- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Such a stupid fucking idea. The idea of cryptocurrencies aside, Bitcoin’s system of mining is peak waste.
It’s great that the idea got implemented in ways that don’t have the ecological footprint Bitcoin has!
I’m glad Bitcoin brought this idea to life. But it’s about time for Bitcoin to resign.Bitcoin isn’t a good idea. It’s based on assumptions about how the world works that don’t actually exist and, the costs for finding a solution to these assumptions are so large that they make the product bad.
I beg to partly differ.
The idea of being able to transfer digital value safely without middlemen is great and has never been available before.
The implementation is bad in the sense that it’s ecologically disastrous and economically unfit.It’s such a great idea that a good use case for it hasn’t been invented in over a decade.
You just think that because you don’t use it lol
For a technology sub I swear most of y’all are tech illiterate
Bitcoin was developed on the idea that no one can be trusted and that everyone will act selfishly for their own self interest. This is patently not true, while many are selfish and are not to be trusted, a truly trustless society does not and cannot exist. People do come together and work in collectives and organisations and people do defer to the expertise of others. Imagine not being able to go to the doctor without first getting a medical degree because you can’t trust what the doctor will tell you or having to learn electrical engineering before having any electrical work done in your home. That is the ideology that helps spawn the no middleman trustless system that formed bitcoin in 2009. The truth is people don’t want to do that an the easy way to demonstrate this is to simply point at the huge amount of transactions that occur off-chain through exchanges (who serve as middlemen) vs the pitiful small number of transactions that occur on chain.
Trustlessness comes with huge costs. Firstly, you have huge amounts of redundant work to prove/verify everything. That’s why bitcoin is so terribly inefficient. Rather than having some you trust approve a transaction you now need to spend huge resources solving useless puzzles to prove that your transactions is the real deal. Secondly, without a middleman there is no one to hold to account. Make a mistake on your transaction? Your money is gone. Get scammed? Same deal. Accidentally leak your private key? Ditto.
Bitcoin is also based on the ideas of Austrian economics. Basically a ridiculous field of economics that doesn’t work. There are reasons why we left the gold standard and there are reasons why so called ‘sound money’ is a terrible idea. Just to simply illustrate. Bitcoiners love to celebrate the first transaction for real world goods using bitcoin. Some guy bought two pizza’s for 10000 btc around 2010 or something. They mock now for how much ‘money’ he wasted on two pizza’s. What good is a currency if you’re too afraid to spend it because its ‘value’ might skyrocket. In no uncertain terms Austrian economics is incredibly stupid. Bitcoin is built on this ideology.
Also Bitcoin is full of middlemen. Mining pools tend to congregate into large organisations lead by a small group of individuals due to economies of scale making larger pools more efficient than smaller pools and, because bitcoin has no real economy underneath it everything has to run back to fiat currency at some point. Whether you’re a baker or a drug dealer you have bills that need to be paid in fiat at some point; therefore, you need to exchange your crypto to fiat and, this is almost unanimously controlled by large exchanges who act as middle men. A big government like the US blocks the exchanges and bitcoin and crypto in general basically dies.
So in summary, bitcoin is based on the idea that no one can be trusted, which is false, that Austrian economics is a good idea, which is wrong and finally that it’s free from middlemen which it isn’t. The assumptions that made bitcoin are wrong.
So many words Bitcoin and so little about the idea behind it.
Are you aware that not each and every cryptocurrency that was created after Bitcoin is bad?
Although admittedly most are. Yet some took the idea further and implemented better versions of value transfer, that doesn’t rely on middlemen.The article is about bitcoin so I talked about bitcoin. But it doesn’t really matter because all cryptocurrencies are bad. They are all negative sum internet funny money that is used by and controlled by some of the people who you would least want to be able to do that.
I think Monero has use cases (besides money laundering). And Monero is basically what people who don’t understand cryptocurrency think Bitcoin is.
Buying drugs?
Yes
Monero is the only crypto I support
Up next: AI
That’s much more useful though.
We shall see. Meta, Google and Microsoft aren’t exact spending billions of dollars on AI to make the world a better place…
What an absolutely absurd waste of resources. There should be enforcement of energy usage from these clowns.
Fuck stupid ass libertarian ponzi schemes
Ummm if you follow the links to the EIA’s report, it does not show their method of calculating so we are basically taking their word for it. It says between 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption is used on cryptocurrency. Feels like an article written by the establishment to make you feel negative about cryptocurrency as it is a big threat to them. Don’t fall for the propaganda. If you are mining, seek green sources of energy as then it is a moot point. Same if you have an EV or other high power electrical devices. The issue is not uses of power, it is how it was generated.
Whatever the motives of those that wrote it, the fact that cryptocurrency uses power wastefully to ensure validity is absurd when we want to reduce climate change.
The concept is great. The execution needs altering.
We need to shift to demand shaping. Storing power generated during the day to be used overnight is not particularly efficient, and requires massive pumped storage facilities. We need to use power at the time it is produced. If we do not have sufficient demand at the time of peak production, energy prices will go to zero (or even below zero!) during those times, and there will be no incentive to continue rolling out solar to meet demand earlier in the day, later in the day, and on cloudy days.
We need much more solar rollout to fully meet demand during marginal or even poor conditions, but that much generation capacity is far more than we can use at that time.
We need a massive load that comes online during optimal generation conditions, but which can be shed under clouds or at low sun angles. Something that will give the power companies an incentive to keep rolling out solar even when we have excess optimal generation capacity.
Reducing wastage, increasing base load of renewables, back up storage and peak load usage and interconnected grids are all used. This suggests reduce wastage, which should not be ignored. Bitcoin wastes the energy solving problems that are computationally difficult but not useful. That’s wastage.
Agreed.
The concept is great.
Is it? I really don’t see how cryptocurrency is a good thing for humanity. The name is a problem in and on itself, since it’s not currency and can not scale up to be used as one.
You’ve clearly never tried to send money between countries that dont have an interconnected bank system. Or has your credit card stolen. Or has to make large transactions outside the bank system, say for a car. Or used PayPal.
The concept of sending money without requiring a third party to be trusted is great. It should not be a store of wealth.or a gambling machine. Enabling cash transfers is it’s only purpose. And that concept is good. And what is cash, but government sanctioned ways of transferring currency. The name is apt.
I mean this is exactly what the established banking system has spewed out in propaganda all of which have been thoroughly debunked. Only difference is Bitcoin is not a company and does not have a propaganda department to counteract. It relies on people educating and thinking for themselves.
This isn’t propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it’s closer to between 3 and 5) and I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).
Bitcoin lightning solves this scaling problem by keeping transaction data off-chain but using the main chain for security. You lock up liquidity in lightning and then you can send infinite transactions through that channel between you and anybody else on the planet who uses lightning. Transactions settle in seconds and cost pennies in fees. Often less than a single penny.
Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.
It doesn’t actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn’t a currency: Despite the fact that it’s claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren’t payments for goods or services). The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn’t surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.
So you have not heard of the lightening network?
The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network. If the power needed was minimal, 1 person or group could easily take over. Power is what keeps it secure and as we enter the AI and quantum computing age, blockchain tech and how they are secured is one way to protect ourselves. Centralized databases are sitting ducks as we have seen with the amount of hacks going on at an increasing pace.
No, it needs non-useful computation to make it more and more difficult to mine. This needs more and more power to do. The power wastage is not required, but is a side effect. There are other methods of securing digital currency. Bitcoin should be seen as a proof of concept at this stage, rather than a complete technology.
The problem is trying to prevent concentration of power and ensuring new good faith actors can enter the ecosystem at any time on a similar footing.
The irony is that the more widespread it is, the less likely for any one entity or group of entities to have control, yet the more total power is being consumed.
How much electricity goes to normal financial institutions though?
A tiny fraction by comparison, given the amount of transactions they handle per second (Visa alone handles thousands per second whereas bitcoin only does 3-7 transactions a second). Either way, I wouldn’t mind seeing the stock market and the vast amounts of effort wasted on that bullshit getting shut down.
Dunno but probably worth it for the amount of transactions they process.
Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?
Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol
If you want to have rather green cryptos, you need to exclude those who rely on proof-of-work to secure the network.
Btw. Ethereum showed that a transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is possible.
If you’re not interested in the complexities that a lot of cryptos have, because you just want to transfer value efficiently, have a look at Nano (https://nano.org)I have heard nano uses a lot less energy compared to Crypto. Though how does it compare to visa/traditional payment systems?
The problem with nano is that it makes the assumption you can just give away transaction space for free. You can’t. If you do, spammers and other low-value uses take up all the space. The more space gets taken up, the more expensive it is to run a node, and the more centralized your network becomes. So what did they do when they ran into this problem? They added a proof-of-work component. The very thing they created their coin to avoid! If you look at almost all of these non-PoW cryptos, the only reason they can get better transactions per second or low tx fees is because they are very centralized or because nobody is actually competing for that space because nobody uses them.
Bitcoin solves this scaling/fee problem with Bitcoin lightning, which is a layer on top of the main chain. The main chain provides security, while actual transactions live on the second layer. Fees on lightning measure in the pennies and confirm instantly. The scale you can take lightning to is basically infinite. That’s actually useful as a currency.
Nano has alwas has a computational part associated with transactions. It once was used to prioritize transactions. Nano has evolved to a different prioritization scheme. That computational part will be phased out.
The lightning network is a silly attempt to merge bad parts of cryptocurrencies with bad parts of traditional finance: you need the electric energy guzzling Bitcoin and middlemen just like in traditional finance - or would you care to open and close your own channels, pay watchtowers etc. or “simply” use the channels of middlemen?
And how would you have cheap transactions without those middlemen, if operating your own channels requires transactions on layer 1?Nano has alwas has a computational part associated with transactions. It once was used to prioritize transactions. Nano has evolved to a different prioritization scheme. That computational part will be phased out.
We’ll see. It had to be “phased in” in the first place for a reason. Either you limit chain space and charge for it, or your chain grows an infinite size. There is no way around that problem.
And how would you have cheap transactions without those middlemen, if operating your own channels requires transactions on layer 1?
Because once a channel is opened, you can have essentially infinite transactions within it. So there is not a 1:1 relationship between channel opening/closing costs (layer 1) and transaction relaying costs (lightning). You need the layer 1 underneath to provide the security for the lightning transactions. Without layer 1, if somebody you are transacting with doesn’t follow the rules, you have no way to enforce the rules. Incentives are setup in such a way that it’s incredible rare you ever need to to go L1 to get that enforcement, since the deck is stacked against anybody who tries to break the rules.
I stated the reason for it being phased in: prioritizing transactions.
Tell me how to keep a channel open without risking loss of funds through flood and loot attacks.
- If you have a custodial wallet: Literally nothing, the wallet handles everything. You don’t even need to know what a channel is.
- If you have a self-custody wallet: Install it on your phone and make sure you can connect to the internet once every 5 days. You don’t have to open the wallet, some background service does everything automatically. Most wallets have built-in automatic watchtowers, so you don’t ever need to connect to the internet and somebody else watches the channel for you.
The attacks you can do in lightning are very limited. Basically the only one you can do is force close a channel and broadcast an old state on-chain. But your other party in the channel can correct you by publishing the more recent state. They have several days to do this. If you tried to cheat this way, not only do you not get the coins you wanted, but there is a penalty as well. You lose money. So nobody ever does it.
There’s about 200M USD currently locked up in lightning contracts. If you think you can hack lighting, have at it. The best hackers in the world have tried, they have all failed.
It is the cost of securing the network. It is intentional as if it was low power and easy to mine, 1 person or organization could take over the network and thus it would loose its decentralization. Nothing wrong with using power as long as it is green. No one is complaining about how much energy social media uses, or electric cars, or the fiat banking systems or all the lights left on etc etc. Power usage is not the issue here, it is power generation. You best believe that big money is spinning Bitcoin as negative as possible as it is a threat to their establishment. Don’t be a sucker for the BS.
It still a problem if it’s using green power as it’s preventing that green power from replacing fossil fuels in more useful and essential parts of the economy. Therefore essentially increasing demand for fossil fuels. Additionally by increasing the nations total energy use it’s making the task of decarbonising energy just that little bit harder.
Energy use is going up with or without crypto. It is a solvable problem. We just have to have the will. The focus should be on more green power, not restricting those who use it already.
Yeah, but the problem is that the green energy could have gone to powering a hospital or a factory, something actually useful. But instead it’s going to crypto. The hospital and the factory still need power and they are likely to pull it from a fossil fuel source. Essentially ’green’ crypto mining is creating demand for fossil fuels making it not actually green. Also we don’t have the time for our energy transition to be slowed down by crypto. Especially considering how utterly useless it is.
You can make this argument with anything that demands electricity. This is how we generate full stop. Anything else is a distraction that propaganda has placed in your mind.
And less than 0.00000001% goes to Ethereum
Don’t over-flatter Ethereum.
Ethereum transitioned from PoW to Pos.
What’s not to like about that?it is now provably not secure. Because pos is provably not objective. Making the whole thing moot. Also, it is literally a system explicitly designed around “the rich get richer”.
Security is relative - always!
Can you name one consensus scheme that isn’t?proof of work is objective. It sucks for other reasons, but I do not need to trust anyone to start participating.
That those with more have more control. It’s a reinvention of fiat currency. PoW also had that problem since people with more money could afford better mining hardware, but PoS is even more direct. That’s not even getting into tether printing and other bullshit. The claim is that cryptocurrency is a move away from our existing financial system, but the reality is that it’s just another arm of it.
POW has been out of date for years. POS solves these problems, but that would take an informed person to realize which seems to be in short supply.
Complaining about downvotes is essentially begging for them.
They arent a big deal, quit counting them. No one else cares, dont put so much stake in an internet number
Doesn’t proof-of-stake boil down to “if you’re hoarding a billion dollars, you’re inherently more trustworthy”?
Yes… some with billions of dollars in a crypto has a billion more reasons to want the network secured.
Yes, I can’t predict any problems that might be caused in a “right by might” monetary system. /s
As opposed to a currency issued and secured by a central bank?
It boils down to, “here let me hold your money and if you do anything to scam the system, I get to keep it.”
Eth has moved to staking, which is good for the environment because it doesn’t have a bunch of computers competing for transactions, unlike bitcoin - instead the network picks a computer for the transaction and takes staked coin if the computer does something nefarious to the transaction. The problem though is that staking requires coins / money. Mining requires electricity and can make money (albeit pennies depending on your setup and electricty costs). For this reason, it’s not just bitcoin that’s a problem, but a whole bevy of other mining-based coins like bitcoin cash, cudos, etc. That problem (the desire for folks to spin up new farms to mine crypto coins which they can mine using the spare CPU/GPU cycles) is likely not going to go away soon.
The benefit of PoW is that it is tied to real world physics and markets. The price of bitcoin is derived from the price of electricity, computing power and the supply. PoS is tied to the price of what the owners of the coins will sell them for and who wants them, in ethereums case there’s an unlimited money printer that could crash the price at any moment - like the usd, but the usd has a huge ass army behind it
The benefit of PoW is that it is tied to real world physics and markets.
Eh… physics in the sense that faster processing means faster processing but it’s a very wasteful process. It’s like ordering a meal from hotel room service and having 100s of people bring you what you ordered. Proof-of-work-wasted.
The price of bitcoin is derived from the price of electricity, computing power and the supply.
There’s a huge part of PoW that is left up to chance. Individual miners will spend lots of money on an expensive rig and get pennies. Some miners will join mining pools to split the wins but those generally are shared according to your computing power, so pennies. Pennies and unless you’re doing things right, huge electric bills. Hell, even death in some cases. There’s a chubbyemu video about a kid who ran too many miners in his room, which got too hot and he suffered heatstroke.
PoW was great to begin with, but it is the reason why crypto has such a large carbon footprint.
PoS is tied to the price of what the owners of the coins will sell them for and who wants them,
Can you elaborate? I think you (or maybe I) am misunderstanding how PoS is priced. From what I understood, it was loosely tied to bitcoin (because investors will diversify into both coins and bitcoin has much more volume / market cap). As I understand, all cryptos are priced at what a buyer would pay for it. It’s not like BTC miners can ask for more money because the price of electricity went up. I don’t think 1 BTC would sell for $1,000,000 USD in 2024 just because it was scheduled to do so. If a competitor to BTC came out and was better (e.g., SEI) I think that would affect BTC’s price. I don’t see how ETH would be any different.
Proof of Stake at the end of the day is just saying “instead of joining a mining pool and paying my electricity and hardware to do a lot of wasteful work, I’ll instead pick another entity to do the mining for me and give me a share of the profits”. Proof of Stake is still Proof of Work, it’s just sort of a curated proof-of-work where the network picks one machine at random to do the work (depending on the amount staked with / trusted in that machine and the administrator of that machine). It works well enough to provide an estimated APY in lots of cases, which isn’t something you can get from Proof of Work mining BTC.
Physics in a sense of the current limits of computing and energy generation are based on physics. If I come up with a faster computer I get paid more and I also further secure the network. It’s a way to insure against technology advancing enough to break the network. If I come up with free electricity I only have to worry about the cost of compute. And bitcoin miners can and do ask for more money if the price of electricity goes up. They do this by holding onto mined coins for longer creating a supply shortage. The big exchanges often get their liquidity pools from miners so if the miners don’t sell they have to pay a higher price set by the market. And finally if PoW is so bad why do you admit that the price of PoS is tied to it? If bitcoin went PoS its fundamentals would collapse and most of the crypto market along with it.
Physics in a sense of the current limits of computing and energy generation are based on physics.
Moore’s law, sure. The same goes for Proof-of-Stake.
If I come up with a faster computer I get paid more and I also further secure the network.
If you come up with a faster ASICs miner you get paid more, sure. I won’t knock BTC mining for aspiring electronics engineers. Get that coin, baby!
It’s a way to insure against technology advancing enough to break the network.
But you having a faster computer means you get paid more, which means you would be advancing the technology.
If I come up with free electricity I only have to worry about the cost of compute.
Electricity is not without costs. Solar panels, hydro generating equipment, the cost of copper wire and magnets, the cost to maintain the equipment, batteries, etc… But yes, if you optimize for paying a low amount of electricty you end up only needing to worry about maintaining your mining hardware.
And bitcoin miners can and do ask for more money if the price of electricity goes up.
Well, they don’t ask…
They do this by holding onto mined coins for longer creating a supply shortage.
…they HODL, right? Same thing anyone who owns coin would do if they wanted the price to go up.
The big exchanges often get their liquidity pools from miners so if the miners don’t sell they have to pay a higher price set by the market.
Supply and demand.
And finally if PoW is so bad why do you admit that the price of PoS is tied to it?
Because BTC owners swap coins between ETH (and all other eth tokens) and BTC? Because more ETH is bought with BTC than it is with fiat money? I’m no expert, I’m just making guesses here but it seems to me if a bunch of kids got rich because they mined or bought BTC early on, some of they might want to diversify into ETH and all other tokens?
Any ties between BTC and ETH are purely market related. They have no bearing on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.
If bitcoin went PoS its fundamentals would collapse and most of the crypto market along with it.
How so?
Bitcoins price is derived from the cost of compute, energy and a finite supply. These are the fundamentals of bitcoin. Just like the price of gold is set mostly by the cost of machinery, energy and labour to pull it out of the ground and then the extra cost of maintaining or protecting the gold reserves, there’s also a finite supply. Bitcoin going PoS would be a bit like the current gold system saying we’re not going to take it out of the ground any more but instead we’re going to say who ever owns the current stockpile gets an imaginary credit for more gold. Any new gold entering into circulation will only be in the form of gold contracts.
PoW / PoS has no effect on how finite a crypto’s coins are.
I know. It’s one of the fundamentals of bitcoin though and that’s what we were talking about
What a total fucking waste.
To those that say this is a waste and has no good purpose, you should know that most energy used by miners is renewables because renewables (especially during off-peak hours) are the cheapest source of energy.
Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
The energy used by miners is needed to secure the Bitcoin network. Historically, we have built currencies of incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals, stable governments, etc. Bitcoin was the first one to build an economy based on pure energy. This stuff literally falls from the sky. While it is not perfectly equitably distributed, it is the most equitably distributed resource on earth that can be used for this purpose.
and if bitcoin wasn’t wasting all that energy, we could be powering actually useful stuff with that renewable energy. It’s not ok that energy is being wasted. It coming from renewable sources does not make wasting it on useless hash calculations is good. That energy could be used elsewhere, for useful work.
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Read the article - some of the mines are deliberately near fossil fuel plants that had been tapering off production.
Those fossil fuel plants are the problem, the problem is not that somebody is willing to buy that electricity. Those fossil fuel plants probably only even still exist because of subsidies of fossil fuels. Renewables are cheaper, have been for quite some time, it’s just a matter of getting enough capital to build out their deployment in the first place and fight existing subsidies for fossil fuels.
That is a governance and policy problem, not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin finds the cheapest energy it can, which tends to come from renewables. So does every other energy-intensive industry on earth. Bitcoin is not unique in this aspect, but what does make it unique is the ability to rapidly turn on/off use of electricity according to current electric rates, unlike say a cement plant or factory.
ThIs Is GoOd FoR bItCoIn
Fake
You’re so low effort, why even bother.
Because it’s fake.
