[patricius]

Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.

The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2 or 3 solutions into the picture.

[rspeele]

Your first point kind of makes it impossible to call anything a waste, right? Everything we do in society is paid for by somebody so it must all be worthwhile.

For the second point, are you talking about Layer 2 solutions that track cryptocurrency in a centralized database, like an exchange, where most transactions happen? Basically just traditional banking but with crypto as the unit of account. Or are you talking about decentralized layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network? I don't think Lightning Network can scale to match what the banking sector does, even if you ignore all the services banks provide other than facilitating transactions. For example you could not pay the US workforce with Lightning Network because it would take several months worth of of blocks just to open a channel to each person, and quickly those channels would run out of inbound capacity and you'd need to open more on top of that, so the Layer 1 capacity still limits the ability to use LN at that scale.

[patricius]

Maybe Lightning Network will scale, maybe not. But VISA or Mastercard could build on top of Bitcoin and allow many more transactions than the base layer does. You would use the base layer for final settlements.

Already now you can get a VISA/Mastercard and use that to spend Bitcoin. But of course, every layer on top of Bitcoin presents its own set of trade-offs in terms of trust and security.

What constitutes waste is completely subjective.

[pcthrowaway]

Millions of people play in casinos, that doesn't mean the energy they use isn't a waste and overall negative for society.

Bitcoin is like that times 1,000,000 when it comes to energy usage.

The energy and resources expended mining for diamonds is wasteful also.

[patricius]

Value is subjective, so it is by definition wrong to say that something is objectively a waste. It depends on who you ask.

[acdha]

> Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.

This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.

Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.

The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.

The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.

[patricius]

What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective. It is efficient and necessary for the use case and value it provides. You can argue it is ineffecient compared to Proof of Stake for example, but Proof of Stake is a completely different system and has a completely different incentive structure.

I’m saying also that L2 (and L3, … Ln) is a way to scale the number of users without increasing power consumption. Every time you add a layer, there are other trade-offs for the benefits gained. But at the base layer you still have the benefits of not having a central authority censoring and controlling exchange of an economic good.

[acdha]

> What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective

No, it’s simply recognizing that competing systems match or exceed on security without the same cost. You’ve effectively acknowledged this by saying that the system will be more usable and affordable by using something better designed which eventually clears in Bitcoin to reduce the number of expensive transactions.

[patricius]

No, not something better designed. Something augmenting Bitcoin to make it cheaper to transact while maintaining a base layer for final settlement that is secure and decentralized.

You leave out other characteristics that make Bitcoin an attractive economic good, when you think that matching or exceeding the security at a lower cost is a valid argument against Bitcoin. If it was all about power consumption, Bitcoin wouldn’t keep increasing in demand and price.

Look, you can theorize all you want about the inefficency of Bitcoin, but the market has spoken and continues to speak.

[sp332]

We know that the power is wasted because the results are just thrown away. Only potentially winning results are even presented to the network.

[FabHK]

> thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.

Except, in good old libertarian fashion, they tend not to pay for it. First, the vast majority of the around $100 it costs to process a BTC transaction comes not from explicit fees, but from (invisible) money supply increase (the mining reward). That still neglects the environmental externalities, which are probably in the $30+ region.

[patricius]

The miners pay for the power, and they believe it is not a waste to do so.

[kayamon]

but the mining reward halves every few years tho