[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