog bites a dog, do we need to ban all dogs? Cryptocurrency is not even that much responsible for emissions in comparison to countries or corporations. Who told you that crypto is bad?

[nmz]

The problem is mining, its a good idea, but bitcoin is basically an alpha project that is being treated as a fully fledged solution.

[cbxyp]

It's afraid.

[hartator]

I am curious as well. I’ve created a wallet: nano_1g6bkdkp9h6y4594sa3kiyu4xdmfz3nbj9z4zeptrdatcztpprcdsno5p6nr

How is it secure if it’s not doing any wasteful mining though?

[nojster]

The general answer is: through proof of stake.

Since this is HN, you might enjoy this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2815 originating from a project called Cardano, which has published dozens of peer reviewed papers (not only on arxiv), presented continuously at EuroCRYPT and works with great academics from “boring” fields (at least to most CS students) such as formal verification.

The main gist in pos (to which Cardano showed the first viable solution that does not have extensive unbonding periods or requires centralized coordination) is that stake pool operators (similar but different to miners in Bitcoin) are chosen randomly to validate the next block based on how much tokens are staked with them. The incentive system to keep these SPOs truthful is outlined in detail in the above mentioned paper.

You basically do not let everyone hunt one complex problem (where all but one miner waste their energy to secure the network) but build a system to chose one to then perform a validation. This decreases energy consumption of the overall network substantially.

[anderber]

This article (https://www.kraken.com/en-us/learn/what-is-nano) goes into how it keeps the network secure. But Proof of Stake is the basics of it.

I sent you one Nano to play with. Let me know what you think! For me, I think Nano is a great replacement to cash. You can give and receive without fees. It makes a great way to donate or pay for things.

[hartator]

Thanks! I’ll play around with it.

[rackjack]

Silly question: what's the problem with fees? If you need other people to do work (process your transaction) for you, you should pay them, right?

[anderber]

> In very basic, the computers you and the receiver own do the processing work for you. Think of it like you're the one mining your own transaction. Instead of fees there's tiny few seconds worth of extra power being used by your CPU

https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/7z9pwk/what_m...

The real amount of work needed to process transactions is extremely minimal. Bitcoin and other proof-of-work coins adds unneeded work that is taxing to systems and therefore, the environment.

[bestouff]

So you can't use nano without installing some proprietary software on a phone ? That doesn't look good ...

[anderber]

There are many wallets and ways to make a wallet, including open source. I just shared the easiest way, which happens to be open source: https://github.com/appditto/natrium_wallet_flutter

[killingtime74]

Only all the crypto people actually use

[Andrew_nenakhov]

If bitcoin's benefits do not offset the "massive costs" for you (because you're likely coming from a first-world country), it doesn't mean that these benefits do not exist for people who were not so lucky as you are.

[SantalBlush]

Carbon pollution is not just a one-time cost, it is a debt that carries a massive interest rate with it that will be paid for generations. So whatever benefits someone else might reap from Bitcoin, it certainly isn't worth it to me.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

People use way more energy for dumb heating. In my region humans can't survive in winter without it. There is no reason why mining rigs can't be used for 'smart' heating, heat being a byproduct of mining.

It is not done currently only because the energy use of bitcoin is so miniscule compared to other uses, that it's not even worthy to bother yet. Down the road, it'll likely change, but currently complaints about 'massive costs to the environment' are mostly virtue signalling.

[8note]

Resistive heating is still dumb heating.

Smart heating involves heat concentration, not heat production

[SantalBlush]

If the energy use of bitcoin was minuscule while heating a building, and it could generate mining rewards while doing so, then people would be using it for that purpose. They aren't.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

People absolutely do use bitcoin mining for heating. It's just not yet popular enough, and it makes sense only in certain climates.

[spinny]

correct. the cost of the Bitcoin network, at least in terms of energy is the sum of all the energy spent mining so far. this is also what values the network and makes it secure. it's a very efficient method to convert raw energy into a digital token

[kebman]

Do you have a measure against the banking system? If you do, then I'd love to see how Bitcoin is worse.

[tsimionescu]

Let's take an article [0] produced by a big Bitcoin miner at face value. They claim the banking system consumes 263.72 TWh globally, twice the power consumption of the Bitcoin network at that time, 113.89 TWh.

Now, Bitcoin is processing 4.6 transactions/second [1]. VISA alone is processing 1700 transactions/second on average, with peak transaction rates claimed in the 24000/second [2]. Mastercard is similar, as are other payment processors.

Even worse, the claimed energy usage is for the entire banking system. This easily amounts to billions of daily transactions, but also many other services that Bitcoin doesn't even come close to offering: insurance, mortgages, credits, risk evaluations, escrow and many others. All this for a mere 2x the total energy expenditure.

[0] https://cointelegraph.com/news/banking-system-consumes-two-t...

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-pr...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/no-visa-doesnt-handle-24000-tps-and...

[neb_b]

Your transactions/second number ignores the lightning network

[tsimionescu]

We were discussing Bitcoin. The Lightning network is a completely different thing, with completely different guarantees of payment security/trust than Bitcoin (it's possible to steal money on the Lightning network, or to do denial of service attacks against nodes, by design).

[kentonv]

According to this: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/cost-per-transaction

Bitcoin costs $150-$300 per transaction. Unless I'm misunderstanding something?

Needless to say, nothing in the regular banking system comes anywhere near those kinds of costs.

[iso1210]

Money laundering millions costs more than that. Hiding illgotten gains in swiss bank accounts costs more.

[beaconstudios]

Bitcoin hasn't replaced the banking system though, nor could it (or should it). A crypto backed finance industry would be a libertarian hellscape of consumer abuse.

[iso1210]

Bitcoin takes 200kWh per transaction. At current US energy pries of 13 cents, that's $26 per transaction.

[notch656a]

The average transaction value made in bitcoin is $80k. A financial service cost of $26 on an $80k international transaction is amazingly good. And with something like litecoin goes down to $0.02

[iso1210]

Just showing that bitcoin is more about international money laundering than a realistic currency

[unobatbayar]

How is financial speculation and scams an environmental cost?

[blackshaw]

It's not the speculation and scams that are an environmental cost, it's the fact that the Bitcoin network uses more energy than a medium-sized country.

[wombat-man]

driving up the price of bitcoin increases the motivation to run even more bitcoin miners which use more and more electricity. Depending on where it's generated that can come at the cost of the environment.

[lowkey]

Tell me you don’t understand the problem Bitcoin solves without telling me.

[SantalBlush]

Bitcoin does solve a problem, but it's a theoretical problem, not a practical one.

[beaconstudios]

"it's not bad you just don't understand it"

Good one

[matheusmoreira]

There's no benefits to mining bitcoin specifically. You're right about that, it buys us nothing. Wouldn't mind even more energy being spent to secure the Monero blockchain though.

Also, scams are only common in the smart contract networks. People create useless shitcoins and spam telegram groups in order to generate some quick hype and exit with as much money as possible. I'd certainly like to believe nobody would be dumb enough to actually invest massive amounts of capital into these scams but that's exactly what they do.

[theturtletalks]

The cost users are paying is the cost of decentralization. One single entity will always be cheaper than blockchain decentralization, but the cost can be spread across millions or billions of users.

Now if the cost is worth it remains to be seen.

[matheusmoreira]

Bitcoin is not decentralized. You need specialized hardware to mine bitcoin and the entry costs are enormous. One CPU one vote is history. As a result there are relatively few miners. Just look at how much bitcoin suffered when countries started banning mining activities. A truly decentralized coin would simply shrug off attempts at regulation because there are so many independent nodes no single country could possibly ban them all. What happened instead is one country banning BTC put a stop to a huge chunk of the network.

[theturtletalks]

I mean decentralization in the "proving ownership" way. Right now, a bank can be the central authority on how much money you have in your account. With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. A bank doing it will always be cheaper, but then the bank has too much control. How much are people willing to pay to make sure one entity does not have too much control or power?

[matheusmoreira]

> With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain.

That's how it was supposed work. The current reality is small highly centralized group of miners maintain the blockchain.

[cft]

>Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.

Do you have a source for this fact? It might survive the 50 year old fiat dollar experiment. Until 50 years ago, there has not been a currency that wasn't backed up by something that was beyond the government

[Guvante]

Don't believe the lies they say about fiat currencies in crypto circles. Currency is way more complicated than they lead you to believe.

After all fractional reserve banking has existed since before currency did. And if you have fractional reserve banking you aren't "back up by something" unless you count the credit of the bank as something. Given that is the literal definition of fiat currency (backed by the full faith and credit of the United States) that means that it is way more complicated than the gold standard.

To give a modern example (the gold standard no longer exists anywhere) many countries have a fixed currency backed by the USD. Since fractional reserve banking is a thing there too it isn't like the country is holding onto $1 USD for every $1 USD equivalent of currency. However it isn't like there isn't a relationship so the source of that relationship is government exchange. You can exchange $1 USD equivalent of currency for $1 USD.

Now we get to the real wrinkle. How can countries have higher inflation than the USD if they are locked with USD? (Which they objectively have) By simply restricting the amount of currency that can be exchanged for USD. This can be hand waved around pretty easy "we have a shortage" or "it is difficult to obtain that much". Now you have a fiat currency in reality but technically it is a backed currency.

To be clear it isn't like ditching the gold standard was without downsides, this is just long enough to point out that broad statements like "backed by anything" fail to account for the reality of backed currencies in a modern financial system.

[notch656a]

>After all fractional reserve banking has existed since before currency did.

We don't even have fractional reserve banking. There is no reserve ratio, it's 0. Bernanke's own published book states it is only fractional reserve banking when it is required to keep a fractional reserve.

[Guvante]

I am talking about the consequence of fractional reserve banking. Specifically that money is made by banks to some amount. Also I think saying "we don't have fractional reserve banking" is needlessly splitting hairs. The requirements are just more complicated than "hold onto X% of deposits".

[cft]

My statement was that the currency (in this example, USD) until 1971 has always been at least partially backed up by something beyond control of any single government (gold). That was the whole reason of Nixon's speech and abolishing gold convertibility on August 15, 1971 [1]. This regime existed since at least Ancient Greece, but probably longer. I have no empirical reason to believe that the currency system of last 50 years is more stable than the one that existed for 2000+ years ( I think substantially longer).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

[Guvante]

You are ignoring my point because it wasn't what you wanted to say. "At least partially backed up by" is a meaningless statement. Certainly everyone agrees that US wasn't holding onto the amount of USD that existed as gold. So what percentage was it? Was that percentage stable?

The answer to both of those questions was no. The actual amount of currency in circulation (including balance sheets) was certainly well in excess of what the US was holding in reserve.

You could say that by offering gold at a rate you fix the value of the currency but I already covered how that is nuanced.

The reality of course is the reason we had trades for reserves and reserve requirements were to provide faith from consumers that the currency was worth something. I don't think anyone can claim that USD isn't worth anything today.

[notch656a]

Switzerland's currency was linked to gold all the way up to like '99

[root_axis]

Bitcoin subsists on the massive electrical and internet infrastructure that is only possible through government.

[notch656a]

Because no private enterprise could provide power or internet. Sure, some of the internet technology was invented with government grants, but lets not pretend these inventions were only inevitable due to US government. If US government were gone today the internet, electricity, and bitcoin will still be here but the usefulness of the dollar will massively decrease.

[analog31]

If not for the relative regularization of commerce provided by corporate law, and relative stability achieved through economic policy, I think there would be no investment in great ventures of the scale needed to build the electric grid, semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications, etc.

The limitation of liability granted to the shareholders of corporations is the granddaddy of all entitlements, because it enables relatively hands off investment. Without those things, a "big business" would be on the scale of a corner grocery store, or a family owned factory.

[notch656a]

Those achievements are through cooperative contracts and agreements. That can happen without US government. They can even happen without any government at all. Government after all is just a body with a monopoly on violence.

[politician]

I'd argue the opposite, if the US government ceased to exist, the electrical grids in North America would collapse shortly thereafter, followed by the Internet and Bitcoin. Without the rule of law and threat of prosecution, a massive surge in usage due to theft would overwhelm systems. Without the nuclear status quo and the threat of retaliation, NA would either be glassed or invaded.

[notch656a]

They would probably be collapsed in the short term and eventually be replaced by something, if not decentralized power generation.

>Without the rule of law and threat of prosecution, a massive surge in usage due to theft would overwhelm systems.

I used both internet and electricity in Northern Syria circa 2015, provided by private providers, and it seemed to work just fine then. Why you think rule of law is so important to internet existing? If the dude running the cell phone towers and cell phone stand points an AK out the window when they see a crook, most people decide not to theft that. You don't need central power grid to have enough electricity to run phones and cryptocurrencies.

>Without the nuclear status quo and the threat of retaliation, NA would either be glassed or invaded.

Or cooperative militias and private individuals ally with someone with nukes or seize the ones already in existence. Not to mention invading American part of NA is hilariously foolish as there would be a "rifle behind every blade of grass."

[vanusa]

I'd argue the opposite, if the US government ceased to exist, the electrical grids in North America would collapse shortly thereafter, followed by the Internet and Bitcoin.

No, there will just be temporary outages and prices these things (electrical grids, internet) will rise to extortionist levels as local authorities / militias take over. Just like they do in any other conflict zone in the world.

[Guvante]

Are we pretending that the US government is gone without a worldwide depression? (To be clear the US isn't alone, any of the major countries disappearing overnight would shock the economic system too hard to make these style what ifs meaningful)

If so it wouldn't stop being valuable for quite a while still, in this hypothetical you would still have years of contracts in terms of USD, not all of which would be renegotiated for tons of reasons. Additionally most foreign trade that historically ran of the USD would want to change to a new world currency but would need to figure out what currency to use.

So lets flip it on its head. What if the mining reward disappeared? Would Bitcoin survive?

[notch656a]

>Are we pretending that the US government is gone without a worldwide depression? (To be clear the US isn't alone, any of the major countries disappearing overnight would shock the economic system too hard to make these style what ifs meaningful)

Crytpo will march on with or without US government, I don't see them as existential concern for BTC or other crypto.

I'm not sure if BTC will survive once there is nothing to mine, but other crypto like XMR has infinite tail emission thus mining never dies. I apologize but here I often use BTC interchangeably to mean PoW cryptos in general. I shouldn't do that.

[root_axis]

Private enterprise providing power and internet would be a massive disaster, this is the reason we have utilities; a cadre of competitors dredging up the shared public space to each erect their own private lines would create a hideous patchwork of incompatible and inefficient infrastructure that would have completely destroyed any possibility for the internet as we know it today.

[beaconstudios]

A source for this fact? It's an opinion.

[8note]

Gold isn't backed up by anything.

If anything, government is a stronger backing than before

[notch656a]

Quantify the environment cost that has been borne by bitcoin and now compare it to the cost by overheating or cooling houses (except perhaps a few elderly or infants, no one needs a house to stay within 60-80 degree band, you can survive with much less heating/cooling energy usage). Then explain to us how anyone living in a comfortable room temperature heated home that complains about bitcoin isn't a hypocrite, using environmental concerns as propaganda to shame people using computation cycles in some way they deem unfit while simultaneously restraining their outrage for AI training or video games.

This comment is unpopular, because it hits too close to the heart of home for many of you sitting in your comfortable home wasting energy on heat and A/C while complaining about environmental consumption of bitcoin.

[beaconstudios]

"You criticise bitcoin for using more electricity than Ireland while using disproportionately high levels of coal power usage, and yet you live in a house. Hypocrite!"

This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.

[notch656a]

Heating and cooling uses way more electricity than Ireland. This message is for the hypocrites who complain about bitcoin while keeping their house above 60 when it's cold, or those running A/C below 80 when its hot. Y'all are wasting way more energy than bitcoin, while many of you simultaneously complain about bitcoin.

>This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.

It's a cogent argument to point out the hypocrisy. If you want to argue we should create a watt-police or ensure externalities of power consumption are better accounted for, that's a different argument.

[beaconstudios]

I mainly just want to ensure the earth doesn't burn. Yes people should ideally not be overheating their home (could easily be done using smart meters if electric companies weren't incentivised to ignore it) and many other things like reducing fossil fuel usage. Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way.

[notch656a]

>Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way.

Well I disagree here. It provides benefit for many people. The example I continually use for me personally is buying precious metals with <30 min clearing without paying credit card fees (and I really hate funding credit card companies anyway). But people in Argentina also using it for reasons just to have efficient way of receiving dollar for free-lance work.

I think we're in agreement we would do well to be as efficient as we can with our resources. It would be great to find a way to eliminate externalities of energy production/consumption.

[rsynnott]

A lot more than Ireland now; that was years ago. It now uses more electricity than Argentina (about 6 Irelands).

[beaconstudios]

Oh, wonderful.

[brokencode]

Of course we could live at 60 degrees in the winter, but most people would agree that their lives are meaningfully improved by increasing the temperature to closer to 70-72.

On the other hand, Bitcoin provides no meaningful benefit to society compared to other currency. The only real benefits of Bitcoin are that it makes ransomware easier to accomplish (which is bad for most people) and that it has made some people a lot of money due to its pyramid scheme qualities (again, bad for most people).

[notch656a]

Crypto provides extraordinary meaning to many people in society compared to other currency. Argentinian freelancers use it to get paid, for instance due to systemic issues with financial transaction in their country.

One big one to me is buying precious metals online with <30 minute clearing time without paying credit card fees. Literally nothing else I can find accomplishes that; I didn't even set out to use crypto for that purpose it just happened to be the best way to do it in my circumstance.

>lives are meaningfully improved by increasing the temperature to closer to 70-72.

Well I could say "nuh uh" and then you could say about bitcoin "nuh uh" but then we'd both merely be saying the other's use of energy consumption is bad. If you have an issue with making sure every bit of electricity is only used for necessities, why don't you go out and say that or explain how you want to make sure externalities are paid for by power consumers. Singling out bitcoin by people living near room temperature with aid of heating/cooling is just hypocrisy.

[brokencode]

That’s a fair point. We should be including the cost of pollution and climate change with the price of energy, and if we were, then I’d care a lot less about the energy use for what I consider nonessential.

That is unfortunately not the world we live in though, and probably never will be due to political reasons.

[paulryanrogers]

Citizens of Kazakhstan or Iran suffering from brown outs or people near recently restarted coal plants may prefer argentinians seek other ways to work around currency and corruption problems.

[spinny]

> On the other hand, Bitcoin provides no meaningful benefit to society compared to other currency.

Decentralization and censorship resistance does not exist in the fiat world. Ask some greek people if Bitcoin was useful to buy food.

Because it's easy for you to open a bank account and have you money secured, it doesn't mean that other people have this luxury.

[notch656a]

People who think money is 'secure' from seizure in the bank aren't thinking one step ahead.

[matheusmoreira]

> can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement

As the first cryptocurrency, it's certainly an incredible innovation and idea. However, it's already outdated technology.

Bitcoin failed to become everything it was idealized to be. It's not anonymous. It's not private. It's not fungible. It's not decentralized. It's not unregulated. It's not even a currency since transactions are not cheap and fast which makes them unusable.

The best thing this coin can do for the wider cryptocurrency space is disappear and let better projects take the lead. Yet it's the most popular coin and the only one the average person knows about. This is sad and to me it's proof of the complete irrationality of this market.

[samarama]

It was never meant to be private or anonymous. You’re creating huge strawmen here.

Bitcoin is definitely fungible and decentralised. You’re using a lot of words that you don’t know what they mean.

[zionic]

On the contrary, I don’t think you know what those words mean. Bitcoin is neither fungible or decentralized.

Mining is completely dominated/centralized by ASIC farms run by huge mining cartels.

Also, buying Bitcoin from someone else inherits that coin’s entire history. If those coins were stolen at some point you could become liable. Bitcoins are non-fungible.

[notch656a]

XMR is fungible, and bitcoin laid the foundation for that. IMO Bitcoin is just the entry point, like the ENIAC.

[samarama]

There is not one entity that controls Bitcoin, thus it is centralized. You can argue about degrees of decentralisation, but it is simply far more decentralised than FIAT.

You’re creating an impossible standard, a logical fallacy. Dollars can also be tainted with serial numbers, get damaged, be marked with colors.

Again, your argument only consists of logical fallacies.

[matheusmoreira]

No. It is absolutely centralized. To discover who's really in control of bitcoin, all you have to do is propose an upgrade that improves network but reduces miner profits.

This is not an impossible standard nor is it a fallacy. Either it's decentralized or it's not. Either it's fungible or it's not. Bitcoin is neither.

[samarama]

Nop, that’s a false dichotomy. As always, it’s a spectrum.

[matheusmoreira]

> Bitcoin is definitely fungible

Run your coins through a mixing service then try to deposit them at an exchange and cash out.

[krzyk]

> not unregulated

What do you mean?

> transactions are not cheap and fast

What do you mean by that? Becauee my transactions were cheap and quick

[matheusmoreira]

> What do you mean?

When it was created, it was idealized as the digital equivalent to cash. Totally private and anonymous so you can do whatever you want without some bank or government monitoring you or taking issue. It was supposed to be your money, not your social credit at the bank that the authorities allow you to use for approved purposes.

Bitcoin totally failed to become all that. The ledger is public and perfectly traceable so it's even worse than money at the bank. People have even identified the wallets of whales so that they can track their movements and see if they're about to dump on the market.

Coins are not fungible which means exchanges will refuse your tainted money if you use a mixing service for privacy. Governments will sanction addresses, making the coins held by them illegal and unacceptable by any business.

> Becauee my transactions were cheap and quick

Mine were not. Were you using the higher layer networks that delay blockchain settlement? Because that defeats the purpose of having cryptocurrencies in the first place.

[krzyk]

> Bitcoin totally failed to become all that. The ledger is public and perfectly traceable so it's even worse than money at the bank.

Well, but that's not about "not regulated", just not totally anonymous.

But it if you think about it is better than money in the bank. Because that can be traced only by governments, and here average Joe can do the tracing. So it is at least more egalitarian.

[matheusmoreira]

Anonymity is a prerequisite to being unregulated. Monero for example is apparently resistant to US sanctions. They tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash.

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt

> Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320;

https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

[vanusa]

All without any meaningful service costs

No we can't, because there's no way you can dismiss the climate costs (and the impact on energy prices and chip supply) as not meaningful.

It is this blue-sky pollyanna-ism among crypto advocates which generates much of the "hate" against it, btw.

[camjohnson26]

Those are externalities, not service costs. Hal Finney didn’t have to pay a dollar to keep the network running, the users pay all the costs, and the users are miners or accounts.

Nuclear bombs can be cheap and bad at the same time, the 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement because it had externalities, then that’s short sighted.

[vanusa]

Those are externalities, not service costs.

In strict accounting terms, yes.

But in practical terms -- the cost offloading that is inherent to BTC is so blatant and direct that it barely qualifies as an "externality" (and only in an abstract, technical sense).

The gist of the GP comment was, in essence: "Isn't BTC nifty because it can do all these things, and it costs basically nothing to run." When in fact the exact opposite it true. And in fact there are still countless people running around trying to downplay its true cost.

If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement

I will accept that the bomb was "an engineering achievement". But I'm not going to get out my pom-poms try to lead the room in a cheer to the effect of: "The Bomb was an astounding engineering achievement that keeps the world safe for democracy, and at minimal service cost".

[camjohnson26]

I never said Bitcoin was good or bad, I said it was an engineering achievement. Crypto discussions are so toxic.

[vanusa]

An "astounding" achievement, you called it.

We get the achievement part. But the astounding part, no.

[jodrellblank]

> All without any meaningful service costs

Only by outsourcing those. If BitCoin consumed the electricity equivalent of Argentina[1] recently with basically nothing to show for it, how much longer before your small group of researchers surpasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. as the most harmful inventors of all time?

What other uses could 120TWh of electricity have been put to? Training GPT-3 took approx 200MWh of electricity[2], so enough power to train GPT-3 ~600x over.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/gpt3_carbon_footprint...

[slg]

> were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value

But that is only possible because the value of bitcoin has skyrocketed. The last data I saw had it at only a few transactions per second which isn't that impressive.

>All without any meaningful service costs

There are service costs, they are just paid in Bitcoin. There is also obviously the electricity spent to keep the whole thing running that exceeds the amount needed to actually process the transactions.

[kebman]

> But that is only possible because the value of bitcoin has skyrocketed.

Even if the price of Bitcoin hadn't skyrocketed, it would still be capable of transacting billions of dollars of value. You'd just have to buy more Bitcoin in order to send the value.

When you do, however, the price of Bitcoin also increase, because it's a scarce asset. That is why it has skyrocketed. And because it's safe. And because it's decentralized. And because it's censorship and regulation resistant. And because it's even scam resistant, due to all transactions being public.

On top of that the transactions per second are irrelevant, as everyday purchases can be handled by side chains that are finally settled on the main chain. This means Bitcoin is still being developed as we speak, and so it's not outdated in any way shape or form. In fact it's getting better day by day.

[planb]

Bitcoin is not a central service. That's like saying "email never had service failure"... Still, from a technical perspective it sure is (was) an astounding achievement to create the first widely deployed blockchain.

[vesinisa]

To say that Bitcoin has no service cost you have to squint your eyes really hard.

[barkingcat]

What are you talking about - the bitcoin and ethereum network "service costs" are through the roof and are one of the biggest failures of the network as it was designed.

The service costs are so extremely high for each transaction, and if you don't pay the gas/service fees there's a very high potential that no one will process your transaction.

It's basically highway robbery.

I'm thinking you've never really transacted anything on the bitcoin blockchain?

[camjohnson26]

Your reply is missing the point so may want to reread what I actually said. I’ve run Ethereum miners and have a Bitcoin paper wallet.

[Darmody]

Using more energy than many many countries with populations of millions isn't meaningful?

[krzyk]

Bitcoin mining can be easily checked for energy usage and that's the problem.

But do you know how much energy is used for printing money?

Or for agriculture (take into account production of equipment and fertilizer), car production, getting oil from ground into cars?

Or by all ACs in the world (which are just a nice-to-have, just like bitcoin)?

[paulryanrogers]

Food is required to survive, AC to live in many parts of the world. Money printing gets cheaper the more digital centralized fiat becomes.

[krzyk]

AC is not required to live, it is just convenience. Heating is required (you would freeze to death), but not AC.

Food doesn't need to have so many fertilizers or bug-killers, it makes food poisonous.

[1270018080]

No need to whataboutism this issue. Bitcoin uses over .5% of the world's electricity just to prop up a pyramid scheme and illicit markets. It's an abject disaster.

[krzyk]

This is your opinion, others find bitcoin useful, 0.5% is a small price for convenience.

They pay price for electricity just like users of ACs.

[native_samples]

The site is disingenuous. There have been far more than two service incidents. Around 2015 there were many periods where transactions simply weren't clearing at all due to overload, and there was no way to set a correct tx fee because the fee needed to get to the front of the queue was constantly changing and wallets couldn't inform users of what the current fee was anyway. From the user's perspective these were outages.

[coffeefirst]

And to me, that's the tragedy.

Clearly the people who created this were absolutely brilliant. And after sinking years of sweat and energy into groundbreaking work, the end result is an energy-sucking ponzi scheme that's done considerably more harm than good.

[beardedman]

> without any meaningful service costs

Wow, that's bold. Do you mean service cost to the anonymous individual? Or overall service cost? Because if it's the latter, I think you might be very sorely mistaken.

[jayd16]

>a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value

Isn't the absolute value of the transaction pretty irrelevant to the technology?

As far as transactions per second Bitcoin is still pretty mediocre, isn't it?

[kebman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

[Jansen312]

The amazing part is they hash "no" work as proof of work to get rewarded with digital coin that contribute to global warming hastening "2012 movie" and we celebrate it as a monumental achievement! Maybe Thanos is right.

[zitterbewegung]

I totally agree with you. Distributed ledger technology is amazing .

But, I think bitcoin could do better if it’s services could be split apart.

People use bitcoin to perform transactions , to speculate on its price and to generate value by mining to secure the blockchain.

If these services were more broken apart we would have a better solution but this could be intractable problem. The main problems that people cite such as the ESG impact are big. Many people in bitcoin speculate on the price which introduces problems with people that want to use it for payments. Since we need miners to secure the chain it has a large environmental impact by those miners. And socially it is used to allow people to violate various laws .

[classified]

Nuclear weapons are a great technical achievement, too. And not one has been misfired yet. /s

[oldsecondhand]

> only 2 service incidents in 14 years

Only 2 service incidents if you don't count all the scams and lost wallets.

[dspillett]

If you count those, that is no different than blaming traditional banks because your gran was conned out of some money by Bodgit & Scarper Roofing and Driveway Contractors Ltd.